The Pirate Empress

by Deborah Cannon

  “The device. It must not explode. The backdraft from the blast will send flames down the tunnels, igniting the noxious fumes of the long dead and creating an explosion that will tip the world on its head. Li is trapped underground.”

  “What? I sent her after the White Tiger. She has failed then. All is lost without the Crosshairs of the Four Winds. What was her plan? Why did she descend underground?”

  Yongfang replied, “Her hope was to emerge from her subterranean path into the focus of Dahlia’s Magic Circle. Unfortunately, we encountered the owner of the tomb that sits below that axis. She knows something of magic dragon bones, and in my struggle to restrain her I was exhumed with her out of her crypt, and somehow deposited on Emperor Qin’s mound. Now that she is freed, the Lady Dai is very confused. She sits upon the mound and watches the bloodshed.”

  “And what of Li. How can we help her? How will we get her out?”

  “I’m afraid she is on her own now, Brigade General.”

  Quan shook his head in growing despair and utter disbelief. My Li, my beauteous, courageous and stalwart Li, I have failed you again. He raised the black flag and then the red one to signal the troop to move south, behind the mound.

  Destroy all encountered. Take no prisoners.

  Quan mounted his horse and spurred it to follow the footfalls of the invisible warriors. If Captain Huang could keep the battle engaged at the north-facing side of the mound, then he and the Yeren would do the rest.

  %%%

  For days, the warship floundered at the mouth of the delta, waiting for the tide, but the tide refused to cooperate. As far as Admiral Fong knew, weeks had passed and he languished where he was. Stuck. He was grounded and the current eschewed all of the rules of the tide. The moon changed from crescent to half cup, and still, the sea lay quiet.

  Young Lao peered over the rail with Lin, staring at the shoreline. If the sea ebbed any further, the entire delta would become land. Lao pointed to a strange occurrence below the ship’s keel. They had ploughed into five feet of silt. “Something moves in the channel,” Lao said. “But that isn’t river water. Why does it move, Lin?”

  Lin squinted down in the moonlight, and Fong looked too. Indeed, the silt below the ship’s hull seemed to walk.

  Fong traversed the length of the deck so that he could better study the phenomenon: a trick of the moon and a weary eye, perhaps? But no, the ground truly did walk. He took his spyglass from where it was hooked to his sash and placed the eyepiece firmly against his right socket. Not moving land was this, but creatures moving upon it. They were black, hard-shelled, large animals with studded feet. Tortoises. Hundreds, maybe thousands of tortoises, coming from the north and moving in a southwesterly direction, heads high as though they tracked a beacon or heard a bidding. They were heading upriver in the direction of Xian and the Fox Queen’s battle.

  Fong felt his young son’s hand slide into his sea-roughened palm. “They want me to go to my mother,” Lao said.

  “Don’t be foolish. They are merely searching for a drink of water. Like us, they found the river dry and are seeking the headwaters.”

  “I don’t think so, father,” Lao said. “These are the tortoises. What my mother saw before, what she claimed to be the Black Tortoise was no tortoise at all. I think that was some kind of dragon.”

  Fong heard a gasp from Lin who had joined them. Her eyes like Lao’s were focused on the moonlit shore. Something moved beyond the travelling tortoises, something huge and white against the dark jungle, larger than any animal Fong had ever seen. A white tiger.

  “I fear your son is right,” she whispered. Lin grasped Fong’s hand and raised his tattoo to her cheek.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  The Power of Nine

  It was the white tiger that guided his warship that night, with the speed of the preternatural, upriver to the confluence of the Yellow and Wei rivers, behind First Emperor’s mound. The sight that embraced him turned his heart to ice as an army of giant Man-bears fought a legion of armed ghosts. A hole had been bored into the side of the mound and some sort of explosive device implanted.

  “Fong!” Quan shouted, wheeling his horse to the approaching sailors. “Thank the gods you’ve come. Quickly to the hilltop and bring Lao with you. I can only hope that the Yeren keep the ghost warriors occupied long enough that we can form the Crosshairs. Else we will be blown to smithereens.”

  “Shouldn’t we disable the device first? At least disarm the enemy?”

  “No time. We must trust in providence.”

  Quan left his horse with Yongfang, and escorted Fong and his son to the top of the mound. Overhead, the Chinese Phoenix circled in the air. “Wu, Peng!” the Brigade General shouted. “Descend. Quickly.” The children landed, and slid off the back of the giant bird almost instantly and raced to Quan.

  Fong glanced swiftly in all directions but his guide, the enormous white tiger, with its thin black bands was gone. Sitting atop the mountain was a strange-looking, beautiful woman, who was clearly not of their time. She was dressed in the fashion of the warring states, a style he had only seen in old paintings. “Who is this lady?” he demanded. “And where are Master Yun and Li?”

  The woman was mumbling in an alien tongue. Fong went to her and raised her to her feet.

  “Leave her be,” Quan said. “She doesn’t matter right now.”

  “And Master Yun and Li? Don’t they matter?”

  “Their destinies are out of our hands,” Quan said. “Their only hope is if we succeed. Now, form the Crosshairs…Wu, do you remember what your great grandfather instructed you to do? You must remember, my son. For the fate of the entire world now rests in the hands of you four.”

  Wu gulped and nodded at his father. He lifted a stick from the ground, and in that motion even Fong recognized the affectations inherited by the warlock’s great grandson. Wu walked counter-clockwise, drawing a large circle in the dust, beginning in the east. Then he moved from the easternmost point of the circle to the westernmost, drawing a straight line across its diameter. He walked to the south end of the circle and drew a rigid, longitudinal line to the north, intersecting the latitude. “Reinforce my lines, father,” he said, his voice full of conviction and quite unlike a young boy’s.

  Quan raised his sabre, and drove the blade deep into the earth cutting along the geoglyph that Wu had designed, so deep that even the most powerful Pole wind could not erase it. When that was done, Wu scratched the characters for each direction at their appropriate locales. He took pigments from four clay pots and smeared the characters with the colours of the four winds: Indigo blue for East and the Azure Dragon, Red ochre for South and the Vermilion Bird, White chalk for West and the White Tiger, and Black charcoal for North and the Black Tortoise. Then he instructed Fong, Lao and Peng to take their posts and stand before their symbols. Wu was last to take his place at the easternmost extreme of the Crosshairs. At that moment, as Wu stepped before the blue character of the East, the clamour of battle stopped. Fong and Quan looked to the north, below the mound, and saw the circle of armed demons freeze. At the other end, where the ghost soldiers had been attempting to ignite their explosive, all struggle ceased.

  “Hold your positions,” Quan ordered, “I am going after Master Yun.”

  %%%

  All of the forces of the universe were within her grasp. Li shut her eyes, breathed deeply, and gathered the forces around her. Opening her eyes, she felt her Chi and tested her power. The glue sealing the coffin oozed. She raised her arms and thrust, shoving the lid off and allowing the heat to escape, thus dismantling her geomantic shield and releasing her body from its protection. The magma surge that had generated the heat she needed to melt the glue shrank back into the earth, leaving boiled statues and melted gowns, roasted cups and food containers, now ice cold. The exquisite silk painting covering the coffin was fried, and the picture of the Rain Dragon and the other mythical creatures destroyed.

  The fifth rib of Dilong glowed faintly in the corn
er where Yongfang had dropped it, white at first, then yellow, the colour of the Emperor’s robes. Li turned her eyes ceilingward. There had to be a way out of here. There had to be a way in which she could plough through fifty feet of solid earth. She clenched her fists, her teeth. She could not possibly die here, not while she was so close.

  A strange vibration began to shake the walls of the tomb. Burnt boxes and cups, statues and finery quivered and crumbled and fell. The singed coffin bounced like a live thing. Then she began to hallucinate. Her mind swooned. What was happening? It was like the gods were angry and had decided they’d had enough of her meddling. Shadows moved and wavered. The earthen wall in front of her suddenly broke and a bright beacon, two bright beacons, appeared. Li gasped. She knew those eyes.

  A dark body, truly the size of an elephant drilled through the wall, sending a spiral of dirt and rubble into the crypt. A dark mass, scaled and ridge-backed emerged. Gold-clawed feet followed. The walls thrummed and Li’s hands went cold, and when she opened her mouth to gasp, she saw the creature break through fully, saw its serrated back that was not slick like a snake nor furred like a burrowing animal, but broad and capped with a carapace like that of a gigantic turtle.

  This time she saw her mistake. No Black Tortoise was this, now that she could see the creature up close. It was a dragon of some sort. And it was not its head that tore a doorway through the solid earth, but its serrated back.

  “You,” she gasped, as the giant head of a hornless rhinoceros emerged from the turtlelike shell. “You have been following me all along.” The ridgeback dragon dipped its bulky head in a bow. “I saw you that day Quan and I escaped from Fong’s warship,” she said, “deep in the emptiness of the sea. I saw your eyes, so red, so bright. I felt you touch me. And that night I took Lao from his father, as we sailed upon the back of Fenghuang. You were watching us. And here you are again!”

  “The dragons have awakened, Pirate Empress. I am Lilong, the hornless one of the sea.” The odd-looking dragon peered up at the ceiling of the tomb. “I believe we still have a job to do?”

  “Of course,” Li shouted with sheer joy. “Thank you for coming!”

  %%%

  The ridge-backed dragon made short work of the tons of earth that stood between them and freedom. Dragon and rider burst through the center of Dahlia’s circle, splitting the soil between the Fox Queen and her prisoner. The bars of Master Yun’s cage broke free of the ground and plunged skyward, toppling back in a hail of sharpened lances. The warlock stepped into the Fox Queen’s path as she crouched, and Li appeared out of the rain of dirt, astride the back of Lilong.

  “Your reign is ended, Dahlia,” Master Yun said, raising the Scimitar. She had no power to shrink the dragons to kittens now that there were two. “This is Lotus Lily, Li to her friends. And to you, the Pirate Empress, who will be your undoing.”

  But they could not vanquish her tails if she had no tails to vanquish. Immediately she became the moon-haired, yellow-eyed queen, the bane of Master Yun. “Your armies are frozen,” he said. “The Crosshairs has been formed.” Li looked to the inert armies surrounding them and saw that it was true. “Return to the Isle of Peng Lai or be killed,” Master Yun said.

  Dahlia stood laughing at him. Even with her armies frozen, Master Yun could not destroy her unless she reverted into the fox. She turned to Li, scowled. “You are the cause of all of this. Get off that oversized turtle-lizard and let me look at you.”

  Li threw a leg over and slid off the back of the dark green, gold-clawed dragon.

  Dahlia snorted. “You are such a puny, skinny little thing. How can such an insignificant little woman cause so much trouble? Why do the gods favour you?”

  “I am neither insignificant, nor little,” Li said. “But I am a woman. And I do not believe the gods favour me at all. Or they would not have taken away my memories.”

  “Master Yun,” Fucanlong interrupted from above. “The fox faerie, Jasmine, is on First Emperor’s mound—”

  The armies of the Fox Queen suddenly reanimated. The forward line of the Inner Circle swung inward, swords raised, and Dahlia transfigured into the silver-tipped, nine-tailed fox. The Power of Nine was restored. Li spun wildly to locate Master Yun.

  “Jasmine has broken the Crosshairs. I must reform it.” He tossed the Scimitar to Li, who caught it with a swift grasp. “This is your fight now.” He signalled to Fucanlong, who caught him in mid leap, and sailed toward the mound. Lilong, the hornless one remained with Li. Master Yun knew that Li’s only chance at vanquishing the Fox Queen would come at the moment he restored the Crosshairs. In that split instant, her circle would freeze, the demon soldiers would be immobilized, and Li could see clear to strike. As he looked down, he saw the armoured Circle closing in to protect their Queen. Li climbed the back of the ridgeback dragon and stood above them all.

  The blue dragon landed beside Wu, who continued to stand his ground. “Great Grandfather,” he shouted. “Huli Jing has taken Peng!”

  Jasmine stood in her woman form, on the lip of the hillside, holding Peng by the arm. The earth where Peng had stood was scuffed, and the character for South and the Vermilion Bird was broken. “The three of you remain in your positions,” Master Yun ordered. Fong, Wu and Lao obeyed, and turned to face the direction of their winds.

  “Jasmine,” he said. “Let your daughter go. This is her destiny. Look around you. Your days are past. What future do you see? All of these beasts of legend and myth, these ghosts and undead, are things of the past. They have no place now.”

  “And what of you, Warlock? Do you have a place among men?”

  Master Yun blinked. “Maybe not.”

  “And yet you do not volunteer your own demise,” Jasmine taunted. “Why is that? I will not be banished.”

  “You and your kith have upset the Emblem of Balance. The Bloodstone must be returned. Heaven and Hell must be restored.”

  “WHY?”

  “The world cannot exist in utter chaos, without purpose,” he answered.

  “You think the race of men has purpose?” She snorted. “They fight among themselves, kill each other for no better purpose than greed—One is too lazy to plough fields so they steal, and the other is too cowardly to fight, so instead they build walls. And what of the gods? Where are they now, huh? Now that we have destroyed their heaven, where have they run to? Where are they hiding? Their rules are stupid. They are not permitted to interfere in the affairs of mortals except under certain conditions. Who made up those conditions, huh? Who? I say we can invent any conditions we please.” Jasmine tossed back her hair and exposed her bare breasts. “Master Yun, think about it. You are more like us than you are like them. You have magic. You have powers. They have brawn, a little bit of intelligence, and sharp weapons. But they’re no match for us.”

  “You and Dahlia cannot control these demons and beasts, these folk like the Xiongnu who don’t belong in this time,” he insisted. “And what of the ghosts? You will never have harmony; you will always have conflict. You cannot rule. The gods must be returned to their heaven, and the demons and the dead to their hell.”

  “Again I say, what good are gods? They hide.”

  “You are asking for Eternal Darkness.”

  “And you are asking for Eternal Light. What’s the difference? Either way, the balance tips to one side or the other.”

  “I have never demanded Eternal Light. Light is not better than Darkness, Jasmine. Nor is Dark better than Light. Without Darkness, there can be no Light.”

  “Oh, you speak gibberish, Warlock, as usual. No wonder we can never agree…Come Peng, it’s time to leave these fools to their death wish.”

  %%%

  How would the future pan out and what was her place in it? All was so alien, so strange. They had transported her from Heaven, destroyed her eternal bliss. Why must she sit here and watch the fox faeries obliterate the world of men? Where did all of these horrible creatures and demons come from? Oh, how the Lady Dai regretted leaving the war
maiden in her coffin, but what choice had she? She refused to remain in her tomb for eternity. And what were they saying, this warlock and this fox faerie, about Light and Darkness and Heaven and Hell and the destruction of all things as men knew them? Oh, if only she could act. If only she were not so helpless.

  The little girl they called Peng eyed her with desperation. Could she help the child? She so reminded Lady Dai of her own darling boy. He used to play like a forest animal, crawling about on all fours…

  %%%

  All eyes turned to Lady Dai as she stood up and called out to Peng. On that instant, Peng understood and reverted into the foxling, slipping out of her mother’s grasp and resuming her position on the Crosshairs of the Four Winds. Jasmine raced to catch her, but Master Yun delivered a windblast, slamming her up against an invisible current of air and holding her there. Quickly, Wu restored the character for South before returning to his post.

  Jasmine raised her hands and spun a spell of defiance, sending the windblast back into Master Yun’s face. He stumbled backward, very nearly tripping down the lip of the hill, and then, regaining his balance, he charged. Jasmine had managed to release herself and stood taunting him. He swirled his hands in the air to triple the force of his next windblast. He summoned the forces of reversal, calling on the power of the cyclone to spin the air in a vertical surge. She was caught up in a gyre, but that didn’t stop her from replicating his spell and trapping him in a helix of his own. He saw Fong out of the corner of his eye, desperate to aid him. “Hold your positions,” he boomed. “It is imperative that you do not move. Lotus Lily’s life depends upon it.”

  The coil of air spun relentlessly around him, sealing him off from his adversary. She, too, was having trouble freeing herself from the gyrating tube of air that trapped her. He only had to hold her long enough to allow Li the chance to lop off Dahlia’s nine tails. How long it would take before the opportunity arose was impossible to guess, but he must keep Jasmine occupied for as long as possible. Though his head was spinning and his thoughts beginning to muddle, he saw the swirling image of the Lady Dai, and silently thanked her. He had no doubt, now, that her only wish was to return to the heaven from which she had been so rudely ousted.