Precious Dragon

by Liz Williams

  The taxi stopped in front of the hotel, and Zhu Irzh slid a few coins into a waiting hand. The coach was so dark and enclosed that Chen had still not set eyes on the driver. Zhu Irzh, cradling the heart, walked up the steps and into the foyer.

  “I could do with a drink—I wonder if Miss Qi would like one? I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but after this evening, a Celestial would almost be pleasant company.”

  “You can ask her,” Chen said. “It’s not that late.”

  But when they called up to Miss Qi’s room, there was no reply.

  “Surely she can’t have gone out,” Chen said. He went over to the desk and queried the clerk.

  “I haven’t seen her.” The young female demon on the desk frowned. “Perhaps she’s sleeping.” This seemed to be the most likely explanation, but Chen’s senses were prickling with a sensation he’d come to learn to recognise. It was that of impending disaster.

  “Could you come with me?” he said to the clerk. Together, they went up to Miss Qi’s room and banged on the door. No reply.

  “Try the door, if you would,” Chen said. He was thankful that this was Hell, with fewer conceptions of other people’s privacy: here, it was regarded as entirely natural to want to burst into another guest’s room last thing at night. The clerk inserted the spare key into the lock and opened the door.

  The bed was neatly made. Miss Qi’s modest bag sat on the floor. The window was open, the drapes floating in the night wind of Hell, and the whole room reeked of magic, with the faintest underlying trace of peach blossom. But there was no sign at all of Miss Qi.

  20

  After the horrible visitor, Precious Dragon sank into such a sound sleep that he did not wake up until noon of the following day. Mrs Pa did not want to disturb her grandson, but she did shake his shoulder gently, just once, to make sure that he could be woken. He rolled over, breathing peacefully, a tousle of hair falling into his eyes, and she crept from the room. However, she need not have worried. Precious Dragon came into the kitchen of his own accord, just as she was making lunch.

  “Grandmother? Hello.”

  “Hello, grandson,” Mrs Pa said. She did not want to tell him about her worries: that the thing might come back, and even if she had been capable of dealing with it herself, that she might not be here. Mai—being dead—had left no provision for her son and sooner or later, given the state of the household finances, Mrs Pa would have to go back to her cleaning job. Her regular employers had been most understanding about this particular week, but she could not reasonably expect any more time off. But if she was to go back to work, who would look after Precious Dragon? And if she took him with her, she would have to warn her employers in advance and she did not know how they would react to the presence of a small child in their homes. Badly, given the usual nature of employers.

  But Precious Dragon seemed to have an uncanny under­standing of her fears. He hoisted himself to the edge of the couch and sat down, swinging his legs.

  “You’ll have to go back to work soon, won’t you?” he pronounced. His apparent reading of her mind gave Mrs Pa such a start that she nearly dropped a plate. She was so surprised that she turned to face him and said, as if he were a grown-up, “Yes. And I don’t know who I’m going to get to look after you, because I don’t know whether or not I’m going to be able to take you with me. I think maybe your father’s family are the best choice. I’m sure they’d like to see you, anyway.” And she felt a pang of guilt, that she had not yet contacted them with the news that their grandson had been so in danger—Precious Dragon was just as much theirs as he was hers, except that they had not been the ones asked to go to echoing Sulai-Ba to rescue him, and she felt a deep kind of pride at that.

  “I am happy to visit my other grandparents,” Precious Dragon said, very gravely. “I should like to get to know them. But there is another choice.”

  “What choice is that?”

  Precious Dragon gave a slight frown, as if peering into a future that he could not properly see. “I do not know yet. But someone will come.”

  His trust in life to provide touched Mrs Pa, but even though she had seen some of her grandson’s weird abilities, she was not sure that she believed him.

  In this, however, she was wrong.

  The knock on the door came early in the evening, a tentative, uncertain sound, so faint that at first Mrs Pa thought she was imagining things. After the previous night, she wasn’t going to open the door without checking first, so she put the chain on the latch as a precaution before looking through the spyhole and then opening the door a crack.

  There was a young woman on the step. She wore a pretty frock, modestly highlighting an elegant figure, and a large hat. She wore sunglasses, even though the sun was setting over the port in a smear of gold and red. She stepped back a little as Mrs Pa opened the door, and something ambled out from the shadows: a black and white shape that Mrs Pa thought was a dog. Then she saw that it wasn’t. It was a badger.

  “Good evening,” Mrs Pa said, somewhat taken aback.

  “Good evening,” said the young woman. “I am so sorry to trouble you. My husband mentioned you to me—he’s Inspector Chen, of the city police department.” She held up a picture of a round, rather surprised face. “You met him last night.”

  “Why, so I did,” Mrs Pa said. Precious Dragon nudged her arm.

  “Grandma? It’s all right.” He spoke with such confidence that Mrs Pa reached out and unlatched the door.

  “Before I come in,” the young woman said, “There’s something you should know. I’m not human.” She took off her sunglasses, to reveal large, crimson eyes. “You see, I’m afraid I am a demon. My husband rescued me from Hell, though, and now I live here. I should quite understand if you’d rather I didn’t come in.”

  “No, that’s all right,” Mrs Pa said, marvelling at her own daring. “After all, my daughter herself lives in Hell. I know that in her own case it was because of someone else’s corruption, but even so—not everyone from Hell is wicked.”

  “Hell is a wicked place,” Chen’s wife said with a sigh. “And so is Earth, sometimes.” She took a step forwards. “My name is Inari.”

  “I think you’d better come in,” Mrs Pa said.

  Inari accepted tea, and the badger had a saucer of water that it drank with a loud golloping noise.

  “Please excuse badger,” Inari said. “He doesn’t have very human manners. He’s my family’s familiar.”

  Precious Dragon sat smiling at the badger. “He’s very furry,” he said.

  “Yes, he is. But I’m afraid he doesn’t like to be cuddled,” Inari explained. “I like your tiger.”

  The little boy beamed. “My grandmother bought it for me.”

  “What a nice grandmother!” Inari took a sip of her tea. “Mrs Pa, my husband has asked me to—well, to keep an eye on you, really. He was very worried.”

  “That’s extremely kind of him,” Mrs Pa said. Pride, and the loss of face, almost made her add, but we can manage. She was too old for face; she could not manage. She bit the words back. “I’ve been wondering—you see, I have to work. I have no choice. But I didn’t know if anyone might look after Precious Dragon for me … He is not the usual kind of child, Inari.”

  “No. I can see that he is not.” Inari smiled. “But then, I’m not the usual kind of childminder.”

  “You may think it’s very naïve of me, to hand over care of my grandson to a stranger—if you wouldn’t mind, of course. I’m sure you’re very busy.”

  “No,” Inari said, rather wistfully. “Actually, I’m not.”

  “But you see, Precious Dragon seems to trust you.” She turned to her grandson, who replied with a nod. “And Precious Dragon seems to know things.”

  “I should be honoured to look after him,” Inari said. Something in her voice prompted Mrs Pa to say, as delicately as she could, “Do you—do you have children of your own?”

  “No.” Inari paused. “You see—I’d like a child
, of course. We both would. But it would be a big problem to find a hospital that would take me if anything went wrong, and I don’t think they’d know what to do, anyway. I’m not supposed to be here on Earth. And if I went back to Hell to have the baby, then there would be other complications. There are problems with my family, you see. And also, well, Chen is human and I’m not. It’s not so easy sometimes.”

  She glanced at Precious Dragon as she spoke, evidently wondering whether this was a suitable subject to raise in front of a small child, but Precious Dragon was considering her with his customary gravity. Mrs Pa said, with a sympathy that struck at her heart, “I know. It’s never easy.”

  “Well,” Inari said. “Enough of my problems. I mustn’t keep you. Here’s my number—let me know when you’d like me to—” Mrs Pa thought that she was about to say “babysit,” but that hadn’t sounded right the first time, somehow. “Look after him,” Inari finished.

  “I will. And thank you.”

  Inari put her sunglasses back on, even though it was now long past twilight, and Mrs Pa showed her to the door. The badger rose, too, and moved past her, sinuous now as it slid into the shadows and she watched them walk up the harbour path, the demon girl and the beast at her side, until the shadows swallowed them.

  21

  Embar Dea reached the Sea Palace towards dawn, when a light as faint and pure as the pearl that she still clutched in her claw was coming up over the eastern horizon. Embar Dea looked out across a cold stretch of ocean, dappled with shards and fragments of ice, to where a glittering phosphorescence tracked across the sea. A rush of excitement filled her: she knew what that glitter meant, magical and beckoning—the path of dragons. And just as she saw this, they began to sing, their voices lifting up through the water and bursting into the light, as cold and eerie as the ocean itself. It was a long time since Embar Dea had given voice, but she did so now, raising her head from the water and sending air fluting through each of the bearded tentacles that surrounded her face.

  When Embar Dea began to sing, the rest of the dragons stopped, as if startled, but only for a moment. Then their voices, too, began again, joining in with her song and responding in harmony to it. Embar Dea knew this meant that she had been accepted and even though there was little possibility that she might not have been, she was still relieved. She was old, and it was long years since she had last spoken with any of her kind, apart from the now-dead in Sulai-Ba. She did not know if things had changed, for territories between dragons were subject to constant subtle shifts, and it was almost certain that the allegiances she knew were no longer in place. Dragons were benign, looking at matters over a great span of years, but dragons played games.

  No games this time, it seemed. As the song from beneath the waves went on, a spire rose from the sea. It was a pinnacle of ice, a fretted turret, rising higher and higher into the wan sunlight and bringing the rest of the palace with it. Embar Dea saw huge halls and caverns, green sea ice like precious stone, marbled with silver, encrusted with barnacles and pearls and at this, she clasped the pearl that she held even more tightly. A staircase of black ice, water gushing and rushing over its sides, came up out of the sea in front of her and Embar Dea climbed, feeling the ice burning-freezing under her claws before her body temperature adjusted and it became like walking on sun-warmed stone.

  Up the steps and into the great central hall of the sea palace. And there were dragons waiting, all nine of the remaining sea dragons of the world of Earth, wild dragons covered in limpets and weed, a dragon from the warm southern seas whose skin was chased with a thousand different colours, gold and scarlet and sea-green, gliding across it in the silent speech of its kind, dragons from the far north who looked like ice themselves, glassy and remote and chill.

  Embar Dea moved between the ranks of dragons, all the way up the long hall, with its pillars and columns and lacy balconies. And as she walked, someone came to meet her.

  He was black and shining, silver glistening and gleaming about his armoured head. Perhaps a hundred feet from nose to tail, bristling with spines, his wedge-shaped great-eyed head swinging from side to side. Between his horns, a pearl showed him to be of imperial lineage.

  “You are the last,” he said. He spoke like the music of dragons. “You are the one from the temple, from the lost place.”

  “I am Embar Dea,” she said, for he had spoken first, as befit his status. But she was full of questions. She knew this dragon: the Prince Rish, but if he was here and speaking for the assembly, then where was the Dragon Lord?

  “Our King is gone,” the Prince said, as if he had heard her thought, as perhaps he had. And all the dragons raised their voices in a terrible song of mourning. Embar Dea bowed her head and felt suddenly, dreadfully old.

  “I have something to give to you,” she said, feeling that she wanted to give up what had become a great burden. She held out the pearl from the Veil of Day, and explained how she had come by it.

  The dragons mourned again, voices raised in icy keening. “This is the pearl of the old King,” the Dragon Prince said. “This is the pearl that went missing from Cloud Kingdom, and thus stole his life away. And now we have it back, but it is too late, the old King is dead and the new King gone.”

  Embar Dea knew that she was not at fault, but she could not help feeling somehow to blame. “If I had been earlier—” she started to say.

  “It would have made no difference. This is many years in the making. We have this now, it is returned to us and thank you, because I believe it is a sign that we’ll prevail.”

  “Please,” Embar Dea said. “What has been happening? All I know are signs of danger and loss, but I don’t know why.”

  “No more do we,” said the mottled, shifting southern dragon, in a voice that suggested that speech did not come easily to her, a voice like rusting metal. “Signs and portents, of danger and woe, but we don’t know where it comes from.”

  “We must go to Cloud Kingdom,” the Dragon Prince said and Embar Dea’s heart lifted at this, for she had not seen Cloud Kingdom since she was a child, born there like all dragons before being sent to the many worlds. “And now you have come,” Prince Rish added, “We are able to leave.”

  22

  They searched the room again and Chen performed a basic locating spell, but there was no clue, either physical or magical, to Miss Qi’s disappearance.

  “I don’t suppose,” Zhu Irzh said in the hopeless tone of the unconvinced, “that she’d have just popped out for a breath of fresh air.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Worry made Chen uncharacteristically snappy. If Miss Qi had gone missing in Singapore Three, he would have been calmer, but here, with so few resources, the situation struck him as bleak. “This is Hell. There is no fresh air and anyway, it’s hardly likely she’d have popped out in it.”

  “How are we going to explain this to Heaven?” was Zhu Irzh’s next thought.

  “We’re not,” Chen replied. “We won’t have to. Because we’re going to find her.”

  He warded both window and door, then closed the room. On Earth, his wards were stronger, since he had jurisdiction there and none in Hell, but they still possessed a certain degree of power and would stop any curious minor demons from entering the room, if not one of Hell’s hierarchy. Zhu Irzh watched approvingly. Then Chen, followed by the flustered desk clerk, went back downstairs.

  “Call the staff, please. I want to see if anyone knows anything.”

  He didn’t hold out much hope and indeed, what little he held was not fulfilled. The staff—a motley, shifty assortment of demons—had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. They shuffled their ill-favoured feet and stared at the ceiling or the floor.

  “If anyone does know anything,” Chen said at last, “Then you know where to find me. It doesn’t matter if you have to wake me up—” not that demons would worry overmuch about disturbing other people’s sleep “—as long as you let me know.”

  “Is there a reward?” one of the staff
members said, a small, ragged person with a backwards-facing head. Lords knew what he’d done to deserve that: having your feet reversed was a common punishment, but it wasn’t usual to see folk facing in the wrong direction. As it was, he had to stand with his back to Chen.

  “We might be able to arrange something,” Chen said cautiously. Zhu Irzh nudged him. “Go for it,” the demon whispered. “It’s the only way you’ll get anything out of this bunch.”

  Chen knew he was right, and he let the tentative offer stand. He went back upstairs with Zhu Irzh, to await developments, and sure enough, they were not long in arriving, via a soft knock on the door.

  Chen was not surprised to see that it was the reversed-head person.

  “I saw ’er,” he said, without preamble. “Your mate. They took ’er out the back.”

  “Who was it?” Chen asked. “Did you see?”

  The demon’s maltreated face became sly. “Yes, but—”

  “All right,” Chen said with a sigh. “How much are we going to give him, Zhu Irzh?”

  “Five hundred dollars,” the demon said.

  “What! You’re joking. I’ll give you fifty.”

  “Do I look like an idiot?” the demon howled. And so on. Five minutes later, Zhu Irzh was handing over fifty dollars with the promise of a further hundred.

  “Right, well, there were three of them, see. I think two of them were blokes but I’m not sure about the third.”

  Chen was taking notes. “When was this?”

  “About an hour and a half ago.”

  Chen did a rapid mental calculation. Given the time that the search and enquiry had taken, Miss Qi had been abducted while he and Zhu Irzh were on their way back from the birthday dinner. That meant that anyone who had been at the banquet could have taken Miss Qi and somehow, Chen thought that this was significant.