Raising Fire

by James Bennett

  For glory. For England.

  Jia sheathed her swords. There was nothing to see here. Nothing she could do. Her mind hardened around her duty, her oath. To serve the Emperor of Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, for all the time to come. All the same, she would not use her weapons this day. The Daoguang Emperor had dispatched her from Canton for one reason only: survey—spy if necessary—and report back. His Radiant Highness, the Son of Heaven, the Lord of Ten Thousand Years, could rely on hearing the truth from her.

  This battle was already over. The war already won.

  In true shape, Jia turned and galloped down the hill, heading for the fishing village and the road north. At her back, the sound of centuries-old ramparts breaking apart in rubble and dust, disintegrating in cannon fire. In screams. In change.

  Not long afterwards, Jia trotted along the Humen docks. An eerie silence hung in the rigging of the boats and skiffs, the peace broken on occasion by the thunder of guns. The villagers had left in a hurry, heading inland for the safety of the forests, and gulls pecked and squawked at the scraps undeterred. The timber rooftops slumped over the street, cold ashes in every hearth, every chimney clear of smoke. Under the stench of dung and fish, a sweetness lingered, a flowery, tarry scent like rotting sap.

  Opium. Death.

  When she heard the strain of music coming from somewhere nearby, shocking and oddly familiar in the still, she instantly shimmered and shrank into human shape, her butterfly swords back in her hands, her braid swinging this way and that as she sought the source of the sound.

  On assassin’s feet, she padded down an alleyway between two houses, pausing at a gate to a courtyard. The red lacquered archway and the dragons, monkeys and roosters carved around the porch beyond suggested a temple, but Jia knew better. The place was sacred to one faith alone. To the gods of yen-yen, the black spice.

  The House of the Sleeping Dragon. Suppressing a snort, Jia read the characters beside the arch. An elegant name for a dive.

  As she padded over the flagstones, past a large copper urn with lily pads floating on the surface, and up to the porch, the music grew louder—a harp, it was the sound of a harp—and the odour of the drug stronger. Crouching to peer over a window ledge, Jia made out the chamber beyond. The familiar sandalwood couches lining the walls. The low tables bearing the usual paraphernalia, the carved pipes of ivory, jade and tortoiseshell. Silver lamps to turn the hard black balls of opium into a sticky gum. Lanterns hung everywhere, unlit at this hour, but clearly betraying the place as a den for smuggler and sailor alike, and the smiling dealers who milked them for silver.

  The man who sat on one of the couches, smoke trailing from his pipe, supported this impression, his long golden hair slicked in the fashion of Manchu noblemen, teased and fixed with elephant dung. His red silk robe, spangled with stars, clung to his willowy frame. He swayed back and forth, this failed refugee, cradling a curved spar of silver in the crook of his arm, one porcelain finger plucking at a ghostly suggestion of strings. Mo shu. Magic. The melody was soft, yet persuasive, an undeniably pleasant strain in the morning gloom.

  The moment that Jia marked the face of the player, her stomach cramped, the mystery unravelling. Emotions warred within her—joy, loss, recrimination, anger. The curtain to the chamber clattered behind her as she stepped through it, announcing her presence.

  “You see?” At once, the man’s palm fell, the strings vanishing like smoke, the music silenced. He looked up at her, a satisfied expression on his face. “It’s true. A fragment of the harp can summon a Remnant. I play but the slightest strain and here you are, awoken from your slumber.”

  Jia sheathed her swords. All the same, when she moved forward, she did so with a modicum of caution.

  “Blaise Von Hart,” she said, as if saying his name stamped his presence more firmly on the room. “It’s really you.”

  It had been, what? Four hundred and eighty-five years? Not that she’d been counting. The last time she’d seen him, he had stood on the altar steps of Mount Song, bidding her farewell. Telling her that he’d soon return. Here he sat, with that same old smile on his lips, as though it had only been a few weeks. Part of her wanted to fly into his arms. Most of her wanted to punch him.

  “You always were perceptive,” he said. “To an extent. You can look into a mirror and see what you want to see. Yet you ignore what’s sitting right under your nose.”

  A frown stole across her brow. Some memories remained painfully clear. Hadn’t she seen her heart’s desire in the Eight Hand Mirror? Yes. Just as the fairy had said she would. Loath to let him detect her shock at his reappearance, she squared her shoulders and crossed her arms, reluctantly reacquainting herself with the cryptic nature of the Xian.

  “This … instrument you play.” Surely that was what he wanted her to notice. “Is that … ? It’s the …” Wonder was creeping into her voice; irritated, she forced it out. “Anyway, you’re mistaken,” she told him. “You sang my name from the walls of Xanadu, did you not? Your lullaby has no power over me. And I have not been sleeping.”

  “No? Haven’t we all been asleep, in our own way?” He waved his pipe, making a moot point of it in the trailing smoke. “Indeed, this is the legendary Cwyth, twice forged and twice broken—or at least a fragment of it. Broken or no, the fragment remains a potent tool. One safer in human hands, no doubt. Why would the Guild or the Chapter want to rouse a Remnant? Both have spent centuries trying to rid us from the earth.”

  Jia snorted. She didn’t quite grasp what he meant, but she didn’t like the sound of it, all the same.

  “If you have something to say, then say it. I have an Emperor to attend.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Nothing.” Like a cloud passing over the moon, his smile was gone. “We signed the Pact. We do our duty, you and I. And I was the one who came to King John with the harp in the first place, wasn’t I? Telling him of the lost magic. Telling him of Arthur and Camlann. Telling him of the Sleep … At Thorney Island that distant summer, I revealed the fragments of this, the mnemonic harp.”

  For a time, a breath between dynasties, Jia had wondered why the envoy had never told her this tale as a little girl. Even later, he hadn’t explained why he had brought the shattered relic in his keeping, the three pieces of the fairy harp, to the famous council in London that had sealed the Remnants’ fate. The harp was the axis on which the Lore spun, giving rise to the music that had lulled them all to sleep. It struck her as odd that Von Hart had neglected to illustrate his part in these matters before, crucial as it was. Oh, she had heard the rumours since and pieced together the facts. As an adult, she had come to learn that the envoy extraordinary, the last fairy in their midst, was far more than a wandering sage, blown by the desert winds into her life. Von Hart had come to Xanadu to speak of kings and pacts and lullabies in the west, but he had always been at the heart of things, a pale seed. Back then, she had trusted his intentions and, ever the faithful student, she hadn’t thought it her place to question him. Now, standing here in the House of the Sleeping Dragon, she wondered whether his sigh was due to shame, some barely concealed regret. Did he think he had made a mistake?

  Before alarm had shuddered all the way through her, Von Hart continued, confirming her fears.

  “We were all young once,” he said. “I believed the Pact could save us.”

  Jia, who didn’t like his talk of rousing Remnants any more than she liked where she thought the conversation was going, said, “Von Hart, I am youxia, Daughter of Empires and Keeper of the Lore.” With a disdain she could barely suppress, she narrowed her eyes on the glowing end of his pipe. “I am sure I have no need to remind you.”

  “Of course not.” He flashed her a look that might have been disarming if not for the calculating gleam in his eyes. “I’m merely an old fool, reminiscing about the Bad Old Days.”

  “Then why do you bring this fragment to me?”

  The fragment of the harp, a yard-long conical spar shaped to resemble a horse’s head—or a fa
bulous beast that was much like a horse—glimmered in his lap, all inlaid ivory and wrought silver. With the same thin smile, he pointed the tip of the thing, sharp as a spear, up at her chest.

  “Because I wanted you to see it,” he said. “Lunewrought bears a particular quality. Easily recognisable, to one in the know. Not to mention bearable, to one untouched by its power. To one … unbound by the spell.”

  “Yet bound by the Lore, as we both are.” It seemed that she did need to remind him, after all. “The Pact we all signed.”

  “Besides,” he went on, as though she hadn’t spoken. “I’m not a believer in locking such things away in some dusty and forgotten reliquary. Relics such as these … well, they have a habit of being discovered.”

  “Like the Eight Hand Mirror,” she said, her tongue a knife. Oh, I have not forgiven you, fairy. “It seems you have a fondness for these trinkets. One might call you a collector.”

  Silently she cursed herself for letting resentment get the better of her. But he sat there so calmly, so unmoved by his broken promise and the long years that had flowed between them, washing them onto different shores where they could only regard each other as strangers.

  “Ah, how astute you are,” he said. “I see the years have soured you.”

  “And my memory of you.”

  It was impossible to conceal her feelings on the matter, her vision blurring with more than just the arcane shimmer of the harp.

  “Touché,” he said, in his crisp Germanic accent. It occurred to her then that his alien nature, his other-worldly origin, was why she struggled so much to read him. Humans, Remnants—with either species she could detect the faintest whiff of an untruth, sometimes even when the speaker believed otherwise themselves. Von Hart remained a blank wall to her. Or perhaps a swirl of shadows, behind a curtain of smoke.

  “Master—Von Hart—why are you here?”

  “Your memory isn’t the only thing that has grown sour,” he told her, his voice dropping into a murmur. “We are not what we were. The Remnants. How long does the fruit remain ripe when cut from the branch?” He shook his head at the rhetorical question. “Oh, you should have seen us in the Old Lands. How silver, how shining we were! When the Fay branded their circles of protection in the earth to hold the dark at bay. No, none of us are what we once were, humans included. Here we stand on the doorstep of another new age, where men fight over the Middle Kingdom as though for sweets at a kinderfest. They are building multiple-barrel flintlock guns. Cannons that can pierce armour at eight hundred yards. There is chaos, Jia. Chaos. There are dark days ahead, child.”

  “I am no child.” Out of all his ominous talk, this was the word that pricked her the most. “I completed my training five hundred years ago. You were there, weren’t you?”

  “Indeed.”

  She remembered that day well and sought to remind him of it, a barb hidden in her tone. But he had been muttering about chaos even then, she recalled. Chaos spreading in the land. A worm gnawing at the heart of things. Wasn’t that why he’d left? Left and never come back.

  Until now.

  “My duty then was the same as it is now,” she told him. “We do what we must to stand against the darkness.”

  “Even a hundred years ago, I would’ve agreed with you,” he said. “This world has always been a candle in the dark, a blazing jewel of gods so old we cannot remember their names. Only their ghosts remain, locked in stone, buried under sand, scattered in the storm. Grand Creation! Bounded by a void both outer and inner. The starlit gulfs of space. The abyss of the nether, the Dark Frontier. And in that abyss, phantoms lurk. Beasts of pincer, tentacle and maw, whose eyes scan the infinite dark, hungry for light, searching for a way in.”

  “I am not afraid of the dark,” she said, flinging out her arms. “And I’m a little too old for ghost stories.”

  “Gut. You will need your courage,” he replied. “Don’t make light of such things. The Lurkers exist and grow in power. Long ago, at the dawn of the Old Lands, when all was silver and bright and new, the Fay stamped their sigils in the earth. Great brandings, wards that stretched from mountain to sea, from ocean floor to the roots of hills, across miles of dunes to the sea again and then beyond, into the wilderness, into ice. In this way, the Fallen Ones sealed the doors of Creation, locking all the paths through the nether. Shutting the darkness out.”

  “Your circles of protection,” she said. Despite herself, Jia looked around the room. Did she expect to see shadows in the walls, a stirring of ghosts? She might not glean the envoy’s intentions, but it was obvious that he was trying to frighten her. Why remained unclear. Soldiers of all descriptions, British, French, Indian and Portuguese, frequented these back-street dens as much as the smugglers, most of them with an oar in the trade, but there had never been a man here as canny, as artful as the one before her. “Do you mean to trick me?” she asked. “Trap me in a fairy bargain? Extract some terrible price for your tale? We were friends once, Von Hart. You were my master. Like a father to me. But I must warn you. I am not the same doe-eyed girl that you left on the altar steps.”

  The envoy looked away at this, dropping his gaze. She could tell that her barb had struck home, but any triumph she might have felt evaporated when he next spoke. “And I am not the same fairy. I weaken, as the circles weaken. As the world weakens, now more than ever.” His fingers danced lightly through the smoke and now, in the face of all her scorn, she could see shadows moving through the walls, the impression of large, hunkering shapes passing over the bamboo screens and the faded paintings, the hint of tendrils, weaving, insectile, sliding over the windows and the furniture. “It’s why I left you,” he said as, with a face as pale as his, she shrank back, seeking the safety of the middle of the room. “For years, I have wandered, from the Arctic Ocean to the ice shelves of Terra Australis, checking on the old boundaries, the old wards. I didn’t find what I hoped to find and I have no news to cheer you. You see, magic is growing sour. Creation rots to the core and the stench of its decay seeps into the void beyond. The ghosts gather, Jia. Gather like flies to a midden heap, seeking the light, the vestiges of the ancient powers like this relic I hold in my hand. The walls grow thin. In time, hungry things will press against them, seeking a way in. Will they catch us sleeping in our beds?”

  Jia shuddered. Outside, beyond the courtyard, the boom of cannons echoed down the streets, bringing her back to the here and now. A far-off rumble of collapsing brick. The roar of an engine, coals stoked by diligent hands. All the noise promised destruction and yet, in that moment, she favoured the stark reality of it over the fairy’s tale of phantoms and death. And … what? What was he getting at? She could barely contemplate the idea.

  “This is dangerous thinking,” she said.

  “I am no more dangerous than the ones out there. The humans. The ruling species. Let us call them what they are.”

  Oh, how old he looked! How pale. The realisation gnawed at her, as if his words had lifted his curtain of smoke, dispelling some of his glamour. His shoulders, a bony line, betrayed his tension, as if he danced on the edge of something he couldn’t name. His sharp eyes snapped around the room, apparently to ward off the shadows, the silhouettes fading now, indistinct shapes thrown by the sunlight through the windows. How could she have thought them otherwise? But Von Hart’s weariness, his sadness, was no illusion.

  “I know nothing of what you speak.” She forced down an unbidden pang of sympathy, her voice a fraught whisper. “Magic circles, shadows, doors … these things strike me as your business, not mine. Still, you came here to share more than a tale and to scratch at old scars. That much I can see. So, tell me. What do you want?”

  He drew deeply on the pipe, his eyes closing as he inhaled. Even so, she felt like he was watching her, weighing her up. When he exhaled, a soft blue ring wreathed its way towards her, the sides bowing out to resemble an octagon. She batted it away with a tut.

  “I mentioned the doors of Creation,” he said. “In the old days
, there were four of them. Think of … think of the Four Guardians of the Celestial Compass, the Turtle of the North, the Tiger of the West, the Phoenix of the South and the Dragon of the East. That kind of thing, ja?” Adopting a teacherly tone, he waited for her to roll her eyes before continuing. “From these watchtowers, these gates, the Fay looked out, guarding the world. And roads led out from these gates, Jia, great silver highways stretching off into the unformed gulfs, into the nether and beyond. Our boldest explorers would return from their voyages with wisdom and treasures untold. And sometimes a Lurker, shackled and chained …”

  Jia’s throat felt dry. “Returned from where?”

  “Why from Avalon, of course. The Isle of the Apples. The Font of All Worlds. The Fay homeland. These days, the gates are no more, the roads shut. Yet one gate remains, opening onto a road that crosses a gulf so deep, so bottomless, that none dare wander there. Even I, with my most powerful spells, can only navigate this territory by manipulating what’s left of the leys and sticking close to earthly bounds. And my crossing must be swift.”

  “You …” She looked at him with renewed wonder. “You would enter such a place?”

  “Twice I have done so,” he admitted. “On matters of life and death. To tear through the skein of reality is no mean feat. The fabric of the cosmos quickly seals and you risk finding yourself on the wrong side of it. Trapped and forever lost. To keep the earthly plane and the nether joined and stable, one would need a gate.”

  “And what of your hungry ghosts? Wouldn’t these monsters flock to such a gate like wild beasts to a watering hole?”

  “Ah, you’re a bright one.” He nodded, impressed. “Indeed they would. Such creatures tend to avoid touching the roads, the leys themselves, repelled by the wards that protect them. But the wards decay and the ghosts grow bold. And these spells will mean nothing once the gate is opened. Unchecked, the Lurkers would pour through it into the earth, bringing catastrophe with them. One would need to … draw their attention away from the gate with an even greater lure. A living source of magic itself …”