by Kylie Chan
‘Ginger!’ a gold dragon said, and I threw the paper-wrapped pieces to him. The pork floss — cooked and shredded pork — and the dried squid were claimed by a couple of dragons who were already enjoying their biscuits. The remaining boxes of pocky floated to the ground beneath the wall, opened and all the dragons shared the sticks.
‘I have a bag of White Rabbit candy for all of you to share as well,’ I said.
‘Did you check the date?’ a green dragon said suspiciously.
‘It’s definitely from after the powdered-milk scare, there won’t be any melamine in it,’ I said.
The dragon nodded. ‘Good.’ Its head dropped slightly. ‘Is that all?’
I pulled a large glossy cardboard box, elegantly decorated with printed flowers and wound with ribbon, from the bottom of the bag. ‘Cakes!’
Three of the dragons rushed to me and held the box floating in front of them. The ribbon unwound and the handles pulled apart, revealing a variety of small individual slices of cake. I’d chosen the most expensive ones: multi-layered chocolate; elegant sponge with mock cream and topped with glazed fruit; and the inevitable whipped hazelnut creation. The dragons shared a look then all opened their mouths into wide dragon grins.
The wall split apart in the middle, revealing a set of stairs that appeared to be made of cloud but were solid underfoot. The dragons relaxed, enjoying the food I’d brought them.
I reached into the very bottom of the bag. ‘Oh, and I have some salty plums.’
Two dragons rushed me. I ducked to avoid their blows as they had a brief scrap over the plums. Another dragon sneaked up, took the plums out of my hand, winked, and slithered to the end of the wall. I went back to the fountain, put the Sogo bag into a bin, and proceeded to the bottom of the stairs. I changed to serpent form and had slithered up the stairs before the two fighting dragons noticed that the plums had already been taken.
The sounds of the dragons ceased and silence engulfed me. Cherry trees lined the wall of the Celestial Palace, nearly as high as the wall itself and adorned with pale pink blossoms. The air was filled with their pink fluffy petals, blowing in the Celestial breeze and covering the ground with a thick, soft blanket. The air was cold; it was early spring, the time when the cherry trees blossomed to give their promise of a warmer future.
I slithered through the piles of petals to the gate of the Celestial Palace, where Michael was waiting for me.
‘I thought you’d been held up,’ he said. ‘I was ready to call you and find out what had happened. You’re gonna be late, Emma.’
‘I was busy bribing the Nine Dragon Wall,’ I said.
He was suddenly more curious. ‘What do you bribe a wall with?’
‘Pocky.’
‘Ah, the great tool of corrupters everywhere. My mom used to bribe me with pocky when we first moved to Hong Kong.’ His face fell and he looked down. ‘I’ll get you that cloud.’
‘I miss her too, Michael,’ I said as a small cloud materialised above us and floated down to land on the cherry blossoms.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘I miss you as well,’ I said. ‘Take your time, but when you’re ready, I’d love you back with us, where you belong.’
He didn’t look at me as he stepped onto the cloud and gestured for me to join him. ‘I’m just not ready yet. After all that’s happened, I need to spend some time being a normal guy on the Earthly. I have a good job in a finance company in Wan Chai, did you know that? And I have an ordinary human girlfriend. Sometimes being ordinary can be the best thing in the world.’
‘I know exactly where you’re coming from, but let me know if you’re ever ready to return to us.’
‘I will. Is Simone meeting us there?’
‘She’s not coming, she’s having a boat party with her schoolfriends.’
Michael grimaced. ‘You should go along. I know what sort of stuff happens at those parties. I went to one of those schools before I dropped out and you employed me.’
‘Leo’s there.’
He visibly relaxed. ‘It’ll be all right then.’
The mist of the cloud surrounded a sturdy platform, and I curled up on it. ‘Simone’s one of the most powerful creatures in creation, Michael; a group of ordinary humans can’t hurt her.’
‘They can break her heart.’
I nodded my serpent head. ‘You have a point. But Leo is there to make sure they don’t.’
‘I just wish she had the brains to realise that Celestial High is where she should be!’ Michael said, frustrated. ‘She would learn so much there, and not just about her talents. She knows nothing about demons.’
‘Go on and tell her.’
He grimaced again. ‘Yeah, I know how far that’ll get me. I never went there myself, I have no first-hand experience, I’m living as a normal human on the Earthly … My opinion isn’t worth squat.’
I chose my words carefully. ‘I think she’d probably value your advice. You’re like a big brother to her. Feel free to talk to her about this. I’m not happy about this school either but she’s determined to go to a “normal” school and we don’t have any other choice on the Earthly. If I try and force her to go to CH she’ll just ditch school altogether, same way you did.’
He was silent at that.
The cloud lifted from the ground, giving me a view of the entire Celestial Palace complex. In many ways it mirrored the Forbidden City in Beijing: rectangular buildings with gold-tiled roofs, small courtyard gardens, and a system of high red walls throughout that separated the large formal ceremonial buildings from the smaller residential and administrative areas. Hundreds of cherry trees bloomed between the buildings and walls. The Grand Audience Chamber sat on top of the hill, its white walls and gold roof shimmering against the brilliantly blue Celestial sky.
‘I’m surprised there’s no analogue for Tian Tan, the Temple of Heaven,’ I said. ‘That’s as big a tourist attraction in Beijing as the Forbidden City.’
‘Haven’t you been there?’ Michael said, amused. ‘It’s half an hour away in the other direction.’
‘It’s only the last couple of months that I’ve discovered I can come to the Celestial in serpent form,’ I said. ‘I’m still finding my way around. I’m always getting lost in the Palace of the Dark Heavens, and the demons are too terrified to put me on the right path. I spent half an hour wandering around last week, no idea where I was.’
The sky darkened from midday blue to the rich violet of evening, and a few stars shone around us.
‘What’s happening?’ I said.
‘The Archives are always in the dark. Dunno why, but it goes from evening to night as you approach.’
‘Are we time-travelling? Moving faster through the day?’
Michael chuckled. ‘You do need to spend more time on the Celestial. Nobody can time-travel, Emma, especially not me. You can’t go breaking the fundamental laws of the universe like that, it just doesn’t work. We’re only moving into an area where it’s always night.’
‘John’s time-travelled. I saw a shadow of him as he was when Simone was a little girl, just last year in a record shop. He recognised us.’
‘Wow,’ Michael said quietly. ‘That’s just … wow.’
The sky darkened to the deep blue-purple of night and the stars came out fully, blazing with the brilliance of high altitude and clear air. A cluster of lights coalesced into view some distance away, and slowly grew as we travelled closer. The temperature didn’t drop as I would have expected at night; it remained warm and pleasant, the breeze full of rich night-time fragrances.
‘I’ve never met the Archivist, but Dad says to take it slowly with him,’ Michael said.
‘Yeah, he’s completely ignored my precedence so far. I was only able to arrange this meeting with Ma’s help,’ I said.
‘You have some powerful friends, ma’am.’
‘And some powerful enemies as well.’
‘I wouldn’t call Er Lang your enemy as such …’
�
�I wasn’t talking about him. There are plenty of guys on the Celestial who have issues with my gender, my serpent nature and my mortality. They might not like me, but they’re out in the open about it. Your real enemies are the ones who pretend to be your friends.’
‘Oh no!’ He clutched his heart theatrically. ‘You’ve found me out! I am your sworn enemy, your nemesis! Now I cannot let you live!’
‘You are so lame sometimes,’ I said. ‘But not nearly as lame as the real Nemesis. Did you hear what he did?’
‘The ambush at Festie? That was real classy,’ he said. ‘And the girl who set that up was supposed to be Simone’s friend.’
I dropped my serpent head. ‘Talk to her about Celestial High, please.’
‘Will do.’
As the cloud took us closer to the Archives I could see that it was a floating series of walkways between large flattened rocks holding bookshelves and racks of scrolls. A particularly large rock in the centre, suspended in the night sky, held a traditional administrative building, its metre-wide veranda reaching right to the edge of the rock. Walkways spread from the central building to the other floating rocks. People became visible on the walkways and I suddenly realised that what I’d thought were small walkways of about a metre across were actually at least ten metres wide. The central building had originally appeared about three hundred metres to a side, but it could easily have been three times that.
‘I’ve seen something vaguely like this before,’ I said, confused. ‘Walkways in the night sky.’
‘The Archivist is a huge fan of Diablo II,’ Michael said. ‘He suddenly remodelled the Archives one day based on a level of the game.’
‘No way.’
‘There are even replica monsters roaming around,’ Michael said. ‘I heard that when Diablo III came out, the Archives were unavailable for three weeks.’
He guided our cloud over the walkways to the central building, and floated it up to the edge of the veranda so I could slide onto it.
‘I’ll stay with you as Retainer,’ he said, summoning his sword and clipping it onto his back. ‘I took the afternoon off work, told them I was having physical therapy for the limp.’
‘What’s the prognosis on that?’
‘I’ll get there.’
The doors opened by themselves, revealing the foyer: a rectangular room about ten metres wide and five deep, with a polished dark wood floor and red wood pillars holding up the roof with the complicated bracket structure used in traditional buildings. A few rosewood sofas, decorative chairs and coffee tables were placed around the room. Large rosewood shelving units on either side held a collection of vases from all dynasties. Doors led out to the left and right, but nobody was present.
‘And they complain about you breaching protocol,’ Michael said.
‘Any idea which way to go?’ I said.
Michael shook his head. ‘Never been here.’
I turned left. ‘I’ll go the yin direction then, just to be contrary.’
Michael opened the door on the left for me. The lower half was dark rosewood, but the top half was a random lattice of wood with paper between the slats. I slithered through the door and into a corridor running down the side of the building. To the left was a dead end, so I headed right. The air tasted of old, dry paper.
Michael unfocused, using his Inner Eye. ‘The Archivist’s office is at the end of this corridor, on the right. There’s a similar corridor on the other side so it didn’t matter which direction we went. The office takes up the back wall of this building, and the middle — where these doors are — holds what looks like the oldest and most valuable records.’
Keep your Inner Eye to yourself and both of you get your asses down here, the Archivist said into my head. From Michael’s expression he’d heard it too. Let’s get this over with so I can move on to something important.
‘Charming,’ I said, and slithered to the end of the corridor, Michael following me.
Michael opened the last door on the right for me and I went in. At first I thought we’d gone in the wrong door: several rows of bookshelves stood in front of us, with an aisle between them. About half the documents on the shelves were scrolls bound with red ribbon; the other half were old-fashioned books. A very few ancient books made of bamboo slats, bound vertically and held together with string, were rolled up for storage on the end shelves.
‘Get a move on, I don’t have all day!’ the Archivist shouted from the centre of the room.
I glanced at Michael. The Archivist sounded like a young woman, but Michael had definitely said ‘he’. Michael missed my look and waited for me to proceed. I slithered down the aisle between the shelves and arrived in a large open area in the centre of the room. The Archivist sat behind a huge rosewood desk that was covered in books and scrolls, a brush and ink stone to one side. There were trolleys all around the desk holding more books and scrolls. The Archivist was in the form of a twelve-year-old Chinese boy wearing a traditional black silk robe. He had round glasses and wore his hair in a long pigtail. He finished the document he was annotating with brush and ink, hung the brush on the brush stand and glared at me.
He waved me impatiently towards him. ‘Hurry up, will you; you really are very slow.’
I nodded my head. ‘Archivist. Thank you for seeing me. I need your help.’
‘Yes, yes, you want to know what you are,’ the Archivist said, shuffling documents on his desk. He stopped and glared at me again. ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows. Now piss off.’
‘I’m a snake. I don’t piss, I pass solid urine; you should know that,’ I said.
He glared at me again, then leaned back in his chair and laughed. He took his glasses off, wiped them on the sleeve of his robe, then put them back on. His laughter eventually faded to an evil chuckle.
‘Tell me where the stuff is and I’ll have a look myself,’ I said. ‘Anything about serpent Shen, anything about Rainbow Serpents, and anything you have about Australia’s first settlers. I also need to know if it’s possible to remove the demon essence from me.’
He gestured towards one of the trolleys. ‘It’s all there. I had the staff collate it for you before you arrived.’ He waved at a set of large double doors. ‘There are some reading rooms through there; they have computers with internet access, and there should be a stack of blank disks if you need them.’
‘My stone will take notes for me,’ I said. I nodded to him again. ‘I thank you, sir.’
He gazed at me appraisingly. ‘You treat me with the respect due to an adult despite my appearance.’
‘You treat me like shit even though I’m First Heavenly General,’ I said.
He banged his hand on the desk and laughed again. ‘That I do,’ he said. ‘Who’d have thought a little human girl would be teaching me about respect.’
I moved closer to the desk and looked him in the eye. ‘Come down to the Earthly with a sword in your hand and I’ll give you a fine lesson in respect.’
He gasped with laughter again. ‘The Celestial didn’t tell me! If I’d known how much fun you are, Emma, I would have let you in here a long time ago. All I’d heard was that you were an uppity bitch who doesn’t know her place.’
‘That I am.’ I glanced at the trolley. ‘Is this everything? You didn’t hold anything back because you’re pissed at me?’
‘I’m not pissed at you so much as annoyed at having to do this pointless task,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows what you are: accept that. Just be what you are; that is the essence of the Tao.’
He waved one hand and a demon appeared next to the desk. ‘We do not have anything on removing demon essence from humans because that has never happened.’ He turned to the demon. ‘Do a full cross-indexed search on Lady Emma’s topics: serpent Shen, Rainbow Serpents, and settlers in Australia — we may not have anything on that last topic. When you have it, take it to reading room two.’
He rose gracefully from the chair and came around the desk. In his twelve-year-old form he reached only to chest h
eight on Michael. ‘Let me show you to the room and you can do the rest yourselves. You might be a hell of a lot of fun, Emma, but I’m not going out of my way to help you on this pointless quest.’
CHAPTER 11
The reading room contained a mix of modern chairs and tables with computers, and rosewood couches and armchairs. A coffee table to one side held a teapot with cups, as well as a thermos jug with coffee, powdered whitener and sugar.
Michael and I sat and flipped open the documents. He looked at the books, having hands; I used my head to unroll the scrolls. They were readable regardless of their language, a benefit from being inside the Archives building. Many of the documents were very old, but some were recent articles published in academic journals; all of them were mind-numbingly tedious. After about half an hour, a demon tapped on the door and came in pushing another trolley of documents for us to study.
Emma, Leo said into my head. Emma, I need you back down here right now. It’s horrible … they brought boys along and one of them tried to drug Simone …
‘What is it, Emma?’ Michael said.
‘Tell Leo to share with you,’ I said.
Michael concentrated for a moment.
One of the boys tried to drug Simone — one of the girls helped him — oh God, Emma, it’s awful …
‘Take it easy, old man, start from the beginning — someone drugged Simone?’ Michael said, his voice fierce with urgency.
He tried to rape her. The girl slipped a roofie into Simone’s drink, Simone felt tired, she went down into the cabin at the front of the boat to sleep it off … the boy followed her … It sounded like Leo took a deep breath. She wasn’t unconscious, and when he tried to … when he tried to … she yinned him! She took half the boat with him. Fortunately it was the front end, and everybody else was at the back in the lounge or on the roof on the sundeck — but she’s killed him for sure, and the boat sank!