Lupi 06 - Blood Magic

said, his voice soft, his gaze appropriately downcast, "I have hopes you might have a job for me. I am a good worker - strong and healthy - and I have a wife and two small sons. I need to work."
    "Hmm."
    Li Lei had a sudden inspiration. From behind the man's back, she pointed at him and made the sign for tong. The woman might not recognize it, but if she did -
    "You look strong enough," she said grudgingly, "but I have promised to speak with my cousin's wife's sister's son today and see if he can do the work. It is a matter of family, you understand? If he does not work hard, I will speak with you again." For the first time she looked directly at Li Lei. "Well, boy? Are you going to keep me waiting forever? Come in, come in."
    The house where the night soil collector lived with his wife was nowhere near as fine as the house where Li Lei had lived, of course. The small public room she entered was crowded and none too clean. But a fire burned cheerily in the hearth on the far wall. Its warmth was welcome.
    "So the man was part of the tong, was he?" Chen Wu Yin's wife demanded.
    Li Lei hesitated, then shrugged, tapped her head, and nodded. I think so.
    "What, are you mute?"
    Li Lei opened her mouth and showed the fat woman why she did not speak. She then dug out the soiled and much-folded piece of paper she'd prepared, which described her supposed antecedents. For who would hire a mute boy who had no people to speak for him?
    A surreptitiously softhearted woman who lived off the collection of shit, it seemed. For the woman could not read, that was clear, yet she exclaimed at the sight of Li Lei's mouth, then muttered about fools and folly - it was not her husband who required mute servants, no, and why were people such idiots? And while she muttered, she retrieved for Li Lei a small bowl of bean curd, then lectured her about where she would sleep and how hard she would work.
    To her disgust, Li Lei felt her eyes fill. She ate the bean curd and bowed her thanks, and her silly eyes stayed moist. At that moment she knew what she would do with the coin sewed into a sash beneath her clothes. It could stay here, with this woman who'd helped a dirty, mute young boy when she did not have to. She wouldn't be needing it herself, would she?
    After that she did indeed work very hard, and when she curled up in the straw in the little shed where she'd been told to sleep, her muscles ached and she could hardly stand to smell herself. But she knew now that the first part of her plan would work.
    The one flaw with Li Lei's disguise had been her voice. Try as she might, she could not sound like anything other than a young woman. So it was necessary that she not speak - and there was a good way to explain that. The night soil collector did not require mute servants, but the sorcerer did. A few impoverished but enterprising families had, early on, tried to place their surplus sons or daughters in his service by rendering them unable to speak. Chen's wife assumed Li Lei was one of them.
    For now, Li Lei would collect night soil - which meant entering the grounds of the sorcerer's compound. Once she understood something of the workings of the place, she could change her disguise slightly. She did not need to pass for a servant there for long, after all.
    Li Lei lay awake in the darkness, curled in the smelly straw, for a long time. She pined for sleep like a lover, but it would not come.
    Just as the ghosts had not come. Not last night, or the night before, or the night before that. Or else they had, but Li Lei had been unable to see or hear them.
    Her silly, fecund stepmother was dead. Her aunts were dead - her mother's younger sister, her father's older sister, and their aunt. So were the servants, even harmless little Shosu who used to giggle with Li Lei when she was supposed to be working, and fussy old Zi Jeng, who had worked for her father's father.
    Her father was dead. The babies... and oh, would not Jing be incensed that she thought of him as one of the babies? But he would not know, for he and the little girls were dead. She would never see or speak to any of them again. She did not even know where their bodies lay, to take them offerings.
    Sun Mzao claimed such offerings could not reach them in the land of the dead, but while he knew a great deal about death, he admitted he had no contact with the dead. Neither did Li Lei. Her knowledge of death lay entirely on this side of the curtain... but aside from that limitation, it was