by Alyc Helms
Jian Huo jerked when he saw the pearls. It was Lung Di’s turn to go still and silent. The qilin walked up to me.
“I believe these belong still to you,” she said, lowering her head. The pearls trickled down her horn like heavy dew, pooling in my waiting hand.
“Those… those are…” Jian Huo’s words faded on a breath.
“Your pearls.” I finished. Despite the qilin’s words, I wasn’t sure whether I should return them to him or not, given the circumstances.
“You gave them to the qilin?” Jian Huo’s question rang stilted and harsh. I flinched.
“In a dream. But she never yielded them to me,” the creature said when I couldn’t respond. “She asked me to guard them so they would not fall into… unwanted hands.”
“You…” Lung Di spun me to face him. His expression was twisted into an inhuman grimace. The false-pearls twined through his fingers. His fist clenched around them, and the illusion that Fang Shih had worked into them broke. They sliced deep into his flesh. As blood welled in the cuts and bathed the pearls red, they shimmered and became a dull woodcarving blade.
Lung Di uttered a cry of pain, dropping the knife. A necrotic cancer spread from the wound, engulfing his hand and moving up his arm. He released me to grasp at his forearm, stemming the necrosis with a grunt of pained concentration. Even though Fang Shih had warned me, I was so stunned by the turn of events that it didn’t occur to me to use that opportunity to make my escape. Instead, I stood watching in dumb wonder as Lung Di’s hand withered and blackened from the knife wound.
I was startled out of my stupor when his head whipped around to pin me with a glare. Before I knew what was happening, he was unfolding on himself, transforming from the suave businessman I’d spent the last few days conning into an ancient serpentine god. His blue-black coils tumbled down the alley, and the earth shook beneath us.
“You BITCH” he screamed, his withered claw coming around to strike me with the mother of all backhands. The blackened tissue broke on impact, and I went flying in a spray of blood and pus, hitting the far wall surrounding the temple and landing at its base in a crumpled heap.
I imagine things happened after that, as things are wont to do, but I wasn’t too concerned about them until Mei Shen and Mian Zi’s faces swam into view. I blinked. The stars swirled behind them like a Van Gogh painting, or something else. I struggled to remember the proper term for a skylight when it was underwater. Surely there was one.
“Mother? Mother, are you all right? Please be all right.” The twins alternated between being four beings and being one. I blinked again. Looking at infinity was making me dizzy and a little sick to my stomach.
“My pearls?” I said. I couldn’t recall why it was important, but it was.
“They’re still in your hand, Mother,” Mian-Mei replied. I wanted to hold them and tell them it would be all right, but I couldn’t seem to make my body work. In the background I could hear strange sounds, like an earthquake… or a great thunderstorm.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Father is fighting Lung Di.” Mian-Mei seemed to be crying, but I couldn’t figure out why.
“Good,” I said. “I hope your father kicks his ass.” Speaking was difficult. My jaw hurt for some reason. My mouth was filled with cotton, my vision rimmed with white fuzz, and a high-pitched whine sounded in my ears.
I must be at the dentist, was my last thought before the world dissolved to white.
THIRTEEN
People’s Hero
Now
The first thing I saw when I entered was the dragon.
And I mean dragon. Blue-black serpentine coils tangled beyond undoing, lined with parallel fringe the violent blue of irises. A rainbow sheen played across the twists and bends, like light off the surface of an oil slick. It took me a moment to realize the light came not from without, but from within.
I took a step back, bumping into the door. This side wasn’t shadow. Just door. Very solid door. Which meant I was trapped here with a dragon. The last time I’d tangled with him, things had not turned out well for me. Seeing him in his true form – or as true as any form he chose to take – reminded me just how badly they’d turned out.
But those great claws of obsidian lay quiescent in the gouges they’d dug into the stone floor. I took a tentative step forward, then another. He didn’t stir. Maybe he was sleeping? Comatose? Dead?
No such luck. One great eye slid open, pale nictating membrane parting underneath. The iris narrowed; the great eye rolled toward me. I was Frodo in Mordor. There was nowhere to hide.
The eye fixed on me. He blinked. Slowly. A sluggish lizard too long in the cold. Except it was mild down here; there’s a reason sommeliers use caves for storing wine.
He yawned with a jaw-popping crack that echoed like cannon fire. To my credit, I didn’t try to retreat again. Wanted to, but didn’t.
“Missy Masters. Come to save me from my own hubris. My hero.”
Yeah, he was just as annoying as I remembered. It was almost a comfort. At least he was predictable.
“I didn’t come for you.” I edged further into the cavern. It was hard to see beyond his bulk, but I’d caught a flash of vibrant plumage when he’d opened his jaws. Not in them. Beyond them.
“I am bereft.”
“I just bet you are.”
His coils shifted, sliding against each other like a nest of eels. Past the constricting knot, I caught another flash of color. Feng Huang, the Phoenix, sat hunched in a gilded cage, head tucked under her wing. If she were here, the other Guardians must be.
I continued to circle him. The great eye tracked my progress. The bearded tendrils streaming from his maw twitched in amusement.
“And you are a liar. Of course you came for me. I created an international crisis and upset the balance of power in the spirit world.” He shifted again, uncoiled a bit, stretched. “I would be disappointed if I went to such trouble and you didn’t come for me after such a blatant invitation.”
“Has anyone explained the concept of ‘overkill’ to you?” I spied a flash of orange: Tiger in another golden cage, curled up tight as any house tom. His tail draped over his nose, tip twitching as he tore apart some doomed creature of his own imaginings. He should have been cute, but I found myself in sympathy with the dream creature.
“No. Perhaps you’ll indulge me, though you may not want to waste the time. It took you longer to arrive than I’d expected. Much longer, and I might never have awoken.”
“Getting here was a bitch.”
“My apologies. If I had made it too easy, you might have suspected something.”
“Next time you might as well make it easier, because I’m always suspicious of you. When are you not up to something?”
He yawned again. “And yet you came anyways, and jumped through all my hoops. I suppose we should take a moment to mourn the death of the little idealist who wouldn’t trade her pearls for her daughter.”
“I’m still an idealist.”
“Idealism is just a series of compromises waiting to happen. How many compromises did you have to make to get here?”
That hit close to home. I struggled for a good comeback. “Yeah. Well… so’s your face.” Not the best retort in my arsenal. He looked pained.
“At least you are not rubber and I am not glue. That is something, I suppose.”
It had taken a bit more circling – I didn’t bother being sneaky about it, and he didn’t make a move to stop me – but I finally spied the third cage, golden bars set into the ground, arching over an emerald pool. The darker jade of Tortoise’s shell just broke the surface, water lapping against it to some distant tidal rhythm.
“Well, you’ve got me here now. The compromises are my business to deal with. So what’s it going to take to get you to release the Guardians and let down the Barrier. Let’s bargain.”
“Everything I want from you, I already have. All that is left is to release the Guardians and seal the matter.�
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“Just like that?” Seal what matter?
His eyes slid closed. He looked like he might go back to sleep on me. “You requested easy, and now you complain. You’re an extremely contrary woman.”
“I’m the one who’s contrary. Right.” I nudged a coil with my foot. “Wake up.”
His eyes opened a crack. “I apologize. Maintaining the ward takes much from me. From all of us. Here.”
He uncoiled, and I saw that he was curved around something besides himself. An altar with all sorts of junk on it – symbolic implements I didn’t know the purpose of, so junk to me, at least. Red candles in tall brass holders flanking an etched brass ewer, jade tea cups ringing a silver basin, a huge wooden rice tub painted red, with several banners on poles jutting up out of it. The inscriptions were just as arcane as the rest of the implements: the Three Dots Society, the Three Harmonies, Red Eyebrows, and White Lotus. If there’d been a banner for the 4-H club, it wouldn’t have looked out of place to me.
“Take the banner above the door. Burn it. Mix the ash with the wine.”
Banner above the door? I glanced that direction. A long sheet of paper with the characters for “Lung Xin Niang” hung above the lintel. And other characters I didn’t recognize. Lung Bao Hu Zhe?
It took me a moment to translate; I was rusty. Dragon protector? As if. “Aw. You made me a banner. Is there a cake?”
“I’ll get you one later. You brought the knife?” I pulled it out, unwrapped it from the protective silk. Something flickered through Lung Di’s half-lidded eyes at seeing it. His left claw clenched against the stone. It looked well and whole, but still emaciated compared to his other claws.
“Good. I can’t tell you what a disaster this would have been if you’d forgotten it.”
“So, Tsung is still working for you?” Poor Mei Shen. She’d be devastated. Assuming she didn’t refuse to believe it.
“David works for himself, which makes him easy to predict.”
“He tried to come here instead of me.”
“Of course. He wants badly what I’m about to give to you. But I was confident that you wouldn’t let him stop you. You could say I counted on it, your need to be the hero.” His eyes drooped shut. I recognized that state. It was the “just for a moment” level of tiredness that led to semis crashing on the Grapevine in the early morning hours.
I snatched the yellow paper banner from above the doorway, crumpled it into the empty silver basin, and set it alight with one of the candles. It burned quickly. I grabbed one of the banners from the rice tub and used the end of its pole to tamp down on the cinders and crush the thin filaments to ash. The brass ewer was so heavy it took both hands to steady it while I poured. The ashes sloshed about in the dark wine.
Lung Di’s head curved toward me as if to watch the proceedings, but he hadn’t opened his eyes again. In fact, he was doing something that sounded suspiciously like snoring – his breath came hard enough to blow my trousers flat against my legs.
“Hey.” I nudged his chin with my toe. Then nudged harder. “Wake up, you useless lizard.”
“Hmm?” He raised his head an inch, his lids opening only a few inches more. The nictating membrane underneath barely parted. “Ah. Good. Now dip the knife in the wine and slice your finger with it.”
I looked at his claw again, half-tucked under his length and still not fully healed.
“No fucking way.”
“As amusing as it would be to see my wound visited upon you, that is not my intent. The mixture nullifies the necromancy of the blade. Your blood on the blade is the key.”
“What key?”
“To the cages. Above each is an inscription. Read the oath, use the knife on the lock, and the Guardians’ magic is returned to them. Missy saves the day. There’ll be a parade, I’m sure. And cake.”
“You’re lying.” And I’d had enough of playing along. I squeezed past the altar and held the blade of the knife to the joint below his jaw. His moustaches quivered again, a reaction I’d always read as amusement with Jian Huo. “We’ve seen what this did to your claw. Wonder if it’ll do the same to your head. Now stop screwing with me. This whole thing has cost you. Mei Shen rules the Shadow Dragons now. Everyone else is pissed at you. And you want me to believe you captured the guardians and raised the New Wall just to free them and take it down? What’s the point?”
“The point was to bring you here to free them. Only that knife will do. Only the blood of a Shadow-born will do. Even if you use that knife on me, I am immortal. The ward will stand, the world will fall, and you will be trapped here.”
“But why me? Why this big, Rube-Goldberg scheme to get me here? I’m nothing to you. I’m not even a good pawn anymore.”
“You are a lousy pawn. You bested me before because I mistook you for one. Just a concubine, I thought, when you had the makings of a champion, like your grandfather. Well, now you are one, or will be. Mine.”
I jerked – away, luckily, or I might have nicked him. “Bullshit. I’m not your champion.”
His shoulders rolled, the movement rippling all down his length. “You will be, as soon as you speak the oaths and free the others. They’ll be furious, I imagine. Your first duty will probably be to defend me from them. Lucky for you they’ll be weakened as I am.”
One claw – the thinner one – lifted and curved possessively around my ankles. “Once Lung Xin Niang, now Lung Bao Hu Zhe. Not quite my brother’s bride, now my champion.”
I was shaking so hard I could barely keep hold of the knife. There’s no worse feeling in the world than helplessness. It had been years since I’d felt this used.
“I won’t do it.”
“Of course you will. This isn’t like that debacle with the pearls. This is a game I’ve controlled from the start.”
“But why me? You said yourself: I’m a lousy pawn now.”
“Against my brother, yes. Against your children? There’s none better. Will they try to supplant me if it means they must kill their mother to do so?”
“Get bent. What happens if I just let them kick your ass anyways when that day comes?”
“Then your honor would be ash in the wind, and your word dust on your tongue. Lung Tian would have reason to deny your status as Lung Xin Niang. Mei Shen and Mian Zi would no longer be fit to be Lung Huang’s heirs. They would no longer be a threat to me.”
My everything went numb. The knife clattered to the floor.
“You fucking asshole.” He would pick now to develop a taste for poetry.
“I am seeing to my own protection. Remember, Missy, that I am not the one who arranged for them to be a threat. For that you must look to my brother. I am merely assuring a détente. If Mei Shen and Mian Zi do nothing, then nothing will ever come of this. I may even come to your aid to ensure your safety. Now that I have a vested interest in your continued existence.”
His head settled back to the ground. His eyes slid shut again with a sigh that blew my hair back.
“So now we will see… what is your opinion on doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, Missy? Because I am not asking you to betray anyone this time,” he murmured. “Except yourself.”
I don’t know how long I watched him sleep, frozen in my helplessness. I could try to break the cages some other way, but I was no sorcerer. Card tricks and parlor magic were my forte. What if I just made things worse? The cages glimmered gold, but with a brightness and energy like no metal I’d ever seen.
I couldn’t even leave, unless I wanted to brave the voidlands without the plague of Templetons to save me. And every moment I delayed was another moment the world grew more chaotic.
In the end, I stooped down and picked up the knife. Dipped it in the mixture of wine and ash. Brought it to my hand.
Idealism was a series of compromises waiting to happen, he’d said. He’d managed to manipulate me into one I was willing to make.
* * *
I approached Tortoise’s cage first. He was slow. Of all the Guardia
ns, he was the one I could probably take in a fight.
The barest touch of the knife sliced my finger, deeper than I’d intended, almost as though intent to cut were enough. Shades of the Subtle Knife. No necrotic cancer crawled up my arm, but the cut still burned as though unclean, oozing blood as I pulled my finger away from the christened blade.
A strip of yellow paper fluttered above Tortoise’s cage. There was no door I could see, but a plain, solid plate sat at waist height. The kind of place where a keyhole should be if this were a normal cage.
On impulse, I tried touching the knife to the plate without reciting the words. All I got for my trouble was a shock. I yelped and swapped the knife to my bleeding hand, fingers going to my mouth on instinct. The heat didn’t help. I pulled my hand away; my fingers were already blistering.
He could have just made the key-plate not work rather than giving me second-degree electrical burns, but no. He was an asshole, and this was his reprimand.
Gingerly, I swapped the knife again. I could make out the inscription easily enough. I almost wished I didn’t understand it. Then I could pretend to myself that on some level this wasn’t my choice.
“I stand as Lung Bao Hu Zhe. This I swear on the freedom of the Guardian of the North.”
I touched the knife to the plate.
There was another jolt, but this one didn’t burn me. It traveled up the bars of the cage, which began to sizzle, then to melt. They trickled down themselves like a candle burned too long, into a puddle around Tortoise, and then into the Guardian himself.
His shell brightened to jade fire. A beaked snout poked out one end, myopic eyes blinking like a newborn. Four webbed feet, sharp claws curving back, also emerged.
Really sharp claws. A beak that could sever a limb, and a shell harder than the stone it resembled. Why had I thought he would be the easy opponent?