The Jade God by Alan Sullivan (snow like ashes series txt) 📕

nodded. “I saw that, sir, though you were all in the dark. Then Blunt got here, as I knew he would, and you can guess the rest. Last night, when my woman came into the study and saw things just as they once were, she thought she had waked up again, and I hadn’t time to stop her. My God, Mr. Derrick, did you know what was coming?”

“No, Martin, I didn’t, except that I frankly expected you might say something. It was a jump in the dark.”

“Then if I had said what she did, or something like it, she would be alive now,” groaned the man bitterly.

Derrick could not answer that, and there ensued a poignant moment which he ended by turning suddenly to Burke. “Is there anything you want cleared up, sergeant?”

“No, sir”⁠—the man’s voice was softer than usual⁠—“but there’s one thing, about Martin calling himself a perjurer. The law does not ask that a man or woman give evidence against each other if they are man and wife. Considering what we’ve heard, I think Martin can forget the perjury part of it. I see now how the knife happened to be in the cottage, for that did surprise me. I thought perhaps Blunt had put it there for his own purpose. We might as well get on to what he has to say.”

“I’ll give you the rest of it,” began the peddler in a clear voice, “and you can pick any holes in it you like. All that Martin says is true, every word of it. I come from the Mong Hills and was born near there. My father was English, and you might know his name, but he’s dead now, so that end of it doesn’t matter. My mother was a Malay woman, and she’s alive. I lived near a temple in the hills where the priests believed in what they said and read, which isn’t always the case in that country. It was a famous temple, and the more famous on account of what was in it, this being a lot of images of Buddha, all the work of one man. The name of the man was Lung Sen, and he had the blood of forefathers who were the greatest artists of their time in wood and gold and jade. Most of Lung’s work went to this temple, where it was very precious, but of the man himself the priests knew nothing except that the faces he carved were alive and something moved behind the eyes. One night I stayed with Lung, and before morning came I knew the man as none other ever had. It seemed that there were two men in him, one the carver of images, the other with all the evil of the world wrapped up in his black heart. He told me, perhaps because I had foreign blood and he thought I would understand better, that he was tired of making flat-faced Buddhas and had been tired for years, and that evil was more interesting than good, and it was more difficult to carve evil than the other thing. Then he looked at me for a quarter of an hour while he smoked, and took something out of a roll of silk. It was the jade god.”

He paused reflectively, his eyes cloudy with memories, and Derrick had a glimpse of what he must have seen then. The half-light, the dark sardonic face, the long, lean fingers, the obscurity of a riverside hut, and all around it the ceaseless whisper of the jungle.

“When I saw that,” went on Blunt presently, “I was frightened, for it was the image of the soul that Lung Sen had hidden from the world. He had spent years making it, putting in the hours when he wasn’t turning out the standard article. And as he looked at the thing I saw that his own face had become just like it. There was a sort of living devil there, crammed with all the knowledge in hell and afraid of nothing in the other place. And this was the man who had been carving Buddhas for nearly fifty years according to his own account. I asked him what he was going to do with it, and he said put it in the temple, where they let him do pretty much as he liked, and after a while it would acquire and soak in the power of the real thing, by which it would be surrounded, but would lose nothing of what he had carved on it. That would make it a god of evil, with the influence of the real gods behind it.”

The man hesitated an instant and looked curiously at Derrick. “All this may sound like a fairy-story to you, but if you and your people had lived in the Mong Hills all your lives it wouldn’t seem like that.”

“I think I understand.”

“Well, when he finished it, working with sharp sand and thousands of little wooden drills to cut the stone, he did put it in the temple. I don’t know how long the job had taken, but probably not less than thirty years. Then he sat tight, smiling to himself, till the priests found out. They knew in a minute that if the thing ever got away from them it would raise hell for whoever had it, so they guarded it day and night till a year or so later Millicent came along. He heard of it; the thought of the thing began to work in his brain; and, to make a long story short, he bribed a young priest and got away with it. The first thing that happened was that Lung Sen didn’t wake up one morning, and his face was just like the jade god’s. The priest was never seen again. Then for some reason they sent for me and told me to go in search of it; didn’t ask, but told me. And I knew enough to go. It took me years to find