by Alec Hutson
Jerrym strained, pouring every ounce of his strength into his spell.
The stone did not move. But then it was like something else was there, helping him, and the weight of the bones seemed to increase. Almost as if the dragon were straining to be free.
The stone tore loose, and Old Balgeron plummeted toward the ground. It looked to Jerrym like the dragon’s jaws opened as they enveloped the archmagus, piercing his wards and then his body with sword-length fangs. A great plume of dust exploded up from the force of the ancient bones smashing into the floor, and when it cleared, only a single arm remained of the archmagus, extended from the ruin of the dragon’s skull, still clutching his staff.
Jerrym walked forward in a daze. He bent down and pulled the staff from his master’s hand. Would it reject him, as the archmagus had said?
Power flooded him, coursing through his body like a river swollen by the spring storms. Jerrym laughed. The imp flapped above the fallen skeleton, goggling down at him, that cursed smirk finally wiped from its face.
Jerrym gestured and the imp vanished in a puff of greasy smoke and a pained shriek. Gods, it felt as good as he always thought it would.
He turned toward the shocked grand vizier. “Tell the emperor there is a new archmagus.”
A clatter of bones came from behind him as the huge pile settled, and he turned. It looked like Old Balgeron was grinning at him.
The grand vizier nodded, his face bloodless. “Y-yes, Archmagus.”
“And send some servants over from the palace to clean up this mess.”
Another shaky dip of his head. The grand vizier couldn’t seem to tear his eyes from the former archmagus’s limp arm.
The haze of dust thrown up by the ancient bones was making his eyes water and throat itch, and Jerrym suddenly felt an overwhelming desire for some fresh air.
Unconsciously he smoothed his hair and brushed his robes clean of the gray film that had settled everywhere. Perhaps he should go down to the docks. Alia was singing tonight.
THEY CAME ACROSS the corpse of the Audi A3 just as the first cold raindrops were beginning to fall. Every door was open, as if all the passengers had fled at the same time when the car had coasted off the road and into the ditch along Route 312. Someone had come along afterward to remove the wheels and scrawl messy Chinese characters across the windshield in white paint. Jason recognized the symbols for China, but that was it. Probably an anti government slur, as black Audis had been the chariots of choice for communist officials before the Event, and there was certainly some resentment over the way things had gone recently.
Jason hopped off his bicycle as he came alongside the car. He glanced up at the elephant-skin sky, and then at the kid laboring along the road behind him. The crinkled hills of eastern Shanxi had been swallowed by the approaching storm. Were they in Henan yet?
“Hey,” Jason yelled at the slumping kid. “We’re gonna stop here for a while.”
The kid didn’t understand him, Jason knew, but his meaning was clear enough, and the kid slipped from his bike and started walking it in to where Jason waited. He didn’t look so good. His complexion had paled as they’d biked the endless asphalt ribbon wending from Yan’an, and he’d even struggled on the long, easy glide this afternoon down from the hills they’d climbed yesterday.
Jason tousled the kid’s sweat-slicked hair. “How ya holding up?”
The kid’s tired black eyes were empty of comprehension.
“You okay?” Jason said, giving the kid a thumbs-up and then flipping his hand upside down. The kid shrugged and put his thumb up.
“All right, that’s the spirit.” Jason rummaged in his backpack and handed a half-drunk bottle of Dongfu Springs to the kid, who took a long swig. “Just one,” Jason said, pulling it away as the kid went for another gulp. As always, the kid didn’t argue.
Jason drank a little, then re-screwed the cap and stashed the bottle again. If it rained, they could replenish their water, but if the approaching storm vanished they’d be waterless tomorrow. Better safe than sorry.
Jason walked over to the Audi. A luxury automobile missing its wheels and left to rust seemed absurd, but post-Event, his crappy Fenghuang bicycle was far more valuable than this hunk of steel and plastic. Jason glanced inside. Nice black leather interior, no stuffed animals pressed against the back window – definitely government. A Mao medallion dangled from the cracked rearview mirror, and someone had scratched out the chairman’s plump face. Looked like people were upset that the patron saints of communism weren’t answering anybody’s prayers right now.
A pale pink iPhone was wedged into the seat cushion. Jason scooped it up and flicked it experimentally. Nothing. As he’d expected, but still it was worth a try, just in case God had decided to throw the switch that made everything work again.
“Sorry, kiddo, no music tonight.”
The kid looked at him blankly. Jason tossed the iPhone away and stretched out inside the Audi, sinking into the black leather luxuriousness. “Oh man, we are camping out here.” Jason put his hands behind his head and let out an exaggerated groan of comfort. The kid smiled, clambering into the backseat; Jason cuffed him playfully, and the kid’s grin widened.
Outside the car, lightning rippled the horizon, and the rain beat a steady rhythm on the roof.
He’d come to China six months ago, after a senior year spring-term class on Chinese civilization. Jason had always been drawn to the East – he must have watched the second Indiana Jones movie a thousand times as a kid, every twist and turn of Indy’s frenzied rickshaw flight through Shanghai etched into his developing brain. Two decades of living the perfect, bland American life had left him increasingly frustrated, wishing he could leave behind mall parking lots and Applebee’s and instead wander some far-eastern bazaar, maybe trail his fingers in baskets of rice or haggle over a jeweled yak’s skull.
So ancient, vast China had seemed the perfect post-graduation adventure. Where Shaolin monks jumped between knife-sharp rock outcroppings over dizzying gorges, their orange robes flapping in the wind, children grew up waiting for the return of the Yellow Emperor, and old women cracked oracle bones to predict the coming floods.
The reality had been slightly different. A little dustier. A little more concrete. Gray sky and gray days. In retrospect, Jason thought, he probably should have gone to some remote village if he’d truly wanted the China experience – but then, he hadn’t really wanted hardship, just exoticism. His own fault for being so naïve. In the end it was okay: the Event would have been harder to deal with in the countryside. Less food to hoard, certainly. That had been the real benefit of being in Yan’an when civilization had stopped – he’d gone down and raided the supermarket while everyone was still waiting for the government to make good on its declarations to fix everything.
Of course, he’d hoped that these new laws of physics would reverse themselves and things would go back to normal. But after two weeks of waiting, eating preserved fruit in his shabby school-provided apartment and watching the occasional bursts of violence outside as people vented their frustrations on the police, then the soldiers, he had decided to strike out on his own toward Shanghai, where hopefully a route to America was still open. Also, the dangling bodies of the local government officials hadn’t exactly made him want to stick around. No telling when the focus of the people’s anger would shift from the ruling class to the ghost-face in their midst.
No computers, no electricity, no internal-combustion engines. No iPhone. Everything with the faintest whiff of technology had suddenly stopped working. It was like being transported a thousand years into the past. Jason wondered if the Event had been world-wide or just in China. He had no way of knowing. Was his family even now tilling the front lawn of their Buffalo subdivision and planting vegetables for a summer harvest? Maybe not. Maybe it was only the Middle Kingdom that had finally had enough of its industrial raping and shucked off modernity. Who knew.
Jason lay in the Audi’s musty darkness and listen
ed to the rain’s patter, pressing the dead iPhone again and again. From the front passenger seat came the kid’s steady, sleep-grooved breathing.
They breakfasted on Snickers bars and pedaled off along the newly gleaming road. Only shreds of the gray clouds remained above them, and by the early afternoon the sky was a sheet of blue. They didn’t see anyone else. That was typical, as in the week since he’d left Yan’an, Jason had only encountered a few other folks: old Chinese men pulling wheelbarrows haphazardly stacked with what must have been all their worldly possessions, the occasional migrant workers, both men and women, trying to get back to their villages, and the kid, who had been wandering around dusty and disoriented by the roadside. Everyone else must be hunkering down, hoping that the Event would reverse itself soon . . . but warily preparing for the worst if it didn’t.
They stopped for an early dinner beside a massive granite boulder with the number 1276 carved into its flank. 1276 kilometers to Shanghai, the sea, and hopefully salvation.
Jason lay on the rock and watched the kid wander around in the coarse grass. Chasing crickets, it looked like.
“Careful,” Jason yelled, closing his eyes and trying to melt into the hot rock. “Xiao xin.” That was about the extent of his Chinese, learned from watching his students dash across busy intersections.
Would they make it to Shanghai? The kid was definitely weakening. Was he sick, or simply not up for bicycling all day on the candy bars and freeze-dried rice snacks that Jason had stuffed his backpack with? Maybe they would come across another little town, like they had in the hills two days ago, and be able to beg or scavenge something a bit more nutritious.
“Jay-son, Jay-son!” The kid screamed a mangled version of his name excitedly. Jason slid off the rock and looked around, squinting. No kid.
“Jay-son!” His name floated up from below, and Jason half ran, half skidded down the slope toward the trees. He pushed his way through the branches and emerged onto a riverbank. The kid had rolled up his ragged pant legs and was splashing around in the mud. Jason approached the sluggish water and dipped his hands in. This could only be the Yellow River. The water was running clear, though, and Jason had heard that the Yellow River was always murky from silt and pollution. In the weeks since the Event, the river must have flushed out the chemicals that had been spewed into it by the factories upstream. Wasn’t there some Chinese myth about the Yellow River, that if it ran clean it meant the Yellow Emperor would return?
The kid seemed inordinately happy to be playing in the river. Jason studied the sky for a moment, and then came to a decision.
“Hey, kid, let’s go get our bikes and bring them down. We can camp here tonight.”
They returned to the road, then carefully navigated the rocky slope and stashed their bikes among the underbrush. Jason found a fallen tree and stretched out to watch the kid jump around in the water. He was just about to doze off to the sounds of insects buzzing and splashing water when he noticed a black speck approaching them along the riverbank.
“Kid,” Jason hissed, motioning for him to come close, “get over here.”
The kid scurried to him, and together they withdrew into the shadows of the trees. Gradually the black dot resolved into a bedraggled-looking man pulling a piece of luggage behind him. He wore a collared white shirt, stained and missing half its buttons.
“What should we do, kid?” Jason whispered.
But the decision was soon removed from their hands as the man paused near where they were hiding and peered into the trees. He gave a small nervous wave. Jason sighed and emerged from the thicket with his hands up.
“Hi, do you speak English?”
A spasm of confusion passed over the man’s face. Jason almost felt bad for the guy. Whoever the man had been preparing himself to meet, it hadn’t been a lanky young American with a scraggly beard trailed by a Chinese kid in a green Pokemon shirt.
“Yes… a little,” the man said. He pushed his glasses higher, and Jason saw that one of the lenses was broken.
“Well… I’m Jason, and this little guy is Xiao Wang.”
“My name… my name is Richard.”
“Uh, nice to meet you, Richard.”
“Nice to meet you, too.” Right. Standard English class back and forth.
The man shifted his attention to the kid, who had crept up beside Jason, and rattled off some rapid-fire Chinese. The kid didn’t seem much more talkative in Chinese, as his answers were simple, one-syllable affairs. Richard appeared to be getting frustrated, his tone sharpening, and Jason laid his hand on the kid’s shoulder protectively. Finally, Richard shook his head in exasperation.
“He says you meet him five days ago, outside Yan’an. You gave him food and let him go with you.”
“Yeah, that sounds right.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
Richard settled onto a rock and blinked up at Jason. “Why help him? He drink your water and eat your food.”
Jason shrugged. “He was pretty out of it when I found him. Really dazed and dirty. Like he fell out of the back of a truck or something. I couldn’t leave him.”
Richard mulled this for a moment, then showed his stained teeth. “You are a nice guy, Jason.”
Jason smiled back warily. “I’m a softy.” He slipped off his backpack and pulled out three globules of preserved meat in plastic. Richard’s eyes widened at the sight, and Jason passed him one of the packages.
“Yes, you are nice guy!”
Jason ripped open his and bit into the salty goodness. “Well, enjoy,” he said around a mouthful. “It’s a long slog up 312 to Yan’an, if that’s where you’re headed. There’s a few small towns in the hills, though. They gave us a little food when we passed through.”
“I am not going to Yan’an. My hometown is Baotou. I will follow the river there.”
Jason took a drink from his water and passed the bottle to the kid, who had already devoured his sticky meat snack. “Were you on business when the Event happened?”
“What is Event?”
“Oh, sorry. That’s what I call when everything stopped working.”
Richard shook his head. “No, I am a government man. In the party. My responsibility was small towns near Kaifeng.”
A communist official. The people of Yan’an hadn’t been too pleased with their local leaders when they’d failed to return things to normal. From his ripped shirt and broken glasses it looked like maybe the peasants near Kaifeng also hadn’t given Richard the fondest of farewells.
Jason leaned back on his elbows and stared out over the slow-moving river. The kid picked up a handful of stones and started trying to skip them across the water. His first throw splashed down unsuccessfully.
“What do you think is going on, Richard? What happened?”
Richard pulled a toothpick out of his breast pocket and levered away at something between his teeth, his free hand daintily veiling what he was doing. Then he put back the toothpick, noisily sucked up some snot, and rocketed a wad out his nose.
“Jason, I can tell you, but you don’t understand.”
Jason pushed himself forward, interested. “Try me.”
Richard stared beyond Jason for a moment, then he slowly said: “There is Chinese word tianming. Do you know it?”
“Tian like sky?”
“Yes, sky or heaven. God, maybe you say. Tianming means that God support China’s kings.”
The Mandate of Heaven. One of the first phrases Jason had learned during his course on Chinese civilization. When natural disasters struck imperial China the people had thought the emperor’s Mandate from above was gone, and the current dynasty would fall.
“So you think Heaven did this?”
Richard glanced up at the darkening sky. “I thought it was just old story. But Heaven takes away when the emperor is unkind to his people.” Richard hung his head. “I was unkind, too. I took land and money and women. This is Heaven’s anger.”
Jason reached out and put
his hand on Richard’s shoulder. “Everyone’s got to pull together now. Things are tough, but I’ve read my history – you Chinese have gotten through some pretty terrible times.”
Richard removed his glasses and made a show of polishing them, lightly skirting the edges of his fractured lens. “Yes, Chinese people are strong. We know how to survive.”
“Then you’ll be okay. Hell, if this happened in America, people would be going to their gun closets as soon as they realized the TV wasn’t coming back on.”
One of the kid’s rocks bounced across the water a few times before vanishing, and he jumped up in excitement, his thin body silhouetted against the orange sunset. “Jay-son, Jay-son,” he cried, looking over his shoulder to see if Jason was watching.
Jason awoke to leaves crackling, branches snapping, and the heavy thump of stumbling footsteps. He rolled off the bed of moss he’d been sleeping on and sat up, disoriented. Moonlight silvered the river. In the darkness a shape heaved and shuddered. Harsh guttural Chinese, high-pitched cries. Richard and the kid. Jason scrambled to his feet as the shape came apart, the larger half throwing the smaller aside and retreating deeper into the blackness. For a moment Jason hesitated between going after Richard or seeing to the kid, but then he crouched down beside the smaller shadow.
“Kid, you okay?”
Small hands clutched at his arm. “Bao.”
Bag. Richard had taken their food bag. The kid must have tried to stop him.
Jason glanced in the direction he thought Richard had gone, tempted to follow. With effort, he put that thought aside.
“Don’t worry, kid. We’ll be fine.”
Then he felt the moistness. The kid’s fingers were warm and sticky.
“What’s that?” Jason said, running his hands along the kid’s body. “Is that from you?”
The kid coughed, and drops spattered Jason’s face. The kid’s shirt was soaked. “Kid, Jesus, Jesus Christ. Hold on. Xiao Wang, Jesus, hold on.” Jason pulled up the kid’s shirt and felt the jagged gash in the kid’s side. He ripped off his own shirt and balled it up, pressing it against the cut. The kid’s fingers squeezed his arm. He coughed again, wetly. There was blood in his lungs, it was choking him, what should he do what could he do? Keeping pressure on the wound, Jason raised the kid into a sitting position and tried to get him to lean over, maybe cough up whatever was in his chest. The kid’s arms went around his neck, pulling at the back of his hair. “Hold on, hold on,” Jason said, rocking him. The kid’s fingers loosened. Jason felt the kid exhale deeply into his shoulder, and then the little body shivered and went limp.