By Shuang, it seemed, he meant Liu Fai. They stopped at a kitchen, where they ate a quick snack of roasted sweet potatoes and rice-dough-cinnamon-roll things called rolling donkeys, before taking the elevator up to a moonlit walkway.
Cool, damp air brushed Jack’s cheeks. Beyond the stone railing, tile-roofed pagodas linked by arched walkways hung suspended in a silver mist. “When the minister said it was late, I didn’t realize how late,” he whispered, unwilling to spoil the soft feel of the night with loud words.
The Archivist whispered as well. “You crossed five thousand miles chasing the moon, Jack. Didn’t you expect to catch it?” She smiled and split from the group, taking one of the bridges into the mist.
Not long after, the remaining four came to an alcove with three wooden doors. “These are your rooms,” said Liu Fai. “You will find water and more food inside.” He raised an eyebrow at Gwen. “I must apologize, but the Wi-Fi is currently down.” Jack couldn’t tell if he was joking.
Gwen waggled her phone. “Not a problem. Satellite.”
“Wait.” Jack caught Liu Fai’s arm before he could leave them. “Why does your dad call you Shuang?”
“Many Chinese parents assign nicknames to their children. Shuang is the name my father gave. It is not one of fondness.” He yanked his arm free and walked away. “It means frost.”
Chapter Thirty
“GWEN!”
Jack sat up in his bed, breathing hard and fast. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, noticing the orange glow of the room, as if someone had lit his lamp while he slept.
But the lamp remained dark.
Deep red spikes of heat pressed down on his scalp and shoulders, sucking the oxygen from the air. Slowly, warily, Jack looked up. A ball of flame no bigger than a baseball hovered above. He let out a rueful laugh. “At least I didn’t light the comforter on fire this time.”
He opened his palm, and the fireball raced down to meet it. What had Lady Ravenswick said? Fire is instinctual. We create it by exciting air molecules. “Instinctual.” Jack concentrated, pushing his senses into the fireball the way he pushed into a spark, straining until his temples bulged. At first, nothing happened.
Then the flame exploded to the size of a beach ball, blowing itself out.
Jack let out a cry and felt for his eyebrows. They were still there.
The fire had not been the only light in the room. Jack could smell the misty blue of dawn wafting in through the window. Its gray light fell across an end table, and a paper Gwen had given him the night before.
“I finished the puzzle,” she had said, biting her lip. “Before we set off to meet Will.”
“What puzzle?”
“Your dad’s puzzle. The poem.” She had shown him the paper. “The lines were all jumbled up, but I’ve got them sorted into stanzas. They might help us. They may even be prophetic.”
Jack picked up the paper and read through the poem again. His dad had put together the first few lines for them.
Eight figures on a fan
Hide the truth from mortal man.
The first king knew, and though he tried,
He took the pills and so he died.
The rest remained a mystery, though Jack had his suspicions.
Child of flame and child of ice
Must join to win the maiden’s life.
Fear not boys, the girl who sees
Will save you from the ghostly thief.
Beneath the stars that never wheel
Above the rivers made of steel.
In dungeon deep you’ll find the key
That sets long-hidden secrets free.
And if the last few lines were prophecy instead of history, they did not bode well.
When castle crumbles, forms your grave,
The fire inside will light the way.
Then matron dies. Then maiden flies.
Then mountain hermit guides your eyes.
Off through time and space I soar
Through forest green, through planet’s core.
Am I the answer? Can I destroy
The monster that still haunts the boy?
“Jack, are you in there?” His sister pounded at the door. “Hurry up. You have to see this!”
Jack cracked the door. “See wha—? Oh.”
The sun had burned off much of the night’s mist, but not all. The wisps that remained hung among natural pillars that rose from a forest canopy. The nearest pillars, in a variety of heights, were topped with pagodas and linked by arched bridges. Jack breathed the fresh air, and marveled at it, because his lungs had gotten so used to the secret compounds beneath London.
Liu Fai waited with Sadie, forearms resting on the walkway’s stone rail, and Gwen emerged from her room a moment later, yawning. Halfway through the yawn, she gasped.
The emissary nodded. “All our visitors share this reaction, and yet the mountains are not the most impressive feature of our agency.” He straightened. “Come. I will show you the rest while I bring you up to speed on the thefts.” A thin white film covered the stone railing where his arms had been.
Jack raised his chin. “Hold up a sec, Frosty.” He was done pretending he didn’t know Liu Fai’s secret.
Liu Fai said nothing, but his jaw tightened. He clenched his fists.
“Jack, don’t,” said Sadie. “He never wanted us to see.”
Gwen looked from brother to sister. “What are you two on about?”
Jack gestured at the rail where the white film had melted into dew. “You can stop pretending, Shuang. You can’t hide your ability. I know you’re the magician I saw in the Thieves’ Guild after Tanner’s people stole the Crown Jewels. Admit it so we can move on.”
Liu Fai growled and thrust out his hands, firing off a stream of frost. Icicles formed above Jack’s head. Gwen yanked him out of the way as one fell and shattered on the stones.
“Oh, is that how you want to play it?” Jack took a menacing step forward, heat pulsing through his arms. He opened his palms. “Fine. Let’s dance.”
After a long, awkward pause, Liu Fai squinted at him, annoyed, a little confused, but not fearful. “I . . . do not want to dance.”
Jack glanced down at his hands and sighed, shoulders drooping. No flame.
Liu Fai huffed and walked away.
They ate breakfast in a cafeteria filled with men and women in loose robes of red, green, or blue, bound with black leather armor. Jack noticed metal studs on the leather covering their palms. He wanted to ask what they were for, but Liu Fai was still sulking, freezing slices of banana and stacking them beside his plate.
Jack found a new favorite food in the doughy steamed buns at the end of the buffet, which turned out to be stuffed with meat. He never got to finish his second round, though. Without warning, their frosty guide stood up and walked off.
“He does that a lot,” said Sadie, popping one of Liu Fai’s frozen banana slices into her mouth.
Jack tossed a cloth napkin down over his plate. “I guess breakfast is over.”
They caught up to Liu Fai in a sloping tunnel lined with square bells, as if together the bells and tunnel formed a single instrument. Jack resisted the urge to play it.
Sadie did not. She tapped the smallest bell with her knuckle, sending a cool tone out into the morning, and laughed. She slipped a hand into Liu Fai’s. “It’s all right. You can trust us.”
He nodded, placing his free hand on the bell to mute it. “Those you saw in the cafeteria are the long wushi, the dragon warriors. You may have noticed that not one of them acknowledged our presence, especially not mine.” The four continued down the line of bells. “The long wushi were once like the dragos, but the fire went out of our bloodlines long ago. My father sought to reinvigorate ours with an arranged marriage.”
“Your mother,” said Gwen, “our Minister of Dragons.”
“I was to be the suhuifujan, the rekindling. But I did not inherit my mother’s skills—not exactly. Dragos who carry the telekinetic DNA make
fire by quickening the air and drawing in dust for fuel. I was born with a similar instinct. Just . . .”
“The opposite?” offered Sadie.
“When I try to make fire, I draw moisture instead of dust. And instead of quickening the molecules, I slow them down, to the point of freezing.” Their little group had entered a stairwell in the cliff face, partially exposed to the daylight. A dragon’s-head fountain at the first landing fed a brook that ran beside the stairs. Liu Fai dipped a hand into the trickling water. When he lifted it out again, he held a many-faceted jewel of pure ice. He handed it to Sadie.
“Oh, it’s lovely,” she said.
“A parlor trick,” he countered. “I am a disappointment to the long wushi. And the dragos look harshly upon a titled earl who cannot make fire.” Liu Fai flicked the remaining water from his hand in a flurry of snowflakes. “For a while, I found a place at the Magicians’ Guild, but once they discovered my trick was no illusion, they rejected me too.”
At the bottom of the stairwell, they entered a passage filled with the burbling of the brook. “We’re sorry,” said Gwen. “We didn’t know.” When Jack said nothing, she slapped his arm.
He rubbed his bruise. “Uh . . . Right. Sorry. We”—Jack gave Gwen a shrug—“didn’t know.”
“How could you know? I became the emissary, wandering back and forth between my two families. Never welcome for long.” Liu Fai stopped before a door carved with serpentine creatures hiding among trees. “The residents of this garden are the only creatures of either ministry who never look upon me with judgment.” He tugged at a big iron ring, swinging the door wide.
Sadie gasped and covered her mouth with both hands. She dropped them to her sides and bounced on her toes. “Jack! It’s like a dream!”
Chapter Thirty-One
THE BROOK PASSED THROUGH a culvert out into a garden with high stone walls overgrown with trees. Large creatures lumbered and slithered among the ponds and pagodas in apparent freedom. Scales in a host of colors glittered in the morning sun.
Jack had some experience with dragons—at the Citadel and in the Archive’s Drago Collection. None of it had been positive. But Sadie forced his hand by rushing out into the open.
“Sadie, wait!”
“She is perfectly safe,” said Liu Fai. “Come and see.”
The other three caught up with her at a koi pond, legs swinging beneath a wooden bridge. Sadie had found the one dragon in the compound that matched her sparkly lavender shoes, though its scales were marbled with emerald green as well. The dragon lay with half its long body in the grass and half on the bridge, its giant head in Sadie’s lap. The horns, branched like antlers, resembled pink granite. It let out a gurgling, contented growl.
In Jack’s estimation, perfectly safe did not apply. A yellow-gold dragon, even larger, took interest in them. He reached for his sister. “Sadie . . .”
Liu Fai touched his elbow. “Trust me, Jack. Your sister is safe. Meet Biyu, our cuddle-bug, to use my mother’s term. She loves people, especially girls.”
“As friends, or for breakfast?” asked Jack.
“She?” asked Gwen.
“You can tell by the flamboyancy of her coloring. Dragons share that trait with humans. The females are the more beautiful of the species.”
“Yeah, we are.” Sadie scratched the dragon under her chin. “Isn’t that right, Biyu?”
A koi swam out from beneath the bridge with dangly whiskers that matched the dragon’s. Jack thought perhaps the two shared some heritage until Biyu snatched it out of the pond, lifted her head, and gulped it down.
“Õi yõu, Biyu!” Liu wiped away the pond water she had slung at his jacket. He laughed and said something in Chinese, pointing away, and the dragon lumbered off, clawed feet flopping.
“She has no wings,” said Gwen, watching her go.
“Not many of her family do. Biyu is a variety of shilong, a stone dragon.”
Biyu reached a pillared alcove in the wall, shaded by the roots of a massive tree. Her scales blended with the stone so well that the moment she stopped moving, she vanished.
“Are there many dragons that can’t fly?” asked Jack as the four of them left the brook.
“Who said she couldn’t fly?” Liu Fai glanced over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow. “Eastern dragons lost the need for wings eons ago. Some families may have kept them for adornment, or perhaps enhanced control, but they are not a necessity.”
“But if they don’t have wings, then how—?”
“Fire,” Liu Fai replied, cutting Jack off, but he offered no additional explanation.
The yellow-gold dragon still stalked their little group, coal-black eyes fixed on Jack, while a pair of long wushi in red robes walked through the trees a short distance beyond, keeping tabs. Liu Fai raised his voice, speaking in Chinese, and the beast crept closer. “That is Laohu, a fucanglong, or treasure dragon. When his flame is lit, he is like a fighter jet.”
With Laohu closer, Jack could make out his markings. His bronze tiger stripes were far more subdued than Biyu’s green marble swirls, and his antlers and talons were like pure platinum. The dragon stretched his head forward. Jack’s head began to throb.
Fire? Flame?
The boy carries the flame?
Apparently dragon thoughts came pre-translated. Jack winced at the impact they had on his brain and pushed back. No. The boy doesn’t carry the flame.
Liu Fai slowed. “Are you all right?”
The pounding subsided. The dragon raised his head, giving Jack a skeptical look.
“I’m fine,” said Jack. “Keep going.”
The emissary returned to his former pace, taking a bridge to a pagoda at the center of a pond, and the treasure dragon stopped at the shore, still watching Jack. Gwen glanced back at him. “Laohu’s flame is not lit. I assume that means you deny your dragons fire, the same as the dragos.”
“We deny them fire, yes.” Liu Fai raised a finger. “But our treatment of dragons is nothing like the dragos’.” He walked up the pagoda steps, pointing out yet another dragon, nestled in the branches of a tree. She was well camouflaged, with copper flanks split and fissured like bark and green scales sprouting here and there along her legs and spine. “The long wushi keep their dragon guests grounded in the preserve for their own protection.”
“The preserve,” mused Jack, reaching the top of the steps and looking around the garden. “If the dragons can’t spark their own fire from the stone here, then it must all be . . .” He let his fingers graze one of the pagoda’s columns and felt heat seap into his skin. “Dragonite.” The pagoda, the path, the walls—they were all dragonite, of a darker variety than the walls of the Archive, but incredibly similar. “Where did you find so much of it?”
“Right here. This valley was a dragon haven long before our agency discovered it. We merely joined them in their natural home.” Liu Fai held a hand out over the pond, and a sky-blue dragon leaped out of the water to rub its head against his palm. “Our relationship is symbiotic.”
The new dragon, much smaller than the others, widened its black eyes, as if excited by the sight of visitors. It snaked through balusters and wound around Sadie, climbing up to her shoulders before launching into the air on perfectly proportioned wings.
Liu Fai rolled his eyes at the performance. “This is Xiaoquan. He is yinglong, a water dragon, one of the few families with full wings.”
The dragon did a backward, twisting loop and settled on a level with Jack’s eyes.
“Watch out—” said Liu Fai, but too late. Xiaoquan unleashed a long stream of pond water straight into Jack’s face.
“They spit.”
Jack wiped the water from his eyes and flicked it away. “Thanks.”
Gwen pressed a handkerchief into his hand. “Explain symbiotic.”
Liu Fai let the water dragon curl around his waist to rest a wet chin on his shoulder. Xiaoquan matched his intense expression. “Man controls fire, and dragons offer luck and wisdom in re
turn. The long wushi do not exist in enmity with their charges as the dragos do, seeking to vanquish every dragon from existence.”
As they argued, Jack tried to return the soggy handkerchief.
Gwen waved him off. “The dragos do not vanquish every dragon. Article two, directive eleven of the Dragon Code states that dragons may be captured as well as killed.”
Liu Fai scowled, along with Xiaoquan. “I am as much drago as I am long wushi. Do not presume to tell me the regulations of my own ministry.”
“Well, if you knew them, I wouldn’t have to.”
“Hey!” Jack shoved the wet handkerchief into his pocket, wincing at the cold, white wetness that seeped through. “Could we get on with the investigation, please?”
The other two went silent. Xiaoquan looked hurt, air-slithered out over the pond, and dropped in with a splash.
“Of course.” Liu Fai softened his voice. “Three artifacts have gone missing, and a mechanical dragon was sighted leaving all three crime scenes.” He shrugged. “We have learned little else.”
“And that’s why we’re here.” Gwen cleared her throat. “How about you start by telling us exactly what was taken?”
“As I said before, the artifacts were all related to Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor.” Liu Fai retreated to a bench on the other side of the pagoda. “The first two were taken together—a text with wooden pages composed by the Qin grand astronomer, and the First Emperor’s jade seal. The mechanical dragon tore a hole through the National Museum of China to steal them.”
“Yeah,” said Jack, eyeing Laohu, who was still watching from the shore. “I saw that on TV. And the third?”
“A moonstone chalice used by the emperor in his alchemical experiments, taken from a museum in Hong Kong.” Liu Fai’s shoulders sagged. “All our efforts to track the missing items have failed. We have only managed to protect those that remain, collecting Qin artifacts from our museums and moving them to our own vault.”
“Wait.” Gwen gave Jack a sideways glance. “You have more Qin artifacts here? Um . . . Do you mind if we take a look?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Clockwork Dragon Page 13