Hey! said a voice inside Wen's head. Who is you and what is you doin' here?
Who in the hells are
you? Wen thought back. And what are you
doing inside my head? Wait a minute, he
thought. What's going on here? I'm supposed to be on the floor of a cell.
Instead he was
surrounded by metal. Very cold
metal. He tried to look to see what was
going on, but couldn't make his eyes work.
I be busy with that, said the
voice. You can't has.
Those eyes are mine,
you bastard, thought Wen. They do what I tell them to. The other presence cursed him, in the manner
of a Dà Găng dock-worker, and fought back against his efforts to regain
control. But finally Wen felt his eyes
snap open, and he could see again.
What he saw was not reassuring.
A look down
confirmed that he was wearing a gold-colored suit of armor; sunlight sparkled
from some sort of ornament on the breastplate.
He remembered Chin Gwai telling him Governor Li had planned to execute
him by melting gold and silver onto him.
This armor evidently was the mechanism by which he intended to achieve
the plan. It's probably copper with a
covering of cheap gold leaf, Wen thought.
Who cares? Is pretty, said the idiot voice sharing
his head. Below the armored feet—uh-oh,
he said to himself—was a high pile of wood.
He smelled whale-oil.
A look out showed
him in a sort of pit, with people surrounding him on every side he could
see. A thin crowd, but it was growing by
the minute. You don't have much time
here, he told himself, before things start to heat up.
What you talkin' about? Shut
up, said Wen, and let me think.
There's another
spirit in here with me, he decided. That
would make a perverse sort of sense. If
Governor Li wanted a public execution of the Notorious Wen, it wouldn't do to
just prop up a body that was dead and possibly starting to smell.
Oh, like you don't stink, said the Dà Găng dockworker.
That's not what I
meant, said Wen, unable to resist the argument.
Then he checked himself. This is
going to be more difficult than I'd thought.
How did you get a second spirit out of your own body? Where was Fengzi when he needed her?
You were dead,
weren't you? Wen asked the other spirit.
Executed for some crime or other?
I didn't do nothin', the spirit said. That
silk was ruined wit' water spots and I was just goin' to t'row it out. Rotten magistrates.
You don't know the
half of it, Wen said. What did they
offer you?
They didn't offer me nothing'! I's just here. And it's cold, and now you's crowdin' me and
takin' mah space.
Believe me, thought
Wen, if I could think of a way to send you back I would do it. Hoping the other spirit was sufficiently
occupied with its complaints to stay distracted, Wen tried moving an arm. He could lift it a little, but something was
preventing further movement. He looked
down past his shoulder: they had bound his hands. Not very tightly, but he was still
bound. "Who ties up a corpse?"
he asked. Then he remembered that he
wasn't supposed to be a corpse; not yet at any rate.
The ornament caught his
eye again as sunlight reflected from it.
He looked more closely—it was his Dragon Emerald Eye. Well, that made sense. What better way to convince the public that
it was Wen Xia you were executing than to hang his most notorious bauble around
his neck where everyone could see it?
Pity the thing doesn't work on land, he thought.
Then he remembered
what One-Eyed Lum had told him, the night Lum had surprised him in Jīn-sè Mèn:
Fengzi had written a spell that communicated between the eye and the Jade Maiden—but it only worked when he
actually wore the eye. "I'll be
damned," he said, smiling.
Don't want to be! cried the spirit of the Dà Găng dockworker.
Don't worry, said
Wen. You won't have to endure this
indignity too much longer. He willed his
arms to move again, this time putting all of his strength into them. He felt the ropes strain.
"Citizens of
Jīn-sè Mèn and Fusang!" cried a voice from somewhere outside Wen's field
of vision. "You are ordered to
present yourself at Dockyard Square immediately, to witness the execution of
the wretched pirate and rebel Wen Xia!"
Dockyard Square? Wen tried to
turn his head, but this time the dockworker was ready for him, and a pounding
headache was the only result. I must
have my back to the sea, Wen thought. I'm
surprised I can't hear the gulls.
Hate the sea, the dockworker said. Wen could almost see the man pouting. Nothing
good never came from the sea.
You don't know how wrong you are there, my poor deceased friend, Wen said. He regained control of his arms and forced them apart. The ropes stretched some more but did not break. The badly made arm-guards chafed against his forearms; Wen felt blood trickling down to his wrists.
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