The Dragons of Heaven

by Alyc Helms

  Don’t ask me what wei-qi had to do with hunting down shadows or taking up my grandfather’s legacy. We hadn’t gotten that far yet.

  Sometimes, our visitors were messengers. My steps slowed, the skip faltering, as I spied a familiar flash of russet. It could be that it was a different fox each time, but the way she watched me, with mocking amber eyes, made me doubt it.

  Besides, how many foxes had four tails?

  Those tails flicked as I approached. I bowed in return on the off chance that she meant it as a greeting. Jian Huo had taken a lot of care to beat some manners into my skull, so it was a good chance to practice.

  “Huxian. It is a pleasure to see you again. Lung Huang is above. I do not believe he is occupied.”

  “Thank you, Miqian, but I am not here to see Lung Huang. I am here to see Lung Xue.”

  Another thing I’d learned here: spirits have many names and titles, and what they call each other – or in the case of powerful spirits like Jian Huo, what they allowed you to call them – said a lot about your standing in the world. Huxian had taken to calling me “silk purse”, and I couldn’t decide if she meant it as an insult or a backhanded compliment.

  “There aren’t any other dragons here.” I was still shaky on the ancient dialect that the spirits used for their honorifics, but Lung was a word I knew.

  Huxian laughed, mocking and merry.

  “That’s you, idiot. You’re Lung Xue, his student.”

  Oh. “And you’re here to see me?” I was busy boggling over having a title. It made it all seem so… official. “Why?”

  She half-turned toward the gardens, tails flicking. This gesture I could guess. She wanted me to walk with her. I did.

  She led me out of the gardens, down toward the mountain path that led back into the valley. I paused at the gates, reluctant to follow the fox past them. It was cold down here, much colder than the gardens and house above. That change in temperature told me that stepping past that threshold was more than just a matter of a few steps.

  The fox paused, turned, and cocked her head at me. “Well? Come along.”

  “Why can’t we talk here?”

  “Because I wish to speak in private. It is only a few more steps.”

  The saccharine tone decided me. I took a step back. “I’m not allowed to leave. Anything you have to say, you can say here.”

  She sighed and settled on her haunches. “My, he does have you on a short leash. Very well, Miqian. But I meant no harm. It is truth, that I only wished to speak in private. Lung Huang is his realm. He knows all that passes within.”

  I didn’t believe one word that came out of her smiling muzzle. I crossed my arms, folding my hands into my sleeves, as much because it was cold down here as because I was not happy that she’d almost tricked me.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “There are demons plaguing the valley. Lung Huang knows this, and I believe you do as well.”

  She had been there when I called the shadows. She knew I knew. I did my best imitation of Jian Huo’s skeptical eyebrow. “And?”

  “We have been forbidden from dealing with them ourselves.”

  That got me. My hands dropped to my sides and I gaped at her. “Why would he do that?”

  “You wish me to guess at the motivation of dragons?” She laughed. “Perhaps it is that the longer we are troubled by these demons, the more we will be in your debt when you stop them. Perhaps it is that they are your responsibility. Or perhaps it is because the eyes of Heaven have fallen upon you.”

  “Wh-huh?” And I thought she’d flummoxed me before.

  “Lung Huang has taken another student. That has stirred curiosity in the gardens of Shambhala, but those visitors who come here have no interest in speaking of you, or else no impetus to do so, or else nothing useful to report.”

  “Who’s interested?” I prodded.

  “His siblings, the Nine Guardians. Well… eight, for Lung Huang is exiled here.” Her ears flattened. “Well, seven, for who knows where the prodigal has gone to ground.”

  “Why do they care about me?” Jian Huo’s siblings were gods, for all intents and purposes. So was Jian Huo, but I tried not to think about that. It was too daunting, and it made my schoolgirl crush feel blasphemous, which was a different magnitude of wrong than the squick that it went to when I recalled he’d been my grandfather’s lover.

  But that connection to my grandfather explained why Jian Huo might take an interest in me. The other guardians? It made my shoulders twitch.

  Huxian agreed with my confusion, if her malicious little grin was anything to go by. “Lung Huang suffered exile the last time he took a student. A laowai. He still suffers it. But that at least could be explained. Lung Huang had a duty to train his Champion. A man already proven.”

  “And I’m not?”

  “That is what they wish to determine, and perhaps why Lung Huang wishes you to be the one to defeat the demons you unleashed.”

  “So this is all some kind of a test?”

  She yipped a laugh. “This is a conversation. And a warning. You have brought the eyes of Heaven down upon you, and the valley suffers while you struggle with the first line of the Tao.” The look she gave me might almost be called sympathetic. “It cannot be a comfortable prospect, to be under such scrutiny.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. I was not feeling in charity with her. “Thanks for the warning.”

  “It is only polite.” As if that was her reason for telling me. She turned and trotted down the mountain path. I watched her go until she disappeared around a bend with a flick of white and russet.

  I found Jian Huo in the pagoda, sipping tea and looking down on the valley. It was clouded over most days, but today the sun shone mellow gold, dappling the snowy hillside and sparkling off the aqua and viridian pools that wended along the valley’s length. I could just make out the rear temple, nestled at the foot of the glacial crevasse and the head of the valley. I couldn’t see the tour buses from here.

  Jian Huo didn’t acknowledge me. I could never decide if I was meant to speak right off, or if this was some game of Jian Huo’s to see how long I could wait him out before I broke. From the little smile I sometimes caught on his face, I suspected the latter.

  I didn’t give him long this time. “I’m going down into the valley tomorrow.”

  He turned. Set down his cup. Gestured for me to sit. “How was your meeting with the huxian?”

  Oh, he could be infuriating. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

  “I did. Your mistake is in assuming I have been keeping you from doing so.”

  I choked on the beginnings of several curse words before managing a coherent sentence. “You said I wasn’t ready!”

  “People suffer, and you are the author of that. Will you make them wait until you are ready?”

  “But Sun Tzu says… And there’s the Tao… and… aren’t I supposed to be learning about right reasons and practicing ‘not-doing’.”

  “Is that what you call your current inaction?”

  I almost hit him, right then. Would have, but for the twitch of his eyebrow. Something about this was amusing him?

  Hell if I could tell what.

  “Fine. Then tomorrow I’m heading down into the valley,” I snapped.

  He lifted his cup and took another sip of his tea. “Dress warmly.”

  I left before I did something stupid, like dump the teapot over his head.

  * * *

  Pissed I might be, but I took Jian Huo’s advice and dressed in layers – enough to keep me snug, but not so much that I looked like the kid from A Christmas Story. After all, I might need to move and fight. I had only the one experience with calling these kinds of monsters from shadow, and none at all with sending them back. Templeton didn’t count. As shadows went, he was a fluffy-bunny.

  Jian Huo waited for me at the gate.

  “Come to kiss me goodbye?” My irritation made me daring and snarky.

  “I regret I
must forgo the pleasure. I am coming with you.”

  “You are?” In all my months here, he’d never left his mountaintop sanctuary.

  He stepped to one side and gestured for me to precede him down the path. “I would be a poor teacher if I did not.”

  “In other words, somebody has to haul my sorry ass home when it gets handed to me?”

  “Oh no. I will expect you to make the climb yourself.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious, or if my snark was rubbing off on him. Worse, what if it had been there all along, and I was only now getting glimpses of it?

  No, that just wouldn’t be fair. Fascination I could deal with, but if I started liking him, I was doomed.

  You’re not your grandfather, I promised myself as I stepped through the gates.

  The path at the gates was clean of snow, but the drifts piled up not far down the mountain. After a few minutes, I wished I’d stacked on more layers. Fuck, it was cold. I tensed against the wind that cut through my clothes. I’d forgotten that it would still be winter beyond the protections of Lung Huang’s pocket sanctuary.

  “C-couldn’t you just f-fly us d-down?” I asked Jian Huo as I led the way down the path. At least, I thought it was the path. The snow was piled up knee-high here, where it hadn’t drifted deeper. For all I knew, I was about to lead us over an unstable edge.

  He’d stop me before I did that. Wouldn’t he?

  “I could. I will not.”

  I shot a glance back at him before I realized he was replying to my words and not my thoughts. He had a knack for that. “I am so going to sneeze on you when I catch cold,” I muttered.

  “Colder temperatures do not cause viral infections,” he said. I tamped down on the temptation to lob a snowball at him. The last thing I wanted was him retaliating. Trudging through the drifts was just starting to warm me up, and a serving of slush down the back of my neck would undo all my hard work.

  “I am so going to catch a cold so I can sneeze on you.”

  He chuckled, a rumble like a thunderstorm. I didn’t have a chance to savor my victory. I stumbled to a halt as my shadow-sensitive eyes caught a flash of movement ahead.

  “Is that…” I whispered, then trailed off as the glimmer of darkness responded. Not to my words. Couldn’t be that, because we’d been bantering loud enough to be heard over the wind. No, it responded to my notice, constricting upon itself and slinking crossways over the path at not much faster than a crawling pace, as though it could creep away unnoticed.

  No chance. Now that I’d spotted it, I realized I could feel it in other ways: the twitch at the back of my shoulders that I thought was a reaction to the temperature, the flutter in my stomach that I’d assumed was due to Jian Huo demonstrating a sense of humor.

  “Do you see now what I mean when I say ‘demon’?”

  I didn’t, but I’d let that lack of perception unnerve me later when I had time to think about it. Sure, the shadow felt unnatural, the metaphysical equivalent of milk gone off, but it was mostly harmless: a cold, starving thing trapped away from home and terrified of the pale sunlight. It might have stayed huddled behind that drift all day if we hadn’t come along and spooked it.

  “Poor thing,” I said, holding out my hand and taking a few steps off the path.

  That’s when it attacked.

  Darkness slammed into me, pushing me back on my ass. I yelped as snow slid under my collar, and the shadow took that opportunity to wrap around my face and fill my mouth. The world went dark and quiet. I fought back, tried to grab hold of something to give myself leverage against it, but my mittened grasp passed right through the shadow, and I ended up giving myself a face full of snow.

  The shadow constricted tighter as I sputtered and choked for air. It clung like a plastic liner laid over a swimming pool. I staggered to my feet, trying to tear myself free. I remembered the yaoguai’s fading screams when the shadows had smothered the life from her. She couldn’t fight them, and neither could I. The thing choking me was insubstantial, just air and darkness that got stronger the more I struggled.

  Think. I didn’t need to fight this. I was its master. I’d called it from the darkness, and I could send it back.

  I reached out for my connection to the Shadow Realms. As though it sensed the opening, the creature convulsed tighter, wrenching me off my own axis. I stumbled a few more steps, spun about, and shunted the shadow into the darkness with such force that I fell back.

  And back. And then down, as gravity came into play. I flailed against the air, as insubstantial as shadow, eyes watering at the sudden brightness and disorientation that came with flipping end-over-end in free-fall. The mountainside whizzed past me, swapping places with the sky and the ground and then the sky again.

  Something large and sinuous caught me. My stomach continued to drop for several moments, though the mountain and the sky returned to their natural positions. Everything still rushed past, but my vector had changed.

  I dangled from golden claws. Something red, green, and gold flashed at the periphery of my vision, but I didn’t dare twist around to look at the creature that carried me. Not in mid-air. Not when the grip of those claws felt so loose and the ground whizzed past far below. We crested the ridge, breaking through the cloud cover that blanketed the valley and nudged up against the peaks in a thick, stratus layer.

  Jian Huo set me down on the broad lawn in the center of the gardens. I collapsed to my knees, gulping deep breaths and fighting the urge to puke.

  “Th-thanks,” I managed to stutter when my heartbeat had calmed to merely racing. My mittened hands clutched at the grass as if that could save me from what had already happened. I couldn’t make myself look around, look up. All I wanted to see in that moment was the ground solidly beneath me.

  “Of course,” Jian Huo said, coming around me and stooping into view. He was man-shaped again. The long tail of his hair snaked behind him, little wisps of storm and cloud drifting up from the dark strands to be blown away by a breeze. “Pancakes make for terrible students, so I’m told.”

  I managed a smile, tried to chuckle. It came out more like a hiccup. “Yeah, well… you should see the other guy.”

  Jian Huo smiled. An actual, honest-to-goodness smile. My belly did another of those flippy things, and I told myself it was just an after-effect of my aborted attempt at base-jumping.

  “Even so.” His smile twitched and he made a sound somewhere between a cough and a snort. Two or three more of those, and he was laughing.

  At me, I was pretty sure. “What?” I said, less charmed than I’d been a moment before.

  “Poor thing?” he gasped, which set him to laughing harder. He rose, arms wrapped around his middle in a vain attempt to hold it in.

  “Poor thing!” he repeated, “and then…” He jigged about in a pantomime mockery of the shadow’s attack and my life-and-death struggle, before falling off an invisible cliff with a look of comical horror. He landed safely on the grass, laughing even harder. “P-poor… thing…”

  I responded the only way I could. I stripped off my wet mittens and lobbed them at his head.

  Dragons were assholes.

  * * *

  “That’s ten,” I said, dusting my hands off as though they’d gotten dirty. They hadn’t, but it was what you did when you completed an important task, and it wasn’t like anyone else was going to congratulate me. “We have to be whittling them down. I was pretty out of it, but I can’t imagine I summoned more than a dozen shadows. Unless they’re breeding.”

  In contrast to the excitement of my first try, my subsequent forays down into the valley had verged on boring. Track a shadow, spook it from hiding, chuck it back into the Shadow Realms. Glare at Jian Huo if I managed to catch him smirking and murmuring “poor thing”.

  He’d managed to contain himself this time. In fact, he seemed less inclined towards humor today. He scanned the shadows more closely than I did and gave the clumps of bracken a wide berth. “These demons are not bound as mortals
are. They can shred themselves into legion, or come together in one monstrous gestalt.”

  “So, kinda like breeding. Great. How will I know when they’re all gone?”

  That got his attention. “Are you so ready to leave? Have you found the answers to the questions that brought you here?”

  He sounded almost as though he wanted me to stay. Well, maybe he did. Except for Feng Huang, he didn’t get a lot of recreational company. Maybe he was lonely.

  “No,” I reassured him. “But, you know, a running tally would be nice.”

  “I will tell you when you have defeated the last,” he said, but it was an absent-minded promise. Something beyond my shoulder had caught his attention. His eyes narrowed.

  “Thanks,” I muttered. “You’re a real… pal…” I drifted off as my attention was caught by the same something. I don’t know how it felt to him, but for me it was a familiar twitch crawling up the back of my neck, a queasiness in my belly.

  “We should return home,” Jian Huo said, taking a step back the way we’d come.

  I held out a stalling hand. “Hold on. I can take this one.”

  “Missy…”

  I ignored him, taking a few cautious steps around a copse of evergreens and brambles grown too thick to walk through. I’d learned my lesson from the first one; I wasn’t going to get jumped.

  The shadow awaited me on the other side. This one was more than just a few wisps of darkness. It hulked like a linebacker, and it took me a few seconds to realize that the shadow had formed itself into a parody of the yaoguai’s demon.

  An inky pseudopod in the shape of a fist swung out at me. I ducked low and swept out a leg, wondering if it would even work, or if this shadow was as insubstantial as the others.