The Dragons of Heaven

by Alyc Helms

  * * *

  The waiting was horrible, made more so by having to watch the two changelings go through the motions of being my children. Whatever intelligence animated them was rather dim. On the one hand, it made things worse because my own children were so brilliant. To see Mian Zi’s copy confounded by the stick game, to see Mei Shen quiet and deferent – I wanted to shake them, strike them as Jian Huo had been about to. Still, it gave me hope that they would be easy to trick. In the tales, changelings were always so cunning, but, if these two were anything to judge by, then just maybe my folk magic had a shot of working.

  Before my patience could snap, Jian Huo returned with several servants and the items I’d requested. Jiu Wei, Shui Yin, and Wu Wei were with him, the latter looking as if all she wanted was to be left alone to commit ritual suicide. A small part of me wanted to assuage the tortured guilt in her eyes, but a much larger part of me was furious that she’d been so careless with my children’s safety. Part of that fury was misdirected – it was my fault for not taking Mei Shen’s worries more seriously – but it was easier to blame Wu Wei.

  “The nurse has slipped away. She was brought here in repayment of a debt.” Jian Huo glared at the fox-girl. “She expressed an interest in meeting the dragon-children. Si Wei thought her harmless. Apparently, Si Wei was mistaken.”

  Even I shivered at the coldness of Jian Huo’s tone, but I’d already figured most of that out while I waited. My attention was caught by the one unexpected element.

  “Si Wei?” I asked.

  “I have forsaken my claim to my fifth tail. To be so duped, and to such ends, proves that I have not earned it.” The fox-girl managed to look me in the eye. “I am so sorry.”

  My anger ebbed, but rather than dissolve into tears and accept the comfort I knew they would all give me, I beamed a big, fake smile at her and thumped her on the shoulder.

  “What for? Everything’s fine!” I ignored the shocked looks and, quelling my revulsion, I grabbed each pod-child by the hand and led them over to the brazier and the pot of steaming water.

  “Now, my darlings, we’re going to go home, but first we need to brew the parting glass. We’ll drink the beer with our friends, and it will give us all luck until we see each other again.” Which was utter nonsense, but that was the point.

  I hummed as I added ingredients to the pot, half to steady myself and half to keep the song’s instructions in mind. First I broke the eggs, tossing out the whites and yolks and putting the shells into the simmering pot. Next came the bread – little golden bing that didn’t have the crusty bits I needed. I did the best I could, picking out the charred pieces to toss in the pot and discarding the rest. Everyone gathered watched me with rapt fascination, although the adults all shared a similar look of concern over my apparent madness. The children’s jaws were slack, though in the Mian Zi imposter I discerned a bit of growing skepticism.

  I kept humming. Next came the milk. Holding my breath, I skimmed off the curdled film at the top and dumped it into the pot. I gestured for a servant to take the rest of the milk away; I didn’t want to gag from the smell and ruin the entire process. Once the milk was gone, I stirred the unlikely ingredients together. Skepticism now lighted both of the changelings’ eyes.

  “We’re supposed to drink this?” Shui Yin’s sotto-voiced question held similar skepticism, and a level of disgust. Jian Huo and Si Wei both shushed him. With trembling hands, I reached for the final ingredient. Please, I prayed, please let this work.

  I sifted out the chaff from the rice and added it to the pot, throwing aside the whole, unbroken grains. I heard a snort of disbelief behind me and turned to face Pod-Mian.

  “That’s not the way to make beer.”

  “Of course it is!” My smile was at full wattage.

  “No,” he countered. “It isn’t.”

  I floundered. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. So far, his skepticism was similar enough to Mian Zi’s that it didn’t count as an admission of his charade. My smile dimmed. “Maybe it isn’t how you make it here in China, but it’s how we make it back home in San Francisco.”

  Pod-Mian’s eyes narrowed, as if he’d never met a simpler creature than me. “You stupid woman. I’ve traveled the world and lived over two millennia, and I’ve never seen anyone make beer that way.”

  Not to be outdone, Pod-Mei’s voice was similarly dismissive: “I’ve traveled as far and lived as long, and neither have I.”

  This time my smile was real, and full of triumph. I upended the pot, dousing them both with the stinking contents.

  “Eggs and crumbs and milk and grain, bring my baby back again!” I shouted the final line of the song in English, the first I’d spoken in years. The Shadow Realms shifted, regurgitating something back into this world, but other than that, there was little outward sign that my spell had worked. One moment the two pod- children were washed over by the hot, stinking liquid, and the next moment Mian Zi sat clutching his sister in the middle of the steaming muck. Mian Zi blinked up at me, a look of fastidious disgust on his face at the smell and the mess.

  Heedless of the stink, I rushed forward to hug them both, and our little group was soon enveloped in Jian Huo’s arms. Our relief was short-lived. Mian Zi struggled against me, and I pulled back, confused.

  “Mother!” He loosened his hold on his sister and she thunked to the floor, a lifeless wooden doll dressed in Mei Shen’s clothes.

  “Mei Shen?” Terror ripped through me as I reached out to touch rough wood. “Mei Shen!” I snatched up the wooden effigy and dove for the nearest shadow. Mian Zi had come back that way; Mei Shen had to be there too. I didn’t care if it was dangerous, if I might lose myself. I’d had years to grow stronger, and I had to try. I could sense the shadow landscape just across the edge of light. I called out for Mei Shen. All I heard in response were nightmare echoes, and all I saw were shifting shadows.

  Before I could submerge, something yanked me back with physical force. I lost hold of the wooden stock that had been Mei Shen’s double. Jian Huo’s arms circled me in a subduing hold as he hauled me back from the wooden stock sitting in shadow, back into the light of the room. I kicked at him, would have bit him, pulled his hair, anything to get free and go after Mei Shen.

  “Missy, stop!” he said, but it wasn’t his command that stopped me. Mian Zi huddled where he’d been soaked, knees pulled tight to his chest and lips white as he bit them to keep from crying. I wanted to collapse, to shove Jian Huo away and try again, but I had to get my shit together for my son’s sake. I sagged in Jian Huo’s grip. He held me for a moment longer to make sure it wasn’t a feint.

  “Let me go,” I whispered. He did. I dropped to my knees in front of Mian Zi, pulled him into my arms. “I’m sorry.”

  “There was something in the spell, Mother. We could hear you. He laughed and said he only had to send back one of us, and that it would be more fun to keep Mei Shen.” Mian Zi gave a little hiccup, and I realized that as hard as it was for me to lose my daughter, it was harder for him to lose his sister. They had been inseparable since birth. I stroked eggshells from his hair, while Jian Huo stroked mine. “What did you do, Mother? Why didn’t he have to send her back?”

  “It’s an old folk story about making the fairies return children that they’ve stolen away. It goes ‘Eggs and crumbs and milk and grain, bring my baby back again.’”

  Speaking it aloud, I knew where I’d gone wrong. In the story, the faeries hadn’t taken twins. In the story, the mother only pleaded for the return of one child.

  “You said baby.” Jian Huo said, confirming the failure I’d already realized. “He was only forced to return one of them.”

  “Who?” I asked. Who could wish harm to my children? Stupid question, but I’d had a rough morning. Jian Huo waited for me to connect my own dots. “Lung Di.” The insulted dragon had come home to roost.

  “We’ll get her back,” Jian Huo promised. “I’ll get her back.”

  Sitting there, rocking m
y son back and forth in the mess of my partially successful spell, I could only worry how much damage Lung Di would do in the meantime.

  * * *

  Whereas before time had flown, now it crawled. Jian Huo spent every day meeting with allies and friends across the breadth of China, looking for some way to force his fallen brother to parlay. Mian Zi and I spent our days in the room he’d shared with his sister at Jiu Wei’s Shanghai temple. We passed the time talking or reading or playing desultory matches of wei-qi, which Mian Zi let me win. Often I would sit holding him close and turning the dull woodcarving knife over and over in my hands while we both tried not to stare at Mei Shen’s empty bed. I was powerless to do anything for my daughter. All I could do was hold my son and hope Jian Huo’s allegiances were enough to let him get her back before I did something stupid.

  Again, I forgot to take into account draconic time scales.

  I snapped three months after Mei Shen was taken. Jian Huo had returned after an absence of several days, and he was describing to me as best he could the complex network of guanxi he was massaging to win Mei Shen’s freedom. It sounded like it would take years to get our daughter back, and I said so.

  “These are the ways of our kind,” he explained, as if I hadn’t been living in an eternal spirit-realm for the better part of my adult life. “Care must be taken to preserve the balance of power. Such arrangements take time.”

  He reached out a hand to comfort me, but I jerked away.

  “Jesus, does everything always have to be about face and guanxi? Can’t you people just do things for each other because it’s the right thing to do? Why does every action and friendship here have to be reduced to use-value? No wonder Marx called it Oriental Despotism!” I slammed my fist into a support beam, letting the pain soak away some of my white-hot fury. Better to hurt myself than continue lashing out at him.

  Jian Huo regarded me for a moment, and then demonstrated that not all interactions were social economics by taking my throbbing hand and pulling me to him. I curled into his arms and turned my face to his chest, wishing I could find comfort in hiding from the world. But I couldn’t, not as long as that monster had Mei Shen.

  “It didn’t take Lung Di this long to arrange Mei Shen’s kidnapping.” My last sally was weak, barely a whisper.

  “It took him twelve years, and I am only beginning to uncover the web of alliances he made to accomplish it. The breadth of his power is… unnerving. There are many who would now move to protect him, because to do so protects their own interests. If I do not take similar care to retrieve her, the results could be disastrous. The balance of power between my siblings must be maintained for the good of all realities.”

  Jian Huo rarely made mention of the role that the Nine played in shielding reality from what was outside – their true purpose in the grand scheme of things. I was so concerned over my daughter that I ignored the import of anything else he had said and went straight for the bit that concerned me.

  “Twelve years?” I pulled back from the cocoon of his arms, shaking. “No. Please. There must be some quicker way. Some Gordian-Knot solution. Why all the machinations? Why can’t you just round up a posse and take her back?”

  “Unless he is a great fool, my brother holds Mei Shen in his own realms. No mortal creature may enter or leave such a place without his permission, just as none may enter or leave Huanglong without mine. And for all that she is my daughter, she is also your daughter. She bears mortal blood.”

  “What can we do, then?”

  “I could force him to relinquish her, but in doing so I would offend many of our mutual allies. Or I could offer him something in trade, but anything he deemed acceptable would strengthen him and weaken me.”

  “And that matters more to you than the safety of our daughter?”

  Jian Huo sighed and released me when I tugged away. He folded his hands into his sleeves, face gone expressionless. “I have lived a long time, Melissa Masters, and my relationships with the other spirits are deep and complex. I will recover our child, this you may trust, but it will take time.”

  “And by that time, after all the time she has spent with your brother, what are the chances that she’ll still be our little girl?” I asked, not expecting an answer. The ghost of a flinch passed across his face, and the satisfaction that welled inside me was warm and ugly. I turned and stormed out of the temple before I could do more damage.

  * * *

  A dozen years in Minshan had taught me to appreciate the panoramic vistas of nature. Now, staying in Shanghai, I felt trapped. The gardens outside Jiu Wei’s temple were just a tiny stamp of green among lights and noise and towering buildings. I had no desire to brave the crowds I suspected teemed outside the garden walls. I sat on the bench at the back of the garden.

  The rains of Jian Huo’s first arrival had frozen into snow – not the magnitude of the blizzards we got in Sichuan, but a cold dusting of hoarfrost that bleached everything in the garden to bone. The bare branches of the trees were black against the white snow, reminding me of my daughter’s dark hair and pale skin. The sky was an improbable blue, almost as blue as the Masters family eyes that Mei Shen had inherited from me against all logic of genetics. All it needed was for me to prick my finger and drop some blood on the frost at my feet for the fairy-tale trope to be complete. But nothing in nature could reveal my daughter’s true charm: her ready laugh, her adventurous spirit, her smiling mischief. Also, Mei Shen’s lips weren’t blood red; they were cherry-blossom pink. Spring was a long way off.

  The switch from Snow White to Persephone was no comfort. It terrified me, the thought of what Lung Di, the Underground Dragon, could do to her while she was in his keeping. Terrified me more to realize that by not acting fast enough, by going through official channels and petitioning the gods, Demeter doomed her daughter to live six months out of every year with a rapist husband. I had used to find the whole Hades/Persephone myth kind of sexy. Not anymore.

  I toyed with the nurse’s carving knife, turning the blade in my hands and fuming over my own impotence. A scrabbling at the edge of sight and hearing distracted me. I looked up, trying to place it. At first I couldn’t see anything, but then my eyes caught movement from one of the shadows beyond the brick archway that led to the world outside the walled temple garden. A gnarled hand beckoned me. Glancing around to make sure nobody – namely Jian Huo – was watching, I gathered my robes close and made my way across the garden.

  Some thread of caution kept me from entering the alley. The figure hunched in the doorway across from the garden entry was the nurse who’d stolen my children. She wore a hooded cloak that disguised her and let her blend into the shadowed opening, but that did little to disguise what she was. The apple-granny mien had rotted; it was pinched and withered now. Why the hell hadn’t I paid attention to Mei Shen’s misgivings?

  “Where’s my daughter?” My voice shook. I wanted to sound cool, in command, but what was the point? We both knew the truth.

  “Come closer,” she beckoned. “Come let us speak.”

  I approached the boundary of the archway, but then good sense asserted itself. Jiu Wei’s temple might have some of the same protections as Jian Huo’s realm. “You can just say whatever you have to say while I stand right here.”

  The old nurse chuckled and settled back into the doorway. She lowered the cowl of her cloak, and I caught a flash of jade in her ratty hair. My grip on the knife tightened.

  “Told him you wouldn’t fall for something that obvious, but my master insisted it was worth a try.” Her tone was wry… conversational, even. Here I was, brewing up a good pot of fury, and she spoke like we were having afternoon tea.

  “Oh, so we’re going to be cordial?”

  “Would you rather we were insulting?”

  “I’d rather rip out your heart with a meat hook, but in the absence of that, sure, I’ll be cordial. Where’s Mei Shen?” I met her gaze and waited for her to introduce the terms of the game. I didn’t have to wait long.r />
  “Just like that?” she sighed and tsk-ed. “You know it won’t be so easy. Lung Di sent me here, it is true, but I’ve not seen your children since I took them. I’m only his emissary to places where he is not welcome.”

  “And what message were you sent to bring?” I asked, entering the game.

  “Lung Huang has nothing that Lung Di wants. But you might. My master says he will only parlay with you, but only if you come alone, and only if you bring an offer worth his time. Something of true value.” The old woman’s smile at the end of the speech made me wish for my meat hook solution. Instead, I drew out the conversation.

  “What guarantee do I have that Lung Di won’t just take me captive too, or that he will honor anything we agree to?”

  “None.” She cackled. “But it’s the only chance you have of recovering your daughter, so you’ll take a gamble and do it.”

  My eyes narrowed. I hated her cackling. I hated her certainty. She reached out a gnarled hand, expecting me to accept no matter the terms.

  “Go to hell.” The shocked look on her face was small satisfaction. I turned and stalked back into the gardens before I weakened enough to take her hand. Perhaps if I told someone she was there, they could catch her before she got away.

  “If you change your mind, just come across the river,” she called after me. “Lung Di’s sanctum is easy enough to find.”

  My steps faltered. I looked back over my shoulder. “You’d tell me where it is?”

  The hag sank into the shadows, so that even I had trouble tracking her. “As I said, it is hard to miss. Just look up.” And she was gone.

  I continued into the temple, chewing on the old woman’s poisoned bait. She knew where Mei Shen was. I had given the jade combs to Mei Shen as protection. The magic of that gift was like Dorothy’s silver slippers; no-one could take them from her unwilling. Mei Shen must have known her nurse was being sent as a messenger, but the comb was Mei Shen’s message to me. The hag knew where my daughter was.