Some more unnamed Nano
Nov. 14th, 2006 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaitouI still need a title for this thing. 'Geomancy for Imaginary Places' isn't going to cut it seeing how there isn't any Geomancy anymore and it all takes place in Victorian Hong Kong, not AU fantasy Hong Kong. Any ideas? After this bit the plot should even out and be coherent with no more talk about I Ching and other things I don't know anything about. Well, about mystical things i don't know anything about. I have been trying to research what I can about the Hong Kong police force and what it was like when it began, but correct titles and such probably own't filter through for a few chapters, if ever.
So anyway...
Chapter Five:
Richard never dreamed. Every night he bundled himself under the covers, positioning his pillow just so, and woke up eight hours later in the exact same position with nary so much as a kicked off cover to show he’d moved at all. In other words Richard Sieber slept like a log.
But that night was different. He wriggled into position, but his pillow felt uncomfortable. Perhaps he’d worn it thin in the middle, what with resting his head in the exact same spot every night. So he fluffed and pummeled the thing until all of the feathers were evenly distributed.
Now it felt too thick.
Though it wasn’t even five minutes since he lay down, Richard huffed in frustration. This kind of restlessness was unheard of! At least for him. Why even his mother said he’d been an uncommonly sound sleeper, even as a baby.
He lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes, breathing deeply and evenly, trying to think peaceful thoughts, boring thoughts. He counted to one hundred in Cantonese and then in Latin. He’d made it through two rounds and was starting in on the third round when his breathing evened out for real and he slipped into slumber.
In the morning he woke when the sunlight came through his window to hit him squarely in the eyes. But Richard didn’t awaken in the same refreshed and pleasant mood that he always did. Instead he felt deeply disturbed and unsettled, with a taste strangely like fear at the back of his throat.
Richard staggered over to the water, hoping that he could flush the fuzzy, groggy feeling away. It was only when he reached for the jug handle that he noticed his left hand was still tightly clenched. He opened it and to his surprise there was a small snippet of white silk clutched in his palm. The fabric was like a stiff brocade, with a pattern like waves woven in white in the background. But embroidered heavily on the fabric were three lines. Two small lines with a gap between them, a longer solid line, and then at the bottom another pair of shorter lines. Richard twisted it this way and that, trying to make sense of it. iIi? The Latin letter for three? The Chinese symbol for three?
Richard sat down on the edge of his bed, examining the fabric. Where on earth did it come from? It didn’t look like it was torn out of anything. Al of the edges were neatly hemmed and straight. It must have been stuck between the sheets, and he’d grabbed it in his sleep. Maybe it was the mark of a launderer, like a tag to match against an order.
Pondering the mystery of the little tag overrode the strange foreboding he felt when he woke. He shaved and dressed, tucking the little slip into his vest pocket.
He passed Su Hua, his maid in the hallway and showed her the slip. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” he asked her in Cantonese.
She shook her head, “No sir, where did you get it?”
Richard decided suddenly against telling her. He didn’t want her to think that he thought there was anything lacking in her housekeeping skills.
“Oh,” he said instead, “I thought maybe it was a character I didn’t know.”
“Oh, you meant what it means,” she said in sudden comprehension, “well, sir, this is a symbol for water.”
He frowned. It didn’t look like any character for water he’d ever seen and he told her so. She shifted the basket of fresh towels against her hip. “It’s not a character, exactly, it’s a symbol from the I Ching. I don’t really know much about it except for that. But any Chinese who’s studied for the Civil Service Exam will probably know all about it.”
Richard would have asked more, but she shifted the basket against her hip again and he remembered that she had a job of her own to do, and he didn’t want to bother her or impose on her more than necessary.
When he reached the government building he freshened up the tea caddies with last night’s purchases and headed off to the library, rubbing the bit of silk between thumb and forefinger. The library had a small collection of books in Chinese, some of the ‘classics’ and a few other books of law and history. There was an even smaller set of books that were actually translated from Chinese into English. Richard decided to start there. He didn’t really want to try wading through a heavy tome of complicated Chinese text so early in the morning.
Luckily for him there was a book near the top shelf, a slim volume bound in olive green leather. Pressed in black into the spine were the words ‘The Book Of Changes – I Ching.’ Richard stood on the library ladder, one elbow propped up on the top step as he leafed through the introduction.
He found out that the I Ching was both philosophy and a divination tool. Richard remembered briefly Jon saying that the governor didn’t respect Chinese mysticism. It was little wonder what with the way they mixed fortune telling and philosophy that way.
The I Ching was nothing but a book of descriptions that went with sixty four sets of six lines, those sets each made out of a pair of three lines. Like the one Richard held in his hand. There were only eight of those.
It didn’t take long for Richard to find the one he was looking for. The set of three lines was the trigram ‘kan’ that represented water, black, nighttime and the direction of north. Furthermore it represented the unknown and danger, philosophically speaking.
“Rubbish,” he said softly to himself. But he remembered the cold sweat he’d woken in ad the feeling of unease that was so hard to shake.
The loud boom of the door slamming shut was almost enough to startle him right off of the ladder as Jon walked into the library. “Richard! One of the clerks said you’d gone in here. I just wanted to…what are you looking at?”
Richard snapped the book closed and jammed it into a random slot in the shelves. “Nothing,” he said hastily.
Jon squinted. “Is that the I Ching?” his tone betrayed his disbelief. “Why on earth would YOU read the I Ching?”
Sighing Richard jumped down from the ladder. “I found this this morning, and I was trying to figure out what it was. Someone mentioned that book.”
Jon made a surprised sound with his nose. “Hmph. Well whoever mentioned it was right. It’s definitely a trigram, but I wouldn’t think about it too much. The superstitious use the eight trigrams all over the place. This probably came off of some Feng Shui knickknack.”
“Feng Shui?”
“Hmm…it’s like fortune telling, but only for places and things. Put your house here, good luck, put your house there, bad luck. Have to put your house there anyway? Well use these charms and you’ll have good luck.”
Richard frowned at the slip of silk. Well there went a great deal of mystery. But he didn’t feel like admitting the strange circumstances he’d found it in to Jon. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “At any rate, you were looking for me?”
Jon handed over the slip of fabric. “Right. The Governor wanted to have a meeting with you to discuss the Guan Yu Robberies.”
Richard groaned and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Oh lord, not again. I have more important things to worry about than Lady Tottington’s missing Ming. Doesn’t he care about the actual crimes being committed in this colony? The triads, the murders, the opium?”
“Ah, but this involves the Gweilo,” Jon said. Gweilo was the Chinese term for ghost that they used as a vicious insult for the white foreigners. He suddenly seemed to remember who he was talking to. “Not you, Richard, you know what I mean.”
“I understand. And I’m sorry that you have to see so many of my countrymen that way.” He clapped Jon on the shoulder, “We’re not so bad, all of us. Just remember, Jon, if we were the best of our country, they wouldn’t have been so eager to send us here. Well, I’d best go see what it is that Governor George wants.”
Richard tucked the scrap of fabric into his pocket and forgot about it completely.
Richard worked as a Captain of the fledgling Hong Kong police force. The British were trying to set up a European force and needed to have ‘experts’ come and create the new system, provide good examples. Back in London he’d been a detective for Scotland Yard, and now he was here in charge of his own division. He tried to make sure that it was as autonomous as possible, but he often found himself investigating something himself, especially when it involved any of the other expatriates.
The last thing anyone needed was an excuse to get the military involved, he thought. They’d just end up with another war on their hands like the late eighteen fifties. And that was just what he was afraid of with Guan Yu.
The robberies were always daring, swift and silent. Most took place while the victim was at home. They never knew what happened until the next morning when they found a note card signed by Guan Yu in their treasure’s place. And Guan Yu always, always stole Chinese artwork. And not just any artwork, it was always something outrageously old, Tang and Song dynasty pieces with some kind of cultural significance.
It was clear to Richard that it was the work of a Chinese thief, someone taking Chinese pieces back from the colonists. But he tried his best to downplay it at every step along the way. He was afraid that if people thought the crimes had some kind of political or revolutionary motivation they’d use it as an excuse for further aggression.
Richard knocked on the governor’s door sharply and waited for the muffled ‘Enter’ through the heavy wood before he walked inside. “Fan Zhong said that you wanted to see me Sir.” Even though he called him Jon himself, Richard could never resist using the correct Chinese name when speaking to the governor.
“Yes, yes. Come in Captain Seiber, sit down. I want to find out what progress we’ve made on the Guan Yu cases. People are getting very upset. I’ve even had requests to have you taken off the case.”
That couldn’t happen. Richard couldn’t afford someone like Corbin taking over the investigation. At least not until he’d had a chance to stop the thief peacefully, to talk to him.
“Sir, I apologize that we’ve been unable to reclaim the stolen antiques. But I think you’ll be pleased with the progress I have made.” He pulled a small leather bound journal out of his jacket pocket. “With your permission, Sir.”
The governor grunted his assent and hooked his thumbs into his vest pockets as he leaned back to listen.
Richard flipped open to a page, using the trigram as a bookmark. “Well, Sir, I want you to appreciate how thorough we’re being with this investigation. I’ve had my men canvassing the local pawn shops to try and find the middleman who is purchasing these pieces from the thief. But of course we haven’t had any luck with that line of questioning yet.
“I’ve cross referenced the servants that worked in each household. But we’re also investigating along family lines to see if this is a wider network. I’m sure you can appreciate the difficulty in that, Sir. As you know, there are only one hundred surnames commonly used for the entire population so there is a certain amount of overlapping of those who don’t have an actual family relation.
“I discovered that there is a historian now in residence in Hong Kong attached to a museum in the United States. I have a man tailing him to make sure that he’s not trying to smuggle pieces out to his, or other, museums. You just can’t underestimate scholars, Sir.” Good. The governor’s eyes were starting to glaze over now.
“We’ve also been trying to find a pattern in the thefts, and are also investigating to make sure that there haven’t been similar thefts among the Chinese merchant houses.”
The governor shook his meaty head. “Seiber, just give me something I can take back to Lady Tottington.”
Richard schooled his face into as bland a mask as he could and said, “The same thing I’ve been urging all households in Hong Kong to do, Sir. Keep their valuables secured, locked away. Don’t put them out on display, and don’t advertise the fact that they won them. Guan Yu can’t steal a thing that he doesn’t know they own.”
With a sign the governor lowered his chin to his chest. “What a bloody nightmare this has turned into. That’s enough Seiber, you can go for now.”
Richard didn’t need to be told twice. With a polite bow of his head he took his leave, heaving a sigh of relief. He’d bought himself a little time, but he didn’t know how much. Guan Yu had to be stopped. It was all a problem of HOW.
So anyway...
Chapter Five:
Richard never dreamed. Every night he bundled himself under the covers, positioning his pillow just so, and woke up eight hours later in the exact same position with nary so much as a kicked off cover to show he’d moved at all. In other words Richard Sieber slept like a log.
But that night was different. He wriggled into position, but his pillow felt uncomfortable. Perhaps he’d worn it thin in the middle, what with resting his head in the exact same spot every night. So he fluffed and pummeled the thing until all of the feathers were evenly distributed.
Now it felt too thick.
Though it wasn’t even five minutes since he lay down, Richard huffed in frustration. This kind of restlessness was unheard of! At least for him. Why even his mother said he’d been an uncommonly sound sleeper, even as a baby.
He lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes, breathing deeply and evenly, trying to think peaceful thoughts, boring thoughts. He counted to one hundred in Cantonese and then in Latin. He’d made it through two rounds and was starting in on the third round when his breathing evened out for real and he slipped into slumber.
In the morning he woke when the sunlight came through his window to hit him squarely in the eyes. But Richard didn’t awaken in the same refreshed and pleasant mood that he always did. Instead he felt deeply disturbed and unsettled, with a taste strangely like fear at the back of his throat.
Richard staggered over to the water, hoping that he could flush the fuzzy, groggy feeling away. It was only when he reached for the jug handle that he noticed his left hand was still tightly clenched. He opened it and to his surprise there was a small snippet of white silk clutched in his palm. The fabric was like a stiff brocade, with a pattern like waves woven in white in the background. But embroidered heavily on the fabric were three lines. Two small lines with a gap between them, a longer solid line, and then at the bottom another pair of shorter lines. Richard twisted it this way and that, trying to make sense of it. iIi? The Latin letter for three? The Chinese symbol for three?
Richard sat down on the edge of his bed, examining the fabric. Where on earth did it come from? It didn’t look like it was torn out of anything. Al of the edges were neatly hemmed and straight. It must have been stuck between the sheets, and he’d grabbed it in his sleep. Maybe it was the mark of a launderer, like a tag to match against an order.
Pondering the mystery of the little tag overrode the strange foreboding he felt when he woke. He shaved and dressed, tucking the little slip into his vest pocket.
He passed Su Hua, his maid in the hallway and showed her the slip. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” he asked her in Cantonese.
She shook her head, “No sir, where did you get it?”
Richard decided suddenly against telling her. He didn’t want her to think that he thought there was anything lacking in her housekeeping skills.
“Oh,” he said instead, “I thought maybe it was a character I didn’t know.”
“Oh, you meant what it means,” she said in sudden comprehension, “well, sir, this is a symbol for water.”
He frowned. It didn’t look like any character for water he’d ever seen and he told her so. She shifted the basket of fresh towels against her hip. “It’s not a character, exactly, it’s a symbol from the I Ching. I don’t really know much about it except for that. But any Chinese who’s studied for the Civil Service Exam will probably know all about it.”
Richard would have asked more, but she shifted the basket against her hip again and he remembered that she had a job of her own to do, and he didn’t want to bother her or impose on her more than necessary.
When he reached the government building he freshened up the tea caddies with last night’s purchases and headed off to the library, rubbing the bit of silk between thumb and forefinger. The library had a small collection of books in Chinese, some of the ‘classics’ and a few other books of law and history. There was an even smaller set of books that were actually translated from Chinese into English. Richard decided to start there. He didn’t really want to try wading through a heavy tome of complicated Chinese text so early in the morning.
Luckily for him there was a book near the top shelf, a slim volume bound in olive green leather. Pressed in black into the spine were the words ‘The Book Of Changes – I Ching.’ Richard stood on the library ladder, one elbow propped up on the top step as he leafed through the introduction.
He found out that the I Ching was both philosophy and a divination tool. Richard remembered briefly Jon saying that the governor didn’t respect Chinese mysticism. It was little wonder what with the way they mixed fortune telling and philosophy that way.
The I Ching was nothing but a book of descriptions that went with sixty four sets of six lines, those sets each made out of a pair of three lines. Like the one Richard held in his hand. There were only eight of those.
It didn’t take long for Richard to find the one he was looking for. The set of three lines was the trigram ‘kan’ that represented water, black, nighttime and the direction of north. Furthermore it represented the unknown and danger, philosophically speaking.
“Rubbish,” he said softly to himself. But he remembered the cold sweat he’d woken in ad the feeling of unease that was so hard to shake.
The loud boom of the door slamming shut was almost enough to startle him right off of the ladder as Jon walked into the library. “Richard! One of the clerks said you’d gone in here. I just wanted to…what are you looking at?”
Richard snapped the book closed and jammed it into a random slot in the shelves. “Nothing,” he said hastily.
Jon squinted. “Is that the I Ching?” his tone betrayed his disbelief. “Why on earth would YOU read the I Ching?”
Sighing Richard jumped down from the ladder. “I found this this morning, and I was trying to figure out what it was. Someone mentioned that book.”
Jon made a surprised sound with his nose. “Hmph. Well whoever mentioned it was right. It’s definitely a trigram, but I wouldn’t think about it too much. The superstitious use the eight trigrams all over the place. This probably came off of some Feng Shui knickknack.”
“Feng Shui?”
“Hmm…it’s like fortune telling, but only for places and things. Put your house here, good luck, put your house there, bad luck. Have to put your house there anyway? Well use these charms and you’ll have good luck.”
Richard frowned at the slip of silk. Well there went a great deal of mystery. But he didn’t feel like admitting the strange circumstances he’d found it in to Jon. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “At any rate, you were looking for me?”
Jon handed over the slip of fabric. “Right. The Governor wanted to have a meeting with you to discuss the Guan Yu Robberies.”
Richard groaned and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Oh lord, not again. I have more important things to worry about than Lady Tottington’s missing Ming. Doesn’t he care about the actual crimes being committed in this colony? The triads, the murders, the opium?”
“Ah, but this involves the Gweilo,” Jon said. Gweilo was the Chinese term for ghost that they used as a vicious insult for the white foreigners. He suddenly seemed to remember who he was talking to. “Not you, Richard, you know what I mean.”
“I understand. And I’m sorry that you have to see so many of my countrymen that way.” He clapped Jon on the shoulder, “We’re not so bad, all of us. Just remember, Jon, if we were the best of our country, they wouldn’t have been so eager to send us here. Well, I’d best go see what it is that Governor George wants.”
Richard tucked the scrap of fabric into his pocket and forgot about it completely.
Richard worked as a Captain of the fledgling Hong Kong police force. The British were trying to set up a European force and needed to have ‘experts’ come and create the new system, provide good examples. Back in London he’d been a detective for Scotland Yard, and now he was here in charge of his own division. He tried to make sure that it was as autonomous as possible, but he often found himself investigating something himself, especially when it involved any of the other expatriates.
The last thing anyone needed was an excuse to get the military involved, he thought. They’d just end up with another war on their hands like the late eighteen fifties. And that was just what he was afraid of with Guan Yu.
The robberies were always daring, swift and silent. Most took place while the victim was at home. They never knew what happened until the next morning when they found a note card signed by Guan Yu in their treasure’s place. And Guan Yu always, always stole Chinese artwork. And not just any artwork, it was always something outrageously old, Tang and Song dynasty pieces with some kind of cultural significance.
It was clear to Richard that it was the work of a Chinese thief, someone taking Chinese pieces back from the colonists. But he tried his best to downplay it at every step along the way. He was afraid that if people thought the crimes had some kind of political or revolutionary motivation they’d use it as an excuse for further aggression.
Richard knocked on the governor’s door sharply and waited for the muffled ‘Enter’ through the heavy wood before he walked inside. “Fan Zhong said that you wanted to see me Sir.” Even though he called him Jon himself, Richard could never resist using the correct Chinese name when speaking to the governor.
“Yes, yes. Come in Captain Seiber, sit down. I want to find out what progress we’ve made on the Guan Yu cases. People are getting very upset. I’ve even had requests to have you taken off the case.”
That couldn’t happen. Richard couldn’t afford someone like Corbin taking over the investigation. At least not until he’d had a chance to stop the thief peacefully, to talk to him.
“Sir, I apologize that we’ve been unable to reclaim the stolen antiques. But I think you’ll be pleased with the progress I have made.” He pulled a small leather bound journal out of his jacket pocket. “With your permission, Sir.”
The governor grunted his assent and hooked his thumbs into his vest pockets as he leaned back to listen.
Richard flipped open to a page, using the trigram as a bookmark. “Well, Sir, I want you to appreciate how thorough we’re being with this investigation. I’ve had my men canvassing the local pawn shops to try and find the middleman who is purchasing these pieces from the thief. But of course we haven’t had any luck with that line of questioning yet.
“I’ve cross referenced the servants that worked in each household. But we’re also investigating along family lines to see if this is a wider network. I’m sure you can appreciate the difficulty in that, Sir. As you know, there are only one hundred surnames commonly used for the entire population so there is a certain amount of overlapping of those who don’t have an actual family relation.
“I discovered that there is a historian now in residence in Hong Kong attached to a museum in the United States. I have a man tailing him to make sure that he’s not trying to smuggle pieces out to his, or other, museums. You just can’t underestimate scholars, Sir.” Good. The governor’s eyes were starting to glaze over now.
“We’ve also been trying to find a pattern in the thefts, and are also investigating to make sure that there haven’t been similar thefts among the Chinese merchant houses.”
The governor shook his meaty head. “Seiber, just give me something I can take back to Lady Tottington.”
Richard schooled his face into as bland a mask as he could and said, “The same thing I’ve been urging all households in Hong Kong to do, Sir. Keep their valuables secured, locked away. Don’t put them out on display, and don’t advertise the fact that they won them. Guan Yu can’t steal a thing that he doesn’t know they own.”
With a sign the governor lowered his chin to his chest. “What a bloody nightmare this has turned into. That’s enough Seiber, you can go for now.”
Richard didn’t need to be told twice. With a polite bow of his head he took his leave, heaving a sigh of relief. He’d bought himself a little time, but he didn’t know how much. Guan Yu had to be stopped. It was all a problem of HOW.
