Raising Fire

by James Bennett

  Maybe Ben could turn that to his advantage. Somehow. He had to try.

  “Why?” Mauntgraul said. “Oh, fear not. I will have the harp. You will lead me to it and then I will kill you.” He tipped his head, his tone remaining light, conversational. “But you make me curious. What do you care if the Sleepers awaken? You see the worthlessness of the Pact, do you not? In all this time, have you never wished to see them again, your kindred? This conflict within you does you no good. Perhaps you should’ve chosen the right side.”

  This time, the White Dog spoke to Ben’s hope, his secret yearning. Perhaps the yearning of all Remnants. An end to hiding. An end to loneliness. The Remnants awakened, walking the earth. Perhaps there was still a chance. A chance for—

  No. He knew better than that.

  “I chose a side. Eight hundred years ago,” he said. “This isn’t the way. What do you think will happen? You think the Sleepers will wake up all smiles and handshakes after so long underground? You’ve seen what a giant can do to a city. A flight of dragons. A horde of trolls.” He could picture it all too easily. This time, he wouldn’t be watching timber houses along an old bridge go up in flames. He’d be watching goblins drag humans into the mines, manticores ripping up power lines, witches getting their warty hands on missiles. “I swore an oath. Break it now and … Maunt, there’ll be a war.”

  Mauntgraul grinned. “Rather a war than certain extinction.”

  Ben tried to argue, but the White Dog was changing, his human physique losing cohesion. His shoulders bubbled and bulged, his neck extending, scales sliding over his flesh. In moments, his wings fanned wide, eclipsing the panorama.

  A claw stretched out, closing around Ben. Jia was on the move again. It was time to follow.

  Ben cried out. But his anger wasn’t just for the dragon. He was thinking about his vision, his flashes of the Ghost Emperor, blazing in some recess of his mind.

  And the voice, that voice, calling him from beyond.

  This time, he’d recognised it.

  It belonged to Von Hart.

  NINETEEN

  A day or so later, Mauntgraul reached Hong Kong.

  Across the bay, the city rose in glittering splendour, her skyscrapers thrusting into the night. Clutched in the White Dog’s claw, Ben felt beaten and bruised, at the limits of his endurance, but the view couldn’t fail to impress him. The neon climbing frame of the Bank of China building. Jardine House, with its innumerable round windows. The dazzle of the Two IFC Tower soaring over all, rising from behind the bulb-strung piers of the Star Ferry terminal. The dense urban wall flickered in a myriad of colour and light, a fairy palace in the water, illuminating the wooded peak that sheltered the city and the harbour. Few cities shone as bright as Hong Kong. From a hotchpotch of news, Ben recalled that the former British colony currently hovered in an opulent limbo, rendered a special administrative zone, not yet under the full control of the Chinese government. The city was a stolen gem of the Opium Wars, returned to the mainland with sad and reticent fingers.

  But the deep black of Victoria Harbour failed to soothe him. The neon hoard waiting below couldn’t allay his dread. Around his throat, the lunewrought collar was a cold vice, crackling with energy, drawing him and his deathly ride down towards a broad concrete wharf in Kowloon.

  Ship containers, mooring winches and forklift trucks spread out under Mauntgraul’s claws. The night, cool in the wake of a recent typhoon, held a trace of humidity, the first breath of the coming spring. Diesel, trash and fish competed in Ben’s nostrils as he swooped down from the heights. Thankfully, the dockyard was empty at this hour, the tanker moored against the stacked maze of containers and the towering cranes unmoved by the descent of a twelve-ton dragon. It was almost midnight, by Ben’s reckoning. And this was a place accustomed to noise. The city rumbled on, sleepless, across the water.

  It was also a place accustomed to dragons. Nine of them, to be precise. The hills of the New Territories had been named after eight of the beasts and an emperor, if Ben remembered correctly. Kowloon Peak, Tung Shan, Tate’s Cairn, Temple Hill, Unicorn Ridge, Lion Rock, Beacon Hill, Crow’s Nest and Emperor Bing sheltered the famed peninsula and harbour. But none of the populace, he knew, would expect to see real dragons. And the emperor who waited ahead was anything but human.

  The wharf spread out in a flat concrete rhombus from the western tip of Kowloon, a few miles from where the Pearl River met the South China Sea. It would’ve made a reasonable landing site, if Mauntgraul had got the chance.

  Too late, Ben registered the growing intensity of the collar, chill against his throat. Rousing from a half-daze, he picked out the figure standing below and shock pricked him to alertness.

  Braid weaving in the midnight wind, Jia stood on the edge of the wharf, looking out over the water. In human form, she made a lithe silhouette, a thirty-something-year-old woman returned to her homeland. How much, he wondered, had she seen change? Over the years, a city where a village used to stand. A highway dissecting a northern plain. A sky full of machines. He knew he was one of the few who could empathise with her. Whether that meant he could reach her or not, time would tell.

  Hearing the snap of wings, Jia turned and looked up at them, and even from a distance Ben could see her weary resolve. The dust of her journey covered her suit. She must have known of her pursuit; the stolen harp would’ve told her as much, jangling across the miles. Unable to shake off the White Dog, she had decided to stop and face them.

  The tense line of her spine brought all Ben’s fears flooding to the surface. He shouted a warning, but it came too late. In the crook of her elbow, the sin-you cradled the fragments of the harp, their silvery light shining on her face.

  Ben didn’t care for her expression. There was desperation, yes, but also the same covetousness that haunted Mauntgraul’s visage, the sickly glimmer drowning out both resistance and reason. It remained faint, a slow poison, but it was enough to tell him that the harp had Jia in its grip. When her fingers plucked at the soundboard, conjuring spectral strings, her movements were fluid, but somehow automatic. As if the artefact guided her hands.

  “Jia! Don’t!”

  Puissance looped out from the fragment, an argent shudder troubling the air. Mauntgraul roared—was it laughter?—as the ripples of light washed over him, mirrored in his ivory scales. He greeted the music as one basking in reunion, in exquisite pain, his claw clenching, squeezing Ben’s ribs and choking off his cry. The dragon’s muscles spoke of resistance, but whether because he’d been stripped of his fragment of the harp or because he was weakened from his journey, his dive for the artefact did him no good.

  Collar burning his flesh, Ben felt the scales around him bubbling and seething, serpentine brawn giving way to human guise, caught and bound by the dissonant magic.

  Fifty feet up, Mauntgraul shuddered. His wings folded inward, collapsing sails. His snout melted away, his pale flesh blushing, moulding to form a grinning face. A thrashing knot of tail and claws, his body rapidly dwindled in size. With a gasp, Ben found himself released, but he took no joy in his freedom. In Human form, the White Dog and he tumbled from the sky, smacking into the concrete of the wharf.

  Minutes passed, stretched out over a rack of pain. The stars wheeled, bleeding fire. Having done its work, the harp fell silent.

  Ben groaned. He spat out blood. Nursing his ribs—more than one of them cracked—he clambered onto his hands and knees, one of his legs sprawled out behind him, twisted and broken. Healing. A few feet away, Mauntgraul lay, a dark mess of limbs face down on the wharf. But Ben’s eyes were only for Jia.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” she told him. “Please. Don’t make me.”

  “We’re as good as dead anyway,” he said. “Your words. Not mine. If you re-forge the harp … Jia, you’ll start a war.”

  “Look around you, Ben. We’re already in the middle of one. A war of attrition. And we are losing.”

  He found that he couldn’t argue with this, his blood t
asting sour in his mouth. He could tell that she was crying; the harp made her sorrow plain, silver on her cheeks. But he couldn’t tell her that she was wrong.

  Still …

  “We swore an oath. All of us. There has to be a better way.”

  But the Lore is broken. You know that. All bets are off.

  “Then show me.” She was shouting now, the fragments trembling in her arms. “Show me as the envoy showed me. I can save them. Don’t you see? There is still time. I can save them all!”

  “Who? The Remnants?” But he guessed that he already knew. In her cell at the Invisible Church, her soft yet pointed question had led him towards a likely conclusion, and she confirmed it now, the wind carrying her bitterness to him.

  “You might not remember your parents. I will honour mine.”

  “Oh yeah? At what cost? The death of thousands? Jia—”

  “Better to die for the truth than live under a lie,” she said. She struggled to get a grip on herself, control her emotions. This sin-you, a creature born to perceive the truth, to uphold justice—how the compromise must’ve troubled her, an inner conflict wriggling like a worm, gnawing away at her promise … Ben could see that. He could also see how some might have taken advantage of it. “If only I had known that at the start.”

  She shook her head, as if rousing herself from a dream. It was only a moment, a window into her uncertainty, but he could read her doubt all the same. Her corruption. He had seen the effects of the harp for himself, the longing and the madness stirred up by the lullaby, a song to melt the hardest of hearts, to derange the soundest of minds. And he saw both in Jia, the unmistakable strain of loss, before her face smoothed into a resolute mask.

  “What good am I?” she said then. “What good am I to walk this world as an appointed judge, when I can’t shatter the illusion that binds us? We are here, Ben. Remnants among humans. The last survivors of myth and magic. And yet we are forced to hide, to shun the light, exiled, outcast, alone. Left to die. Don’t you see? The Lore is the greatest lie of all.”

  “Is that what he told you? Von Hart?”

  “My master has shown me much. Sacrifice. Truth.”

  I bet.

  “And you believe him? You trust the Fay? Jia, whatever he told you, I’m telling you that there is always a price.”

  She bowed her head at this. As if she couldn’t deny it.

  “I have no choice.”

  “There is always a choice,” he said.

  “Flowers in a mirror and the moon in water,” she told him, simply.

  He had nothing to say to this, his words lost in a frustrated growl.

  “We were locked behind a dark mirror,” she said. “And I have broken the glass. I know on which side I stand.”

  With a chill up his spine, he remembered du Sang’s parting words in the catacombs under Paris, a strange riddle that now seemed to hold the weight of a prophecy.

  A shattering of glass. The turn of a key. A black door opening.

  “Jia,” Ben said. “What have you done?”

  Mauntgraul stole her chance of an answer.

  “Give me the harp,” the White Dog said. “It is mine. And I promise you that your death will be swift.”

  Despite his threat, Mauntgraul’s words came out in a croak. Still, it was enough to make Ben and Jia turn in his direction as he climbed to his feet. Everything about him screamed of enervation, his ribcage showing starkly through his skin, his flesh sagging from his bones. The harp had scoured him, sucking him dry, leaving only waste. He stood in the shadow of the ship containers, his lips trembling between hollow cheekbones, the streaks of hair on either side of his head lit by the fragments in Jia’s arms. The harp was all he cared about now. All that he craved.

  The harmonic curve, moulded to resemble the mane of a horse—or a creature much like a horse—and the soundboard, shaped into galloping hooves. The dismantled instrument shone with a deep, subliminal radiance, a silvery glow pushing at the air, coupled with the faint suggestion of music, chimes of desire and death.

  Neither fragment burned as bright as the lust in the White Dog’s eyes, however, black pearls of need fixed upon Jia.

  In response, Jia opened her arms to him, a fragment in either hand.

  “You want this?” she said. “Maniac. Butcher. Well, you can have it.”

  Like a snake before flame, Mauntgraul drew back his lips, a hiss slipping between his teeth. Jia spent a second staring at him, her face hardening, the light from the artefact making a mask of her features. No. The mask was gone now, Ben saw, torn away by the radiance, her doubt discarded.

  She looked drunk, he realised. Drunk on the power in her grip.

  Who was this creature before him? Sin-you? Youxia? Ben barely recognised her, but he caught her intent. Desperately he thrust out a hand, his fingers splayed.

  “Don’t—”

  Jia paid him no heed. Her arms closed in a swift arc, bringing the fragments of the harp together. The metal glimmered, jangling to shatter stone. There was an odd whispering under the sound, a liquid slithering that set his teeth on edge, lunewrought melding to lunewrought. He caught a hint of the metal weaving like vines, even as his collar pulsed, responding to the reunion of the harp. As he watched, the equine mane bonded with the hooves of the other fragment, creating the shape of a wishbone, gilded in silver. The Cwyth almost made whole.

  And the night exploded.

  A barrage of light slammed into Ben, the unleashed force of the harp as unforgiving as rock. The deluge of energy swept him up, tossing him like so much flotsam across the wharf. Ropes, barrels and tools joined him, rolling into the silvery flood. With a crack, his back thumped into a stack of crates, the impact sending splinters flying around him, some of them spearing the scales of his suit, making him cry out in pain. All the same, he was lucky. The obstacle prevented him from sliding over the edge of the jetty, a broken toy thrown into the water. As the crates collapsed on top of him, a sparkling dome flowered over the wharf, the skyline bleaching out, erased by an alien power. Ben clapped his hands over his ears, shrinking from the rising melody, trying to shut out its burrowing fingers.

  To shut out the music. The music of death. It was bells, sweet bells, a church rattling in an earthquake. It was the breath before every goodbye. In a symphony of a thousand screams, the lullaby spiralled across the wharf, smacking off the waters of the bay and tearing at the sky.

  Clutching his skull, Ben squinted through the surrounding wreckage. Jia stood silhouetted in the eye of the storm. In one arm she cradled the bow-shaped V of the harp, the artefact two thirds assembled and throbbing, blazing in the dark. Between the harmonic curve and the soundboard, Ben saw the spectre of strings lacing together and watched, choked by dread, as Jia plucked at them, strumming the appalling notes. Music and light rippled out over the wharf.

  And where there was music, there was magic.

  The ground. The ground was opening up.

  Under him the concrete buckled and cracked, the wharf shifting. Throwing off broken wood, Ben stood and flung out his arms, fighting for balance. He shared an anxious look with Mauntgraul, the White Dog falling to his knees, the ground under him ripped away like a rug. A few feet behind him, the middle of the wharf was bubbling, seething around a widening hole, a whirlpool of rock sinking into the earth. Ben caught the gleam of obsidian, some ensorcelled cavern yawning in the depths, and his cry joined the other dragon’s as he felt himself dragged towards it.

  Arms wheeling, he tried to run backwards, tottering away from the maw. It was useless. The ground tipped, the churning concrete hurling him onto his back, a makeshift conveyor belt carrying him towards the White Dog. Desperately he flipped onto his stomach, scrabbling for purchase. In his skull, the music took on a strained pitch, a piercing whine, discordant, cruel. The magic, he knew, couldn’t touch him—he had been spared the lullaby, after all—but the same wasn’t true of Mauntgraul. And as bony fingers closed around his foot, he realised that the dragon meant to dr
ag him into the earth along with him. Into the Sleep.

  Howling, Mauntgraul struggled against the music. He had managed to resist the harp before, Ben knew, thwart the spoiling enchantment, and it seemed that he still had some fight left in him. His face was a grimacing knot, his hands clutching at Ben, climbing his legs, using him as an anchor. Ben kicked out, stamping on the White Dog’s shoulders, his head, but the dragon was beyond pain, shrieking and flinging his arms around Ben’s waist, hauling himself up onto his stomach. Ben gagged, screwing up his face at the stench of blood and sweat, murder and madness filling his nostrils. Limbs locked, the two of them wrestled on the heaving ground, sliding inexorably towards the mouth of the maelstrom.

  Still, Mauntgraul was making headway. It occurred to Ben that he meant to exchange his place, put another in his tomb instead. Namely Ben. And Ben, immune to the Sleep, would surely die there, buried and starving, awake and aware, locked under the earth.

  Christ.

  “I’m sorry,” Jia said, as if reading his mind.

  He looked up and saw her approach, walking lightly across the wharf. Things weren’t happening fast enough for her, it seemed; she came to the edge of the maelstrom, a slender figure in a fluttering cloak of shadow and light, pressing the magic upon them. The music of the harp, strummed by a rebellious hand, went echoing across the waters. Like polished stones, the notes dispersed, skipping and shimmering over the waves, some bouncing with a hollow twang against the hulls of tugboats and neon-lit junks, others fizzling out against the far shore, light bleeding into light. Silver washed out Ben’s thoughts, his throat strangled by cold metal, a fanfare exploding in his mind.

  Bells. Bells.

  Mauntgraul screamed.

  The next moment, a great weight was pressing down upon Ben. They were at the lip of the hole now, a dark funnel whirling under them, sucking at their feet. He had seen this cavern before, this bubbling of the earth, many years ago and miles from here in the mountains outside Beijing, the harp blazing in Von Hart’s hands. He had seen it more recently too, the cracked shell of Zhoukoudian. In a jolt of horror, he grasped the full extent of the danger, the looming finality, the way the ground would close over their heads, sealing both of them in. Another minute and down they would go, down into the darkness, one of them swallowed by the Sleep, the other by a slow and agonising death.