The Night Watch

by Sean Stewart

  —The cash register clanged in the Double Happiness Gift Shop.

  Claire felt as if sixteen hours had passed, as if she had just lived out that day of her tenth year, second by second. She felt the memory slipping away like a dream on waking. She tried fiercely to hold on to it, the snow and the blue sky, the smell of her room, and her mother was in it somehow, but the harder she tried to remember, the faster it disappeared, like a snowflake melting in her hand.

  Then it was gone, and she knew it was gone forever, and she would never get it back. Her mother had given her something very precious and she had lost it, lost it. She turned and found Li Mei crying in silence. No sobs or gasps: just a steady flow of tears down her narrow cheeks.

  On the counter before them, a white diamond and a tiny seed were lying in the old woman’s balance. The diamond glittered like frost in the sun. The old woman scooped each one up and popped them into small plastic containers.

  Li Mei touched Claire’s hand. “They will go into the Garden.”

  Claire’s heart was broken, but she didn’t cry. Her mother had given her that, too. Frozen her up inside. “I didn’t want to lose that day.”

  Li Mei took the incense after the old woman wrapped it. “Our dead didn’t want to give up their lives.”

  The incense wasn’t all Li Mei bought. There was paper jewelry too, and spirit money, a hundred million dollars of it. “For my mother to buy her way into Heaven,” Li Mei explained. They watched it burn in a little brazier back at Li Mei’s home. Then they ate. Claire coaxed Li Mei into drinking two cups of plum wine, and carried her into her room when the young woman finally fell asleep, still silently weeping.

  Then Claire sank into a soft couch in the front room. The air was still heavy with sad smoke. “Emily, you idiot,” she whispered. “What have you done?” Probably she would get herself killed and what would Claire have done to stop it? What had she ever given the girl but wariness? Even her own cursed white cold bitch goddess mother had given her something, something terribly precious, if only she could remember it.

  She was crying, damn it. She hated that, but she couldn’t seem to stop.

  She finished the bottle of plum wine herself, hoping to let sleep sneak up on her, but she was still too wary for that. She wondered what had happened to Jen, and whether Water Spider would get him back from the haunted apartment building. She remembered cards bubbling and turning black. Players’ hands burning down to the bone.

  She tried to remember the day that had been taken from her in the Lady’s gift shop.

  Tap, tap.

  She remembered The Harrier turning the corner onto Keefer Street last night, white and cold and distant as a star. Claire supposed she should feel grateful, she should feel blessed that her mother had cared enough to save her. But instead she felt angry at her for letting the others die. And absurdly jealous of Water Spider, whom the goddess had touched instead of her.

  Tap. Tap. Something was knocking on the window of Li Mei’s house. Groggy with incense and exhaustion, Claire pulled herself back from sleep and struggled up from the couch. Tap tap tap. She fumbled in the dark, smacked her shin on a coffee table, cursed, and limped across the room to the window on the north wall. The sky outside was finally paling. The long night of horrors was almost over. Tap tap tap! “I’m coming, for Christ’s sake.”

  The tapping stopped, and a horribly burned and disfigured face pressed up against the glass. It was Lieutenant Jackson. Claire screamed.

  Jackson grimaced. “Glad to see you too, sweetie.” His voice was faint. It was hard to hear him through the glass.

  “Oh God, you’re alive, oh shit we have to get you to a doctor—”

  Jackson shook his head. “Uh, negatory, Claire. I’m dead. We’re all dead, actually, except for you and Lamont and Nagy. I don’t think Nagy’s going to make it, though.”

  “You’re dead?”

  “No shit, sweetheart.” Half his face was burned down to the bone.

  “Then why…I mean, what…?”

  He grimaced again. “I don’t know. The captain doesn’t know. We’re not in great shape, I’ll tell you that. Most of the guys don’t have enough left to drag themselves out of the barracks. I was taking a piss when it hit, don’t know why that would make me a good ghost, but who knows anything about this shit? I followed your incense here. It’s killing me to hold on so far from my body, though, so I gotta make it quick. John Walker hasn’t showed up, Claire.” Lieutenant Jackson grunted and closed his one good eye. “Christ. Lord have mercy. Yeah, anyway: no John Walker to take us to the North Side, so, uh, there we sit in a parking lot on the edge of this godforsaken slant village. And we can scare the shit out of a few Chinamen, I suppose, or haunt a monster, but Christ’s sake, we just want to go home. We just want to go home.”

  “I, I don’t know—”

  “Shit. Ow, shit. Daybreak coming,” Jackson said. He started talking faster. “Yeah, anyway, we figured the White Bitch bailed you out, and maybe you got connections or something. Ask her to tell John Walker to get his ass over here, okay? Christ, Claire, we’re a long way from home—”

  A cock crowed, and he was gone.

  May Emily’s God have mercy on my soul, Claire thought, staring through the window at the dawn. Rain hurried down the gutters outside. John Walker has not come and the ghosts of Southside’s dead are trapped in Chinatown and begging me for help. What am I going to do now?

  Sleep crept up on her as she tried to decide. Whether it was fate, or weariness, or just plum wine, Claire remained asleep even when Li Mei rose and left the house, and only woke when a squad of Southside’s trackers burst into the room and put her under arrest.

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  After Water Spider took his leave of Claire and Li Mei, he arranged a billet for Pearl. As he finished this business he turned to find the Honorable Minister for the South leaning in the doorway. “Where to now?” Johnny Ma asked. Even at four in the morning, he looked fresh and immaculate, as if his evening were just beginning.

  “I have a certain task to perform.”

  “May I walk with you?”

  “My path leads me to Hastings Street.”

  The Monkey’s eyebrows rose. “Then I shall definitely come with you. It isn’t safe to go down there by yourself. But I suppose you know that.”

  “Forgive me, Minister; while of course you are always a delight, I am afraid I would be poor company tonight. My thoughts and I need some solitude. I am sure you understand.”

  “Perfectly.” Johnny belted a stylish trench coat around his waist. “Are we ready, then?” He dug a gold-plated cigarette case from his coat pocket and flipped it open. “Want another?”

  “Under no circumstances.”

  “Probably wise.” Johnny clicked the case shut. He lit his joint and then pointed at the sword belted on Water Spider’s hip. “Taking the Old Man out, I see.” Water Spider retrieved an umbrella from the stand.

  They went out through the front doors of Government House and stood for a moment under the Dragon and Phoenix carved on the North Gate. It was still dark. Still raining. “Not so much gunfire,” Johnny said.

  “Wait a few hours.”

  “The Southsiders, you mean?”

  “My people tell me their planes are taxiing on the waters of English Bay now.”

  “Do your people know they aren’t your people anymore?”

  “We value loyalty in this government,” Water Spider said.

  Johnny pulled thoughtfully on his joint. “Huang Ti has been given the Borders portfolio for the duration of the emergency.”

  “I hope he can find some clothes. The men and women of Borders are not accustomed to taking orders from a Minister wearing a bathrobe.”

  Johnny laughed. “You always were a pompous prick.”

  “Hm. Well.” Water Spider reflected. “Winter and Emily Thompson have dealt with us, with the Mandarins,” he said. “How will Huang Ti explain that Chinatown’s real power lies els
ewhere, with the Lady and the Dragon and the Double Monkey, and the chosen puppets of these Powers? I rather pity the new Minister for Borders.”

  “Pity Huang Ti, eh? Well, you are a man of more generous sensibilities than I,” Johnny said. “Are you still seeing that concubine of his, by the way?”

  Water Spider put up his umbrella. “No.”

  “Pity. She suited you better. I always thought she was a bit too clever for him. Better he stick to his wife. A good soul, and slow enough to make even him feel clever.”

  “Shut up, Johnny. Respect the woman. She is raising two children, one of them very difficult.”

  “No harm meant, my friend. No disrespect intended.”

  “You think that charm and wit forgive your moments of viciousness. Your improprieties. They do not.”

  Johnny looked at his colleague and took another drag on his joint. “You shame me.”

  Water Spider grunted and walked out into the rain. “Flippancy is a habit, Johnny.” He thought of Huang Ti, taking his pleasure with Pearl while at home his wife struggled with their deaf and blind child. “So is betrayal.”

  They walked the block along Keefer to the barricade at Columbia. “I lost one man around two this morning,” the captain reported, shaking his head. “Zhang jumped over the barricade. One of the monsters had a gun. Popped Zhang and ran. Not much action since then.”

  “I am grieved by your loss.”

  “Minister? We’ve been hearing aircraft. Are the Southsiders coming?”

  “Yes.” Grins broke out on the faces of Water Spider’s men. They cheered as he walked away. He did not tell them not to.

  It was a block down to Hastings Street. Neon hummed and crackled in the air: dragons and stars and falling coins. A huge purple Buddha let gold coins fall through his fat electric fingers over the Number One Son Casino. “You didn’t tell those brave soldiers back there who the Southsiders might be coming for,” Johnny said.

  “Six men on that detail.” Rain drummed monotonously against Water Spider’s silk umbrella. “Do you know how long it would take one of the Snows to kill them all?”

  “All of them? All six?”

  “Less than a second,” Water Spider said. “Less than the time from one heartbeat to the next.”

  Johnny had no clever remarks.

  Water Spider picked a gap between two rickshaws and plunged into Hastings Street. The instant he left the sidewalk, he left Chinatown proper and stepped into no man’s land. Crowds of sharps and pickpockets swirled around him, cripples and charm-sellers with crepe-paper necklaces, prostitutes wearing rented smiles, the old, the poor, the foolish and the reckless: all flowed around him, a river of disrepute, and at their touch he felt everything he had been diffusing from him, all his duty and scholarship, all his hard work and propriety, as if he himself were a kind of tea, his virtue seeping away into their dirty water. It was a different world on the far curb, and a different man who stepped into it.

  “I am greatly honored by your company to this point,” he said to Johnny Ma. “I will go on from here alone.”

  Johnny nodded. “What have you come here for, Spider?”

  “My father,” he said.

  Water Spider’s father lived two blocks north of Hastings in a small apartment at the corner of Columbia and Cordova. Nobody lived north of Cordova, no matter how desperate or deranged; from Cordova to the docks was a three-block strip of hell, stretching from Centennial Pier in the west to the abandoned fairgrounds of the P.N.E. park three kilometers down the shore. Throughout the twentieth century Vancouver had been Canada’s California. Dreamers and rogues and folk too poor to survive the brutal Canadian winters had fled there. Those whose luck or hope ran out ended up on the Lower East side, strewn like sea wrack at the edge of the Pacific. The Dream of 2004 had come there like the end of the world.

  In Vancouver, the greatest battles of ’04 had been fought along Hastings Street. In cities all around the world, nearly every community that bordered on a place like the Lower East Side had run mad with minotaurs, or been consumed. But Chinatown, deep in a magic of its own, and blessed with the leadership of Wu Lei, the angel they called the Emperor, had fought the darkness to a standstill. The final engagement had come at the Carnegie Library at the corner of Main and Hastings. There the Spider Darkness and the Emperor met, and there they both fell.

  Wu Lei’s followers had revered him as a hero, as a god. When he died, those of his knights who survived put on their mourning and became the Shrouded Ones. All but one. Alone among that honored company, Water Spider’s father, Floating Ant, had chosen to turn his back on the Emperor, and Chinatown, and honor.

  Water Spider knocked on Floating Ant’s door. “It is me, Father.”

  “You? Who are you?” An iron bar slid back in the center of the door and two eyes peered out. “Spider! Only much older and wetter. Why are you here?”

  “Will you let me in?”

  “Of course, of course! Only, tell me why you’ve come.”

  “Father? Why do you sound afraid?” The iron bar shot back. Bolts slid, chains rattled. The door swung slowly open. “You’re already up,” Water Spider said, surprised. Instead of a bathrobe or a dressing gown, his father was dressed formally, in a long tunic and pants of white silk, with pearl buttons in gold mounts. Looking past his father’s shoulder, Water Spider saw three old men sitting cross-legged on the floor around a small, low table. One was dressed all in gold silk, with a pair of white boots. The second wore only red, save for a pair of white gloves. The third wore a long black robe, belted with a white silk sash.

  A pot of tea sat on the table—almond from the smell of it—but there was only one cup, before his father’s empty place.

  “You are all wearing white,” Water Spider said. “Who has died?”

  His father gave him a curious look. “Well, Spider. Come in, come in. You look cold and empty and careworn.”

  “I am all those things tonight. If you could spare a cup of that tea, I would be very grateful,” Water Spider said, heading for the low table.

  “No, not this,” his father said, snatching the pot away. “I will make you something better. Something better, for a connoisseur.” He opened the window above the sink and poured the tea outside into the rainy night. Floating Ant still moved spryly and his back was straight, as if he carried on it only sixty of his ninety-six years. Water Spider felt older than that, this night.

  But this had been his father’s gift, and curse: to live, and live, and live, while everyone around him perished, in body or soul. No doubt he would outlive his son, as he had outlasted his wife and the comrades he had deserted at the Carnegie Slaughter. For years he had seemed to live on nothing but plum wine and marijuana. His body had not decayed, but become small and leathery and tough, as if the wine had pickled his insides, and the smoke from the joints had cured his hide. But this morning Floating Ant was uneasy. Old ghosts haunted his eyes and hands.

  While his father rummaged in a cabinet for tea, Water Spider placed his umbrella in the stand by the door, and turned politely to the silent gentlemen waiting around the table. They regarded him, unspeaking. There was something in their looks that disturbed him. Their eyes were still water; he could see his own reflection there, trembling and shallow on the surface. Any thoughts that might move in the depths of their silence were hidden utterly from him.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me, Father?”

  Floating Ant turned. “Introduce…? Ah—no. No, I don’t think so. This isn’t actually the best time to visit, Spider. In fact, of all the days in the six years since you last came—”

  “Five, father.”

  “Five, then. In all those years, I don’t think there has been a worse day for you to drop by. So I think perhaps a cup of tea, and then I must send you back to composing edicts and scheming for power. Very sorry, ah?”

  Water Spider went to the little coal stove and squatted before it. Something had been burning in it recently; great curls and flakes of bl
ack ash rustled in the wind of his coming. “I need your help,” he said.

  His father laughed.

  “It is not a time for laughter. A young man I sent out tonight has been trapped in a gargoyle house. A demon guards the door. I need you to take me to a Shrouded One.”

  A silver tea ball swung, forgotten, from Floating Ant’s ancient fingers. “Oh,” he said.

  Water Spider warmed his hands before the fire. “This is not a good day for me either. Over this night I have lost my servant, my woman, and my position in the Government. Daylight may well find Chinatown occupied by a foreign power. Forgive me if I sound intemperate, but I doubt your night has been worse than mine. I need—I am begging for your help. If all my work must be ashes, at least let me rescue this one poor boy, whose only fault was that he followed my orders.”

  Floating Ant filled a copper kettle and brought it to the little stove. “That’s a busy night,” he said. “So your career is ruined, ah? Well.” The old man ran his long fingernails through Water Spider’s hair. “Now you see why you should have had children. The only true comfort in one’s age.” He gave a dry little laugh.

  “What right have you to mock me?” Water Spider said. Pearl’s great aphrodisiac: not to have his children. “If you had been more of a comfort to me in my youth, perhaps I would be a greater solace to your age. I will drink plum wine in your room until I pass out, though, if that would ease you. Or smoke hashish, or eat poppy bread. Any of these little attentions that draw a family together.”

  “Enough,” said the stranger in black. His eyes like cold stone wells were deep with years.

  Water Spider turned, furious. “Sir, I do not believe we have been introduced.”

  The old man in gold smiled and said, “‘A youth, when at home, should be filial, and, abroad, respectful to his elders.’”

  “Very well, you can quote K’ung Fu-tzu. But does not the Old Man also say, ‘If a man lose his uprightness, and yet live, his escape from death is the effect of mere good fortune’? If you do not remember what it was like in our house when I was young, perhaps you are of an age, venerable sirs, to remember what my father did in the service of the Emperor. Or rather, did not do.”