“Songbird no-go! Chi-shien gweilo, ben tiansheng de yidui rou — ”
And here he went off into some further rattle-fast string of stuff, only stopping short when Chess stuck his gun to the old man’s shiny blue silk-clad chest.
“Listen, granddad,” he said, with surprising patience, “we ain’t leavin’ ’til the Reverend here and Songbird sit down together. So you go tell her that and see what it gets you, ’cause I can tell you right now exactly what it’ll get you, if you don’t.”
The old man swallowed hard and drew himself up slightly, as if steeling himself to refuse once more (and be shot for it, a good Celestial soldier). But an imperious voice issued from just up the street, saying: “No need for that, gentlemen . . . I will gladly see the Reverend, if he cares to come inside.”
Chess shrugged, and put up his gun. The old man ran off without a backward glance, calling out as he did: “Chunren gweilo, waaah! Cao ni zuxian shi ba dai!”
“That don’t sound too nice,” Morrow remarked.
“It is not,” the voice — Songbird’s, he surmised — replied. “He is a foolish old man, and I will deal with him later, harshly, for insulting my guests. But again, gentlemen, will you enter?”
Morrow thought he’d rather not, another thing he knew enough to keep to himself. Instead, he trailed Chess and the Reverend into what proved the most luxurious establishment they’d yet discovered: a snug red brick house, its dim-lit ground floor given over to gambling — fan-tan, mah-jongg, a creepily silent general click and shuffle of plain brass counters and polished elephant-horn dominoes. On a low stage, a four-piece orchestra sat playing some windy chaos which sounded to Morrow like they were still deep in the process of tuning their weirdly shaped instrumentation. Girls swayed back and forth on either side, doing a serpentine dance.
No sign of Songbird, though. Just a curtain made from jet beads swinging back and forth atop a flight of stairs, and the same voice calling down, impatiently: “Up here, Reverend Rook! Bring your men with you, if you must. I mean you no harm, and trust you mean me the same. You would never have come here at all were that not true, wei?”
“Yes ma’am,” the Rev agreed, taking hold of Chess’s arm.
But Chess dug himself in. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere near that bitch,” he said. “You already got her parole, so you don’t really need me. Just the stink of this hole alone’s ’bout enough to make my head split open, anyways.”
“Too much feminine perfume, and such?”
“Too much junk, more like. Take Morrow, you want some backup.”
Another rumbling laugh. “Your call, darlin’. Hell, though — I thought you were up for anything, Chess. When’d you get so damn nice?”
Chess nodded at the curtain. “You drug us down here to see some baby whore who does table-rappin’ on the side; ain’t my idea of a good time, is all. I’ll stay in easy callin’ distance.”
Morrow, dubious: “Baby whore?”
“’Course,” Chess snapped. “Chinee breed ’em that way — whores, witches, what-have-you. Same as them little mush-faced dogs, or them gold-colour fish with the floppy heads.” He shook his head, nose wrinkling. “It’s creepish, the whole damn thing.”
“Sure you ain’t just jealous?” the Rev suggested. “I’ll be in fairly close quarters with her, after all.” To which Chess’s sharp face coloured and darkened, in equal measure.
“I’ll stay close,” he repeated. “Locked and loaded — all you gotta do is yell. Meet you back out front, soon as you’re done your business.”
Rook shrugged. “Probably the best place for you, you feel that strongly about it. Ed?”
“Sir.”
So they left Chess behind, climbing to meet the only other magician Morrow’d ever run across so far, with nothing but a shotgun and Rook’s Bible for cover. First witch-woman Morrow’d seen since Old Mother Harelip, too, for all she was barely old enough to . . . well, she’d have to at least be old enough to bleed, according to Asbury’s strictures.
The curtain parted with a slither. Inside, one windowless room took up the whole of the house’s second floor — spacious, yet cramped by a stifling forest of screens which had been arranged to turn one end of the room into a haphazard sort of pagoda. Where Songbird slept, Morrow reckoned, and maybe conducted other sorts of encounters.
“You are correct in this conclusion, Mister Morrow,” the voice told him, with uncomfortable acuteness — and now issuing from somewhere roughly behind him, which troubled Morrow even more. “For while my maiden’s flower is far too highly valued to be sold except at auction, there are no strictures levied against my allowing an occasional ‘lookee’ if some white man wishes to pay for the privilege, though I charge considerably more than fifty cents. I say white man, because most Celestials already know that the secret parts of their womenfolk differ in no way from those of any other female, be she yellow, white . . . or dead.”
Morrow felt a small shoulder brush lightly against his elbow and all but fell back, the stock of his shotgun knocking one screen sharp enough that it rang against the sanctum’s wall like a muffled bell. The Reverend, no doubt more used to these sorts of tricks, simply stepped aside, bowing as Songbird settled onto a throne set with a high silk cushion.
“Have to decline the kind offer, Honourable Lady,” Rook said. “Though for all I probably couldn’t afford it, I’m sure it makes a lovely view. What I’m more interested in, however, is your skill — ”
“ — as an interpreter of dreams? I know.”
And here Songbird raised her face to what light there was, revealing herself as a truly spectral vision: twelve years old at most, a porcelain doll dressed all in red bridal silk whose features matched those of the painted courtesans decorating her walls almost exactly, aside from one peculiarity — a near-complete lack of colour in the face under her sheer red veil, pig-pale skin, crone-white hair and faded hazel eyes all bleached by some hideous trick of nature. Her hands she held folded in her lap, interlaced fingers covered with long, gilded filigree spikes which gave off a dry, squeaking tone as they rubbed together, a distan
t cymbal’s clash.
“Albino,” the Rev observed. “You must be almost blind, I’d think.”