Pilgrimage

Fourteen years and ten thousand miles, and the pilgrims finally stand at the foot of the mountain where the scriptures wait. The last stretch is the strangest — a bottomless boat, a corpse in the river that no one will name, and a heaven whose clerks have their hand out. The road is almost done teaching.

A whole country without a single man, a river that conceives children straight from a cup of water, and two thirsty monks who drink before they ask. The only cure is guarded by an old enemy with a grudge — and that is the easy half of the trouble waiting in the capital.

A rich farmer has a son-in-law problem. The strapping young man who married his daughter three years back has turned out to be a long-snouted, big-eared monster who eats like a famine and has locked the bride away. The farmer wants him gone. The monk and the monkey are happy to oblige.

A river so heavy a feather sinks, and a monster wearing nine skulls who has eaten every pilgrim before this one. Two of the travelers can fight in water and one cannot, which turns out to be the whole problem — and the river will not be crossed by winning.

For once the monk begs his own meal instead of sending a disciple — and walks straight into a house of seven smiling women who are not women at all. By the time the monkey finds the trail, the only thing between his master and the cookpot is a pig with no shame and a monkey with too much pride.

An emperor wants the souls of his war dead set free, so he sends one gentle, fearful monk west to fetch the scriptures that can do it — a road no man survives alone. Five hundred years after heaven buried him, the strongest creature alive is still pinned under a mountain, waiting for someone to come by.

A corpse-fiend who wants the holy monk's flesh comes at the pilgrims three times wearing three borrowed faces — a girl, an old woman, an old man. Only one of the travelers can see what is under each disguise, and seeing it is exactly what gets him thrown off the road.