The Hidden Blade Read Online Free PDF Page B

chemise and padded out to the courtyard.
    The moon was still full, shining bright and clear in a cloudless sky, its cool light silvering the stones in the courtyard and the gray tiles of the roof. The willow danced, pliant and yielding, a pretty yet ghostly sight.
    She curled her toes. The walkway beneath the long eave was cold on her feet. Amah did not like her walking barefoot.
    The sounds of drums beating rose in the distance. No, not drums—the night watchman’s clappers. At first she thought they were marking the passage of the hours. But the
tock-tocks
were urgent and without rhythm.
    It must be a criminal pursuit. A night thief, perhaps even a flying thief, one of those martial arts-trained criminals who could bound three men high and leap across rooftops.
    Her pulse accelerated as she realized the sounds were moving closer to her. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad to be awake in the small hours after all. If she could catch a glimpse of the thief, it would mark the most exciting event in her nine years of life.
    A door in the row opposite hers opened. Out stepped Da-ren’s servant Bao-shun, a curved broadsword by his side. He cocked his head and listened carefully. Then he saw her and blinked in surprise.
    He marched across the courtyard. “Bai Gu-niang, it’s chilly at this hour. You should be abed.”
    “I can’t sleep,” she replied. “Can you tell me what is that sound? It’s coming this way.”
    Bao-shun was taken aback. “You can already hear it? Bai Gu-niang has sharp ears. It’s probably nothing. The law chasing night robbers.”
    “Can we go out to the alley and look?” she asked hopefully.
    He immediately shook his head. “No, no, no. Fu-ren would have my head if she knew I let you out in the middle of the night with a criminal on the loose.”
    There were times when she hated being a girl. She pushed her lips out into a prominent pout, the kind on which one could hang a bottle of oil, as Amah would say.
    “Bai Gu-niang must not become cross with me—Da-ren would punish me if I upset you.” But for all his kind cajoling, Bao-shun did not back down. “Now please go back to your room. I’ll go have a look to make sure nothing’s wrong.”
    The banging sounds rose appreciably. Between the beats, men shouted. Ying-ying pretended to acquiesce, retreating into her room. But as soon as Bao-shun entered the next courtyard, she came out and silently followed him.
    Bao-shun walked about the middle courtyard, looking all around. Satisfied, he went into the front courtyard. She tiptoed into the middle courtyard, staying close to the wall-hugging rooms, on the walkways in the shadow of the extended eaves.
    In the front courtyard, Bao-shun must have finished his inspection, for she heard him lift the bar on the front gate. She inched closer to the moon gate, a round opening in the wall between the middle and front courtyards, and was about to slip through when a movement at the periphery of her vision made her look back.
    A black-clad figure was crouched on the roof, barely a stone’s throw from where she stood. She froze. For all her eagerness to witness a real, live outlaw on the run, she hadn’t imagined that he’d come this close to her. To her horror, he took a great, lithe bound, an abrupt yet graceful motion like that of a lizard, and landed
in
the middle courtyard, his feet silent as a cat’s.
    He was on her side of the courtyard now, little more than the length of a
kang
away. She heard a whimper. It came from her own throat. The outlaw’s head turned. He was masked, but his eyes burned directly into hers.
    All the stories she had ever heard about bandits and robbers scuttled amok in her head. He’d capture her and sell her into slavery somewhere so far away that nobody would ever find her again. Worse, he’d sell her to mountain bandits who loved the taste of children, especially a pampered child like her, with extra-tender flesh from having never done a day of work in her life.
    Bao-shun was