The Dragons of Heaven

by Alyc Helms

  Not so China. Perhaps, having come through the upheavals of the twentieth century and the madness and violence of the Mao era, China was mature enough to deal with a little crisis like a magical wall of isolation. Or perhaps the existence or absence of such a wall didn’t touch the lives of the majority of people. Perhaps we needed China more than they needed us. Whatever the case, things were business-as-usual in China’s largest city.

  The cab driver took me over the river and up the Hujin expressway, chattering at me in Shanghainese the entire time. I understood perhaps one word in ten, and none of them had anything to do with the New Wall. I couldn’t very well ask without giving away that I was a foreigner, so I sat back and fumed as we crawled through the traffic past the outer ring and the middle ring and eventually onto the streets of the Huangpu district. Between the buildings we sometimes caught glimpses of the financial district across the river, shrouded in a haze of gold.

  This was the postcard of Shanghai: the skyscrapers lit more by neon than by the setting sun. The world flashed with color and light. It was too much – too many colors, too many people, the air too thick with smog to properly see. “Crowded” was too tame a term to describe the teeming mass of traffic choking the streets. Bodies ceased to be individual things and became the circulatory system of some greater organism, surging forward in pulsing waves with every beat of the traffic lights. Everywhere I looked, Jumbotron screens flashed images at eyeblink speed, faster than I could decipher. I was glad for the protective cocoon of the car as we crawled along with the current of traffic. The chatter of the driver ceased to be confusing and became a comfort – meaningless syllables strung together, like some sort of crash course in meditation.

  I’d visited New York a few times. I didn’t like it. Too crowded. New York had nothing on Shanghai.

  I wrested my attention from the passing street before agoraphobia could take hold.

  “Everything is very well-ordered,” I said. Perhaps with the shadows pulled about my face to hide my features, I could get away with asking a few questions under the guise of being a hukou provincial. No need to disguise my Mandarin; I’d never bothered to rid myself of my Sichuan accent.

  The driver glanced back through the mirror, switching to something that might once have been Mandarin. “This is Shanghai,” he said, as if that explained all.

  “Other places are not so well-ordered,” I said, an invitation for him to brag about Shanghai and condemn those “other places” – and pass along some news in the process.

  He made a spitting sound against his teeth. “Hong Kong. No control there, and they weren’t quick enough to quarantine the laowai. Too many laowai in Hong Kong. Here,” he thumped his dashboard, “Beijing,” he thumbed a direction I assumed was north, though it might just have been “up”. “Every other city, the People’s Heroes keep the peace, and the laowai are kept safe until the terrorists are caught.”

  “Well, but the students…” I trailed off. It was China. There was always something happening with the students.

  Another tetching sound. “They want to get rid of KFC. I say get rid of McDonalds. KFC is good.” A pause as he squeezed by a group of bicyclers. I closed my eyes, afraid I was about to see someone get sideswiped into a smear by the passing cab. “They should question the Japanese.”

  “The… Japanese?” Unlikely the “they” he was talking about were the anti-KFC students anymore.

  “The Japanese. They did this. The Americans helped. You heard about the drones?”

  I shook my head, and the cab driver proceeded to tell me about the secret technologies and schemes that the western governments had been developing for years to forcibly stunt China’s emergence as a world power. The sad thing was, I didn’t disagree with many of his observations. Eighty percent right was still twenty percent wrong. And the twenty percent was very, very wrong.

  But at least I knew the visitors and tourists here were being kept safer than they likely would have been back in the States. The People’s Heroes were China’s state-sponsored answer to Argent. Trained like Olympians – and with a similar wash-out rate – they didn’t number among the many hidden arms of Chinese bureaucracy. If the People’s Heroes were involved, then China had decided that keeping foreigners safe was a matter of face.

  The rest of the world might spin it differently, but I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure the protection of the laowai. One could never underestimate the power of keeping face. Mark one for China.

  The driver wove through a confusion of smaller streets and closes, dropping me in front of a row of shikumen terrace houses that had somehow escaped developmental destruction, a rarity this close to the Bund. I wished I dared give him a tip, but it would have marked me as a foreigner. I didn’t want him calling the People’s Heroes on me.

  The teal-and-silver cab drove off, leaving me alone on a quiet street. For just a moment, standing next to the line of close-built brick townhouses, I could pretend I was back home, and that the world wasn’t in turmoil.

  Only for a moment. I couldn’t leave the world hanging for longer than that. I drew in a breath, coughed at the twinge deep in my lungs from taking in all the gunk in the air, and passed through the stone archway.

  The courtyard on the other side of the shikumen’s outer wall was little bigger than a postage stamp. A mural covered the brick side of the building, artfully distressed to look older than it was. A red-lipped woman on the mural winked with her smile, welcoming me to Magnolia House. A guard stood to one side of the main door. His face remained impassive, but he shifted, stance widening, knees bending – ready for trouble.

  “I’m here to see Song Yulan.” And I hoped I was in the right place.

  The guard said nothing, eyes fixed on a point somewhere over my shoulder, but before I could repeat myself, the door opened. A slender man of middling age bowed to me.

  “Mr Masters.” He ushered me in before I could run. I’d hoped to cling to anonymity for a bit longer. “You honor us with your visit. It has been a long time. What brings you to Shanghai?”

  I held onto my coat and hat when he would have taken them. He couldn’t be serious with that question. That was manners taken to a ridiculous extreme.

  But just as ridiculous was my instinctual response to play along. “Business. Is Ms Song available?”

  “For you, sir? Always.” He led me into the club proper. I followed, trying not to gape. Mr Mystic had been active in fighting the Red Guard. I was supposed to have been here before.

  Whatever the club had once been, it had changed since my grandfather’s day. The steward led me into a Gibsonian cyber-cafe. Computers lined the walls. Neon and blacklights made me blink and cling to the shadows about my face. Kids – mostly kids, but a few adults on the younger side of the spectrum – clacked away at keyboards. Some of them wore ungainly contraptions about their heads, but most stared at screens featuring improbably-attired avatars and fantastically-colorful worlds. Many of them chattered into headsets, presumably to virtual people they only connected to through those other worlds. The recessed speakers blared a jarring unh-tse, unh-tse, unh-tse, unh-tse, complete with a juvenile female’s voice wailing about how her love was forever.

  I snorted. Nobody that young could possibly comprehend forever-love.

  A woman detached herself from the bar. She was older than most of the customers, somewhere in her forties at least, but she carried her age well. In her tailored jacket and palazzo pants, she could have given fashion lessons to Marlene Dietrich.

  So strange to see her out of the traditional robes. Her expression was as blank as her doorman’s for all that her lips curved in a welcoming smile. Her eyes glittered cold and hard as marcasite in the techno pulse of lights coming from the monitors. “I get the feeling you disapprove,” she murmured by way of greeting.

  And I got the feeling she was fighting back a snicker. Well, that answered that question. However much my disguise might fool most people, Song Yulan saw through it. Perhaps Johnny ha
d told her.

  “Nothing so strong. Just feeling my age. Is there someplace quieter we can talk?”

  “Of course. My office?” She led me through the main room of the club and down a back hallway. We stopped at another door, this one with an electronic keypad. Her nails clacked against the casing as she punched in the code. The lights blinked green, followed by an electronic buzz. She led me into an office that sported the colonial theme I’d expected to see in the common area, all oxblood leather sofas and walls of books and a half-domed globe sporting a tea set instead of the usual brandy or scotch. She shut the door behind us.

  “There. Now you can remove that ridiculous disguise. Tea? I’ve just made a fresh pot.” She moved to the service.

  I stiffened. It was one thing to suspect she knew me, quite another to have my identity pulled out from under me. I stayed in character on instinct, fighting the urge to fidget. “At the risk of being rude, do we really have the time?”

  “There is always time for tea.” She sat and crossed her legs. Her long nails formed a cage around her teacup. She watched me over the rim of her cup but didn’t drink. “Does it really fool anyone?”

  And now I just felt silly. I removed my hat and released the shadows obscuring my face. My spine curved into a slump. I let my voice crawl back up to its natural pitch. “Yeah, seems to.”

  “Sit.” I remained standing. She poured me tea. “I apologize for my abruptness. You caught me unawares. We weren’t sure that you would come.”

  We? “Because I should leave China’s business to China?” My jaw tensed. Just let her try to feed me that line of bullshit.

  Song Yulan’s brows rose in an expression that was so familiar it near broke my heart. Like grandfather, like granddaughter. “Because Lung Di wanted you to come.”

  I expelled a breath, my chest sinking inward. It was one thing to suspect that David Tsung was a lying bastard, quite another to have it so baldly confirmed. I fumbled for the chair and lowered myself into it. “I know. He sent your former apprentice with the two-by-four equivalent of a calling card.”

  Song Yulan tapped her nails on her cup. I didn’t need to look at her face to know she was struggling over how best to tell me that I was an idiot. “We sent David, but that doesn’t mean you should trust him. I’m still not convinced that he’s sincere in this latest defection. He was quick enough to support the suggestion that you be brought in, but I can’t tell if that means he’s serving our interests, or Lung Di’s… or his own.”

  “We can shut out Tsung if his motives are in question. I’m more concerned about Lung Di. Has he ever been this blatant?” It was one thing to work underground. Behind the scenes. The puppetmaster nudging his human tools. This New Wall wasn’t his style. “Or am I wrong in thinking he’s taken the other Guardians?”

  “We are all in agreement that he’s gone too far this time. It is one thing to meddle with humans, quite another to break guanxi with his fellow spirits.”

  Amazing that my teacup didn’t shatter from the strength of my grip. I breathed in steam to cool my anger. It was OK to mess with humans, but heaven forbid Lung Di inconvenience his fellow spirits? “Perhaps he’s hoping the rest of the Nine will respond?”

  “The Nine have withdrawn from the world.” The twist of her lips and the deadpan delivery as good as gave me her opinion on that decision.

  “So it falls to us to fix his mess.”

  Song Yulan shook her head. “I am not so eager to include you as others are.”

  “Why? Because China’s business is not my business?” I snapped, setting aside my cup. It clattered on the table, tea sloshing over the side. “Four Guardians – four – he needed to capture to create this ward, and not just some classroom turtle or little girl’s pet chow.”

  Her lips formed the words “pet chow?”, but I wasn’t finished with my tirade. I stood, looming over her. “He had to develop the ritual, send instructions to Chinatowns all over the world, and get his people to execute the ritual simultaneously. Can you actually sit there and tell me that nobody suspected something was going on? Is he so damned powerful that he can keep something like this secret? Or was it that nobody wanted to go against him because they have guanxi with him, and going against him might damage your own interests? Until he went too far. And now you’re saying you couldn’t possibly have foreseen that he would do something this extreme? Well, you should have known better. You all should have known better.”

  Song Yulan didn’t move through my tirade, her face frozen in a porcelain mask. She blinked. Took a measured breath. “David Tsung knew. He claims it was why he left me. To discover what his grandfather was up to.”

  It sounded like a concession. I chose to read it as such. “But you don’t trust him.” I resumed my seat, lifting my teacup and taking a sip. My own concession. “You said ‘we’ before. Who is ‘we’?”

  Song Yulan’s jaw tensed. “It is complicated.”

  “Then use small words.”

  That earned me a chuckle. “The People’s Heroes have been establishing order within the city–”

  “So I’ve heard. I wouldn’t expect you to ally yourself with them.” The Cultural Revolution hadn’t been kind to the more traditional spirits of China, and the PHC was the secular face of new China.

  Song Yulan shook her head, blunt cut feathering along her jaw. “Much has changed in the past few weeks. It makes for strange allies. The PHC has taken control of most of the Shadow Dragon Triad’s holdings, including Lung Di’s sanctum. The only way to get at it is to go through them. We believe that is where Lung Di holds the Guardians.”

  “He’s with them?”

  “It is unclear. The wards are impenetrable.”

  “Not for someone who can pass through Shadow.” Which left myself and Tsung. “So why didn’t you send Tsung in?”

  Song Yulan grimaced. “You think the PHC is inclined to trust him any more than you or I? But it is convenient that they don’t trust him because it meant we needed you.”

  “Is there a reason I shouldn’t go to the PHC?”

  “There has been a coup among the Shadow Dragons. It would be best if you spoke to their new leader directly.”

  “You’d trust Lung Di’s own network over the PHC? Why?”

  “I believe the PHC will have few qualms about sending you in to fix this, but what if that is what Lung Di wants? The new leader of the Shadow Dragons may have ideas for a different approach. She understands how he thinks.”

  She. Interesting, though I didn’t think I could trust anyone who understood the thought processes of the Shadow Dragons’ former head.

  I set my tea aside. “When can I meet her?” If I didn’t agree with Song Yulan’s reservations, I could always go to the PHC. It sounded like we’d have to go to them eventually, anyways.

  Song Yulan ducked her head, but I caught the flash of a smile. By the time she looked up, it was gone.

  “I will take you to her now.”

  * * *

  Song Yulan led me out the back way, into an alley so narrow that only a madman would try to drive down it.

  And, of course, every taxi driver along the Puxi.

  We flattened against a wall until there was a break. It was paltry as breaks went, but Song Yulan dove across the way, and I was left to follow. Horns blared, and the driver bearing down on me passed close enough to clip the tail of my coat.

  Song Yulan didn’t wait for me to catch my breath. She led the way down a built-over brick tunnel that had once been a space between buildings. Crumbled masonry littered the path. I held my arm over my face to ward off the stink of bodies and feces.

  We came out on a busy thoroughfare. No dodging traffic here. We’d have to wait at the light like good pedestrians.

  Song Yulan fidgeted and shot glances up and down the street. Her agitation attracted more curious glances than my shadowy presence.

  I leaned close to be heard over the traffic. “Is there something wrong?”

  “Let us hope not. T
he People’s Heroes will know you’re here by now. They have people watching the club. I think I’ve spotted four agents following us.”

  I closed and opened my fist. The light changed, and we flooded across the street with the rest of the crowd. “And you didn’t think to mention this before? We could have been more circumspect.”

  “They knew you were here the moment you arrived. It’s not their rank-and-file I’m worried about. We can handle them. Just so long as their commander doesn’t show up.”

  “Let us hope,” I muttered. Song Yulan was the Guardian of Shanghai. Big fish, by anyone’s standards. I didn’t want to meet up with anyone who she thought was trouble.

  We hit the curb, and Song Yulan cut crosswise through the crowd, leading us into an open-air promenade: a cross between a futuristic shopping mall, a food court, and a stock exchange on steroids. The press around us lightened to something more in keeping with Times Square on New Year’s Eve. My guide bullied her way past the other pedestrians, the only way to get anywhere in a city like this. She glanced over her shoulder, frowned, and pushed harder. I followed her backward glance. Four men shoved through the crowd. To the untrained eye they were nothing remarkable. Just a few businessmen with someplace to be, like every other businessman in the crowd. But my eye was trained. As was my escort’s.

  “I believe they’ve been instructed to delay us,” Song Yulan said. She stopped, ignoring the curses of the people forced to eddy around us.

  “Are things about to get interesting, Ms Song?”

  “I’d say so, M– Mr Masters.”

  The men closed with us. After my recent experience with Lao Chan, I was careful to keep in mind that there could be more than just these four lurking somewhere in the crowd. Before the men could offer any threat – or even speak – Song Yulan struck out with a series of quick, precise punches at the fellow in the lead. The man blocked. He was good, but no match for my escort. I didn’t have much time to make a more thorough assessment of anyone’s style. The other three were upon us.