Jade Dragon

by James Swallow

  “Can’t ever lose control,” Ko muttered. “Can’t ever become like those animals!”

  “And you won’t,” Feng was becoming smoke, melting around him. “We won’t. Let me in, Ko. Let me in.”

  A lifetime of restraint. Never once had Ko allowed himself to slip, to fall into the easy path that so many of his friends had taken. He had rejected it always, the moment of belief becoming crystal-hard when Chan had informed him, grave-faced and quiet, that his father had been murdered. The child he had been vowed never to have a waking moment where it wasn’t him in charge, in control. But now he felt Feng’s soul pressing into him, filling his body like water into a bottle.

  Trust me!

  I do, Ko replied, the answer surprising him.

  The Mask grabbed a handful of the boy’s jacket and dragged him off the floor. Ko’s eyes snapped open and what Monkey King saw there made him hesitate. A new and iron-hard determination, ancient and inviolate.

  The katana spun in an arc and took off the guardian’s hand at the wrist.

  “It’s been a while since I cut meat,” snarled the youth, a strange dissonance in his words. “But you never forget how it’s done.”

  The bodyguard fell back, momentarily confused, and the youth attacked with skilful, aggressive motions. Monkey King’s mask broke with a bone-snap crack as the polycarbonate samurai blade sank into his skull, cutting clear across the orbit of his right eye.

  Old Yee hobbled from the cracks forming in the street, his barrow falling into a void spitting with noxious smoke. The noodle seller tripped and fell. Overhead, in the low and hateful clouds, he glimpsed something huge and monstrous. A tail the size of a metro train clipped the hippo Centre in passing, and the old man died in the rain of glass and concrete.

  The quarrel lodged between the second and third of Heywood Ropé’s ribs, to no ill effect. Fixx discarded the crossbow and vaulted away from the Josephite’s attack, rolling and drawing the SunKings. Selecting three-round bursts, he followed Ropé across bookshelves, blowing fists of confetti from the rare and antique volumes.

  “Philistine,” snorted the killer. Ropé jerked his wrist and the blade of the ghost knife shot out on a wire, hissing furiously. Fixx fired at the thing, but it wove around the bullets and cut dozens of shallow nicks before retreating. He moved and went to fully automatic; a metre of yellow flame shrieked from the muzzles of the pistols as he unloaded the rest of the magazines. High-impact armour-piercing rounds punched chunks from stonework and blew out windows as the Josephite evaded. The op adjusted aim on the fly and found his target. Bullets ripped away great ragged lumps of Ropé’s left arm and shoulder, drawing out a howl. The breeches on the SunKings locked open, spent and fuming. Fixx let the empty guns fall from his hands and went for his sword.

  Ropé came hard as the monomolecular blade whispered free of its scabbard. Edge met edge with a glass-shattering impact, hot metal sparks stinging. They fought sword to knife, strike and feint, lunge and riposte.

  Ropé made a snake hiss and Fixx glimpsed a momentary ghost-glitter of silver sunglasses, of burning hellfire behind his eyes. The op pressed the hilt of the sword forward and twisted it, baring his teeth. Fixx didn’t much like holdout weapons—unsportsmanlike, really—but there was a time and a place for that sort of behaviour. Like now.

  The one-shot ScumStopper Xtreme hard-jacketed slug in his sword hilt discharged into Ropé’s chest with such force that it blew the man back into a hanging d-screen, bringing the flickering console down upon him. Burnt plastic and cordite gusted through the air.

  Fixx limped to the young executive handcuffed to the oak lectern. “Mr Lam?”

  “Fuh-Frankie,” came the reply.

  He tapped the cuffs with the sword. “Hold out your hands, Frankie.”

  “Wha–?”

  The sword whistled through the air and the casehardened chain split beneath the blade, scattering links across the stone floor. Frankie swallowed hard and pulled himself away.

  Fixx nodded at the room. “You know a way outta here?”

  The exec’s face telegraphed his terror even before he could give it voice. Fixx turned on his heel, bringing up the sword as a shape exploded from the wreckage of the screen. Ropé flew across the room, pressing the ghost knife down in his grip. The red orchard of slash-wounds across the sanctioned operative made him seconds too slow.

  “Stab stab stab stab!” Ropé collided with him, burying the ritual weapon in Fixx’s torso over and over, fast as lightning. He felt the sword tumble from his nerveless fingers, felt the velocity of the attack shove him across the tiles. Blood slicked the floor, and Fixx’s chest and gut contracted as the auto-routines built into his armour kicked in, dosing him with shots of TraumaNix.

  Ropé hazed into view. “This amusement pales, pagan. I must get back to my work.” The ghost knife’s blades shifted and changed, fractal edges turning like origami razors.

  In the Yip apartment, there was the whispering hiss of cutting flesh. The boys had made a good job of slicing out each other’s vocal chords, and now they were painting a pentagram in their mother’s blood. Through the heat-hazed windows, the cilia of a starborn thing followed them about the grisly work.

  The Jade Dragon grew, its tail looping through the streets, crossing over the bay and back. The demon embraced the waves of hate and desire on the air, tasted the foetor of the blue as it rose up in the minds of its food-thralls. Flexing its muscles for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, it released experimental thrusts of power, warping local pockets of reality. It picked a man at random and had him explode into a horde of questing tenticular masses, probing and penetrating through the corridors of a tower block. In the dark night overhead, the King of Rapture disintegrated orbital spy satellites from a dozen different multinats; across the world, the operators jacked into them in Novograd, Seattle, Kyoto, Dublin and Sydney died instantly from serotonin overdoses. Transcontinental airliners vectored straight into the runways at SkyHarbor, swan-like fuselages turning into balls of fire and steel as the flight crews tore each other’s hearts out. The Dragon’s influence washed out across the water, sinking junks and sampans, forcing the simple bio-brain of the Macao hydrofoil ferry to drown itself. These things it did without really thinking about them, these small mischiefs easy like breathing for the beast.

  Ise made it to the doors of the church just as Father Woo was pushing them shut. The priest held a shotgun like he knew how to use it. The go-ganger thought the padre was going to leave him out there, out on the street where the shadowy crawling things and maddened people ran riot; but then the priest beckoned him sharply. Ise threw himself through the doorway as the gun barked, killing something behind him.

  It was only a fragment of the Lord of Lusts, a mirror-piece of the Master of Ecstasy’s monumental horror; but still the Jade Dragon boiled with inchoate power, the bubbling potency of unbridled animal hungers spilling into the world. The city reeled and went mad. Those who saw the beast in dreams over the past weeks gave it their minds, never understanding that to believe in it only made Him more real. Those who had been fortunate enough to avoid the taint spread by Tze’s Cabal were fortunate no more. There was nowhere in Hong Kong where the touch of the blue did not reach. Each mind formed another link in the chain, released more caged passions and horrible secrets. Millions of people found themselves hating and loving, needing and yearning for bloodshed and lust.

  With great care, Alice nailed her feet to the floor and arranged it so she could seat herself on the bed. She drew the last of the cabbalistic shapes on the milk-pale flesh of her forearm with the shard from the mirror, then took the gun and rested the muzzle on her lower lip. The weapon tasted of oil and steel, and she had to fight back a gag reflex. Teasing the end of the barrel with her tongue, she squeezed the trigger and waited for heaven.

  The song pealed around her mind, never-ending, looping in an infernal circle. Juno tried to stop herself from speaking the words, but they forced themselves from her mo
uth, the unstoppable meme washing out across the audience.

  “We adore you, Juno!” came the screams. “You complete us! We love you!”

  They echoed her, line for line, beat for beat, a flock of worshippers growing by the second as more minds in the city fell into the power of the Jade Dragon. The throbbing subliminals in the backbeats and the flickering hypno-commands in the screens made slaves of them, and Juno was at the core of it. Floating camera drones and emplaced lenses followed her every movement across the stage, holding her and broadcasting the image citywide.

  She was the catalyst, at the heart of the expanding reaction. For every person who joined in the chorus, for each mind that willingly surrendered itself to the touch of the Z3N, the creature’s manifestation became stronger. Against her will, Juno led the city into a hive mind designed and directed by the will of the beast. It was circular, a self-reinforcing metaconcert—and soon it would reach a critical mass of human thought and make the Jade Dragon fully real in the material plane.

  Juno touched the very faintest corona of the demon-thing’s psyche, and it sickened her beyond all words. She understood only that to pierce the veil of dimension from the Outer Darkness where it originated, the beast needed believers. It could only become tangible when men and women gave themselves over to the desires that it embodied, the blood-soaked, conflicting needs to procreate and to destroy.

  As the lyrics came around again, Juno saw the flesh-city and the glass monsters of her waking dreams forming, and rejected them with all her might. “I’m the quiet muh-mind in-inside,” she stammered. “Pretty… pretty…” Her chest tightened, the muscles rebelling. She tasted blood in her mouth and screamed, fighting the compulsion, forcing the words to shift and change.

  “I’m the lying fiend inside!” she spat wildly, “hateful voice! I’m the bloody smile! Touch my thoughts and die, there’s nowhere you can hide!”

  Juno clutched at her skull as spikes of pain wracked her. The singer’s piercing shriek was repeated by the first fifteen rows of the concert audience, each of them falling into psychic synchronicity with her.

  “I won’t sing!” she snarled, tearing the microphone tab from her cheek. “I won’t help you any more!” The camera drones closed in, curious at her sudden change in behaviour.

  Juno’s angry cries died in her throat as the brilliant sodium lights of the stage were snuffed out, plunging the platform into blackness. She saw a shimmering curtain fall, cutting her off from the audience, and suddenly the screens blared out new tunes, picking up and repeating the words to “Touch” over and over. The live feeds from the cameras were abruptly severed.

  From the deep shadows of the wings emerged Mr Tze, his face bright with rage. “You dare defy me?” he roared, his voice beating at her over the blare of the music. “You vat-grown, clockwork bitch. You’re just a grandiose sexclone, a fuck-toy for my bidding.” He brutally backhanded her. “Sing, damn you. I order you to sing. Infans simulare! Infans simulare.”

  “No more.” she cried, her words strangled and sobbing. “I won’t do it.” Mad elation filled her, a sudden sense of lunatic freedom.

  Tze spat and drew his sword. “Very well. The King is coming, it is too late to stop it now. If you will not obey him, you will bleed for him.”

  “Listen to me!” she screamed at the cameras, begging her fans to hear her. “The Jade Dragon will destroy you all! Don’t let it in! If you ever loved me, don’t—”

  Tze’s ceremonial blade flashed in the spilled light from the screens and opened her throat to the air. Juno staggered backwards and fell, hands at her neck, struggling to hold in a flood of rich, hot crimson.

  There were bright flickers of pasts and lives that she had not experienced, the death and death and death of other Juno Qwans, an endless loop of them, lives of engineered soulnessness bereft of human warmth. Laughter. Applause. The punishing glare of fame. In the grey haze, her mind collapsed to a single point, to the touch of a man’s hand on her face and the look of utter truth in his eyes. Francis…

  Voiceless, she collapsed and died there on the stage, a blossom of red expanding about her.

  “The songbird is silenced,” snorted Tze. Above, the unblinking glass eyes watched and recorded.

  Only the goggles over Professor Tang’s eyeballs had stopped him from gouging them out when the green fires fell from the air, but now he was pleased, giddy with the sight as he raped the corpse of the lab assistant he had shot in the stomach. All the secret things, all the keys to the monstrous desires in his head were free, and he had no more need of human values.

  Fixx felt his breath coming in shallow, brutal gasps. There was blood all around him, making the stone tiles slippery. His vision was misty, as if everything around him was made of felt. He tasted copper. The sanctioned operative made his hands work with fierce concentration, fishing in his coat pocket for a weapon, a touchstone. His fingers found a ragged tear in the kevleather and nothing else. With effort, Fixx pushed himself off the floor, leaning up.

  “Looking for something?” asked Ropé. The Josephite had the ghost knife held up high. He tipped back his head and let drops of red fall from the shifting blades on to his tongue. The killer came closer, nodding at the bones scattered on the floor. “Lost your precious things? How sad.” With exaggerated care, Ropé brought his shoe down on the fetishes and ground them into powder. “All gone. Now how will you know what to do, Joshua? You’ll have to make your own mind up for once.”

  Fixx had a dagger in his boot, but it might have well been on Mars. Agony churned in his gut as he dragged himself backwards, pressing against a jade pillar. Dimly, he was aware of a sour breeze sluicing in through the broken windows, heavy with death-scents, sirens, singing and the noises of human despair. A rough chuckle escaped his lips. “This… not goin’ exactly how I planned.”

  “You had a plan?” sneered Ropé.

  “Nah,” admitted Fixx, “always been a kinda make-it-up-as-I go sorta guy.”

  Ropé toyed with the knife, flicking a glance at Frankie where he cowered by a console. “Perhaps there’s something to your ridiculous religion, Joshua. You might be right. Perhaps your loas did bring you here for a reason—just not the one you thought it was.” He bared teeth. “You’re here to die, Joshua Fixx, to fail. Look.” Ropé pointed at the d-screens that were still functioning. The displays were fed from cameras at the Peak. He saw the audience, the weeping black skies, the stage.

  “Juno!” Frankie gasped, staggering to his feet. “Oh god, no.”

  The audio feed had been damaged in the firefight, and no sound was relayed; but they saw the anger ripple across the idol singer’s face, her sudden surge of rebellion. Frankie’s heart leapt as she flung away her microphone, freeing herself. “I knew you could do it!” he shouted. “Run, Juno!”

  Ropé rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you shout a bit louder, Francis? She might even hear you… ”

  The live feed shifted as the stage went dark. For a second the cameras dithered, shifting to image-enhanced mode. In the corner of the display, the Live Feed overlay changed to Broadcast Suspended.

  “Oh dear,” mocked the Josephite. “The slave has ideas above its station. Not that it matters, too little too late.”

  He could not tear his eyes from the screen as Tze, resplendent in the cloak and finery of a Qin warlord, came into frame and berated the girl.

  “Frankie,” said Fixx, “look away. Don’t… ”

  The ghost of Tze’s blow made Frankie choke; he felt it as keenly as if it had been him that was struck. He saw the sword, and shook his head. “No, no, no, no—”

  Juno looked into the camera, directly at him. He read her lips. If you ever loved me, don’t—

  “No!” Frankie’s body went rigid with rage and shock. Juno fell away, life ebbing from her eyes, crashing to the stage.

  Ropé made an amused noise. “Your turn now Joshua. Take solace in knowing that your vitae will be put to good use. I’m going to paint a mural with it.” The knife
fell and Fixx caught it, pushing all his strength into holding the razor tip away from his throat.

  Ropé licked his lips. “Don’t fight it. Believe me, this is a kindness I do for you… I’m sparing you the endless agonies of living in a world where the Dragon rules. ”

  The blade pressed into Fixx’s skin; he felt his strength ebbing, and at the corner of his vision he saw movement. A flash of wet steel.

  “Any last words?” said Ropé, his breath hot and pungent.

  “Yeah,” Fixx coughed. “Look behind you.”

  “Bastard!” screamed Frankie, and sank Fixx’s sword into the Josephite’s back. The blade punctured Ropé’s heart and burst from his chest.

  Fixx kicked him away and fell back, forcing himself to his feet. Frankie was gasping, tears streaking his face. Black blood covered his hands and he stared down at them, shaking.

  Incredibly, Ropé was not dead. The ghost knife was forgotten as he fingered the blade, trying in vain to get a grip on the sword and pull it out.

  Fixx hobbled to him and yanked on the hilt. “Mine, I think.” The sword came free and oily fluids spurted from the entry and exit wounds.

  “Nuh…” Ropé twittered, eyes misting. “No.”

  “Yeah,” said the operative, and with effort Fixx gathered up the Josephite and hurled him through the broken window.

  Ropé fell a hundred storeys, plunging into darkness and fire.

  “Tze.” The executive turned at the sound of his name to see the ragged thief crossing the statue park. He paused before the idling spidercopter. There was something different about the boy, a glint in his eye that had been absent there in the car park when he blundered in with guns blazing. A certainty, he decided. A surety of purpose.

  “I’ll say this for you, lad. You’re a survivor.” Tze eyed the bloodied katana. “My servant?”