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bright morning sunlight, the zone seemed especially dark: a little fragment of night scored across the glittering expanse of the harbor. He found Sergeant Ma sitting disconsolately in a teahouse across the street from the funeral parlor. Ma blanched visibly when he saw who had arrived.
    "Nothing's happened yet," Ma said defensively. Chen sighed. Ma was clad in a fawn jacket and huge boots: evidently his idea of civilian garb. Chen had never seen anyone who looked more like a policeman.
    "I hope someone's watching the back," Chen said, with a faint note of query. Ma nodded.
    "A patrolman. Don't worry, he's well-hidden."
    "Frankly, I'll be surprised if we get a glimpse of anything," Chen told him. "Even if he's in there, Tang needn't leave the house in order to make his escape."
    "Why not?"
    "Places like funeral parlors and temples are nexus points—junctions between the worlds. Since it's licensed, that parlor will have access to both Hell and the Celestial regions. A temple will have an actual correlate in both; so there's a version of Kuan Yin's temple in the part of Hell that relates to our district, for instance."
    Ma furrowed his brow in painful concentration as he grappled with this concept.
    "Sergeant," Chen said, trying not to sound too sarcastic. "Can I ask how familiar you actually are with the precepts of your own religion?"
    Ma looked up unhappily.
    "It isn't my religion, though. I was brought up by my grandparents—grandma was a Christian and grandfather only believed in money. He wouldn't let my grandma take me to church, but she told me a lot about Hell."
    "You come from Da Lo Province, isn't that right?" Chen said. Gloomily, Ma nodded. Chen began to see where the pattern had begun: an impressionable child from a rural backwater, fed with half-digested facts about the nature of the afterlife from someone who almost certainly had no idea what she was talking about. He decided that a few clarifying details might be in order.
    "I don't know what your grandma told you about Hell," he said, "but it isn't a fiery sort of place where the dead suffer eternal torment. When you die, you either go to Heaven or Hell, but first you have to pass through a kind of process. You see, you've got two souls, not one as the Christians tell people. One is called the hun , and the other is called the p'o . When you die, the hun goes out into the universe and tries to find its way to Heaven—usually it just wanders about until it gets reincarnated—but the p'o is different. It used to remain with the corpse for about three years, but that was before the other worlds speeded up the process to bring their bureaucracies more in line with modern times. Now, when a person dies, the p'o goes to the afterlife—either Heaven, or Hell—the Yellow Springs."
    "Why is Hell called the Yellow Springs?" Ma asked, frowning. Chen shrugged.
    "It's a bit like somewhere being called 'Big Hill.' I suppose there are yellow springs somewhere in Hell. It's also known as 'Di Yu,' the 'Prisons of the Earth'—that's probably a bit more accurate. Each soul who ends up in Hell has earned their place, and they get a fitting punishment, but it isn't eternal. Eventually you get to come back to this world when you reincarnate. Demons live in Hell, too, but they're just a different kind of entity to ourselves."
    "I hope I never see Hell," Ma remarked fervently. Chen smiled.
    "You probably already have. Anyway, Heaven's not all that wonderful, either—it's enchantingly pretty, granted, but Imperial Court etiquette is still positively medieval and it's just as much bound by bureaucracy as Hell itself."
    "So what actually happens when you—when you die?" Ma whispered.
    "Usually, if you die in a normal manner, an officer comes to you with a warrant, and takes you to the Night Harbor, which is where the boat leaves for the other worlds. In other places in China, it's different—you might find yourself going down into a cave, for example—but here, because we're a