By the time Wei Yuan crawled, choking, out of the pit, I had already set the array at its rim.
I used my pack for an altar, a pile of dirt for a brazier, a broken branch for a brush, and drew a little gray city in the dust. Then I intoned, low and steady:
“O Xuanjin Sword, descend and cleave the vengeful shade; punish the wicked, let the blade consecrate the path. By my ancestor’s decree, divine weapon, act without delay.”
My voice was quiet, but it hung in the dusk like smoke. At the same time I pinched a yellow talisman between my fingers and flicked it toward the two willows growing on the far side of the pit.
The paper struck the trunk like a thrown blade. There was a tiny shock of air, a hiss — metal overcomes wood — and the Xuanjin Sword-talisman sank into the willow. A dark tear opened in the bark and a smear of fresh red welled out.
“Ah! That’s blood, right?!” Bai Wei shrieked, eyes sharp as a hawk as she pointed at the spray of crimson.
“Shut up.” Before I could say anything, Si Jiangchen stared at her coldly. “Come here!”
Feng Qianqian and Wei Yuan had already taken cover behind me; only Bai Wei, who thought the pit filthy and kept her distance, had remained farther off. Si Jiangchen’s order flushed her eyes. Tears sprang to hers, she sniffled and, petulant and small, spun and ran back along the path by which they’d come.
“Wei-jie!” Wei Yuan instinctively moved to follow; someone grabbed his arm.
“Don’t,” I said. My voice went low — perhaps too close to Si Jiangchen’s own tone — and Wei Yuan stopped, sheepish, letting my hand hold him.
After that burst from the willow, the tree shivered. Its drooping branches stirred with an unnerving, regular motion in the gathering gloom, like a corporeal thing drawing breath.
“Sister… sister…” Feng Qianqian’s voice trembled behind me. She wanted to lay a hand on my shoulder but recoiled, crouching into herself. “The ghosts, they’re coming down!”
I’d already seen them. When the tips of the willows moved, dark shapes fell like rotted fruit — a handful of disheveled women and two or three small, childlike figures trailing after them.
“Evil spirits of this world, heed and bow: Six Aces above, Six Servants below…” I didn’t hesitate. I sent three yellow talismans spinning from my fingers — three was the most I could drive at once.
The charms hissed and clung. The willow-bound spirits stilled, dissolving into faint smoke as if the breeze might blow them away. But the others, farther from the trunk, lunged.
Two of the childlike things bolted straight for me; the women veered toward Si Jiangchen.
Feng Qianqian panicked and shoved one of the spare talismans into her mouth. Wei Yuan, who couldn’t see the ghosts, read our faces and gripped my hand tighter. “Xiao—Xiao He, what do we do? What about me?”
I moved sideways to shield him, raising my right hand and pointing with my sword finger at one of the smaller spirits. Its face was bloated and pale, one eye gouged into a bloody hollow. I tapped the center of its forehead.
It screamed like a thing being torn apart. I snapped two more quick pins with my fingers; the other small entities were jerked free and, with a practiced motion, slid between my index and middle finger and into a little yellow porcelain bottle, the rim sealed by another talisman.
“Let go!” Si Jiangchen’s voice was flat behind me — and then Wei Yuan gave a choked sound as if struck.
Wei Yuan yanked his hand back like it had been scalded. I turned and saw Si Jiangchen holding a cigarette like a brand; he’d pressed it against the back of Wei Yuan’s hand and left a red mark.
“Son of a—!” Wei Yuan hissed, pain making him flinch.
Si Jiangchen only put the cigarette back between his lips and exhaled a humorless laugh through his nose. “You were lying in filth with trash. Smelled like it.”
The three pale women screamed and clawed at him, trying to slip into his body, but he acted as if he couldn’t see them. I knew his talents were formidable, but he couldn’t perceive spirits. These fledgling ghosts, ignorant of him, saw only an undefended human and pressed in.
“Keep them away from him!” I could feel the bile rise, the way they drifted near his throat, their postures obscene — it would have passed for lewd foreplay if not for their ravaged faces.
My fingers flicked three more talismans. Each landed perfectly on its target. Si Jiangchen glanced at the papers, amused. “So close to me, are you?”
I scowled and finished sealing them into bottles, one by one.
“Is that it? What about the tree?” Wei Yuan asked, rubbing his hand and nodding toward the willow still bleeding.
“Cut it down and burn it.” I couldn’t bear to stand aside while a tree bound to suffering kept menacing people. The Xuanjin talisman had pinned its evil, and all the half-formed things had been collected, but the willow itself had to go.
With the immediate danger handled, things felt at least contained. Wei Yuan started dialing the police; out here, in the hills, it would be a long wait for their patrol car. I opened my black umbrella and lifted a red and a black ghost from their porcelain prisons.
“Feng Zhenzhen, you know why you haven’t been guided away,” I said as I looked toward the trash-strewn pit where the girl's bones were probably hurriedly buried.
Feng Zhenzhen wept, covering her face. She’d died violently and had hoped her family would at least pity her enough to perform rites, to call back her spirit and let it pass. She never expected her own kin wouldn’t spare even a straw mat.
“Xiao He,” Wei Yuan said quietly, having understood I’d been bargaining with a spirit. “If you tell her, I’ll pay — I’ll help pay to have the rites done. Let her go in peace.”
Hearing that, the ghost’s eyes turned redder. She couldn’t fathom that the people responsible for her death would be the ones to arrange her funeral. She had anger, grief, helplessness; she railed and wailed into the air.
“Xiao He, the tree still isn’t clean,” Si Jiangchen said suddenly. I handed Feng Zhenzhen back to Wei Yuan by sealing her bottle, but his next words made my scalp prickle: “Why is Bai Wei sitting on the wall?”
Si Jiangchen’s question snapped me toward the family’s courtyard wall. On the gray top of the masonry, unmistakable against the dim sky, sat Bai Wei.
She was tied up, bound so tightly she couldn’t move. A thin hemp rope ran from a fork in the willow’s branch to a loop around the back of Bai Wei’s neck. She was lashed there like some grotesque doll, sitting as if on a perch, one end of the rope anchored in the tree, the other wound cruelly around her throat.