The Singing-Spring Tower in the Womanland's capital; the upper gallery; the pipa girl A-Xiao — that is me.
The patrons say A-Xiao's pipa has three wonders: tremolo too fast to see, harmonics clear as mountain springwater — and a third they cannot name, saying only that under my music, old wounds hurt less.
The first two wonders are practice. The third is my secret: I am of the scorpion clan.
A scorpion playing the pipa is no curiosity — it is the family art. You take our tail-sting for a weapon; in truth the sting is a plectrum. The gift of the scorpion-tailed was always the fine strength of the plucked string — the old generations of Poison-Enemy Mountain produced the finest musicians under heaven. On the pipa's four strings, my five fingers play one music; beneath my skirts, the sting rests silently on the strings and plays another. Two voices at once, one bright, one hidden: the bright strings please the ear; the hidden string enters the body — travelling the meridians.
So the patrons' old wounds truly do ease. The hidden string's tone walks the acupoints. My little venom-sister works her needle in the apothecary; I work my string in the wine-house. One clan's art, two roads.
Why hide the tail and live among humans?
Half for a living. Half to trace the origin of one tune.
As a scorpling on Poison-Enemy Mountain, I played outside Pipa Cave. The cave was forbidden; the elders would not speak of it, saying only that a Great-Aunt had lived there, gone three hundred years, the cave sealed since. Disobedient, I pressed my ear to the stone seams and listened to the wind — and the wind through the cracks moaned like someone playing the pipa within.
I memorized that wind. At home, I played it back. The elders' faces drained.
The oldest asked, trembling: who taught you that tune?
I said: the wind in the cave.
They exchanged long looks, and made me swear never to play it again. I swore.
But oaths do not govern hands. Ever since, at every full moon my fingers itch beyond suppressing until the tune has been played through, beginning to end. While it plays, my chest burns and my sting tingles — as if another were borrowing my hands to warm her old music.
I have searched every score and ancient songbook since. The tune exists in none. Yet it is manifestly complete: opening, development, turn, and close, nothing missing. And it carries an unspeakable force — the first half tender, like whispers under the moon; then a sudden turn, and killing intent sweeps the strings, note after note drawing blood; but at the close the killing fades, and only two or three notes remain, soft, like a sigh. Or like… unwillingness.
What manner of person composes such a tune?
Last year, the Black Turtle's forces entered Poison-Enemy Mountain and pried open Pipa Cave. The elders sent word by night: the cave is breached, the Great-Aunt's things cannot be protected, and your tune — the letter breaks off there. The kinsman who carried it never made it off the mountain.
I dropped my pipa and ran for home. On the road I met the medicine-basket boy's company — bound for Pipa Cave themselves, to dismantle the three corrosion-drug cauldrons.
What we found inside shakes me still: three cauldrons squatting at the cave's heart, and the walls gouged everywhere — the Turtle's people had been searching for something, and had turned the Great-Aunt's home inside out.
What they sought, I do not know. I saw only, on the stone dais of the main chamber, a pipa carved of stone, enshrined — all four strings broken.
I walked to the stone pipa and — some ghost moving my hands — began the full-moon tune.
At the peak of the killing passage, the four broken strings of the stone pipa rang once, together.
Dust sifted from the cave roof; the cauldron-array faltered; the company seized the moment and tore down all three. And under my fingers, at the close, those few sighing notes — for the first time — did not sigh.
They resolved into another sound. Something very soft. Like: "good."
The elders consented at last to speak: the Great-Aunt was the Scorpion Demoness of three hundred years past, mistress of Pipa Cave. The tune is her death-song — played once in her life, and when it ended she walked into her final battle. It was never scored, never taught. By rights, no one under heaven should know it.
But it has landed in my hands. Across three hundred years, by the full moon, teaching me — one performance at a time.
She wants an heir who knows this tune. She has been waiting for one.
Waiting — for what?
I travel west with the company now, the pipa on my back, bright strings and hidden string newly silked.
When the bond is deep enough and the tune is fully mine, Great-Aunt —
whose ears, on that day, do you mean to borrow my hands for?