First, a rule: do not call me a divine hound.
I am a dog. I held a posting. That is all. Under the True Lord's command no one keeps "divinities" — only those who serve. The Meishan brothers served. The hawk served. So did I. That is the law of Guanjiangkou: merit is merit, fault is fault, and when the hunt is done, man and dog are entered in the same ledger of deeds.
In my ledger, a few entries can stand daylight. I ran down the Great Sage once — that bout had no winner, and after he became the Victorious Fighting Buddha he still bared his teeth at me, friendly-like. I bit the Nine-Headed Beast — took one head clean off, and the reek of that blood kept me off my food for three days. The other captures and subjugations I won't enumerate; listing them smells of a veteran polishing his medals.
What I mean to speak of is the night, three hundred years ago.
That night the True Lord returned to Guanjiangkou without unbuckling his armor. This master of mine — the one you mortals call Erlang — never wears joy or anger on his face. But I am his dog: whether the hand inside his sleeve trembles, I can smell at three zhang. That whole night, the hand stayed clenched.
He dismissed the entire temple, called me alone to him, and crouched down. He never crouches. That night he crouched, met my eyes level, and said three things.
First: what is about to happen in Heaven is larger than Heaven.
Second: I must go. This errand is not a matter of blades. It is a matter of accounts.
Third — with his hand pressed on my head: guard the temple gate. Wait for my whistle.
Then he rose, took the hawk, and stepped into the clouds. In the instant they closed behind him, I heard — impossibly far up — a door of enormous size drop its bar.
I never saw him again.
I have watched this gate three hundred years. The first hundred, the incense still burned strong; I lay under the eaves counting clouds. The second hundred, the pilgrims thinned, the old temple-keeper died, and I began clearing the human world's uncleanness myself — the True Lord absent, Guanjiangkou's postings still wanted a dog. The third hundred, half the temple fell, the boundary stele by the river toppled, and the Bureau planted its flags outside the gate. They do not know what lies within it. I see no reason to enlighten them.
The whistle has never come.
I do not doubt him. The day a serving dog doubts its master is the day its service ends. He said wait for the whistle; I wait. Heaven has dropped its bar, and his whistle cannot carry down — that is not a broken promise. That is a broken road. And while the road is broken, the promise stands.
These three hundred years I do three things only: guard the gate; train the ears; keep the ledger. The gate needs no explanation. The ears — I have honed them past even their old sharpness, fine enough to sift one thread of whistle out of ten thousand li of wind: if the call comes, I must not miss it. And the ledger — a record of the world's crooked accounts: where a yao's name was blotted out for nothing, where incense was waylaid, where altars rose that should not stand. The day the True Lord returns, I will bark him that ledger entry by entry.
Two nights ago, under the eclipse, something happened.
On the old altar seven li north, a young one has been training its bay. Thirty years now; I have listened every night as it worked up from a farm-pup's whimper to a passable second bay — and the bloodline in that throat cannot hide from me. It is our line's seed, strayed into the world.
That night its bay struck the sky-canopy and dropped back — alone, unanswered, nowhere to land.
And these old bones, moved by something I cannot name, answered the roll for it.
I regretted it at once. Not the spent breath — a realization, one that ran cold down my spine:
I have ground these ears for three hundred years waiting for one whistle. And in that young one's bay, I heard it plainly: the understructure of a whistle. The same pitch. The same teaching.
The whistle in that pup's dreams and the whistle I have been waiting for are, I fear, one and the same.
Then the question stands — how does the True Lord's whistle come to fall into the dreams of a stray pup in the mortal world?
Unless the whistle has been sounding all along.
And through that barred door, all that leaks down is a thread as thin as a dream.
The young one has gone west with a boy who carries a medicine basket. Good. West is where the accounts rot worst.
I do not move. I watch my gate.
But from tonight, these ears stand taller than on any night in three hundred years —
when that bar lifts, I will be the first one there.