by Kylie Chan
Ah Yat tapped gently on the door, then came into the office with a cup of Ceylon tea for me. ‘Your new driver has arrived, ma’am. I put him in the second student room.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Two Eighty-Three.’
‘No, Ah Yat, what’s his name?’
Ah Yat looked blank. ‘I have no idea, ma’am.’
‘I’ll talk to him when he’s settled in then.’
‘I’ll tell him, ma’am,’ she said, and went out.
Simone came in and flopped to sit in one of the visitors’ chairs. ‘The turtle’s fine, it seems to have settled in the lake in the Northern Heavens. The Celestials are arranging for it to be fed regularly. It let me go and pushed me away with its nose, so it’s happy for now. We need to find out more about it though.’ She sat up straighter. ‘I want to go to Sham Shui Po tonight, when the stores are closing. Take them by surprise.’
‘Me too. Call up Liu — let’s see who we can round up to go.’
The phone rang and Ah Yat picked it up in the kitchen.
Simone unfocused, talking to Liu, and I waited for her. The intercom beeped on the phone on my desk and I picked it up.
‘Call for you, ma’am, it’s the fung shui man,’ Ah Yat said, and put the call through.
‘Ronnie,’ I said with pleasure. ‘Good to talk to you.’
‘Ms Donahoe,’ Ronnie Wong said. ‘Good to talk to you too. Just wondering when you’d like me to come in and have a look at your seals? I hear that you’re having some difficulty with them. Lok gave me a call.’
‘What an excellent idea,’ I said. ‘How soon can you be here?’
‘If I hang up now I can be there in about three minutes. I need to collect some stuff.’
‘Simone and I are going out as soon as we can get a suitable group of warriors together — we’re going to raid a nest. Can you handle things without us?’
‘Certainly. I’ll be right there,’ Ronnie said, and hung up.
‘Same situation as when you went into One Two Two’s nest, Emma,’ Simone said, still unfocused. ‘The Winds can’t really spare any of their armies because of the danger of attack right now. There’s something of a feeling of being besieged at the moment, with the Demon King and the higher-ranking demons attacking just about everything Celestial all the time.’
‘I understand that completely,’ I said. ‘A couple of Celestial Masters and a few seniors from the Mountain should probably do us for this, unless the demon that tipped us off has warned our target.’
‘Liu is putting a team together, and suggests that you start heading out that way now since you can’t teleport,’ Simone said.
‘Right after I talk to Ronnie.’ The front doorbell rang. ‘There he is.’
I went to the front door. Ah Yat had already opened it and let Ronnie in, and he was giving her a warm hug.
‘Hi, Ronnie,’ I said.
Ronnie released Ah Yat and saluted me. He appeared to be a thirty-year-old Chinese wearing a plain white shirt with no tie and a pair of tan slacks with loafers. He grinned at me through his thick plastic-rimmed glasses. ‘Hi, Emma, your seals are completely down. What’s causing this? The ink is still damp on the paper!’
‘I have no idea, and if you could find the cause I’d very much appreciate it,’ I said.
Ronnie concentrated, and moved into the living room. ‘Something weird here. I may have to change and check it after I’ve reset the seals.’
‘Warn Ah Yat before you do.’
Ronnie grinned at Ah Yat. ‘This one knows exactly what I am.’
Ah Yat smiled back at Ronnie and returned to the kitchen.
Simone came into the living room. ‘Hi, Ronnie. Emma, we have fifteen, and we’re good to go. Did you talk to the new driver yet?’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
Simone concentrated. ‘Done.’
The new driver came out from the students’ quarters at the other end of the flat, and fell to one knee, saluting Simone and myself.
‘Up you get,’ I said, and he rose. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Two Seven Three, ma’am.’
‘No, your name.’
‘Oh. Denis.’
‘Welcome to the insanity, Denis. The keys to the big Mercedes in the number one car park downstairs are on the hall table. Please bring it round the front. We’re going to raid a nest in Sham Shui Po.’
He grinned broadly. ‘Excellent. I’ll meet you downstairs.’
I nodded. ‘Be right there.’ I raised my hand to stop Denis before he walked out the door. ‘Denis, this is Ronnie, he’s resetting the seals on the apartment for me.’ Denis nodded to Ronnie, who nodded back. ‘You can probably sense his demon nature; he’s half-demon, which makes him particularly skilled in this. He may have to change later to check some stuff for us; please don’t destroy him.’
Denis nodded to me. ‘Understood, ma’am. I’ll get the car out for you.’
‘Be right down.’
‘See you at Sham Shui Po, Emma,’ Simone said, and disappeared.
Ronnie placed a large, battered briefcase on the coffee table and opened it. He pulled out a fung shui mirror with the complicated direction and elemental symbols around the edge, and a stack of paper seals held together with a rubber band. ‘These won’t cut it for this type of job. Need hand-made ones.’
He scrabbled through the case and pulled out a smaller, ebony case that he flipped open. It contained an ink brush, a stone tablet for mixing the ink, and an ink block. The ink block was a solid black block, square in cross-section, that had been intricately carved and highlighted with gold paint around the edges. Ronnie summoned some water into the cavity of the tablet and ran the ink block in circles over it, dissolving the block to make the ink.
‘I heard you spoke to my father recently,’ he said. ‘How is he?’
‘Alive,’ I said. ‘Has he gone after you lately?’
‘Still alive? Oh well, can’t have everything. No, he hasn’t. He might be busy with something else.’ He glanced up at me through the plastic-rimmed glasses. ‘Actually, it occurs to me that I should keep you updated when he’s trying me out, because he only tries to kill me when he has nothing better to do. If he’s not trying to kill me, then he’s plotting something.’ He glanced down at the stone. ‘And he hasn’t tried to kill me at all since about the middle of September.’
‘He’s certainly been trying the Celestial,’ I said. ‘We are suffering constant attacks from Hell from both your father and his assorted children. With the Dark Lord gone, it’s becoming very hard to hold things together.’
‘You can do it, Emma,’ Ronnie said, and picked up the brush. He squinted at a piece of rice paper that was about twenty centimetres long and five wide. ‘Now go and get your Retainer.’
‘Damn, Ronnie, is there anything that goes on that you don’t know about?’ I said.
He grinned up at me. ‘Not much.’
‘You sure you don’t want a job at the Academy?’
He snorted with derision and began the complex process of writing the symbols onto the paper that would create the seal. ‘No, thanks. I’ve managed to remain solo and avoid the King’s assassination attempts for close on three hundred years now. I quite like being a free agent.’ He nodded to me. ‘I appreciate the offer though, Lady Emma, and if there was any organisation I would join, it would be Wudang.’
Ronnie rose with the paper in one hand, the ink still slightly wet. He waved it to dry the ink, then went to the front door. He stood in front of the doorframe and concentrated. He flashed brilliant white for a second, then the white energy coalesced onto the paper, making it almost too bright to see. The paper was ripped from his hand and smacked into the left-hand doorframe, glowed painfully white, and disappeared.
‘One down, six more to go,’ he said.
‘There are more windows than that,’ I said.
‘That’s just this door alone,’ Ronnie said. ‘If I do my job right, both of us are going to feel mighty u
ncomfortable every time we go through this door.’
‘That’s what I like to hear,’ I said. ‘I’d better go, they’re waiting for me.’
He returned to the coffee table, knelt on the carpet again and pulled out another seal. ‘Go. Let me know how it ends.’
‘Somehow I have the feeling that I won’t need to,’ I said.
Ronnie grinned at the seal he was working on. ‘See you later, Ms Donahoe.’
CHAPTER 16
Denis double-parked on the busy Sham Shui Po street to let me out of the Mercedes. ‘Do you want me to park and join you, or circle the building?’ he said. ‘There’s a government car park across the road.’
‘Park on the street if you can, otherwise cruise,’ I said. ‘Hopefully this won’t take long, but we may need to get out fast if we find what we’re looking for.’
‘Good luck, ma’am,’ he said as I closed the door, and he pulled away to find a park.
Although it was 9.30 pm, the street was full of young Hong Kong locals, some driving souped-up Lancers and Nissan imports. People crushed the sidewalks and overflowed onto the streets, a typical evening in the busy area around the Golden Arcade. This part of Hong Kong was one of the most densely populated areas in the world; the buildings were all packed high rises, stacking minuscule apartments with tiny windows over sprawling block-sized shopping malls full of similarly tiny shops. The sidewalks and gutters overflowed with trash; it had been a long time since the morning pass-through by the street sweepers.
The Golden Arcade filled the basement and first two floors of one of these apartment complexes. About three hundred metres long and a hundred wide, it twisted through narrow passageways from two entrances. The large entrance on the corner was for the basement and ground floor; a tiny entrance halfway along the building allowed access to the first floor.
None of the Disciples in our team were visible. They had all merged into the crowd. We would meet up inside.
The interior of the mall was low-ceilinged, with small shopfronts on either side of the meandering narrow corridors. Each shop, only about two metres square, had its speciality laid out on the counter: video cards or network cards, the prices written large in marker on cardboard cut-outs. Shoppers would cruise from store to store seeking the best price for the particular piece of hardware they were looking for.
As I entered, a young man called to me, ‘Copy software, ma’am?’ but I ignored him and headed down the stairs and further in. If I’d said yes he would have taken me to a shopfront around the corner further away; the mall was closely watched by customs officers. There would be a small shop selling handbags or candy with a false back wall, and behind that would be another store selling cheap mainland-made copies of any software or game the user could imagine.
The Academy kids occasionally practised their skills on these copy CD shops, running through and closing them down using the more advanced energy and Arts techniques. There was no fear of them being reported because they were shutting down criminals. The underworld outlets were excellent targets and we’d probably decimated the income the Triads received. If the demon Six had inherited Simon Wong’s underworld empire, it looked like the backlash was finally catching up with us.
I moved down the stairs to the basement. The lower stores contained stacks of DVDs in shrink-wrapped bundles of a hundred, colourful novelty peripherals such as mice and keyboards, and cheap computer accessories — mouse pads and printer paper. The store holders glanced curiously at me, but none accosted me to buy. Wrong race, wrong gender, wrong age.
As I went further in, the stores became smaller and their goods cheaper. The floor hadn’t been washed in a very long time and piles of dirt and dead insects crusted the corners. Some of the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered.
Simone was waiting for me at the end of the corridor. A small flight of stairs led up to street level, with a metal chute next to them for throwing boxes of stock down into the basement. The corridor the demon had mentioned was on our left, stretching the complete length of the arcade. The ceiling was low and angular in places where it fitted under the stairs. There was a single pull-down roller door halfway along, with boxes containing computer cases stacked in front of it.
As I neared the door, the Disciples came into view. Simone had hidden them with a simple charm that only made them visible as they were approached. They weren’t wearing Mountain uniforms, just jeans and T-shirts, but their T-shirts were black in unspoken acknowledgement of their Master. Nobody told them to wear black; they did it out of a sense of unity. I smiled inwardly; without thinking, I’d worn a black T-shirt too.
It was something of a crush with fifteen Disciples, Simone and myself. I went to stand next to Simone and the Masters and looked at the door.
‘Will anybody see if someone uses PK to break the door?’ I asked.
‘No need, Emma,’ Simone said. ‘Michael’s here.’
Michael shimmered into view behind Simone, strikingly different in his white T-shirt. ‘Sorry, forgot you can’t see much. I’ll take down the door for you.’ He nodded to the Disciples around us. ‘Be ready, there may be something on the other side. Nobody can sense anything.’
‘Wait,’ I said, raising my hand. ‘You can’t sense anything?’
Both Simone and Michael shook their heads.
‘Might be similar to what happened under Kowloon City Park, Emma,’ Simone said. ‘But I don’t remember that well, and that charm dissipated shortly after the demon was destroyed, so we couldn’t study it. We’ll just have to play it by ear.’
I tapped the stone in my ring.
‘What now!’
‘Stone, they can’t sense what’s on the other side of the door.’
The stone sounded chagrined. ‘Oh. I see.’
‘I hate to ask this, but …’
‘No,’ the stone said. ‘All my children are accounted for. So if this demon has used stone essence to line the walls and make them spyproof, he’s used Shen outside of my family.’
‘Are your kids the most powerful stone Shen?’ Michael said.
The stone hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘No. The children of other Building Blocks, and direct descendants of the Grandmother herself are more powerful than mine.’
‘Could one of their kids defeat one of yours?’
The stone hesitated again, then, ‘Yes.’
‘Bad news all around,’ I said, studying the door. It was plain grey steel. In human form I couldn’t check any further.
‘Let’s just do it and see what we get,’ Liu said. ‘The other shops are closing, the ones nearby are deserted. Let’s go.’
‘Everybody,’ Michael said firmly, and the Disciples stilled to hear him. ‘I’m going to change this door to mercury to make it open silently for us. Just hold your breath until it solidifies at the bottom — mercury is pretty toxic and you don’t want to inhale any.’ He glanced around. ‘Got it?’
The Disciples nodded.
‘Okay, doing it now.’
Michael raised one hand towards the roller door and it changed from dull steel to shiny mercury, then slid into a puddle on the floor. The mercury splashed against an invisible force field — he had ensured that it wouldn’t touch us — then solidified into a grey lava-like lump on the floor.
‘All clear, it’s steel again,’ Michael said.
The interior of the store was obviously a front. The shelves were unoccupied except for a couple of empty display boxes for hardware more than ten years old. The counter was a tired-looking office desk with no chair, and the cash register’s power cord hung forlornly down the back of the desk, not even plugged into the wall. There were no other doors or apparent entrances to the demon’s nest, however, and the Disciples began to search for the way in.
‘Nothing,’ Simone said, casting around. ‘Michael?’
Michael concentrated. ‘Nothing here either. Appears to be just a room.’
‘Stone?’ I said.
‘Strange.’ The stone was silent fo
r a moment, then Lee, one of the Disciples, stepped forward. The stone drifted out of my ring and grew to about the size of my fist, still square and polished green. Lee took True Form, a red granite stone about the same size. The two stones circled the room, occasionally moving to the centre of the room and then drifting out again — an elegant dance that seemed to have no pattern to it. Finally they drifted only millimetres above the floor, side by side, and covered nearly every square centimetre.
Lee stopped just inside the shop door and hovered slightly above the floor.
The stone returned to my ring. ‘Under there.’
‘There is a hollowness of some sort directly beneath me,’ Lee said. ‘Other than that, we can’t really be sure, ma’am.’
Simone and Michael stepped forward and both crouched to put their hands on the floor, concentrating. They shared a look, then stood again. Lee returned to human form and joined the silent group of Disciples.
Michael shrugged. ‘Concrete. Too much for me, unless we go for physical force, which will rock the building and probably bring the authorities.’
‘Isn’t there a latch or something?’ I said.
‘If there is, it isn’t anything obvious,’ the stone in my ring said. ‘Probably something only a demon could open.’
Simone shot me a look. Don’t even think about it. The last thing we need is you running out of control right at the entrance to a nest.
I stood on the spot the stones had indicated, then crouched and put my hands on the floor, wondering if my demon nature could detect anything. I jumped back as the floor slid smoothly open, revealing a black stone ramp leading down. A strong breeze came from the hole, surprisingly fresh with the smell of mown grass and greenery.
The Demon King, in his usual human form of a mid-twenties Chinese with maroon hair in a short ponytail, poked his head through the hole and grinned at me. ‘Hi, guys, just got here. Mind if we tag along?’
‘We can handle this ourselves,’ I said. ‘Get lost.’
His smile didn’t shift. ‘This is demon business. By rights I could tell you to get lost, but in the interests of Hell–Celestial relations, we’ll just come along and see what happens.’ He raised his hands. ‘Strictly hands off, we’ll just observe. I promise.’