by Sean Stewart
Like distant thunder, a low roar rumbled from the sky, swelling gradually. “Those will be the first planes from the Southside,” Water Spider said. “Li Mei, shortly after I sent Claire and Jen to rescue his mother, we received a radio message from Raining Chiu. She is making her way home by helicopter. She says that Winter killed your mother earlier this morning. The Southsiders will neither confirm nor deny this report, but we have yet to hear from Li Bing. Surely if your mother was alive and unharmed, they would have had her speak to us.”
“No. Oh no.”
“The Southsiders consider Chinatown to have provoked a confrontation by the abduction of Winter’s heir, Emily Thompson.” The roar of jet engines throbbed through the darkness. Water Spider glanced at Claire. “While I am no longer privy to the doings of the Council of Ministers, I believe that at this moment our two cities are at war.”
“You can’t hope to win,” Claire said.
Water Spider nodded. “No, I don’t believe we can. Winter means to have his heir. Having gone this far, I do not think he will stop now. He will send his troops to occupy Chinatown. Perhaps they will merely search for her. Perhaps they will execute hostages until she is produced. So you see,” he said to Li Mei, “I really must know where she is.”
“In the Forest,” Li Mei said, her face ashen. “I could tell a strange destiny was working her. She said she dared not come into Chinatown, in case her people were waiting for her. The plane landed on English Bay. I asked it to taxi up False Creek. I let Emily off at the south edge of Chinatown, where it gives way to the Forest. She meant to hide there. I—” Li Mei bit her lip. “Oh, Mother. And now I have betrayed Emily too. Everything I touch turns to ash.”
“Emily Thompson must be found and made to speak to her grandfather,” Water Spider said. “I expect you to do this.”
“I thought you weren’t giving orders anymore,” Claire said.
“Li Mei placed this destiny in her mouth,” Water Spider said curtly. “Now she must swallow it.” He took a moment to send a runner to the radio room, to tell the Southsiders that Emily Thompson had been dropped off at the Forest’s edge. When he was done he turned back to Claire. “You could help search for her, I think. You know Miss Thompson as well as anyone. Will you not find her, and ask her to end this war?”
“I will help find her,” Claire said slowly. “She will make up her own mind. But what about you? If finding Emily is so important, won’t you come with us?”
Water Spider walked over to the sword rack and took down the ancient blade that rested there. “I have my own destiny to eat.” He buckled the old sword belt firmly around his waist. “Thank you for bringing back my Pearl. I will not forget it. Now there is another who must be returned. Jen gave his life to me. I must try to give it back.”
Chapter
Fourteen
“You were with Emily,” Claire said to Li Mei, as soon as Water Spider had gone. “Why has the fool of a girl run away?”
“I don’t know. She said it was important. She promised me.”
“Emily doesn’t break her promises,” Claire said. “One of her many little failings, that.”
Li Mei’s thin eyes were bloodshot, her angular face drawn tight with exhaustion. “Will she help me feed my hungry ghosts? Hey?”
“Emily did not kill your mother,” Claire said. “You can’t blame her for that.”
“You think it is an accident Winter killed my mother after Emily ran away? I do not. I think we were the cause of her death. Who shall I blame besides Emily? Myself? Believe me, I am already doing that. I find there is too much guilt. It fills me up and overflows me. Emily Thompson is a strong woman. She can carry her share.”
Gunfire rattled outside. It faded, and rain filled the silence left behind. “You two are very much alike,” Claire said.
“Has she also killed her mother, then? Oh, I suppose she has. The mother died in childbirth, I recall.” Li Mei walked behind Water Spider’s desk and bent to study her reflection in the window. She bit her lips to bring the color back into them and brushed at her hair with her long red fingernails. “Or were you referring only to our beauty?”
“You are both very young, and you take yourselves extremely seriously,” Claire said. “Come on. You need to eat and sleep.”
“We are not the same.” Li Mei straightened and turned back from the window. “And you are not my governess. Please do not presume. More people will die because of what I did unless we can find Emily.”
“You saw Water Spider send a runner to the radio room,” Claire said. “Soon Winter will know that you left Emily on the south side of Chinatown at the edge of the Forest. If Winter can’t find her there with a squad of trackers, we certainly won’t be able to. It’s out of your hands now. May Emily’s God help her when Winter catches her.”
“What if Winter does not catch her?” Li Mei said. “The Forest is a Power. It will decide where Emily goes, and who finds her.”
“I always forget how superstitious you wetlanders are.”
Li Mei arched one thin eyebrow. “Superstitious, yes, but very pragmatic. You Southsiders, on the other hand, are very rational and terribly idealistic; a dreadful combination. You are not eight hundred kilometers away on the bald prairie now. There is no North Side here, we have not fenced all our gods onto a single reservation. They lie thick as leaves on the ground, not just in Chinatown but in all the Islands, the little pockets of humanity left where once Vancouver was. I wonder how long it will take your people to learn that lesson?”
Claire regarded Li Mei. “A sort of condescending mysticism is another unlovely trait you and Emily share.”
Li Mei went back to the window. From the inside hip pocket of her jacket—low enough not to spoil its shape—she slipped a thin wood case, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She opened it and took out an eye-stick, touching subtle hints of brown around her eyes, repairing the damage that rain and tears had done. It required great patience, as her hands were shaking badly. From time to time another tear would interrupt her work, and she would have to draw a makeup cloth from her pocket. “You are right that we cannot compete with Winter’s men. If we are to find Emily, we must guess where she will go.”
Claire watched her work. “It is not Emily’s way to run and hide. Not forever. Oh, right now I’m sure she is confused, and angry, and scared half out of her mind. But in the end she will want to face Winter again. There is not much subtlety in my little babushka. She will want things settled face to face. That’s how her grandfather raised her, and she loves him more than anyone in this world, or the next.”
“Forgive me if I find no love for him in my heart.”
Claire nodded. “Hm. Well, he is not easy to love. Even for us. But he is a great man.”
“Never,” Li Mei said. Her voice was light and dry with anger and despair. “‘Never has a man who has bent himself been able to make others straight.’ There is no greatness without virtue. And there is no virtue in murder.” Li Mei turned away. Tears crawled from her thin eyes.
“Sleep,” Claire said. “Then we will find Emily.”
Li Mei blotted the tears with her makeup cloth. “And virtue will be restored, and all will be right under Heaven.”
“More or less,” Claire said.
Li Mei refused to go home immediately, saying that she needed to go to the Garden to get special funerary offerings for her mother. Claire trailed behind her as she crossed the street to walk beside the wall of the Lady’s Garden. To Claire’s ears most parts of Chinatown were hideously noisy, even now at nearly four o’clock on Saturday morning—full of shouting people, screeching gates, wind chimes that clanged or clacked or boomed or rattled, chickens that clucked and pigs that squealed, plus an assortment of whistles, gongs, fireworks, mysterious chants, and drunken singing. But all that was muted around the Garden. Gentle sunshine from some other season spilled over the Lady’s walls into the night, making fugitive rainbows dance and flicker there.
A red-crested woodpecke
r watched them from the Lady’s wall. As Claire passed he cocked his head. When their eyes met, his beak gaped as if he were laughing. Claire shivered and hurried on. “I thought it was impossible to enter the Garden and return.”
“This is true,” Li Mei said, turning the corner at Columbia and walking along the Garden’s back wall. She headed for a small door Claire had not noticed before. “But we aren’t going into the Garden. We are going to its gift shop. I should warn you, nothing there is cheap.”
“Gift shop?”
Li Mei opened the door and motioned Claire inside. “We are an entrepreneurial people.”
Claire slowed, then stopped before the doorway. The child of a goddess, she had never been able to ignore the invisible world the way most Southsiders did. She felt the pulse and rhythm of a great Power beyond the threshold.
“What is it?” Li Mei asked.
“I’m…It sounds odd, but I am wondering whether I can pass through this door without being destroyed,” Claire said. She was The Harrier’s child and a thing of the prairie, after all: created from snow and steel and great solitude.
Li Mei’s eyebrows rose. “It’s a gift shop, governess.”
Claire exhaled, and nodded. “Mm. I suppose you’re right. Still, can you blame me? Imagine what they would stock in the North Side’s retail outlet.”
“You have a point.” When Claire made no move to enter, Li Mei waved her in again. “Please—age before beauty, and reason before superstition.”
Claire looked at her. “You are not entirely alike, mind you. Emily was at least a little more earnest.”
Li Mei followed her. “When you must maintain your nation on a diet of beets, there is much to be earnest about.”
A wizened little Chinese woman in black pajamas peered at them over a pair of wire spectacles as they entered the shop. She said something in Cantonese, which Li Mei answered. As usual it sounded to Claire as if every phrase ended with an exclamation point. She imagined most conversations in Chinese went something like,
“Hello! How are you, you pig!”
“Fine, dying dog!”
“The sky weeps little shits, eh! Tomorrow I shall execute my wife!”
The clerk waved at Claire impatiently. “Go look, please. You see what you like. Many good things. Beautiful things. You need this good luck, hey?” She pursed her lips disapprovingly at Claire. “Too thin, and funny color.” She said something to Li Mei in Chinese. Li Mei looked at Claire and smirked before replying. The old woman closed her eyes and wrinkled her nose as if smelling dead fish, then waved her tiny hands and turned away. They laughed together, Li Mei’s white teeth just showing, the old woman sniggering with a hand over her mouth.
Li Mei caught Claire’s scowl. “Please. Pay no attention.”
Claire looked for something to hit her with.
The Double Happiness Gift Shop had a very unusual selection of things for sale: joss sticks; I Ching coins; charms brushed in red ink on gold paper, or carved into jade, or burned into shards of bone or horn or tortoiseshell; amulets made from bird tongues, old transistors, spark plugs, spent bullets, ancient American Mercury dimes, and lacquered ginseng root, suspended from cords of red silk or gold thread or braided dog’s hair or salvaged TV cable or stripped electrical wires. There were rows and rows of small glass bottles with powders inside, labelled in Chinese characters with pictures of butterflies, chrysanthemums, hummingbirds, turtles (lots of these), pearls, bones, and, confusingly, clocks. Vials and vials of liquids: oozy black ones, watery gold ones, red ones that looked like blood; liquids clear and clotted, dense and mottled, liquids gently bubbling, and opaque mixtures that seethed unnervingly from within.
Also available in glass, gold, brass, crystal, bone and wood, were chimes, bells, gongs, whistles, combs and dice. There were books, too: books written on rags of silk, books etched on thin bamboo scrims that rolled up like little blinds, cheap holographic books whose texts changed when you looked at them from different angles, books brushed on paper and plastic. Claire saw at least one whose every page was made from mother-of-pearl, with Chinese characters inlaid in gold.
And of course there were seeds—in glass jars, in silk bags, seeds in paper packets with gaudy pictures on the outside, seeds in jade boxes and clay pots and oyster shells, seeds that grew into flowers and trees and appliances, if the pictures on the outside were to be believed.
Every item’s price and description was meticulously labelled in Chinese characters that Claire, without her familiar, had no hope of deciphering.
“Ah.” From a tall urn Li Mei drew out three long sticks of incense.
“You too, yes?” the old woman said, looking at Claire.
“Me?”
“You have many dead. They sit on your shoulders.” Claire peered down at her shoulders, square beneath her scratchy fatigue shirt. “Hungry ghosts!” the old woman said, with a jab of her finger. “Give them some smoke to eat, yes?”
“All ghosts are hungry,” Claire said.
Li Mei drew out three more sticks of incense. Claire followed her up to the counter. The old woman laid the incense in a balance she kept next to her register. She eyed it professionally. “One day, each.”
Li Mei looked at Claire. “I told you they were expensive.”
The old woman rang up their purchases—
—And Claire woke up ten years old in her bed in the Tory Building. It was dark and she tried to go back to sleep but her body knew it was morning. Finally she gave up and opened her eyes. “Seven-sixteen,” the room said.
She climbed out of bed and dragged on her long johns and pants and undershirt and a sweater, brushed her white hair away from her hateful ice-cube-colored eyes and headed down to breakfast.
She no longer woke up every morning wondering if she would see her mother. It had been three years since the last time. The memory of that meeting had blurred and faded like a snowy track worn away by the wind, its edges crumbling, dry and indistinct. Blowing away through the years.
Claire wasn’t exactly anybody’s charge, but a couple of the women in the Tory Building cafeteria were pleasant enough. Winter was understandably cautious in his dealings with The Harrier’s daughter, and though he never treated her like family, he did at least get rid of the overtly cruel or superstitious members of his personal staff. Claire did not mistake this caginess for love.
It was boiled wheat and honey for breakfast, with a cup of hot chicory to finish. Then off to McKernan Elementary and Junior High. School, while still hellish, was marginally less purgatorial this year than last; over the summer three girls in Claire’s grade had developed perceptible breasts, thus drawing a certain amount of the fire formerly reserved for her. Some of the other girls, God help them, were jealous. Claire supposed it made sense, if you were desperately worried about your long-term popularity with boys.
The Harrier didn’t much go in for sexual subtlety. Her mother’s habit was to snatch an unsuspecting man under cover of a blizzard or other natural crisis, use him up like a box of matches, and then throw him in the snow. Watching the boys of her class snapping bras and peering under changing-room doors, Claire was coming to appreciate the virtues of this approach.
Curiously, she was the only offspring to result from The Harrier’s indiscretions, as far as she knew. A dubious honor.
Things were vastly better inside the classroom, where pulverizing tedium replaced the more ingenious cruelties of her peers. They were well into their second week on the internal combustion engine. Claire barely managed to reassemble her little motor in the hour and a half allotted, and she had three pieces left over, which couldn’t be a good sign. The motor started anyway. A pleasant surprise.
At the end of the day it was skiing. When she got to her cubby she found someone had stolen her wax, but she had long since given up complaining. Even if her teachers were honestly willing to help, the wax wasn’t going to reappear, and it was beneath her dignity to whine. That’s what They wanted anyway. She went out on unwaxe
d skis, with predictable results. Trying to go up each hill of the route was like trying to scale a glass mountain in greased boots. At the halfway point she was almost a kilometer behind; it would be dark by the time she got back, and the school would be deserted.
She had become quite expert at making a virtue out of solitude.
She turned back from the river valley, heading south. She made the long hill up to the University Hospital and paused at the top, breathing hard. A cold white magic gathered in the December air. To one side, a brace of cedar waxwings hopped through the bare branches of a mountain ash, looking for any shrivelled red berries others might have missed. The parking lot behind the abandoned Cross Cancer Institute stretched out before her, a sheet of white too dazzling to look at, as if a glass sun had been smashed to splinters and strewn across the plain, every crystal still burning with cold fire. For the second time in her life Claire saw sun dogs. Two pairs, flanking the sun in the ice-blue sky.
Then her mother was there. The sun dogs snapped and quarrelled around The Harrier’s heels, balls of white fire, flashing and winking. Clouds of fine white snow fountained at their feet, hung fretted and sparkling in the freezing air, and then frayed into tatters of white smoke. They stood by, panting, as The Harrier crouched down and touched her daughter’s cheek. Their breaths smoked up together in the cold winter air and Claire felt a sudden rush of joy, as if her mother was giving this to her. The snow. The sun with its hounds at heel. The burning sky. The enormous silence.
Her fingers were halfway to frostbite by the time she got back to the school, and she was forced to endure the inevitable lecture on Proper Waxing Technique. That night, while her classmates were home eating dinner with their families, she was in the Tory Building cafeteria eating tasteless breaded perch fillets, which she despised.
But when she had labelled her Four-Stroke Engine Diagram, read over the day’s math homework, and then screened herself to drowsiness, she lay in bed in her nightgown, closed her eyes, and held the vision of the sun dogs and the snowy field like the memory of a mother’s kiss, until sleep took her.