Village Puppets

Lujia Village was ordinary once. People went out to the fields at dawn and barred their doors at dusk, and could argue half a day over who had really driven the Maskwalkers off; the incense in the ancestral hall mattered, and when an elder spoke the young did not talk back.

Then the ancestral hall became a temple to the Merciful Lady, the Herald began handing out red flowers, and a recipe for boiling prayer-silk in medicine spread from house to house. One after another the villagers went to sleep; what woke was wood. The craft behind such puppets should have stayed beyond the frontier, yet in this one village it was used on everyone.

These puppets have form but no substance: they can wound the living at will, while blades pass through them like mist. Each still keeps the shape of a life — child, housewife, elder, scholar — and each kills in the manner of that life.

• "Little Rascal": A child's body that skips about, then catches you with a shoulder or a few swift kicks as it runs past.
• "Simple Brother": Carved with a broad, honest smile. It smiles when it falls and cracks on the field ridge, and it smiles as it lunges.
• "Village Beauty": A village woman with a delicately carved face; two years ago she was neither broken nor hostile, and would sometimes pat a staring child on the head.
• "Peacemaker": An old man's shape, face twisted in pain; in life he loved to settle quarrels, and now the only way he has left is to wrench off his own head and hurl it at the noise.
• "Mad Scholar": A scholar with no books of the sages and no sermons, only Chaos Fire pouring from his mouth to burn everything for the Lady; after a decade at a cold desk he left the village and learned that power and blood held every road, and came home to kneel to her day and night, waiting for a fire to level the injustice.
• "Village Elder": A green glow wreaths the head he tears off and smashes on the ground, and a breath later it bursts into a wide cloud of poison; these were the loudest against turning the ancestral hall into a temple, until their voices dropped and they began wearing the red flowers before sleep.
• "Village Auntie": Tall and shaped like a woman, able to "give birth" to wooden children that land on their feet and come at you one after another; nobody can say who first passed the recipe around, but one household after another tried it.

Fire and poison both want you standing square in front of the mouth. Watch the head and step wide the moment it lifts; the cloud lingers, so do not turn back into it.

Some of them cannot be cut at all; against those, go around instead of through. Break the group apart, keep one in front of you at a time, and never let the small ones get behind.