Jade Man's Skin by Daniel Fox

Author:Daniel Fox [Fox, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-345-51911-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

THAT WAS Shen, rapping his skull with hard knuckles. Then rubbing it better, a little more vigorously than he might. “Chung. Think. Which is harder, your skull or a stone shirt?”

He tried to break Shen’s nose, by slamming his hard head backward; but Shen was ready for it and his head met only those knuckles again, patiently painfully rapping. So then he did think; and, “Oh. Yes.” Jade would turn a blade, and the emperor had been stabbed once already. It would surely stop an arrow, maybe stop a club with no more than bruising for the man who wore it, and he wasn’t sure that the emperor could bruise. “But can you run in it? Really?”

“Yu Shan can. Really. And fight in it, and climb trees. And swim if he has to, though he says it drags him down. The only thing he can’t do is talk, but at least that means he can’t argue.”

“I can talk,” Yu Shan said, as though to assert that he could argue too, only that he chose not to. His voice was odd, as though thinned by distance: the other side of a mountain, say, or swallowed at the bottom of a mine.

“How does it, you know, how does it feel?”

Yu Shan only shook his head. It was Jiao who laughed.

“You can’t ask him that, Chung. You can’t ask him anything. Afterward, he’ll tell you that it hurts, except that it doesn’t hurt at all. Like being wrapped in fire that’s cruel but not actually hot, he might say, or wearing an ice-shirt that isn’t really cold, although it is. His blood is so thick with jade, I think it clogs his thinking. I don’t know, maybe the shirt is the real brain. That much jade all linked together, it’s got to be smarter than he is. The shirt talks to the stone-dust in his blood, and the dust talks to him, and he just has to listen …”

Yu Shan smiled peaceably. Jiao rolled her eyes, and tucked her arm through his; and that must be a consequence of his being lost in jade, because he would have jittered away from her and looked around for Siew Ren else. At which point Jiao would have either hit him, or more likely just stormed away and brooded behind the dark shadows of her eyes.

Perhaps it was Siew Ren they had been hiding from, as much as the emperor? If she knew about the shirt, she would surely have been here alongside them. How Jiao had sneaked him away, Chung couldn’t guess and didn’t mean to ask. Really, he wanted to ask more about the shirt, but she was no more help than Yu Shan …

“Never mind, sweet,” Shen murmured in his ear. “It’s only stone,” and this is flesh, the pressure of his body against Chung’s back, entirely discounting their own scant shirts on this hot damp night. “Let’s just sit in the corner here, and talk again about what happens when we land.

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