Julienne puts her arms around Olivia. "You promised you wouldn't feed from me again."
"When I said that, I wasn't famished." Olivia's voice is thread. "I don't know what I will do."
As before, Olivia is light. Lighter. No weight to her at all, no substance. "I'm holding you to your promise."
* * *
Time trickles. In this state Xiaoqing can think only in smells and sharp jabbing pains. She knows the rough direction—the closer she gets the surer she becomes—but she can barely push forward the mass of her own body. Her human skin is breaking. When the layer of this form has been flayed away heaven will eat through her true self, corrosive poison.
When she can concentrate, she detaches from the frame of her sinews and arteries, floating free in the coils of her memory. But flesh pulls her back and the hunger would return in howling waves. It claws at her, and tells her that there is food, that it is sweet and full of youth and life. Hunger becomes all she knows, all she can think of, eclipsing both the idea and the eminent actuality of Bai Suzhen.
She loses count of the precipice-moments where she almost opens her jaw wide and seizes the human in her fangs; for all her feebleness Xiaoqing is still predator, and Julienne only prey. It wouldn't be a feeding of simple power. It would be a rending of throat and breast, where she sinks her teeth deep and finds the treasure of pancreas and liver, the gorgeous sensation of innards sliding down her gullet.
Not this mortal. Not Julienne. Julienne who is practically carrying her now, who holds her upright, who trusts Xiaoqing blindly.
Unconsciousness interrupts her, and when she jolts alert Julienne is loosening her collar. "No." Her voice unravels.
"You need to breathe." Julienne's fingers fumble and falter, pinching a button. "Oh."
"Stop. You don't need to see the rest."
"I've already seen the rest," the mortal snaps, impatience vaulting over shock. "You made sure I saw everything there was to see."
Xiaoqing wants to laugh. "Not—" She gags on the air that her lungs desperately require. "Not the same. This I can't control. I'm not going to look human."
"We'll see then. How far are we from… from your sister?"
"Near."
She hopes.
When she first catches scent of something other than Julienne—something food—she does not think. She springs for it, the last of her strength rippling scale-bright.
Flesh soft-sweet in her mouth, a heart that throbs all the way down to her stomach. Cartilage that bends then breaks between her teeth. Entrails spiced in animal musk. She swallows and swallows in her haste to devour, to have as much as she can. She breathes in the viscera and slows down to separate each scent into its distinct entity, its hue and texture.
A soft sound that she gradually recognizes as human.
Blood cools on her and she's looking at a girl with a fist pressed to her mouth, teeth over knuckles, making quiet noises as she chews on her own skin.
Xiaoqing tries to remember the human's name. At her feet, a lynx-headed body lies. One glassy eye stares up at her; the other socket is empty, dribbling fluids, and she remembers that crunching on her tongue. Cuts sting her front and her blouse is in shreds. He must have fought.
Legs and arms. She still has those, for no good reason. It would be good to assume the shape that she should be; it would feel right. There's still much she hasn't eaten, and she shouldn't let such plenty go to waste. In her native form she can gobble up the world.
We are more than our nature, younger-sister. But we shouldn't have to be ashamed. Just because we want to gain human form. Yes, but sometimes it is useful to rise above instincts. Bai Suzhen's hand on her wrist. Staying her.
"Julienne." Xiaoqing tests the word, remembering the shape of it. Her tongue flicks, forked. "Julienne."
Xiaoqing pulls away from the lynx's remains. She knows without looking that she is more scales than skin, that she is only human in outline, a vessel into which the serpent is uneasily poured. This has happened before. Bai Suzhen's human lover and his terror at the glory of her true form. A threshold over which there is no stepping back. A truth no human can witness and accept.
"That was a servant of—the god. Daizeon's."
"It is?" She has forced her tongue, at least, to become mammalian. Words come slowly. Intellect returns in fragments, slotting together badly.
"Hau Ngai warned me about them."
When Julienne extends her hand Xiaoqing can only gaze at it in wonder, as though it is a holy lotus offered by Guanyin herself. The hand is not withdrawn. Its back is a knot of teeth-print bruises, reddening. "Why aren't you fleeing for your life? I just butchered this lynx."
"You didn't try to eat me." Julienne exhales. "It'd have been easy for you, too. This thing had claws; I don't."
Xiaoqing touches the fear-etched marks, teeth driven over and over into flesh. "In all my centuries I've never met a mortal so fearless."
"It's hard to be really scared here—I should be in hysterics. In Hong Kong I would probably have run and not looked back. I don't know."
"You sell your courage short." She takes the hand, finally, and pulls herself up. Every part in her courses with renewed potency. Her feet light, her muscles coiled, weapons whetted and ready in their sheaths. "Never allow yourself to believe you're anything but extraordinary."
Julienne considers her for a moment before saying, "You're reeking."
* * *
The lynx must have been hiding it, for when Olivia has crushed the last of its internal organs there is a door. Splintered wooden frame and tattered paper.
Julienne considers doing something more dramatic than biting her knuckles raw. The last time she reacted to anything strongly was at seventeen. She can't remember what it was about, now—an accumulation of life in general or rage at her own sexuality—but she tore apart her room, and afterward had to clean it up by herself. Shattered mugs and a monitor cracked from having a desk lamp slammed into it over and over.
Stitching that episode back together she is almost more afraid of it than she is of Olivia. But nothing like that ever happened again, while Olivia rending the lynx apart happened barely minutes ago.
Beyond the door, opaque fog churns thick with nothing, heavy with nowhere. Hau Ngai said that the borderlands of heaven are not geography but thought, waiting to be shaped by the desires and preferences of the immortal allotted that patch of land, that bit of mountain or that bend of river.
"It's safe," she says. "My aunt said to keep wading through until we find the pagoda. It's been recalled to its normal size. Not big. Six floors. Some fifteen by fifteen at the base. Meters, that is, not… what unit do you count in?"
"By how fast I can cover a distance is how I measure it."
"Sounds like something Hau Ngai would say. Aren't we going through?"
"This is my battle. Not yours."
More than courage it is vindictiveness that drives Julienne to step around Olivia and into the gate. The mist doesn't feel like anything. No clinging dampness or vapor. It obscures everything ahead and behind, and after a few brash steps she realizes that she can't see Olivia.
Until the other woman takes her elbow. "Mortals are mad, every single one of you. Just a matter of how much and what kind."
The pagoda hovers in emptiness. There is no ground beneath it, no grass surrounding it, no sky above its yellow steeple. Vertigo seizes Julienne. Like a free-fall nightmare, terminal velocity without motion yet with the certain knowledge that impact is both inevitable and imminent.
Julienne expected to see the man—the monk—looming over the entrance in his suit and rolex, muscled and monstrous. He is not there.
Two figures with smooth glazed faces, one chiseled ivory, the other carved teak. Gesturing to the pagoda they bow to Olivia. One says, "Madame Siuching will find us of little temptation to her appetite. I began life as an official's seal, and my brother a lute."
"I can eat your spirits." Olivia's mouth curls.
"But they wou
ld taste of nothing very much. Between the two of us we've less than five hundred years. Insipid fare to one such as you." The lute spirit produces a key. Its head is shaped like an old coin, square-holed, brightened with gold tassels. "We'll open the pagoda momentarily."
"I know whom you serve."
The ivory face cracks a smile. This is literal; Julienne can hears the noise of a material with no give being made to contort. "Then you should also know, madame, that the archer commands no rank or position. That she continues to exist and carry out her part is a mere technicality."
Olivia tosses her head. "What does she have to do with anything?"
Julienne reaches for the arrowhead and immediately drops her hand.
The door gapes, spilling a gust of heat. Neither spirit follows them as they enter, and behind them there is a sound of locking.
Inside it is sauna-warm and silent. The walls are close and tight, windowless; Julienne is used to pagodas being airy and ventilated, but this is anything but.
"Siuching?"
"You didn't think I'm actually called Olivia? I use that for convenience; in Hong Kong everyone is expected to be a bit colonial, even demons." She circles the stairs. "We just walked into a trap."
"Then why did you—"
"Because I'm not afraid. You shouldn't be, either. I know what you've been told about snakes, but when I said I would honor you always I meant it."
Julienne turns her eyes to one of the bas-relief faces in the wall. She cringes when she realizes it looks back, with pupils that move and eyes that blink: thick heavy lashes, etched to fine detail. "Stop saying things like that."
"Why?"
"It doesn't mean anything."
"Perhaps when such words fall through human lips they don't. I'll give your aunts no cause for complaint. Or a reason to avenge you, either on me or on Daizeon."
Red marble lines the next floor, which is lantern-lit and far larger than fifteen by fifteen—or even thirty by thirty. Immense candles clutch the walls in waxy grips, and to one side the statue of some war god looms, bearded face locked in a scowl, hands clenched around a sword hilt. The monk stands under this icon, sekzoeng held in the crook of his elbow. He doesn't dress as he did in Harbor City, Julienne observes with a peculiar dispassion; instead it is vestments, red on yellow, and a head shaven clean.
Olivia's hand rises, falls; with the lynx she was furious, uncontrolled. Now she is exact and what bursts from the monk's throat is so viscous and carotid it sprays black.
A moment later the monk grabs Olivia and flings her into the candles. He rebalances himself and starts toward Julienne.
Olivia tears into his back, opening his chest wide; from where she is Julienne can see diaphragm straining and lungs rapidly inflating and deflating against the damage.
"Go!" Olivia's hand clutches at the lungs. "Find my sister. Up—at the top—she should be there, I can sense her. I'll put him down as many times as it takes." And saying that she tears the lungs loose.
Julienne runs.
* * *
She runs until her gorge and mouth seem one; she runs until her ribs are spears in her sides. The steps rise steep, grease-slick, and she clings to the railing thinking if this is now the moment to call; if Hau Ngai would answer. Her aunt would. It will be simple.
For bringing down the suns Hau Ngai was stripped of rank and divinity. What would be her sentence this time, if she's thought to collaborate with Olivia? On Julienne goes, though eventually she slows down to a walk. Then a crawl on hands and knees.
She pulls herself up, every joint creaking. There's no more stair.
The table is small and alone, shaped as though it's been made expressly to bear this. On it, a vase long and tall, painted with pictures of snakes. Snake with snake. Snake with men. Snake with women. A plump-cheeked child. Yellow paper charms obscure more than half the illustrations.
Julienne does not know what to expect, and if she weren't ragged mindless she mightn't have done anything. When she touches the vase there's no fire to burn her, no curse to rupture her eyes. Just celadon polished and near-frictionless. The paper talismans are made to guard against demons.
"Leave that, girl."
His footsteps drag leaden, but the monk is whole. Beside him the lute and seal spirits close ranks, blood on their hands and on their mouths.
Julienne tries to breathe past her panic. "What did you do to Olivia?"
"What is fitting for her kind. Step away from that."
She doesn't move. Her arms, weak and quaking, clasp the vase. "No."
"I've no quarrel with you. As such."
Julienne tears off one of the charms.
"The snake must've fooled you into being her accomplice." He pushes himself forward; Daizeon's servants follow.
She scratches off another yellow paper. Her nails slip on glazed ceramic. Her stomach feels far away from her, sinking deep. "Do you know who you'll have to answer to if you hurt me in any way?"
The slightest pause. "The archer will not be in time."
She heaves the vase as high as she has the strength to, and dashes it on the ground.
There's nothing but the spill of pottery shards and shattered snake-pictures, and then there is something: scales so white, diamonds and moonstones, platinum and fresh-cut ivory. A breadth and length impossible to take in; a breadth and length that fill the room to bursting.
A monk bitten in half. Two heads torn off that roll and clatter, like dolls of wood and ivory.
Then the room is empty and there's a woman, naked, her hair snarled all the way down to her thighs. She holds a heart in her hand, veined black, hissing with embers. "You'll have to do this," Bak Seijuen says and points at the sekzoeng. "I've sworn to bring death to no human, which he still is, if only barely. Stab it through, just like so."
The heart is braced against the table. Julienne moves on autopilot. Lift. Drop. The end of the sekzoeng is filed to a point. It meets resistance inside all that softness, a gold gleaming object that Julienne without thinking extracts and slips into her pocket.
While she is still staring at the organ's final throbs the white cobra takes her chin and frowns at her. "Are you my descendant? Siuching's?"
"I—no. Olivia... Siuching is downstairs."
The way down is quick, and it is no time at all to find Olivia lying still and unbreathing on the red marble. Julienne's composure tips over, dropping her to her knees even as Bak Seijuen takes Olivia in her arms, and brushes her lips over Olivia's forehead, then eyelids, then mouth. There she lingers the longest, breath or power passing from her to the younger snake.
A convulsion. Olivia opens her eyes, which brim as she throws her arms around Bak Seijuen. Her shoulders fold and unfold, and she pours high wailing sobs into Bak Seijuen's breast. Even before—in banfaudou, in that room—she didn't cry like this, and Julienne looks elsewhere, voyeuristic, knowing that this isn't where she should be. That she doesn't belong in this moment, if she ever belonged at all.
When Olivia has quieted the cobra looks up. "The seals could've been removed only by a human. Bak Seijuen pays what she owes, always. Speak your desire, mortal child, and within reason you'll have it. Remember that once I've given it you must seize the wish and make it yours, or else have only emptiness in your fists."
What is it that you long for best, that clenches teeth and claws over the ventricles of your heart?
Think about what you want, child.
Julienne swallows past a throat gone to desert. Olivia hasn't even looked at her. They are in love, or at least Olivia is. She has no right. "I want," she says and her pulse pounds thunder. "I want your sister Siuching."
They both train their gazes on her, and there's an unblinking stillness—reptilian—that makes her regret having ever said something so fiercely stupid.
"That's very forward. And not entirely within reason." Bak Seijuen shakes her head. "My prison comes apart. Let us be quit of it, for sure as teeth cut through meat, I've had enough of this place."
&n
bsp; 2.7
The pagoda crumbled with less noise than a sand castle.
Julienne is told they are back in Hong Kong and though she does not know where this exact spot is—a low-end apartment, laundry strung out from window to window like dead moths—the heaviness of her body lets her know heaven is far behind. There's blood flecking her sleeves. She has already forgotten what it is like to be brave, to have said and done half the things she did.
She flinches when Olivia tries to touch her. Shutting her eyes—it seems necessary somehow—she whispers a name. Almost instantly Hau Ngai takes her into familiar arms, and then home.
The bathroom tiles and shampoo bottles look like alien landscape, and habit alone keeps Julienne lucid through the shower. In the living room she deposits her head in Hau Ngai's lap, and lets herself be held for a very long time. This gentleness from her aunt she thinks the oddest thing, odder by far than demons and monks who refuse to die.
"Auntie?"
"Yes."
"You were right. About everything."
"You don't need to concede that so quickly. Being young permits you to be wrong, though it's becoming that you are willing to admit so. Why did you not call for me?"
"Daizeon's servants said—you exist on a technicality."
"Heaven comprises of nothing save technicalities. There are eternal scribes devoted to the task of documenting such. They type every hour of every day without pause."
Julienne turns her face to her aunt's fresh, crisp shirt. "I found—I don't know what it is, after the monk… died. Do you want to see it?"
She fishes the coin out of her jeans, a small hexagon with one character etched onto it: silence. There's a dent from the sekzoeng, but the rest of it is unblemished gold. It must signify something, for Hau Ngai clenches it in her palm and smiles slowly. "This is well done, Julienne."
"What is it?"
"I will tell you one day, but this will please a certain goddess very much. Did you find what you wanted in heaven?"
Traffic noises outside. The flat next door is loud with two children chatting excitedly about a school trip to Ocean Park. She expected to return in the dead of night, an hour full of gray shadows, but instead it is an afternoon: mundane.
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