The Dragons of Heaven (34 page)

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.”

T
hen

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.

I must have gasped. The dragon at my side slid closer and said in a voice that was too intimate: “Shanghai. It is by far the best view of that city.”

“We… we're under the river?”

“We are.” His hand ran up my arm, and I recalled myself enough to pull away.

“Where's Mei Shen?” I demanded.

He leaned over the coffee table – a modern monstrosity of steel and glass – and plucked one remote from the collection that sat there. He pressed a series of buttons, and the entire wall of screens flashed to life. He spared me a brief glance to gauge my reaction, but he didn't get much for his trouble. Apart from my pregnancy, I hadn't missed TV during my years with Jian Huo, and high-tech gizmos were never my thing. He glowered when all I did was raise a brow. The glower slid into a malicious smile, and he pressed another button.

Mei Shen's image flashed up on the screens, dwarfing me with her size. I sank onto the couch, hugging myself to contain my trembling. I wasn't among friends; I couldn't afford to break down. Mei Shen was safe, that's what mattered. I don't know what situation I'd feared to find her in, but seeing her sitting in the middle of a room that was an altar to gender norms, in every shade of Barbie pink, was not it.

Mei Shen hunched over a small bamboo cricket cage, ignoring the Toys 'Я' Us collection around her. It was an artful display of blissful innocence, but I knew my daughter's ploys as if they were my own. She knew she was being watched. She knew the toys were there to beguile her into complacency. Ignoring it all to play with a cricket was her way of being ornery. I wiped away tears and darted a glance at Lung Di. He only had eyes for Mei Shen, and he looked distinctly put out. He noticed me watching him and turned away from the screens.

“As you can see, she is happy and well-cared for in my keeping.”

I set aside all the censure I wanted to heap on him about his attempt to poison my daughter with western consumerism and misogyny. Mei Shen was fighting that battle very well on her own. Instead, I loosed my building anger at his literal interpretation of our bargain.

“You know that this isn't what I meant when I asked to see Mei Shen.” I motioned to the monitors, where she was still speaking to the cricket. He'd even left the sound muted.

“Do I? Forgive me. I gave you what you asked for. In the future, you will have to be more specific.”

My mouth worked as I tried to come up with some counter to this, but I had nothing. He was right; I would need to choose my words more carefully.

“Fine,” I bit out. “If literality is how you want to play this, then that's how we'll do it.” I leaned back on the couch, crossing my arms and legs. I tried to hold my gaze steady on him, but my eyes kept darting to Mei Shen's image, which rather ruined the effect I was going for. “I believe you had a manifesto you wanted to deliver?”

He flicked a button on the remote and the screens went dark. I jerked but held back my protests.

“In due time. You're dirty and your clothes smell and you haven't slept.” He reached down and pulled me to my feet. I resisted with my dead weight, but he was strong. “I will play the good host whether you wish it or not.”

He propelled me out of the room and down another hallway, this one carpeted and illuminated with recessed lighting. Templeton's claws scrabbled for a moment on the polished stone floors behind us, before being muffled. I glanced back to make sure my shadow was keeping up.

Lung Di stopped at a set of black-lacquered doors with silver fittings. He released my elbow to open them with a grand gesture. The suite beyond rivaled the décor of any Ritz or Waldorf penthouse, right down to the wet bar and cabinet mini-fridge. Only the watery cityscape, gloaming through the skylight, gave a hint that this wasn't a hotel suite in any major city around the globe.

“Take a shower,” he instructed with a sniff. “Take a nap. Ready your wits. We will dine together, and I'll deliver my ‘manifesto', as you called it. Then we may begin negotiations in earnest.”

With another lascivious look, he shut the heavy doors in my face. I knew without trying that they'd be locked, but I made the attempt anyway. They were so well-made that they didn't even rattle. Templeton huffed and sniffed the seam of the door.

“I don't trust him,” the rat observed with a shudder.

“I don't either,” I said.

“What was that you said earlier about facing a dragon in its lair?”

I thought back. Yesterday seemed far away. “That only a fool does it.”

“But you have a plan, right?” He looked up at me. “Right?”

“As much a plan as I ever have.” Turning away, I headed deeper into the suite to examine my new prison.

“Oh,” Templeton whispered behind me. He gave the door another half-hearted nudge.

I
t took
me an hour of dithering to get over the idea that Lung Di could be watching me. He didn't have to be. His demonstration with the screens was enough to set me to self-surveilling. Just make me think that he could be watching, and I'd do the rest of the work myself.

All lascivious looks and suggestive physicality aside, I wasn't under the delusion that Lung Di wanted me. He just wanted me to know my place. He'd already evidenced a strong predilection for stereotypes – the Bondian Batcave he lived in, the Pink Princess Palace where he'd cloistered Mei Shen. I wasn't going to let him turn me into the rope for a sexual tug-of-war with Jian Huo. That whole “sleep with your brother's girl to get at your brother” thing was bullshit. No way was I going to yield him that kind of power.

With these rationalizations buttressing me against the specter of surveillance, I got over myself enough to strip out of my dirty clothes, though I kept my pearls on.

In keeping with the rest of the suite, the bathroom was enormous. The shower had a multi-setting showerhead that I would have killed for during my student days with Jian Huo. Not that I'd be making use of it here and now. I shut the opaque glass door and steamed up the place the good, old-fashioned way.

By the time I got out of the shower, my clothes were gone. I wrapped myself in a thick, terrycloth robe and went in search of a more suitable replacement. I found Templeton hiding in the shadows under the coffee table, checking over his remaining two baubles. He was sitting on my knapsack.

“Servant?” I asked.

“Shadows. Two of them,” he responded. “I would have tried to stop them, but I thought your bag was more important.”

“You did right.” I patted his head and checked the pockets of my knapsack. All present and accounted for. The bones of my plan remained undisturbed. “Did they give you much trouble?”