by Alyc Helms
“Always wanted to do that.”
“I am going to go back in time and castrate Sa- aaaahhhhh!” My scream rose in pitch and register as Skyrocket took off, before I recalled that perhaps such a howl was a tad unmanly even for myself. I clamped my lips tight and resisted the urge to jerk my legs up every time we passed over a building taller than two stories. My protests aside, I didn’t particularly want to be dropped in the middle of the Huangpu.
Lung Di’s tower curved into the sky with a gentle, serpentine twist, smoke-glass windows glimmering like scales in the nighttime lights of Shanghai.
“That’s quite a light show.”
No mistaking what Tom was referring to. Red, gold, and green explosions burst around the serpentine twist of the tower like a localized storm, breaking my heart with every flash.
“Not our problem,” I yelled over the wind and the noise of Skyrocket’s jetpack. As much as I wanted to stop the battle, I didn’t want to attract Mei Shen’s attention. She’d only stop me from dealing with David Tsung. I spied Song Yulan at the base of the building, next to an open service entrance. “Down there.”
I stumbled as Skyrocket released me without touching down himself. Song Yulan caught and steadied me. Tom streaked off again before I could tell him to hurry.
“Tsung?” I asked Song Yulan as she led me into fluorescent-lit hallways.
“Already at the basement ward. The PHC troops slowed him down a bit.”
“No idea what he wants?”
“Other than to beat you to Lung Di’s sanctum?” She shook her head. “You should save your breath. It’s a long way down.”
We slipped into an atrium. The peaked and faceted glass roof slithered up and around the building’s core like a constrictor. I broke out in a sweat, my little mammalian hind-brain sending all sorts of conflicting signals – freeze, run, hide, fight! – as it bought into the illusion that I was trapped and immobile until the serpent could consume me. For all my bravado, I didn’t feel up to facing off with Lung Di. At least the last time I’d had a plan. Now, I was just a mouse in his coils, scrabbling to get free of something too big to grasp.
Bursts of flame and smoke broke the cobalt darkness of the night sky beyond the atrium. Water rained down and spattered against the glass, breaking the light into fractals of reflection and shadow.
Maybe my death would heal the rift between my children. Bring them together against their common foe. Except I didn’t think Lung Di wanted me dead. He was too complicated a villain for something so straightforward.
“I want an easier nemesis,” I muttered
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. Just wishing for horses.”
Song Yulan didn’t bother to answer, didn’t pause to gape at the battle above. She hurried across the empty lobby, feet silent on the marble. Only her palazzo pants made any sound, the silk swishing against itself. I pulled my hat lower and followed. We rounded a corner to the elevator lobby at the same time a contingent of four guards burst out of one of the bays. I ducked back as they raised their rifles, but I needn’t have bothered. Song Yulan pulled out a prayer strip from somewhere and threw it at them. The curling ribbon of paper burst into a cloud of dandelion fluff that drifted down onto the guards. One of them had a moment to get off a yawn before all four collapsed into a snoring pile.
Song Yulan skirted the pile and avoided the elevators in favor of the stairwell.
The sounds of fighting reached us long before we reached the bottom floor. My thighs and calves burned from clattering down so many flights, and my knee was not terribly happy, but at least we were going down rather than up. Song Yulan didn’t bother with the stairs. She just popped to the bottom of every flight and waited for me with nails clacking against the railing. I was starting to resent her as much as I did Johnny Cho.
I came down hard on the bottom landing; we’d been descending for so long that conditioning made my body expect there would be another step beyond. I caught my stumble before it could turn into a roll. Song Yulan helped steady me.
“Your friend has arrived with Seven Lotus Petals Falling.”
“Go. Get him. I should be fine for a few minutes.”
She arched one brow but faded from view without comment, leaving me in the stairwell with the sounds of fighting coming from the room beyond.
Time to give the PHC a hand.
I opened the door quietly, hoping to have a moment to assess before I was dragged into the fight. David Tsung was surrounded by five men in black suits, but he still seemed to have the upper hand. Several more bodies lay unconscious or dead where they’d fallen, and at least two of the standing fighters were limping. The room had poured concrete floors and the same cinderblock walls and fast-flickering fluorescent lighting as the stairwell. I felt another headache coming on. Centered on the far side of the room stood a portal made of darkness: the entry to Lung Di’s sanctum, ebony frame carved with even darker sigils that had no meaning I could discern beyond being really fucking creepy. I snorted. God, he was such a melodramatic hack.
Now that I had seen it, I could sense that door like an itch in my brain. Calling Shadow here would be a Very. Bad. Idea.
One of the suits noticed me and was wise enough to back off. The others followed his example, and Tsung turned to face me.
“Give it up, Mr Tsung. Mei Shen was your only ally, and she’s busy.”
“Masters.” He paused, perhaps to catch his breath, perhaps calculating the value of giving up my identity. I wasn’t worried. I had no doubt that Mian Zi could ensure the silence of the people in this room – without killing them.
Tsung must have realized the same. He continued without giving me away. “I won’t let you be the one to go in there.”
“Why not? Just give me a good reason.” I stepped around him. Not enough time to go for the door before he could catch me, and that didn’t even get into the danger of crossing over in this place where the level of nasty on the other side of the veil was even worse than the things that waited outside Jian Huo’s realm. “But you could have done that at the meeting at Jiu Wei’s temple, which tells me there isn’t any good reason.”
“You’re quick to assume I’m the bad guy.”
“You left Song Yulan to work for Lung Di. It’s a pretty damning association.”
“Three years ago, there were stirrings among the Shadow Dragons. Something big. Something hidden. I needed to find out what he was up to, and going to him was the only way to find out.”
Three years ago. I’d been gone from China for three years. “You can’t believe he trusted you.”
“My defection was useful to him. My purpose didn’t matter.”
“So you know he’s playing you.”
“I like to think we’re playing each other.”
“And now you’re playing the rest of us. You really expect me to buy all this?”
“I don’t care what you buy. Mei Shen trusts me. You should trust your daughter. Or is it only Mian Zi whom you trust? The rationalist. The boy.”
He might as well have just come out and called me a hypocrite. “And you think an ad hominem attack is going to help you make your case? Have you told Mei Shen whatever it is you won’t tell me?” He flinched. I nodded. “I didn’t think so. Mei Shen doesn’t trust you. She just knows that I shouldn’t go. You’re her unpleasant alternative. My daughter is wiser than us all.”
“And yet you’re ready to ignore her concerns and play into Lung Di’s plans?”
“Because Mian Zi is right, too. He knows that whatever’s going on, I’ll do what’s best for everyone. You’ll do what’s best for you.” We’d stopped circling, each of us equidistant from the door. I waited for his next sally, watched for an attack. Where the hell were Song Yulan and the monk?
“I suppose if that’s how you feel, the meeting was pointless from the beginning.” He tensed, but not for an attack as I’d expected.
My stomach flipped with nausea, and a chill washed over me like a bucket of spiders
dumped over my head – the familiar feeling of shadow being brought forth. No. He wasn’t. Not here. Nobody was that stupid.
Creatures more void than shadow pulled themselves up off the ground into hulking shadow-behemoths. Snakes of darkness slithered out of the pockmarks in the cinderblock walls and dripped down from cracks in the ceiling. The background whispers and chitterings of the Shadow Realms crescendoed in volume somewhere between a cicada swarm and an alien invasion.
The People’s Heroes cried out as the dark shapes formed from nothing. One man cowered in the space between the door and the open wall. Bad call. Tendrils of inky black slid out from under the door, the thin space alongside the frame, the spiral grooves of the hinges. He slapped at them, a grown man and trained fighter as terrified as young Billy Westmont from Potrero Hill. He had more cause. These shadows were sharks compared to the guppies I usually called.
“No,” I whispered, watching the shadows multiply. No matter how many I tried to send back, there would be more. That was the nature of unformed, uncontrolled shadow. I tried anyway, but it was as I’d feared; the shadows eluded me. We were too close to Lung Di’s sanctum. These monsters had another master. A stronger one than either Tsung or myself.
“You are fucking insane.” Even if I shut the door to the stairwell, the shadows would break free and be loosed into Shanghai. So many. So awful.
“And you should probably deal with this rather than call me names.” David Tsung strode to the portal. The sigils on the frame writhed, the darkness of the ward rippling like oil.
I lunged for him, knowing I’d be too late to stop him. I flinched as a flash like sunlight streaked past me and hit Tsung mid-back. He grunted, stumbled, hit the ward–
And bounced back off of it. We collided and tumbled to the ground. The shadows around us hissed and recoiled from the light.
I glanced back over my shoulder. Seven Lotus Petals Falling rushed through the doorway, followed by Song Yulan and a peaked-looking Skyrocket wielding a gun that would be completely useless against the shadow-threat.
I pushed Tsung’s limp form off me, and Song Yulan hauled me to my feet. “Go. Quickly.”
Already, the shadows were amassing, their pulsing tendrils and wisps coming together to form larger, more threatening shapes. “I can’t leave you here with them.”
“Can you banish them?”
I shook my head. “They only answer to one master.”
“Then better that you go and finish this business with the New Wall. Hurry. We’ll hold them here as long as we can.”
Seven Lotus Petals Falling stepped up beside us and tossed a prayer strip in the direction of the man cowering in the shadow of the doorway. The strip uncurled in a burst of warm yellow light, driving the shadows back from the poor man. One of the other men slammed the door shut and grabbed his friend, pulling him into the small knot of defenders forming before the doorway.
“Go!” Song Yulan shoved me towards the portal. “Do not fail.”
TWELVE
Enter the Other Dragon
Then
The hag had been correct. The moment I stepped out of the shadows on the Puxi side of the Huangpu, I knew which building housed Lung Di’s sanctum. It fit into the eclectic skyline of Shanghai’s financial district by standing out: a glass serpent twisting up from the earth to challenge the heavens. The smoked glass sides were limned with violet-blue neon.
Nobody stopped me as I entered the building and headed for the elevators. I wasn’t even sure the lobby guards noticed me. The car took Templeton and me down no matter how many buttons I pushed, so at least one person had noticed me.
I don’t know what I expected when I stepped out of the elevator and into Lung Di’s realm – some dark corner of hell, crawling with vermin and rife with human suffering, I suppose – but reality didn’t comply. A passage from the elevator lobby led to a series of large, water-smoothed caverns. Phosphorescent algae grew along the rivulets of water that trickled down the arching walls. Most people would have thought themselves in pitch blackness, but I had an affinity for darkness. The light from the algae was as bright to me as starlight in the desert. It played off the colors of the stone, jewelling the cavern in glowing viridian greens, cobalt blues, and shadow-spars of deepest amethyst. Templeton and I both drew breath in wonder at the beauty.
“I am happy to see that my realm pleases you.”
The voice emerged from a pocket of shadow so deep that not even my eyes could pierce it. A figure stepped out of the shadow, and I had to force myself not to take a step back. Templeton cowered between my legs.
It was the first time I’d seen him in over a decade, the first time I’d ever seen him up close. During the Zi Gong Hu, I had been so anxious and flustered that I’d hardly registered his looks, beyond a generic handsome. Now I had to revise that impression.
He was taller than most Chinese men I’d met. Long face, high cheekbones – classic Han features. He could as easily have passed for a hero as a villain. He wore a tailored suit of charcoal grey, a crisp, white dress shirt, and a tie of cobalt blue. A tie-tack of smoked platinum winked at me in the dim light of the cavern. I had to do a double-take. The contemporary clothes were so out-of-keeping with the life I led – the world I’d thought he inhabited – that they made me self-conscious. I tugged at the hem of my Shaolin robes, which I’d been wearing for almost two days. I hated that he could make me feel so awkward.
“It’s lovely,” I conceded, then couldn’t keep myself from adding: “Like a shiny apple with a worm inside.”
He surprised me again by laughing – a real laugh with no menace whatsoever. Oh, he was good.
“You mean to be insulting, but it is no more than the truth. A worm. It is not much of an improvement over a pig or a carp. The inventiveness of mortals when it comes to our ancestry never fails to amuse me.” He was smiling.
“Yeah,” I grumbled. “We’re a hoot. Where’s my daughter?”
His laughter ebbed. His dark eyes glittered, but I couldn’t tell if it was from humor or anger, or just a reflection of the algae. Templeton wisely continued to cower.
“Come, Missy.” He stepped closer, nudging the edge of my personal space. I held my ground. “You know that there are formalities that must be observed. You know how we spirits love our little rituals. Won’t you indulge me? Nobody will anymore.”
“I guess you should have thought of that before you became a murdering, thieving psychopath.”
“I believe the proper diagnosis would be sociopath.” He took another step closer, breaking into my comfort zone. Once again I ignored the urge to step back.
“Look.” I was tired of the baiting. “I could care less about your mental issues. I just came for my daughter.”
“You don’t care to know why I took her?”
It was a trap – or a game – but the bait worked. With that question, my curiosity stirred. “Revenge?”
“Against whom? You? You overvalue yourself. Jian Huo?” He lifted his hand to the pearls at my throat. No more holding my ground. I flinched back before he could touch me. Or them. It made him smile. “He knows better. I wonder that he said nothing to you.”
“Fine.” I bit out. “I’ll listen to whatever you have to say. But I want to see Mei Shen first.”
“Of course you do. I expected no less. But it will cost you.”
“I already said I would listen to your megalomaniacal ravings.”
“And therefore I have a vested interest in allowing you to stay as my guest. Access to your daughter will cost you more.”
I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. I crossed my arms to indicate that some things weren’t for sale at any price. “What do you want?”
“You have things of great value with you, I am sure. Gifts from my brother?” He gestured to my throat. “Your pearls, for example. They will suffice.”
That was more what I had expected. I snorted like any haggler confronted with a first offer. “Jian Huo’s pearls? Just to see Mei
Shen? Pfft. I thought you’d have a sense for how these things are supposed to go. You’re blowing your wad too soon. Templeton.” The rat wasn’t cowering quite as much, but he jerked when I brought attention to him. I put my hand out, still holding Lung Di’s eyes. Nothing happened. I broke eye contact to glare at the rat. He held the baubles clutched to his chest.
“Templeton!” I jerked my open palm. His beady eyes darted between me and the dragon, then slowly, reluctantly, he reached out and placed the bit of coral in my palm. I turned to Lung Di.
“Here.” I thrust the coral at him.
“I was hoping for something more.”
“Well, that’s all I’m offering for now. Take it or leave it.”
He looked askance at the knobby chunk of sunrise-colored calcite before taking it. He inspected it with a sneer, then tucked it away in his breast pocket. Templeton whimpered.
“I can see I’ll get nothing in the way of civil conversation from you until you have your way. Very well. Follow me.” He took my arm and placed it in the crook of his. I tried to pull away, but his grip was like steel. I ended up stumbling beside him as we walked through subterranean passageways. Even with my enhanced vision, the pathways were treacherous. Not rocky – they’d been smoothed by aeons of trickling water – but uneven, with hollows and rises hidden by deep shadow. Lung Di’s grace moving over them was preternatural. Even Templeton seemed to be doing OK with his three-pawed trundle. Me, not so much.
The corridor opened into a large cavern. A bank of flat screen monitors covered one cavern wall. I made out the obscured speakers of a – I did a quick count – 6.1 surround sound system. Sleek black couches in leather and chrome sat waiting to swallow me whole, and carpets of black, cobalt, and pale dove-grey covered the floor. Even the cave walls had been carved into strange, abstract murals; in the recessed lighting they swayed and shifted like rich draperies.
A skylight of thick glass loomed above us, revealing a murky sky and wavering stars. It took me several moments to realize that it wasn’t a skylight at all. We were under water, and the “stars” were the lights of the city.
