Jade Dragon

by James Swallow

“There she is,” said Feng, pointing with his sword. Along the leathery highway, Nikita was sitting on a couch made from dead dogs. Faint whisps of face and body sat about her, giggling and laughing. She was dressed in a tattered Dior delta, streaked with mud and fluids. Fixx heard Ko gasp when she turned her face to them. Half of her skull was bared, flesh seared away. Blood ran from the torn eye socket, dripping into the wineglass in Nikita’s hand. Now and then, she would laugh as if in response to some unheard joke and sip at the contents of the glass.

  Feng angrily used the blade to dissipate the wraiths, and Ko stepped closer, taking the burnt twigs of bones that were Nikita’s ruined right hand. “Sis?” he asked. “It’s me.”

  “Little brother.” She gave a languid nod. “You should run. He’s coming.”

  “Who’s comin’?” asked Fixx.

  The flesh-world around them began to tremble. “The King,” she said.

  And more than anything, Ko wanted to look away, but inside his mind, there was no place to seek shelter. A frigid hurricane of blue ice ripped into them, and above—

  Tze loomed, a towering god wreathed in noxious smoke and shimmering darts of painful colour…

  Ko felt his ire surge at the sight of the man’s grinning face. For a moment, he felt the weight of a weapon in his hand, and saw Feng’s sword in his grip. But then—

  Tendrils of liquid night emerged. They stabbed out and penetrated, rushing through flesh and savaging his mind…

  Fixx held on to him, but it was no good. They slipped on a new surface of sheer ice and fell—

  Into visions of…

  Black skies filled with blinded stars.

  Emerald serpent forms, congealing, forming a monstrous snake-god; a mouth of snaggle teeth, eyes blue pools of destructive sensual energy.

  Jade Dragon…

  Juno screaming, lit across a stage of razorblades and glass, a puppeteer’s strings tied to her limbs, ranging away over her head.

  Tze above, hands on the strings, directing and laughing.

  In the water…

  Grinning mindless salarymen in bars choking on mouthfuls of blue capsules.

  Masks floating, black-clad hands pouring thick drums of azure syrup into wheeling falls of clean water.

  Children across the city sharing one nightmare.

  I’m the quiet mind inside, pretty voice…

  Through sheaves of flashing pixels, inside flexing waveforms.

  Lies and compulsions sewn into every singing word, every rhythm and bright sparkling vision.

  Legions sleeping awake at their d-screens, absorbing.

  All thinking the same way…

  The blue, in everything, in each breath of air, each bite and sip.

  All eyes on Juno.

  At the tower, Ropé bearing the wageslave’s throat before a multi-bladed knife.

  A rip in the sky…

  Opening.

  The Jade Dragon tearing through.

  Slashing.

  Ending the world…

  Ripping.

  And no one to stop it…

  “Out!” Ko screamed. “Get me out!”

  He felt Feng’s fingers around his wrist and then…

  Ko hit the ground and felt asphalt beneath his fingers. He barely got to his feet before he vomited explosively, bringing up thin, watery bile.

  Fixx was nearby, sitting on his haunches. It took a moment for Ko to realise that they were on the roof of the hospital building. “How did we get up here?”

  “Sleepwalkin’,” offered the op, casting the bones and reading them. “Damn. That was heavy.” He looked up. “Your buddy, Feng. Got us free of it.”

  Ko looked at his feet and shivered. “Is Nikita all right?”

  “No change. Same for all those poor fools.”

  The thief found his attention drawn up to the distant shadow of the peak. “All that was true… That mad bastard is gonna summon a demon, rape the world…” Ko grabbed at Fixx. “We can’t let that happen!”

  But the op’s attention was elsewhere, staring down at the hospital parking lot. “First things first,” he said, pointing. “We got company.”

  A silver Mercedes Vector drew to a halt, and from inside came three distinctive figures. A man and two women in identical suits, faces hidden behind gaily-painted opera masks.

  The Road to the Shining City must be marked out

  For the Dark Ones and their Servitors

  Just as landing lights mark out an airfield runway

  The spilled blood would guide the Dark Ones to the Earthly Plane

  To the Last City

  Message embedded in Happy Carp beer commercial, origin unknown.

  15. Enter the Dragon

  Blue Snake came into the hospital first, with her sister White Snake and Qin Hui following close behind. Blue and White had not been born as siblings, but in their service to the Cabal they had been made so, in manners far beyond the level of crude genetics. Their masks were negative images of each other. Where her visage was dominated by azure colours, honeyed filigree and pale trim, her sister’s facade was white with blue and gold detail. Their masks were the faces of two mythic characters, serpent-spirits who guarded a mountain in legend. By contrast, Qin Hui’s face was dominated by death-white, with facets of black and pink; his name was taken from a perfidious politician of the Song Dynasty, whose hands bore the blood of the renowned hero Yue Fei—if the stories of the playwrights were to be believed.

  They advanced through people who wailed and rocked. Blue Snake felt a pang of envy for them that was quickly excised; these wretches did not yet understand the gift they had been given.

  A nurse approached, her expression frayed. She had the hardened aspect of someone who had seen much trauma but still kept a kernel of humanity within, refusing to become cold to it. She wore the kevlar uniform typical of an Accident and Emergency staffer. “What do you want here?”

  White Snake showed the nurse a datascreen. “Have you seen these two men? The black man’s name is unknown to us, but the youth is Chen Wah Ko.”

  The nurse shrugged. Blue Snake saw the lie instantly, the slight dilation in her eyes and the change in her blood capillary flow. The mask fed the data to her, direcdy into her thoughts; it went to her sister and to Qin Hui as well.

  White Snake took the nurse by the arm and spun her about, dislocating her wrist in the process. With her other hand, the Mask produced a sprayhypo loaded with Z3N doses. White Snake fired twenty ccs of the blue into the woman’s neck and let her drop, stuttering, to the floor.

  Mr Tze suggested that they be careful not to terminate anyone already in the early stages of the rapture, that they take every opportunity to induce more to the glory should the opportunity present itself. To this end, Qin Hui tossed a slow-release canister of aerosol Z3N into the air ducts while Blue Snake examined the hospitals computer system. Her mask extruded a wire into the reception terminal’s interface socket and she sat motionless, the monitor in front of her flashing through pop-up permissions screens.

  White Snake ensured that the channels on all the hospitals d-screens were tuned to the live feed from Wyldsky. They had learnt only recently that one of the clinic’s doctors had been causing problems, attempting to interfere with the pattern. It was of course no accident that this same doctor had made contact with the Chen boy. This was the way of things, the play of designs laid down by the King and his brethren.

  The canister began to hiss; thousands of others, some spraying mists, some dripping thick blue liquid into reservoirs, were doing the same across the city. The Masks had been planting them for months in places where they would lie undiscovered. Metro stations and schools. Shopplexes and parks. Trams and taxis. Everywhere.

  But this was only the secondary objective; the primary was to locate the targets. This directive was also broken into two elements. The first was to Isolate and Apprehend. The second, the simpler of the two that would come into play if the first could not be achieved, was to Kill.

 
“I have them,” said Blue Snake. “Eastern quadrant of the building, emergency exit stairwell number four. They are together, descending from the roof.” Before her, grainy video feeds from monitor pods showed a pair of blurry figures.

  “Hey!” shouted a voice, attracting White Snake’s attention. A security guard with a large taser hove into view, his expression confused at the trio of incongruous porcelain masks. “Step away from the computer!”

  White Snake adjusted something on the hypo, and aimed it at the guard. Reconfigured for dartgun mode, the device coughed, and one of the cartridges embedded itself in his right eye. The man screamed and clawed at his face, foam forming at the edges of his lips.

  “Moving,” said Qin Hui, producing a flechette pistol and pointing. He didn’t need to speak; none of them did. But the public relations department felt that, at least around humans, they should converse in a normal fashion. Alienation of the client base was never good for business.

  The Masks moved into the hospital corridors, laying people down as they came across them.

  Ko grabbed the op’s shoulder and pulled. “Come on, man!” he cried. “What are you waiting for? We’ve got to run, get distance… Get Nikita out of here!”

  But Fixx hesitated, thinking. “They don’t want her. She’s already dead in Tze’s eyes. They’re here for us.”

  “What?”

  The other man rubbed his chin. Yeah. It was making sense to him now, the pieces of sensation and distant, weird vibes he’d been collecting over the past few months at last starting to cohere into something tangible. The waking dreams that led him to the singer in Newer Orleans, the fragments of deep fear that bled across the night from the Eastern sky. The words of the old Sifu and the steel-sharp determination in the eyes of this streetpunk. All of it reflected in the psychic aftertaste of the man who had violated Nikita’s mind, the man called Tze. In The Han, they had looked at each other for a fraction of a second, and Fixx knew. There were other clouded souls and dark forces at work here, but this monstrous plan had Tze at its heart. He glanced at Ko, and felt a sudden understanding, a sharp and painful realisation. As much as he wanted to, as much as it seemed Maitre Carrefour had brought him here for it, Fixx at last saw the role that he was to play. The final pages of the script for this night became clear. “You have to stop Tze,” he told the teenager. “He has to die by your hand. ”

  Ko’s jaw dropped open. “Me?”

  “Listen,” Fixx lent close to him. “World turns, she’s gotta a pattern, see? Layers and levels, moves like clockwork. The whole of life works on one principle, slick. Right man, right place, right time. When one of those is off, all hell breaks loose.”

  The kid swallowed hard. Fixx knew he was remembering the visions, the carrion city and the horrors of the emerald serpent-demon.

  He prodded Ko in the chest. “You and your boy Feng. You gotta do it. No-one else can.”

  “I steal cars, for Buddha’s sake. I’m just a… a thief, and not a very good one at that,” he said, dejected.

  They were alone in the stairwell, their voices echoing. Fixx looked around. “Ask the ghost what he thinks. ”

  Ko fell silent for a moment, looking into the middle distance. After a moment, he nodded. “What do I have to do?”

  “Get up to the Peak, find that black-hearted sonuvabitch… and end him. Else, there’ll be no place to run to.”

  “Nowhere to hide,” added Ko, his voice low. “What’re you gonna do? What about that Lam guy?”

  Fixx smiled. “Don’t you worry none, I’ll give ’em some-thin’ to think about.”

  The metallic gridwork of the stairs clanged as Ko took them three at a time, vaulting over the banister to leap off to the next floor. He glimpsed Feng on every landing, nervously watching for any sign of the Tze’s sinister henchmen. The running made it easier for Ko to keep his concentration in the moment, worrying about where he was going to be in the next second instead of letting the conflicted emotions inside him take over.

  He was leaving Nikita alone; Fixx was standing his ground to let Ko escape; there was something awful hatching on the Peak; the man who ruined his sister was in league with monsters. Any one of these things would cripple him with fear and doubt if he let them.z/p>

  Ko dropped past the ground floor and went down one more, into the basement sublevel. He was moving so fast he lost his balance and bounced off the door, practically tumbling through it into the open grey cavern of the vehicle park. He slipped on a patch of old motor oil and fell against a concrete stanchion. There were cars dotted about in some of the parking spaces. All of them were the same kind of unremarkable compacts, Kondobishi Yasumes or Toyomazda Sunrays. Nothing with any poke, as traditional go-ganger slang called it.

  He took a breath, scanning the underground car park for Feng. On the other side of the garage, he spied the swordsman gesturing at a rank of white vans. Ambulances. Over there, the paramedics waited on alert status for calls that would send them racing out into the night; but for some reason nobody was around down here, and Ko could hear the far-off sound of a phone ringing and ringing. The meat wagons were bulkier than the compacts, but they made up with overcharged engines what they didn’t have in grace. Ko jogged across the asphalt and got halfway there when Feng shouted out a wordless warning.

  He turned and saw a woman in a white mask sprinting out of the stairwell toward him. She was so fast. Ko vaguely remembered the sight of a similar mask on the face of a driver, crossing the Tsing Ma Bridge; then she was on him, a hammer blow punch spinning him around. He turned into the impact, feeling his teeth rattle and slid away down the flank of a parked vehicle. She came at him with a kick that stove in an ambulance’s fender, popping the headlight out like a glass eye.

  Belatedly, Ko wished he’d asked Fixx if he could borrow his crossbow. In his pocket, his fingers traced the shape of something and on reflex he threw it at the guardian, moving and taking cover by the van’s open doors.

  The woman caught the missile out of the air and examined it quizzically. “Tarot card,” she said, without a hint of exertion in her voice. “Knight of Wands.”

  Ko came at her at full tilt, dragging a heavy fire extinguisher from a snap-clip on the wall. The red cylinder swung into the masked woman’s head and Ko heard something break. She staggered and fell over. He followed up by letting the thing off into her face, great gouts of white chemical foam smothering the guardian. She batted at the acidic stuff like an animal with tar on its fur.

  “Mine,” he grated, recovering the card. Ko tossed the extinguisher and vaulted into the ambulance’s cab. He didn’t even need to hotwire it; the motor was already in standby mode. The thief stamped the accelerator pedal into the floor and the hydrogen engine snarled. Automatically, a two-tone siren started wailing and the blue lamps dotted over the vehicle strobed wildly.

  In the wing mirror, Ko saw the woman in the white mask getting to her feet as he launched the ambulance out on to the street. She had her head cocked, like she was talking to someone.

  Ko turned on to Princess Margaret Road and headed south, watching the accelerometer needle drift up the dial. He hoped that would be the last he’d see of the Masks, but somehow, he doubted it.

  From the spidercopter’s window, Tze saw the spread of Wyldsky and he was pleased with it. The sprawling mass of the concert crowd moved like wheat in a breeze, rocking as they threw themselves into the music. The noise from the towering speaker stacks was so loud that the ’copter’s approach was hardly noticed. The flyer crossed behind the stage and turned to land in the statue park behind it.

  Tze felt a definite spring in his step as he came down the gangway. His hands threaded together. Outwardly, he was maintaining an air of calm, but inwardly he felt almost giddy with anticipation. Tonight, the things he saw only as vivid dreams would be made flesh. Ahead, the band on stage were coming to the climax of their final number. He knew little about the group, cared even less. All that mattered was that the lead singer, the oily man who had
been there that night at the tower, that he had greed and desires that the Cabal could easily turn to its advantage. Tze had seen the anti-corporate banners in the crowds, heard the flaming rhetoric in the songs. It was ample window-dressing for the main event. For Juno Qwan.

  He turned, playfully tracing the face of a terracotta soldier and found her behind him, walking like she was approaching the gallows. “That won’t do,” he told the singer.

  Juno’s face was tear-stained, her eyes frightened. “Am I going… to die?”

  “You’re going to sing,” said the executive, tapping the hilt of an ornate ceremonial sword on his belt. “And it will be perfect.”

  “Why are you dressed like that?”

  Tze laughed. “I have a penchant for the theatrical, dear girl.”

  She’d been watching him all through the flight from the castle. “I know you. I’ve seen your face. In my head. Sometimes.”

  “They call that meta-engram imprinting.” He nodded. “An echo, if you like, from the donor.” Tze leered a little. “There’s some of me in you.”

  “Are you my father?”

  “In a way. Along with a thousand others.” He sighed. “It’s all terribly complicated.”

  Juno looked at the stage. She seemed like a child now, lost and afraid. “I don’t want Heywood to hurt me any more. Please don’t let him. He… There are things in his eyes.”

  Tze frowned. The simple honesty of the girl’s statement rang a warning note within him; but he dismissed it. This was no time for distractions. “He has business elsewhere, child. Monkey King will escort you.” The Mask loomed.

  Juno hesitated. “I… I can’t remember the words.”

  Tze nodded to the guardian. “Help her.”

  Monkey King produced the leather case with the injector device and Juno’s eyes flashed with panic. “No, no! Just give me a moment…”

  The Mask ignored her and shot a dose of Z3N into her jugular. She staggered and he picked her up, carrying her forward.

  Tze let out a laugh and raised his hands to the sky. “Let’s rock!” he told the black clouds.