Samurai

by Jason Hightman

  Come get your ship, she thought. Come see who’s waiting, dearest.

  The Japanese Dragon, appearing in his veiled form as a human doctor, was settled wearily into the back of a yellow-topped black taxi, but the driver had just stepped into the rainy street to push crawling beggars out of the way.

  The Japanese Serpent watched as the cabdriver fell to the watery road, succumbing to the terrible disease that had brought down everyone else on the road in front of him.

  Nuisance, a sorry flaw in our design, thought the Dragon. I’ve no control over this magic; it just pours out of me like a leaking faucet….

  The Serpent had spent the past hours limping through the city’s vast slums and neighborhoods, waiting for his wounds to heal. He had hoped for an easy, undisturbed passage to the cargo ship, where he could regain his strength quietly, but there was no escaping the supernatural madness gripping Bombay. He curled his mouth in disgust at the torrent of locusts swooping from above, the bugs pockmarking the windshield, and tried to restore himself to a calm, stoic resolve. India is vile as death itself, he thought, for he could see the tiny insects, bacteria, and viruses floating in the air, squirming over the buildings, living on human skin.

  The world was a filthy toilet, and people lived in it without knowing.

  He got out and left the car, ignoring the pathetic people crying for help and the cold dirty water rising around him. He realized his own body was being affected by his proximity to the Tiger Dragon. The bacteria on his own skin had grown, the tiny creatures now visible. Stunned, he watched the swarm of liquid blobs drip onto his metal leg. Shaking them off, he became aware that his vision was blurring. For several revolting moments, he could only see himself as a human. And the heat in his body was rising and falling erratically. He was used to supernatural ripples—but not ones that affected him.

  He looked up beyond the human refuse ahead, and wondered what the buildings would look like wrapped in the coils of his beautiful silver-and-gold fires, with the embers of a dead Indian Tiger Dragon drifting across the sky….

  A bloated city burned clean and made sterile by the perfect efficiency of the flame.

  Use me, his power beckoned. You do have the strength. See what your fire can truly do.

  Chapter 33

  NO SUICIDE MISSIONS

  “WE’RE GOING INTO THE palace. But we’re not going in there to die,” Simon told Key, his voice echoing in the machine shop. “You’re going to need this.”

  He opened his backpack, revealing the black armor pieces he’d found in Key’s room, along with a long silver dagger from the ship. The Black Dragon seemed to recoil ever so slightly from the sight of the weapons, tucking his fur-lined tail behind his back.

  Key stared at the forbidden armor, looking both pleased and worried. “You carried that for me, all this time?”

  “Didn’t have room for the helmet,” said Simon. “I wanted to give it to you before, with the tigers, but I didn’t have time.”

  Armored under their coats, the three left Mamoru still restfully unconscious and headed for Issindra’s domain. There they planned to bait her and catch her with her own trap…if they could figure out what that was. Simon tried to turn the worry in his stomach into excitement.

  Once inside the Tiger Palace, Simon and Key were led by the Black Dragon past the floors of miserable workers, rows of them at sewing machines, who looked up at them with dull, spellbound eyes. Huge tiger’s-eye sculptures clicked and rumbled above them. The boys kept moving, their St. George blood immune to the palace’s power, but their fear was growing the deeper they went into the Serpent’s domain.

  And for good reason. Roaming guards approached, alert and suspicious, threatening to stop them. The Dragon, however, was a powerful ally, bewitching the guards to let them pass unhindered. Key let out a worried breath as they moved onward without a word.

  It was at the sixth floor, after passing so many of the laborers, that Simon decided he couldn’t stand to see any more suffering.

  “We have to free these people,” he said, his attention caught on a skinny young girl who was pulling a cart loaded with heavy rolls of fabric.

  “How?” said Key.

  “It will delay us,” the Black Dragon cautioned.

  “Are you drawing strength from this, too?” Simon accused him. “We have to take away the Dragon’s strength. It’s good to get her off-guard, but we need to throw her off-balance. We have to rob her of the thing that makes this place home to her.”

  “Can you break her magic?” Key asked the Dragon.

  The Black Dragon moved into the workroom. He eyed the supervisor, a fat, slow-witted woman who approached with a pompous air. The Dragon raised his finger, and pointed at the door, and to Simon’s surprise, the woman strode directly past them and out, her expression glazed by his sorcery.

  Then the Dragon hobbled down past the rows of textile machines and workers, to the great tiger’s-eye sculpture clicking at the back of the room. The eye burned down on all the workers, made them accept any pay, any job, any humiliation.

  With a shaking hand, the Dragon swung his cane at the sculpture, but his strength alone was not enough. Seeing this, the boys ran up, hammering at the eye with their weapons, their blows ringing, clanging, until the cracks grew. The sculpture fell from the wall, rolling off to shatter into pieces; the sound a sweet symphony of destruction. In breaking the sculpture, they’d broken the spell.

  The factory ground to a halt.

  “Tell them the work ends early today,” the Black Dragon told a foreman. In a daze, the foreman followed the Black Dragon’s instructions. “Tell them to come back to the palace tomorrow,” he said. “There will be gold for them to take. And silver. Overdue payments.”

  “Just what’s going on here?” said a rumbling voice, and in came the security chief, a burly, blue-turbaned man with a killer’s stare. His hate was no work of Dragon magic. He’d taken the job because he liked to hurt people, pure and simple. He moved to block the exit.

  The Black Dragon raised his finger.

  “Don’t point at me, you old Chinese imbecile,” the man barked. “I asked you a question. Do you speak English? What are you doing here?”

  Key whispered to Simon, “He’s too big. Make him fall, use his own weight to pull him down.” Taking the cue, Simon strode up to the security chief and kicked him in the leg, snarling, “Why don’t you just shut up and get out of our way!”

  When the chief lunged at him, Simon tripped him, and the man tumbled past him into the wall and banged his head, knocking himself unconscious. Key nodded with satisfaction, as if finished with an algebra problem.

  The Black Dragon lifted the security chief’s walkie-talkie, and, mimicking his voice, he told the remaining guards to flee the building, go home, evacuate the workers, there was a toxic gas leak, nothing could contain it. The workers in the room stared in confusion at the old Chinese man.

  He bowed and motioned to the door.

  The palace was liberated. Workers flooded out of the building, like zombies restored to life but not yet believing it. They trailed out in the strengthening storm, the sky seemingly ready to collapse on them, the earth bucking as if to free itself from bonds of its own.

  Inside, the sight of the chains in the factory made Simon sick.

  He lifted the binds, small enough for children to wear. “Why do you do this? Why is your kind like this?” he said to the Black Dragon.

  “That…is a simple question,” said the old Serpent. “We feed on the pain. The riddle of it is why we are here at all. Why should nature seek to bring something like me…to life? But, then, is there not a reason for all things?”

  “Do you have an answer?” pressed Simon. “’Cause I don’t.”

  “No one will ever solve it,” the Black Dragon said, holding his gaze. “But if there were no evil in humankind for the Dragon to feed upon, the Dragon would die out. Why is your kind like this?”

  “People are evil. I told you, I don’t li
ke thinking about it.” Simon sighed, and moved to the door.

  “Ah,” said the Black Dragon. “To think of such things makes us old. But wiser. To question makes you stronger.”

  “Then you think about it,” said Simon, heading out. “It makes me feel weaker. I don’t want to think about how sick the world is.”

  “Then truly evil has no purpose.”

  Mamoru had awoken in the parts factory with an almost instantaneous understanding of what had happened. He had been awake enough to have heard the voices of the boys and understand they were plotting something.

  In disbelief that Key could do this to him, and cursing Simon St. George, Mamoru knew the Black Dragon could not possibly have dealt him the knockout blow. He’d watched its every move.

  Simon had done it, he was certain.

  Not sure where he’d find the boys, Mamoru immediately began walking to the harbor, where he suspected they were trying to get into the battle. He reached in his pocket for cab fare and found another object, the netsuke of the good Dragon, the ivory meant to reassure him, but it only made him angrier.

  Mamoru alone had been left to protect the children. It was his only task. He knew Sachiko would be furious.

  Facing the worsening storm, and cursing himself for being stupid, he hurried through the throngs of people toward a taxicab.

  Simon, Key, and the Black Dragon had reached the top floor of the palace.

  Before them were the giant wooden doors of the Tiger Dragon’s bedchamber.

  Simon hesitated. “You aren’t afraid of what’s in here, are you?”

  The Black Dragon stared up at the towering doors. “I would be of little help if I stayed out here beyond the fray. I will trust that the legends exaggerated her powers and her trickeries.”

  Simon flung open the doors, and a huge open room with enormous windows, a pavilion atop the palace, greeted them. Jungle trees were rooted beneath the stone floor, and vines wrapped around snake-figure columns, while torches made for dim light. Exotic birds called from somewhere in the sinister greenery. The Black Dragon’s canary hid itself in its master’s fur. Simon could understand its fear. The entire room seemed to shiver and shudder as the dark leaves swayed in the hot storm winds, hiding untold threats.

  Simon moved into the room.

  Chanting, the Black Dragon forced the torchlight to grow stronger, and the boys found a panel in the floor, through which they could stare down at Issindra’s prized animals.

  The cages were very narrow. Tigers circled the tight quarters, restless, unaware of Simon and Key above. A thick glass shield engraved with Dragonrunes topped the cages. The runes slid around, words gliding over words, enchanted.

  “Rune-writing,” said Key, pointing to the glass top on the first cage. “It’s meant to keep fires contained. This trap wasn’t made for tigers—it was made for a Dragon.”

  “So this is how the Tiger Dragon will trap the Japanese Dragon,” said Simon, taking it in.

  “This is what I’m thinking.”

  “This is how she will hold him,” said the Black Dragon. “But to trap him there must be something else…a spellchant, hypnosis. The room itself may be rife with ancient power. Perhaps she activates the sculpted snakes there along the walls, as the legends say.”

  The old creature looked down on the feline zoo. “The tiger is a solitary animal, it meets with others only to mate,” said the Black Dragon slowly. “She has followed her enemy so long she loves him. Not unheard of, in Serpents or in humans. That’s what the writing here really is. It is a sleepspell for a Dragon, to bring him here and keep him.”

  Not just the floor below them, but the bedchamber as well, was riddled with trapdoors and cages. The entire palace was filled with snares.

  “We can use these traps, too,” said Key. “One at a time. This is what I was hoping for. We let the Tiger Dragon trap the Japanese, and then we lock her in as well. They’ll both try to burn their way out, and when they’re out of energy—you send down your blackfire and finish them. Your fire will kill them, right?”

  The Black Dragon thought for a minute, his dark fur rippling from the night winds, and then he nodded, grim. “There’s good chances the Tiger Dragon never anticipated these traps would be used against her very own magic. It could work. It will be safer than any of you trying to use a deathspell.”

  “But we know the spell if we need it,” said Key, “we studied all the Indian deathspells before we arrived here.” The Black Dragon’s eyes wrinkled in worry that it should come to hand-to-hand combat. “We memorized the Ice Serpent’s as well, just in case, and the Dragon of Japan we’ve been ready to fight for a long time,” Key added.

  “We still need to get the Tiger Serpent in the cage,” noted the Dragon.

  “You say she loves him?” scoffed Simon, looking at the traps. “You are very strange animals.”

  “As are you,” said the Black Dragon. “Indeed, the Dragonkind loves human strangeness.”

  “Well, I try not to think about human strangeness very much.”

  The Black Dragon looked at him quizzically. “What has happened to you, Simon? You were always the questioner. Now you do not question things?”

  Simon studied the traps. “I just want to know where to go and what the mission is. Let’s get going. What do we need to do?”

  “But do you ever wonder what the mission is for?”

  “It just tires you out, questioning everything all the time. Takes too much.”

  The old Dragon looked disturbed. “The good soldier.”

  “That’s right. What’s wrong with that?”

  “A soldier sees only targets. You are becoming like your father.”

  Simon shrugged him off, as he and Key looked down on the caged tigers anxiously. Where to begin….

  “Well, staring at it all night is not going to get the job done and finished,” said the Black Dragon, leaning against the wall, smoking his long pipe. “We need all the trappings we can get. The tigers must come out, so the Dragons can come in.”

  “Do we know this will hold her?” wondered Simon aloud, and he peered closer at the glass. The tiger below sensed him, and looked up, leaping to scratch the glass. Key yelped and fell back.

  “No guarantees,” said the Black Dragon.

  “I’ll settle for some good odds,” said Simon.

  “Good odds, I think not,” mused the Black Dragon, circling his pipe in the air. “But decent odds.”

  “What did I just say? I don’t like ‘decent,’” said Simon. “I want good. I want great.”

  “You want lies,” smiled the Dragon.

  “If that’s the best you can do.”

  The Dragon blew away smoke and looked directly at him. “It’s perfect.”

  The Dragonhunters had gotten as close as they could to the harbor, but rising tides had swamped the street. They leapt one by one from their car to a high, narrow wall beside a building. From here, Sachiko got a sobering look at the size of the growing storm, and the lightning menacing the Tiger Dragon’s palace.

  “They’re out of there now. The boys are safe,” Aldric said, worried himself.

  “I know,” she replied with a concerned smile, and, in a consoling gesture that surprised Aldric, she reached out and gripped his arm. “They’re all right.”

  Behind them, getting to the narrow wall last in line, Taro watched her. “She gives him comfort,” his low voice rumbled, “very kind of her.”

  Sachiko was visibly unsettled. Alaythia seemed to want to say something in her defense, but at a loss, she began moving along the pathway.

  Akira looked back at Taro. “You see torment in the smallest of things,” he said. “Your house is strong…and what all of us envy.”

  Taro looked stunned.

  “You should have stayed with the boy,” Akira warned. “None of us have as much to lose.”

  Chapter 34

  DRAGONTRAPPING

  IN THE TIGER DRAGON’S PALACE chamber, a dangerous plan was being prepare
d.

  “I’m trusting you that this will work,” Simon was saying. “I never heard of it before. You can talk to each other in your heads—actually in your heads?”

  “Not talk,” said the Dragon. “Crysounds. Pleading noises. Like whalesong.”

  “They’ll think you’re held captive here. They’ll know where it comes from?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll think the Hunters are harming you.”

  “They should. Yes. A thousand times, yes,” the old Dragon said, irritably.

  Key piped in. “Then we just stay calm. We bait them to leave the harbor, and all we have to do is wait for them here.”

  “And then we have to destroy them,” said Simon. For a moment, he was disturbed at the enormity of the task, but he thought of the fire roiling beneath Japan, of the chaos here in Bombay, and he regained his resolve. “Let’s hope the trap works. Let’s hope the Tiger Dragon’s already thought of everything for us.”

  Key looked at him, unsure.

  At the same time, his black-and-white frame shivering, the Ice Serpent was finally getting comfortable in a luxurious Land Rover, a taxicab he had gotten tailor-made to his needs while in Bombay, the entire rear section darkened by Indian curtains and padded absurdly with high cushions for his old bones.

  And then the noises started inside his brain.

  The Ice Serpent heard the distress call of the Chinese Black Dragon deep in his wintery brain, a moaning in the oldest of Dragontongues. This was most unusual. In fact, to his knowledge, it had never happened before. Not in hundreds of years. Dragons hate each other. Even under the threat of death, they do not ask each other for help, not like this, not out of weakness.