"To serve the tiger as its thrall" — you all use the phrase. You use it to curse collaborators.
But you may not know where thralls come from.
When a tiger eats a man and the soul does not scatter, the soul falls in beside the tiger and becomes its thrall. A thrall sees what the tiger cannot: the hunter's pit, the crossbow ambush, the traveller alone on the mountain road. And the rule — always a rule — says: lure one living person to feed the tiger, and the tiger frees the thrall to its next life.
The same mold, you notice, as the water-ghosts' substitute precedent.
I was eaten thirty years ago. A peddler — the surname no longer matters — crossing the ridge under a carrying-pole, met a starving tiger. My last living thought was not fear but fury: in my load was a case of new writing-brushes for the school below the mountain, and the children were waiting on them to begin their lessons.
As a thrall, the tiger walked me over the whole mountain. Tigers cannot speak, but thrall and tiger share intent: it was hungry. It wanted me to lure.
I said: no.
It roared. I said: you ate me — that I accept. Tigers and wolves must feed; that is heaven's arrangement, and I bear you no grudge for my death. But to buy my freedom with another's life? Living, I was an honest peddler whose scale-beam never tipped false once. Shall I turn crooked trader as a ghost?
No.
And it could do nothing. A thrall who will not lure cannot be forced — that, too, is the rule. So we deadlocked: it hunted its hunts; I walked my walks. And with the years, strange things grew. I could see the traps — and could not help steering it around them. It made its kills — and took to carrying my old peddler's pole back in its jaws, to keep where I could see it. Thirty years on, master and slave have worn into… a companionship with no proper name.
Stranger still: this rule-breaking thrall of mine has not faded. I have grown more solid. The old earth-god of the mountain shrine explained: a thrall who lures spends its hidden virtue and thins; a thrall who protects earns it and thickens. Thirty years of traps steered around, of travellers pulled back from the edge — all of it has grown into you.
He said: at this rate you will stand on your own one day — no tiger, no luring — and cultivate, honestly, into something of the "Power" lineage.
The Power lineage. It is in Cart-Slow Kingdom's old almanacs: Tiger Power, Deer Power, Goat Power — the three Grand Immortals of three hundred years ago walked exactly that road: beasts taking human form, proving the Way through strength.
A thrall-ghost, on the road of Grand Immortals? The old earth-god said: the road does not check your birth. Only your footprints.
Good. Then I walk it.
But my true business today is not my cultivation. It is the evil lately loose in Cart-Slow Kingdom.
Someone is collecting thralls.
The mountain's thralls have been vanishing one by one. Not to rebirth — rebirth leaves records; the earth-god's ledger takes names. They are being summoned: a scented wind comes by night, and in the wind a voice recites thralls' names. When a name strikes true, that thrall walks away into the wind, eyes empty, like a puppet gathered on its string.
The night the wind came for me, I heard its pitch in full. It said: little thralls — luring men to feed tigers is the lesser way. Follow me, and you shall lure the whole world, to feed the Great Master. On the day of completion, all of you will be given true bodies.
Lure the whole world. Feed the Great Master.
I spat at it. The wind left. But I have not slept since — thralls who keep the rule are few; thralls who break it, fewer. The ones whose names struck true, who walked into the wind: where are they now? And down what roads are they luring — whom?
When the medicine-basket boy passed through Cart-Slow Kingdom, I barred the road and reported all of it. Brother Wangliang of his company heard me out and said the thing that iced my spine:
"The half-beat people — no wonder they walk in such perfect order. There are thralls guiding the column."
So I joined. In thirty years I have steered travellers around a hundred traps and more.
Now the largest trap under heaven stands open in the west, waiting for everyone to walk in.
The guiding trade — this once, I accept the commission:
to guide the road around it.