The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 10 - Chapter 12

Chapter 12: The Feitouman (Part 2)

Jinshi studied the animal in the cage. “I’ve never seen a bird with a face quite like this before. I never imagined.”

They had moved to Jinshi’s chambers, where he sat in the place of honor, with Suiren, Taomei, and Chue around him, as well as Basen for his bodyguard. Maomao suspected Basen’s older brother Baryou was nearby as well, but she didn’t expect to actually see him at any point. Gaoshun was absent; whether he was off duty or on some other errand, she didn’t know. For some reason, Tianyu was there too, smiling away.

Pretend you have work or something and get out of here! Maomao thought at him, but if it seemed like something interesting was going on, Tianyu would make it his business to be a part of it.

“What made you think a bird like this might be the true identity of our feitouman?” Jinshi asked.

Maomao closed her eyes. She would have to be careful not to give Tianyu any information that might tip him off.

“Sir. The first thing that struck me as odd was the word ‘mask.’ People said they had seen it by the tree or on the roof of the building, so my first thought was to look near the tree. My encounter with the alleged spirit also took the form of a mask.”

Chue had noticed the tree as well. Maomao’s investigation had turned up bird droppings—and not those of a small bird, but rather a fairly large, carnivorous one.

“I’ve seen small birds flying through the house during the day, so it occurred to me that if there was a predator around, they might well be nocturnal.”

“Mm. So that was when you realized there was a bird behind these apparitions. How did you prove it?”

“Once I knew about this bird, sir, it was a fairly simple guess. I’d never seen one myself, but I had heard of birds with faces that look like masks. There was a picture of one in the encyclopedia of animals that I got at the apothecary’s shop where I used to work. Although I admit I didn’t pay it much mind the first time I saw it.”

She trusted Jinshi would know which encyclopedia she was referring to—one of the books brought out of the Shi clan fortress. It was in Jinshi’s keeping at the moment; if he’d brought it to the western capital, he might be able to look at it.

“An encyclopedia?” Jinshi said with a glance at Taomei. She brought out an armload of books, Chue helping to carry those she couldn’t fit in her arms. The books included the encyclopedia of medicinal herbs, along with those about insects and animals. Those were Shi clan books, but there were several others Maomao had never seen.

Guess he didn’t waste any time digging them out after yesterday.

She was impressed by how quickly he worked.

“This is what we would call, appropriately enough, a masked owl,” she said. “No normal owl would give the impression of a flying mask—and this one has an unusual coloration.” This owl boasted feathers so dark they were almost black. Usually, even birds with dark-colored bodies had white feathers on their bellies, but other than its face, this one was a uniform dark brown. It would be easy to miss it in the night.

“A masked owl? That’s this, isn’t it?” Jinshi asked, opening to the relevant page of the Shi clan encyclopedia. Coloring aside, the unsettling, masklike face certainly matched the bird in the cage.

Tianyu raised his hand. “May I ask something?”

“Go ahead.” Jinshi sounded somewhat more commanding than usual.

“I agree it looks like it’s wearing a mask, but doesn’t it seem a bit small? It’s a little undersized to be a person’s face.”

Tianyu peered into the cage at the bird. The animal wasn’t fighting; in fact, it looked sleepy. If they put some nesting material in with it, maybe it would doze off.

“The human eye is unreliable,” Maomao replied. “It might be only the white part you’d see floating in midair, but I think it would look bigger than it is.” Then Maomao took a piece of paper from the folds of her robe. She was just looking for writing utensils when Chue took some out and offered them to her. She was nimble, that was for sure. Incidentally, she hadn’t spared the annoyed looks at Basen, who had almost let the bird escape.

Maomao made four dots on the paper, right where a person’s eyes, mouth, and nose would be, and held it up for Jinshi and Tianyu. “People will perceive anything as a human face as long as the dots are in the right place. It’s like how we sometimes see faces in the knots of wooden pillars.”

“So now we know what the mysterious mask was,” Tianyu said. He reached into the cage and poked the owl, which didn’t particularly react.

Taomei appeared carrying a small dish of raw chicken meat. It seemed she was more generous with owls than with ducks. Maybe two predators knew each other.

So the bird gets meat?

Taomei picked up a piece of chicken with a pair of chopsticks and held it out; the owl promptly took it. It showed no aversion to food offered by humans.

“What about the head, though? You said you’d solved half the riddle. Does that mean you think the head is something else?” Tianyu was no fool; he remembered exactly what Maomao had said.

“A mask and a head? What does that mean?” Jinshi asked.

Maomao began to explain, taking the chance to review everything she knew. “Witnesses began reporting it about two months ago. At the time, some people reported a mask and some said they saw a head, but in the last twenty days or so, most witnesses have reported a head. What’s more, they report it outside the mansion. In my case, I saw the mask, but no head.”

“So you think the mask and the head are different things. If this bird accounts for the mask, then what’s the head?” Jinshi asked.

“About that...” Maomao glanced at Chue.

“Yes? Whatever do you need? Is there something you want from Miss Chue?”

“It’s not you, is it, Miss Chue?”

Maomao considered the timeline. The head had been witnessed starting about twenty days earlier, or in other words, right about the time Maomao and the others had arrived in the western capital. And there was one member of their party who seemed especially prone to doing unusual things.

“How could you, Miss Maomao? Hasn’t Miss Chue been with you the last several days?”

Maomao had to admit that was true. They’d been working in the fields together.

“It was just a hypothesis,” she said. “But I feel like this owl has given me a big piece of the puzzle.” As the owl ate its chicken, she looked at its leg. There, she spotted a small, well-crafted metal ring. “I don’t think it will take us long at all to find out the truth about the head. We just have to set a little trap.”

She smiled at the owl with the unsettling face and gave it a pat on the head.

The next day, Chue appeared at the medical office. Maomao had cleaned up from breakfast and was helping the quack make some medicines. A look at Jinshi’s encyclopedia of herbs had given her some idea as to which of the specimens she’d collected might be useful, and they were experimenting.

“Are you a prophet, Miss Maomao?” Chue asked, blinking.

“I take it you caught the culprit. You weren’t too rough with them, were you?”

“What in the world are you two talking about? I’m so confused,” said the quack, who was in no way part of this conversation. It seemed like a lot of work to explain things to him, so Maomao decided to just have him keep working on the medicines. When he was done with that, she suspected he would make them tea.

Chue needed no invitation to make herself at home; she sat in a chair and waited for the quack to bring her some sweets. The conversation with Maomao almost seemed ancillary to her goal of treats.

“Don’t worry. It was just like you said, Miss Maomao. We watched the owl’s cage all night long, and when the bird suddenly started making a ruckus, we searched the premises. It was the strangest thing! We found a woman dressed all in black and wearing a bizarre mask.”

Chue related all this with great good cheer, while also grabbing a sip of the tea the quack doctor politely produced. The accompanying snacks were dried fruit, a very western-capitalesque treat.

“Really? Wow, who knew?” Maomao said, a bit taken aback herself to find that her prediction had been so on the mark. “So, was this the person who was keeping the owl?”

“Bingo!” Chue formed a large circle with both arms, a gesture of confirmation.

Maomao thought about the owl they’d caught. “It was pretty obvious it was a domestic bird. The way it had something on its leg, and wasn’t worried about being in a cage or eating chicken that had already been cut up for it. I don’t think this is an animal she was just keeping temporarily. She’s had it a long time.”

“Hoh, hoh.”

“Plus, there’s something that’s been bothering me about the witness testimony.”

Specifically, a commonality between the reports of the mask, which had started two months earlier, and the reports of the head, which dated from twenty days ago.

“Two months ago... Wouldn’t that be just about the time Empress Gyokuyou’s infamous niece was about to leave for the capital?”

“Oh!” Chue said, evidently catching Maomao’s drift.

“Suppose the owl was intended to be one of the offerings to be taken to the Imperial city, but it somehow got away,” Maomao said.

“Hoh, hoh! You mean, maybe she was trying to catch it so she could have another chance to offer it to the Imperial family now that a member has come all the way here? All right, but why the mask? Trying to hide her identity?”

Maomao had an idea about that, although it wasn’t a clear or certain answer—just one of her guesses.

“Miss Maomao,” Chue said. “Miss Chue may act silly, but she’s nobody’s fool. She would understand that your opinion was just one possibility, and would never accept it uncritically.”

It was Chue’s roundabout way of saying Spit it out already. Maomao saw little choice but to oblige.

“I suspect the mask and the black outfit are to make this person look more like the owl’s mother.”

Chue cocked her head at that.

“Are you familiar with imprinting?” Maomao asked.

“Oh yes, Miss Chue knows all about that. It means that when a bird hatches from its egg, it thinks the first thing it sees is its mother. The same way that duck feels about my little brother-in-law.”

“Yes, exactly. I think maybe whoever raised the owl intended to return it to the wild, and wanted to make sure it didn’t imprint on a human face.”

“Hoh...”

Judging by the owl’s droppings, it was catching its own food, which meant it knew how to hunt.

“However, it can and will accept meat from a human hand,” Maomao said. “Domesticate an interesting-looking bird like that, and a rich person might buy it as a curiosity, or it could be given as an offering to the nobility.”

“But its keeper didn’t want it to end up that way, so she let it go—or maybe it escaped?”

“This is only a hypothesis, remember.” Maomao refused to speak with certainty.

“It was her bad luck, though, that the owl took up residence right in Master Gyoku-ou’s annex! And when a member of the Imperial family arrived to stay there—well, how terrible!”

“Hypothesis!” Maomao repeated.

“She realized the owl would be quicker to come to her if she dressed the way she had while she was raising it. Then, when she caught it, she planned to release it somewhere far away, somewhere people would never find it.”

“Hypothe...sigh.”

“Don’t worry, I know!”

Perhaps the keeper had used some kind of bird whistle. The owl had responded, but hadn’t come outside.

Regardless of whether Maomao’s guess was accurate, it did gain them one thing.

“The person in black is the owl’s keeper, right?” Maomao asked.

“Yes indeed!” Chue chirped.

They grinned at each other. The quack, still out of the loop, was visibly intimidated by two people who looked to him like they were up to no good.

If Maomao was right that this person had raised the bird from a fledgling, it would bring them close to solving one particular problem. Nianzhen, the former serf, had spoken of the Windreader tribe, and how the Yi clan had granted the tribe their protection.

But I’m betting they didn’t earn the protection of a major clan by just ritually scratching in the dirt.

There was also the question of how they had actually gotten rid of the insects they found. Maomao felt herself being led to one conclusion: the Windreaders had kept birds. As she’d suggested to Jinshi, they might well have used the creatures to communicate. A fast, reliable means of carrying messages would have been very valuable.

For starters, Maomao decided she wanted to meet this masked stranger.