Wingrove, David - Chung Kuo 02 Read Online Free PDF Page A

longer, he bent
down and put his hand behind the cold stiff neck, lifting the head,
drawing the hair back from the ear.
    It was not,
physically, difficult to do—the flesh parted easily before the
knife; the blood stopped flowing almost as soon as it had begun—yet
he was conscious of a deep, almost overpowering reluctance in
himself. This was a T'ang! A Son of Heaven! He shivered, letting the
severed flesh fall, then turned the head and did the same to the
other side.
    He lowered the
head onto the pillow and stepped back, appalled. Outwardly he seemed
calm, almost icy in his control, but inwardly he quaked with an
inexplicable, almost religious fear of what he was doing. His pulse
raced, his stomach churned, and all the while a part of him kept
saying to himself, What are you doing, Otto? What are you doing?
    He stared,
horrified, at the two thick question-marks of flesh that lay now on
the pillow, separated from their owner's head; then he steeled
himself and reached out to take them. He drew the tiny bag from
inside his jacket and dropped them into it, then sealed the bag and
returned it to the pocket.
    Wang Hsien lay
there, regal even in death, indifferent to all that had been done to
him. Fischer stared at him a while, mesmerized, awed by the power of
the silent figure. Then, realizing he was wasting time, he bent over
the corpse again, smoothing the hair back into place, hiding the
disfigurement.
    Nervousness made
him laugh—a laugh he stifled quickly. He shuddered and looked
about him again, then went to the doorway. There he paused, reaching
up to reset the camera, checking the elapsed time against his wrist
timer, then moved the camera's clock forward until the two were
synchronized. That done, he pressed out the combination quickly. The
lights at the top changed from amber to green, signifying that the
camera was functioning again.
    He looked back,
checking the room one final time. Then, satisfied that nothing was
disturbed, he backed out of the room, pulling the door to silently
behind him, his heart pounding, his mouth dry with fear, the sealed
bag seeming to bum where it pressed against his chest.
    * *
*
    WANG TA-HUNG
woke to whispering in his room and sat up, clutching the blankets to
his chest, his mind dark with fear.
    "Who is
it?" he called out, his voice quavering. "Kuan Yin preserve
me, who is it?" A figure approached the huge bed, bowed. "It
is only I, Excellency. Your servant, Wu Ming."
    Wang Ta-hung,
the T'ang's eldest surviving son, pulled the blankets tighter about
his neck and stared, wide-eyed, past his Master of the Bedchamber,
into the darkness beyond.
    "Who is
there, Wu Ming? Who were you whispering to?" A second figure
stepped from the darkness and stood beside the first, his head bowed.
He was a tall, strongly built Han dressed in dark silks, his beard
braided into three tiny pigtails, his face, when it lifted once
again, solid, unreadable. A handsome, yet inexpressive face.
"Excellency."
    "Hung
Mien-lo!"
    Wang Ta-hung
turned and glanced at the ornate timepiece beside the bed, then
twisted back, facing the two men, his face twitching with alarm. "It
is almost half two! What are you doing here? What's happened?"
Hung Mien-lo sat on the bed beside the frightened twenty-year-old,
taking his upper arms gently but firmly in his hands.
    "It's all
right, Ta-hung. Please, calm yourself. I have some news, that's all."
The young Prince nodded, but it was as if he were still in the grip
of some awful dream: his eyes continued to stare, a muscle in his
left cheek twitched violently. He had been this way for eighteen
months now, since the day he had found his two brothers dead in one
of the guest bedrooms of the summer palace, their naked bodies
gray-blue from the poison, the two maids they had been entertaining
sprawled nearby, their pale limbs laced with blood, their eyes gouged
out.
    Some said that
the pale was ted-looking youth was mad; others that it was only
natural for one of his sickly disposition