NINE
"I would have thought that bureaucratic foul-ups weren't possible where the gods were concerned." Wen pointed to a group of demons dragging corpses along a road. As they watched, the corpses reanimated and got to their feet, shuffling along for a few minutes. Then the demons slit the throats of the prisoners, one by one. After pausing to let the blood pool around the bodies, the demons resumed their dragging. "You can't tell me that's a mistake."
"No," Fengzi said, nodding her agreement. "That's one of the more mild punishments you'll find down here. And as near as I can tell, they're doing it by the book."
She slowed a bit, and Wen kept pace with her; the ancestors slowly pulled ahead of them. "I have to warn you, though: the bureaucracy down here isn't a whole lot different from what we know on earth. They do make mistakes, Wen. I've read about them."
"I didn't need to know that."
"But I don't want you to think that your plan is automatically going to work. I read, in my studies, of a group of people who were victims of exactly that sort of foul-up." She pointed back the way they'd come. "They had the misfortune to have the same names as notorious sinners, and were prevented from crossing the Bridge of the Seven Treasures. As soon as they came before Qin Guang in the Hell of the Mirror of Retribution the mistake was discovered."
"That doesn't seem so bad. It's the first hell, after all."
"That's not the point."
"It isn't?" Wen didn't like the look on her face; it was entirely too unhappy.
"They had to be interrogated to ensure that a mistake had been made," she said. Wen nodded; he'd been threatened with interrogation and knew the sorts of tortures involved in even routine questioning. "By the time Qin Guang and his assistants had determined the truth of the matter, five days had passed."
"Better five days of interrogation than three years in hell," Wen said.
"The magistrate's conclusion," she said, "was that these men and women shouldn't be in hell at all, so he sent them back to earth."
"That's wonderful!" Wen said. "Perhaps we can get the same ruling for my father."
"Oh, you wouldn't want that," Fengzi said. "Remember, Xia: these people had been dead for five days by the time the magistrate decided they didn't belong in hell. Their bodies had been burned, or eaten by foxes, or worse. And for some of them that was only the beginning."
"Beginning of what?" Wen found himself wanting to be with the grandfathers; he didn't know how this story was going to end, but he was certain he wasn't going to like it however it came out.
"They appealed to King Qin, naturally, since he was the presiding magistrate. But there wasn't anything he could do about it, because they didn't belong in hell, they hadn't earned the right to cross the bridge into heaven, and they had no bodies to go back to. By the time the appeals were finished, several of them didn't even have homes to haunt. And they've been wandering the Middle Kingdom ever since. It's been hundreds of years, they say, and these ghosts just... wander. Nobody knows how the original mistake was made, and nobody will admit to making it, so there's no way to fix it. These people are going to be ghosts for as long as the kingdoms of heaven and hell exist."
"That," said Wen, "is not going to happen to my father." He tried to put into his voice a confidence he was far from feeling.
No comments:
Post a Comment