by Rebecca Lim
‘Uh, uh,’ Ray said dangerously, aiming the muzzle of his small pistol between the man’s eyes, which widened as he recognised the man holding the gun.
‘Мой Бог! Spark’s here!’ he screamed in a heavy Russian accent. ‘Get Spark if you cannot find vase! His head is worth as much!’
The man’s voice echoed about the east wing, cutting through the sounds of fists meeting faces and shoes connecting with hardened abdominal muscles everywhere.
Every man in the room seemed to stop what he was doing and turn to look at Ray, who hissed at Harley, ‘Now! Now! I’ll keep them busy.’
Harley rolled to his feet and sprinted for the left staircase at the back of the room as his dad and the thug grappled for control of his pistol. As he ran, Harley caught a flash of brilliant green streaking up the matching staircase to the right.
Harley hugged the back wall as men threw themselves down the staircase next to him, rushing to get a piece of his dad. It was astonishing.
Harley’s legs were burning as he made it onto the now deserted upper level. ‘Qing?’ he called out.
‘Here!’ she called back, waving from the opposite end of the gallery. ‘Someone hid it!’
Qing was standing on an ebony-coloured chair pushed up against the side of a tall, lacquered wooden cabinet which was centred in the space above the doors to the east wing. The open-fronted display cabinet was filled with lumpy earthenware vessels: bowls, plates, vases, urns, ginger jars. All of them were rendered in muddy colours with unsophisticated finishes; they were nothing like the spectacularly coloured examples on temperature-controlled display behind safety glass on the ground floor.
Harley began to run down the gallery towards Qing as she braced herself against the top of the cabinet to reach for a plain brown pot, wide and stumpy and painted with black markings.
Before her fingers could even touch the pot, however, the old gardener was standing at the base of the cabinet, looking up at her. He gave Qing a strange, pained look. ‘I can’t let you do that,’ he murmured. ‘I cannot let you have it, much as I yearn to.’
Harley slowed in surprise; he hadn’t even seen or heard the old man’s approach.
His dad yelled out from below, ‘Har-ley!’
Harley peered over the banister, shocked to see his dad barely holding off a ring of weapon-wielding men with his shaking gun hand. ‘You need to hurry, son!’
‘Mr Téng?’ Harley said, then gave a yell of surprise when the old man turned to look across at him, his eyes glowing a luminous gold, jet-black irises ringed in a thin rim of silvery green. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Remember!’ the old man howled, his face twisting as if lumpen creatures were moving about under his skin. ‘No matter what I say, no matter what happens, you must destroy it!’
As the old man threw himself onto the ground, twitching and snarling and changing right before their eyes, Qing leant so far around the front of the display cabinet that it began to rock away from the wall. She desperately shoved her left hand inside the top compartment containing the stubby, barrel-shaped jar and caught hold of it with a triumphant cry.
Out of its mouth she pulled a small, familiar-looking vase with a white background and a red potter’s mark at its base. Only, this time, the dragon winding around and around the vase was bright … green.
Qing slid the ugly pot back into its spot in the cabinet, gazing down at the vase in her right hand, puzzled. She was looking at Harley as if she were about to say something when she was swept straight off her chair – swallowed in the coils of a giant green snake which lifted her off her feet towards the ceiling.
The coils raced up her body until the only parts of her that Harley could see were her face and the hand holding the vase. Qing stared, mesmerised, at the golden eyes of the creature looking fixedly down at her; it wasn’t a snake, Harley saw now, but some kind of legless dragon. It had the same ridged and horned head as the green dragon depicted on the vase, and large, rippling green-silver scales – almost like fish scales but plate-sized – and it had no limbs. Its green body was so long and wide that it filled up one whole side of the gallery, and it was floating just above the floorboards.
‘Lǎo fū,’ Qing gasped. ‘Let me go. You are a slave to this vase. I can feel it.’
I am bound to it. I have been its guardian – for centuries. The old gardener’s voice seemed to speak directly into Harley’s head, sounding weirdly amplified, ancient and reptilian, making every hair on the back of Harley’s neck stand up. If you try to take it from me, you will die.
Dimly, Harley could hear the sounds of men calling out fearfully from below, but the dragon’s eyes, and its voice, were hypnotic, and Harley could not look away. The air smelled like tinder, yet it was colder than ice.
The Téng – for that was the kind of creature it was – began tightening its coils around the girl, forced by some long-ago edict to prevent the destruction of the very thing that made it suffer.
‘Who is imprisoned in it?’ Qing gasped as the coils of the Téng tightened around her. She felt her own nature beginning to change and expand in response, but continued, fiercely, to resist. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, old one,’ she gritted. ‘You are kin. You are from my time. You have done nothing wrong except be faithful and steadfast to the safekeeping of this vase.’
It is someone important, like you, the Téng rasped, its tone of despair almost driving Harley to his knees as he stood below the beast’s vast, rearing body, Qing struggling high up in its grasp. That vase contains the beginning of the end. I willingly gave my life to prevent it, but I did not know how long it would be, how long …
The Téng’s wail rose and rose until it seemed it would shatter the roof beams and eaves of the mansion. In it, Harley could sense all the weight of years the Téng had been bound to protect the vase, unable to be truly itself for long, more man now than dragon – dutiful, confused, alone.
‘Aaaaaahhhh,’ Qing cried out as the coils of the Téng bore down crushingly. Her eyes glowed a fierce gold, black irises widening dangerously, and the Téng hissed, drawing its lips back from its sabre-like teeth, cursed to kill any who threatened the vase …
Suddenly, with all her remaining strength and breath, Qing drew her arm sideways with a swift, sharp movement and threw the vase over the banister of the upper gallery.
Nooooooo, the Téng roared, instantly releasing Qing, who fell to the ground and lay there, stunned. Snapping and uncoiling like a taut streamer, the Téng followed the vase over the bannister.
But it could not catch the ancient ceramic vessel before it shattered on the black and white tiles, filling the whole room with brilliant, searing light.
For one moment, Harley thought he saw a tall, broad-shouldered, muscular young man kneeling in the wreckage of the vase. He appeared only a few years older than Harley himself. His black hair was tied tightly into a topknot, and he wore dark leggings, a heavily embroidered green and gold ceremonial surcoat with a coat of pieced-bronze armour fitted snugly over the top. But then with a glare of hatred at all around him and an inhuman leap, the young man was gone, and there was the sense of something emerald-coloured, vast and furious, rushing through the room like an arctic wind before it swooped through the open doors of the east wing and up through the skywell at the centre of the house.
Harley heard the half-blinded men below claw and bellow and scatter as the Téng landed among them in a tangle of loops and coils and claws. Some scrambled out through the open front doors of the mansion, others jumped out of the windows they’d first come through wielding boltcutters and diamond saws.
Half-blind himself, Harley yelled, ‘Dad!’
‘Here!’ Ray called out weakly, trapped between heavy folds of the Téng’s coiled body. He’d lost his pistol and was lying on his back on the floor, unable to move.
The Téng looked down into Ray’s face, its breath hot upon his skin, and Ray’s expression said everything – that he should have believed Harley’s story in the first place; that he real
ly wanted to live to see Harley grow up, but that that would probably not be possible now.
‘Please!’ Harley begged, looking down from the upper gallery as the Téng reared over his father, poised to strike. ‘He might be a bad man, but I love him.’
The Téng looked up at Qing and Harley looking down on him from the gallery above.
We have no fight, little sister, little brother, he said, and the Téng’s voice in their heads was joyous. I am free! But look no further for the Children of the Dragon or it will be the beginning of the end. That much I know.
Then the coils of the Téng slid and shifted, and its dragon-like head lifted towards the open doors. With a slither and a bound, it, too, was up and through the skywell in the great mansion on Balestier Road, like a streak of silver-green lightning lost to sight in a moment.
Harley and Qing stared at each other in awe before looking back down at Ray on the ground.
‘You two!’ Ray pointed at both of them weakly from where he still lay, flat on his back. ‘Take the stairs! Schumacher!’
When Harley and Qing finally reached Harley’s dad – stepping gingerly through toppled display cases and hastily discarded modern and ancient weaponry to reach him – Schumacher was scooping Ray tenderly off the ground like a little kid. He set his boss back on his feet before dusting off the shoulders of Ray’s jumpsuit. Schumacher grinned at Harley and Qing over Ray’s head and his eyes were smiling, but Harley could see the tension in them. ‘Now we make like the bananas and split, ja?’ Schumacher reminded Ray of one of his favourite sayings. ‘If Interpol don’t know you are here, boss, they very soon will.’
Ray held up his hand like a stop sign and turned to Qing. ‘What do we do now?’ he said urgently, indicating the now blank white pieces of shattered vase that the green dragon had left in its furious wake. ‘The vase is hopelessly smashed and there’s still a price on your heads, plus I was almost crushed to death by the great, suffocating weight of an apparently mythical creature. When he touched me it felt like, like,’ Ray’s face showed his puzzled wonderment, ‘eternity. It felt older than anything I’ve ever taken before from any museum in the world.’
‘Harley told the truth,’ Qing admonished him.
Ray nodded miserably. ‘Everything I’ve worked for is in jeopardy,’ he whispered. ‘I’m supposed to be a “ghost”, remember? And leave no trace. This is probably the worst day of my professional life. But for the first time in possibly ever, maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is getting you both back to where you belong.’
‘Bet this is a mystery greater than any security system you’ve ever had to crack, right, Dad?’ Harley said stiffly.
His dad nodded. ‘Solving mysteries is a huge part of what I do…’
‘…While running a major criminal empire,’ Harley finished for him, still hurt at Ray’s earlier revelations.
Ray didn’t deny this but hung his head and murmured, ‘So where to now?’
Qing’s finely arched brows drew together as she stared through the open doors at the skywell through which the brilliant green dragon from the broken vase had vanished. ‘The Forbidden City,’ she murmured with a troubled look on her face. ‘He will go there. To try to locate the other vases. We must stop him before he…’ she closed her eyes momentarily, ‘…destroys them.’
Ray raised his head at her words. If there were other vases, maybe he could still square things with Chiu Chiu Pang. He would work out the details later, on the fly, like he always did.
‘Right then,’ Ray said briskly, rubbing his hands together and turning to Schumacher. ‘The Forbidden City it is. Radio ahead and tell the pilots to refuel for Beijing. Harls, you’re staying with me. It’s too dangerous to take you home yet.’
Though he was still mad at his dad, Harley’s ears pricked up at the idea of more ‘camping’.
Qing turned away from the skywell and searched Ray’s face with her eyes, the ring of colour around her dark irises startlingly blue. ‘Not Beijing,’ she chided gently. ‘The Forbidden City of the highest peak of the Wǔdāng shān – the Wudang Mountains. In his state of pain and confusion, Tái would have gone home to find answers. I would have done the same in his place.’
Ray’s gaze flicked to his son in surprise, then back to Qing. ‘You know who he is?’
Qing nodded solemnly. ‘Táifēng,’ she replied. ‘The Second Son of the Second Dragon.’
‘The same Second Dragon who wanted you and your sisters dead?’ Harley exclaimed.
Qing nodded again. ‘Táifēng, like his father, has always craved power. He will not stop until we are all gone.’
Harley swallowed as she added, ‘He’s gone to find Master Jìn, the magician who did this to us – to him. We need to find the master, and my sisters, before Tái does – or something very bad will happen.’
Harley’s eyes went wide as Qing added quietly, ‘In a war between dragons, there are no survivors.’
After Qing, Harley, Ray and Schumacher re-boarded their private jet and everyone had had a turn in the sumptuous bathroom featuring the full-sized spa with real gold taps, they convened around the boardroom table.
By then, their plane was somewhere over northern Malaysia, bound for a private hangar at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport in China. Qing was retelling the story of the scroll in Garstang J. Runyon’s possession at Antediluvian House to a fascinated Schumacher. Ray was listening intently this time, a look of wonderment battling a look of scepticism on his face.
‘So you are like the prinzessen of the dragon peoples?’ Schumacher mused, handing Qing a freshly opened can of sandwich tuna and a small cocktail fork.
‘There were many dragon kings across many regions,’ Qing replied modestly between forkfuls of tuna. ‘Our misfortune is that my uncle never accepted my father’s rule.’
At that moment, there was an urgent series of complicated-sounding knocks on the cockpit door from the pilot side. Ray and Schumacher shot upright in their seats as the exact sequence of strange sounds was repeated again.
‘Kinder,’ Schumacher said tersely. ‘Bathroom. Inside. Now.’
Harley and Qing shot across to the bathroom, leaving the door slightly open. From there, they had a restricted view of the back of Ray’s head and couldn’t see Schumacher at all.
‘Come in!’ Ray called out.
Qing and Harley heard a series of locks disengage before one of the co-pilots emerged from the cockpit. They heard Ray say, ‘You can uncover your eyes, Withers, it’s only me and Schuey in here,’ and then they heard the reply, in a crisp English accent, ‘Yes, yes, I can see that it’s only two grown men and an open can of tuna in here, which is entirely consistent with the number of persons on our flight manifest.’ The co-pilot said these words extra loudly, as if he wanted to be heard by people possibly secreted in the bathroom.
From their hiding place, Harley and Qing saw the co-pilot step forward into their line of vision, shooting a quick look at the slightly open bathroom door in the process.
‘This is not the protocol!’ Schumacher replied sternly. ‘You are flying, we are relaxing. That is always the way.’
‘We’re getting messages from certain friendly elements of ground control, sir,’ the co-pilot said nervously. ‘We understand that, ah, Grandmaster Pang has a large contingent of men stationed at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport to intercept you immediately on arrival.’
Ray leant back in his chair, exhaling loudly. ‘Withers, we expressly chose Wuhan Tianhe over Shiyan Wudangshan Airport – which is the closest airport to the mountains – because Wuhan is almost five hours away and was supposed to give us an element of surprise!’
‘Grandmaster Pang was tipped off when your flight plan was filed, sir,’ the co-pilot responded. ‘We’re not sure how. We’re also told he has men waiting for you at all other airports with private jet facilities in the Hubei, Sichuan, Hunan, Jiangxi, Shaanxi, Henan and Anhui provinces.’
‘So we land in Shanghai,’ Schumacher replied. ‘Only
twelve hours by car. No one sees us coming and boom – we are there.’
‘Chiu Chiu Pang calls Shanghai home,’ Ray said dryly. ‘If we fart in Shanghai, he’ll know about it.’
‘Merde,’ Schumacher replied glumly.
‘And he’s put a new bounty on your head, Mr Spark,’ the co-pilot added, ‘which is double the collective bounty for the, ah, children who are not here on this flight with you.’
‘Double merde,’ Schumacher muttered.
‘Twenty million dollars?’ Ray exclaimed. ‘Just for me alone?’
The co-pilot nodded. ‘Apparently every master criminal in the world is now on the lookout for you, sir. May I suggest that the, ah, group make an emergency landing on Macau Island instead, taking a night ferry to Hong Kong from where you might hope to slip into mainland China unnoticed?’
‘That’s almost two days of extra travel time!’ Ray exclaimed.
‘You should do it, boss,’ Schumacher insisted. ‘That’s an extra two days you get to keep your head.’
‘He has a point, sir,’ Withers agreed.
Ray turned and looked at the gap in the bathroom door, meeting Harley’s worried eye, and sighed loudly. ‘Macau it is.’
‘A wise choice, sir,’ Withers responded, shooting the bathroom door another anxious glance before moving out of the children’s line of sight, reentering the cockpit and re-engaging all the locks.
Harley and Qing came out of the bathroom, Harley’s special phone already in his hand.
‘Dial your mum, Harls,’ Ray groaned, rubbing his face with his hands.
Harley pulled up Mum on his contact list and everyone winced as she screeched, ‘Ray Patrick Spark!’ to the accompanying sound of Qing’s laughter.
Harley Spark, thirteen years and twenty-two days old, found himself rapidly descending towards a runway on Taipa Island, Macau, in a private jet with solid gold bathroom taps, in the dead of night. This was all thanks to an ancient dragon vase bearing a rare potter’s mark, and a diabolical international crime network of which his dad was an (unconfirmed) member.
