by Eric Lahti
“Thanks,” I tell him and take a sip of my water. So cold, so wet, so bland. “What’s the second reason? The real reason?”
“I need to go to Earth,” he says.
“Why would you want to do that?” I ask. Everyone knows Earth is a train wreck. Sure, a lot of us came from there, but no one really wants to go back.
There’s a bustle of activity and Mrs. Chow sets steaming cups of noodle soup in front of us. I can smell the soy sauce and sriracha chiles. Chan happily sniffs at his and dips a big ladle-like spoon in the soup. His appreciation is palpable. Even if I can’t see his face because of that ridiculous hat his whole body shows how much he’s enjoying the soup.
Since he’s preoccupied, I take a spoonful myself. The sriracha sauce – that amazing blend of garlic and near-lethal chiles – offsets the salty soy sauce. Mrs. Chow’s food is everything I’ve ever heard it was; Tiān in a bowl.
We eat our soup quietly and I can’t help but think baiju would make this so much better. It’s a way we have here; you never converse during the meal. Before the meal and after the meal conversation is expected, but it’s seriously disrespectful to your food to talk while you’re eating. Noodles of this quality especially deserve full attention.
When Chan finishes – just before I do – he pushes his bowl forward and pours us more water. He’ll wait patiently while I eat. After my last spoonful of noodles I say a small thank you prayer and push my empty bowl forward.
“There’s a boy on Earth who is in danger,” Chan says as if the pause in the conversation never happened.
“So?” I ask.
“He’s got magic, Crow,” Chan says. “Serious magic.”
I never did get Chan’s hang-up with all this harum scarum stuff he spouts all the time. Sure, there’s magic here. The whole damned planet is powered by ancient magics. But it’s just power, you can make lights shine and clocks move, but he seems to think it can do more than build railroads and make the world move.
“Good luck,” I tell him and take another sip of water. Gods above, I hate this stuff.
Chan goes on, prattling away about magic and Earth. Somehow or another he missed the part where I didn’t say “Pray tell, this is fascinating, please go on.”
“There’s still some magic left on that ball. Most of it is concentrated in the hands of a small group of people but it’s still there. And sometimes it winds up in unexpected places, like a boy who can pull cookies from the Dreaming Lands.”
“Uh huh,” I say.
“Every now and then a true fangshi – a sorcerer they call them there – is born. One was born a bit back. We weren’t sure for a while if he was a true fangshi but the watchers we put in place have verified it. Unfortunately, this child has attracted the attention of The Beast.”
That caught my attention. There’s always someone around here trying to prove they’re tougher than everyone else, but I’ve never heard of this guy. “Who’s ‘The Beast’?” I ask.
“Someone new. Apparently very dangerous. I need to extract the child before anything bad can happen to him,” Chan says. His brow is furrowed in concentration and worry. He must think this kid is something special if he sent watchers over to Earth to keep an eye on things. Watchers take a huge amount of energy to run.
“Anyone seen this ‘The Beast’?” I ask.
“No,” Chan replies. His eyes get vacant as he remembers something. “Just his handiwork. He set those girls on fire last month. No one can seem to find him. For all his apparent power and reach, he’s a phantom.”
The girls. Shit. I saw the remains of that and wouldn’t wish it on anyone, especially a child. The girls Chan’s referring to were a couple of Jìnǚ from around here. They pissed off the wrong person and he roasted them in 200 liter drums. It must have taken a long time for them to die and the screams had to have been incredible.
“Who are ‘we’?” I ask.
“We?” Chan asks.
“You said ‘watchers we put in place’. Who are ‘we’?”
“I must learn that for all your drinking and throwing up on powerful people you’re extremely attentive, Crow,” Chan says with a gravelly laugh. “’We’ are a small group trying to explore magic. They’re a group of women from up north; they call themselves ‘The Furious Fae.’”
“I’ve heard of them,” I say, biting my tongue slightly. Personally, I think they’re a bunch of idiots who have too much free time on their hands.
“They don’t keep a low profile,” Chan says. Something about the way he says it makes me wonder if he disagrees.
“So you’re going to Earth to bring back a kid. What then?”
“Time will tell, but the fates will be kind. I’ll do my best to raise him and teach him,” Chan says.
“Ever been around kids?” I ask.
Chan shakes his head.
“Good luck,” I tell him with a chuckle. “So you and the little guy…”
“Fangshi,” Chan interrupts. “He is a fangshi.”
“Yeah, him,” I say, wondering if Chan has finally gone completely off the rails. “You’re going to what, become some happy little family?”
“I’ll teach him and protect him.”
“What is it with you and all this magic?” I ask. “You’re obsessed with the stuff but you and I know people can’t wield it. It’s machine stuff.”
“How do you think the machines came to be?” Chan asks. “Someone had to have the magic to give it to the machines.”
There’s a logic to that, but it almost smells circular. We don’t know what caused x to happen so it must have been magic. Schools teach that magic was discovered and harnessed by the first Clock Man (Shit, I have to kill the current one tomorrow) but all he does is regulate the flow. I’ve heard stories about people being able to actually use magic but I rank those stories right up there with the stories about spontaneous combustion.
Chan peers at me and I can tell he sees the gears turning slowly in my head. “You know what your problem is, Crow?”
“I don’t have any baiju?” I ask.
“You always want a magical solution to your problems but you refuse to realize you can make that magic happen yourself.”
Asshole. He keeps dragging our conversations back to magic like some kind of damned nut. “You know what your problem is, Chan?” I ask.
“I have no problems,” he says.
I decide to ignore the fact that he insists on wearing that hat everywhere and ask, “What has this dogged insistence on magic gotten you?”
“Admittedly nothing so far.”
“Exactly,” I tell him. “Quit looking for a way to power up your life and just go live it.”
Chan gets a queer expression on his face and I can tell he’s actually pondering what I just said. I know him; he’ll keep chewing on it until he comes to a conclusion and then he’ll show up at my doorstep at 3am wanting to discuss it.
“Good luck tomorrow,” he tells me. “Remember, you must not fail.”
“Good luck with your kid,” I reply. “I hope he keeps you up all night when he gets nightmares.”
IV
Croatoa is the capital of Aluna. It’s a massive, sprawling city filled with the constant clicks and whirs of gears turning, sending Chinese magic to the mystical engines that keep the place running. We kind of parallel Earth’s history to a point, a fact that makes some of our scientists want to pull their hair out. The chances of two different planets having even remotely similar lifeforms is astronomical; for two different places to parallel to the point that both places have Chinese culture is so impossible it’s mind-blowing. The only thing I can think our planets must have been linked together at some point in the past and ancient Earth’s Chinese mystics came here. Someone on the other end closed the tunnel because we can see Earth but they can’t see us.
It’s enough to make my head hurt just thinking about it.
Overhead wires pulse green and purple sending the various magics around and the air is filled with t
he constant crackling of arcane energies. It’s one of those things you just learn to live with if you want luxuries like light and warm water. I guess that’s one of the differences between Aluna and Earth; the electricity that drives Earth simply doesn’t work here. Another strange aspect of the universe, you’d think things like electricity would work everywhere but we’ve brought back the occasional Earth engine and the damned things will start up and produce absolutely nothing but smoke.
The street is filled with various vendors hawking everything from herbal erection remedies to chemical powders guaranteed to stop every ache and pain. The chemicals are a load of hogwash. I had a splitting headache once – no it wasn’t a hangover, Chan had punched me during a training session – and stopped at one of the chemical booths and bought a packet of white powder. The guy selling it told me to mix it with water and drink it down.
It didn’t do a damned thing. My headache finally went away after a bottle of baiju.
The herbal remedies are a whole other beast. When I was still a green rookie on the force someone slipped a packet of herbal erection remedies into my coffee. I am not kidding here; I had an erection for three days. The local herbalist told me the chu’anzu powder was for older people and chided me for being a young guy and taking it.
When I asked him what I could do about it, he just shrugged and told me to get laid. Not easy to do when you’re a rookie. I got the guys back, though. Down one of the back alleys off Tsu Street is a woman who sells breast augmentation pills. A couple of the guys on the force were wearing bras for a week.
Mrs. Chow’s noodles are still with me so I ignore the pretty lady trying to sell me roasted bird feet. She pleads and bats long eyelashes and like a sucker I give in and buy a fried tarantula. The legs are the best part.
In front of my apartment, while I’m busy crunching away on my tarantula and wondering what was so important that Chan told me I must not fail, something catches my eye and a little part of my brain clicks. One of those fancy new magic powered carriages is parked in the street. It’s a gleaming dark green and brass affront to nature with tan leather seats and no top. The squarish nose of the thing has brass – or is it bronze, I can’t remember – pipes sticking out and folding back into the machine. It’s gorgeous and hideous and I want one.
Things like that carriage cost a fortune and I don’t live in the best part of town. The people around here are nice and all, but that’s a lot of food parked in our street. I would have expected it to be a bare frame by now but no one is going anywhere near it. As I get closer I feel why; there’s some kind of crackling field surrounding the thing. Get too close and it’ll fry your eyeballs right out of your head.
That much money and power parked in my neighborhood can’t be good. Things like that do not park down here. I break off the final leg of my tarantula, chuck the body into a nearby trash can and start looking around. Maybe it’s my overpowered sense of self but after the day I’ve had it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the owner of the car was here for me.
“Crow,” a voice says from the alley next to my hovel.
I hate it when I’m right.
I peer down the alley but can’t make out much. The magic lights don’t extend into the alleys and all I can make out is a pool of black. There’s a flash of light, someone lighting a bidi, but the light and the smoker are too far away to make out any details of what the guy looks like.
“What?” I yell down the alley.
“Come here,” a voice yells back.
“You come here,” I reply.
“Got a proposition for you,” the voice says.
“Do I have to dress up?”
“No but you might want to hear this.”
There is absolutely no way I’m going to walk down that alley alone. Even if I had a barker on me (which I don’t) I wouldn’t walk down there.
“Come on out here. I’ll buy you a coffee,” I call back.
“Do you really want to talk money around your neighbors, Crow?”
Even mentioning money in this part of town is a shortcut to attracting attention you don’t want. “You gonna shoot me?” I ask. I figure there’s a chance he might tell me the truth.
“I don’t even have a barker on me,” the voice responds. “Come on, Crow, I’ve got places to be, people to intimidate.”
I know I’m going to regret this.
The alley is only about five feet wide and goes up ten stories on either side. The bare concrete of the floor is clean and tidy. We may be poor but we’re not slobs. There’s graffiti all around me, written in a mishmash of Chinese script and Western slang. The kids call it Changlish. I call it lazy.
To the right of me is a cartoon thing – Māo, I think his name is – smiling a big toothy grin and holding up a bidi with a five-leaf design on the wrapper. They call it a “cat”. I call anything with fur freaky. The left side of the wall is covered with random sayings about freedom, liberty, magic, and the odd picture of Chan. Even the graffiti is neat and tidy, rarely infringing on another artist’s work. In the rare cases where a tag partially obscures another tag a disgustingly jovial discussion takes place.
“Sorry.”
“No worries. Nice work.”
“I liked yours.”
“Yours is more pertinent.”
Blah, blah, blah. It’s kind of sickening but exactly the opposite of what you’d expect from the artists. I’ve met these guys before and they’ll happily gut you with an extremely ornate butterfly knife if you interrupt a work in progress. They’re a strange group; incredibly patient with each other but they detest everyone else. Art critics of highest order.
The alley gets darker the further in I go and I have to fight against my claustrophobia to keep going. Tight spaces, you know. I know these walls will smash together any second now and trap me forever.
“Hurry it up, Crow,” the voice says.
“Eat a dick,” I tell him and keep forcing one foot in front of the other.
At the end of the alley is a larger open space bisected by a narrow road and filled with dumpsters. The road is where the garbage truck rumbles through once a week and takes the small amount of crap we can’t recycle out to the wondrous place known as the pit of flames.
Standing alone under a crackling light is a man in a long black coat. Even though it’s warm outside he’s completely bundled up. The jacket is wrapped tight around him and the collar is pulled up. A fedora is pulled down over his eyes and all I can make out is a faint trace of lips and a hint of grayish skin.
When he looks up at me the fedora casts shadows over his face obscuring any details. “Took you long enough,” he says.
“I was enjoying the scenery,” I tell him. “Did you see the art?”
He chuckles, a grunting sort of laugh that sounds more like a snort than a mirthful noise and shoots me a huge smile that’s more simian than human. There’s something predatory in that smile. “You call that art?”
“You must have missed the one in the bikini.”
He gives me another piggy chuckle-snort. “Must have,” he says with a smile.
“Wanna tell me what’s the dealy-O here?” I ask.
“The ‘dealy-O’?”
“Yeah. The dealy-O. Why are you hanging out in an alley behind my apartment?”
“The art,” he says and shoots me a smile.
“The art,” I say, “is back there. This is just a dumpster and a light.”
“And no witnesses.”
“Gonna kill me, Hoss?” I ask. “I guess not because if you wanted me dead you could have popped me or slit my throat out front and the only thing anyone would notice is a pair of new boots.”
“We have no desire to kill you. We’d just like to offer you a choice.”
“We?” I ask. “You got a mouse in your pocket?”
“My controller and I would like to offer you a job and a large sum of money.”
I usually look to a person’s eyes to find out if they’re lying. There are al
ways little cues that people can’t stop. One of my few gifts is the ability to look someone in the eye and tell whether or not I’m being lied to. This guy’s eyes are hidden and it’s messing up my game. All I’ve got left is my scintillating personality and a desperate hope that my conversation skills are up to par. “You had me at ‘large sum of money’.”
“Would you like to know the best part?”
“There’s something better than a ‘large sum of money’?”
“You don’t have to do a thing to get the money. In fact, all you have to do is not do something you’re not really interested in doing anyway,” he says.
“Oh, thank Tiān,” I reply, clutching at my heart. “So I can not only skip doing my laundry but get paid for not doing it.”
Was that a laugh I just saw? I think it was a laugh. “No, Mr. Crow, I’m referring to a job you took on today. Your laundry should continue unabated.” He sniffs at the air. “As soon as possible, actually.”
I can’t help but take a whiff but all I smell is the soy sauce on my jacket and a faint hint of bidis. I’ve definitely smelled worse. I’ll just leave the ambiguity of that statement right where it is. “Laundry day is tomorrow,” I quip. “So what’s the job I don’t have to do?”
Seriousness stalks into his voice and his apelike smile fades. “Don’t kill the Clock Man,” he says. “Walk away. Move away. Leave it alone.”
“Can’t,” I say simply.
“Sure you can,” he replies. “All you have to do is not do something. You can not do something.”
“I don’t do a thing on weekends.”
“You’re all good then,” he says. His speech starts to get faster, like he’s in a hurry to get out of here. “Don’t do what you’re planning on doing, Crow. Try to carry out this mission and it will go very poorly for you.”
He’s fidgety, like his hands don’t quite know what to do with themselves. Odd, he was calm as a cucumber a few minutes ago. I wonder what’s gotten into him; I don’t usually have this effect on people but I may be able to use it to my advantage.