Raising Fire Page 18

  The sight of the latter drew his face into a scowl.

  He heard Jia shout something from the bedroom behind him, perhaps in shock, perhaps a warning, but he wasn’t listening. Whatever he had offered her, whatever information, it would have to wait. He had more immediate concerns.

  Bellowing, he leapt down into the living room, his sprouting claws buckling the floorboards, throwing up a diadem of wood and glass. Through the gaping hole that had been the front wall, the curtains smouldering, he peered through the smoke and saw the figure standing in the road.

  It was the Sister. An assassin of the Whispering Chapter.

  He’d only made her acquaintance once before, on the North Sea oil rig a few days ago, but the square set of her shoulders and jaw were imprinted on his mind. Ditto her faded military fatigues, the cross shaven across her skull and the broken grin that hung beneath it.

  The bazooka on her shoulder was new.

  How did she find me? How did she track me to my lair?

  Few Remnants would risk his fury, and even Lambert du Sang wouldn’t go as far as to dox him. Would he?

  As soon as he thought it, an answer came swimming through the smoke.

  It’s the lunewrought. The damn lunewrought. Some trace residue of the Fay metal. I’m fucking tainted …

  That meant she must’ve brought the manacle along, looking to make another attempt at his capture. He only hoped she hadn’t brought a fragment of the harp with her too, trusting to the fact that the Chapter seemed reluctant to use the artefact—plus he doubted the old woman on the rig would let the thing out of her sight.

  Something large, silver and round gleamed on her back, but he had no time to think about that. He watched the Sister discard the rocket launcher from her shoulder, letting the weapon clank to the ground. Her intrusion flooded him with anger, a violation that brought scales rippling over his flesh, his eyes flaring, his mouth widening, distorted by a row of fangs.

  “You have got to be kidding m—”

  The Sister grinned up at him, answering his transformation by drawing both of her Uzis from the straps at her thighs, snapping them out in front of her and spraying the shattered façade with bullets. The two stone griffins wobbling on the doorstep burst into mossy clouds of shrapnel, joining the ruin of the front door and windows. Plaster rained down, the odd ornament dancing off the mantelpiece, the TV exploding, the floorboards thudding under his feet. Gunfire perfumed the room, acrid in his nostrils, the bullets zipping past his ears. Ben threw up his arms as hot metal whined and sparked off his thickening scales, unable to penetrate his flesh but still hurting like hell. The light fixture, a metal shade, fell from the ceiling and onto his head, stoking his temper.

  When his would-be captor ran out of ammo, the muzzles of her guns trailing smoke, the living room was crumpling further with his unfolding mass, his leathery wings pushing at the walls, his tail spilling out into the street, the arrowhead tip thumping down on a parked car. Alarms wailed. Distantly, he heard screaming, his neighbours thrown into panic by the commotion, and he prayed they would stay inside, keep out of harm’s way. It was much too late for discretion. As he reared, his horns crashed through the living room ceiling, reducing the bedroom above to rubble. The floor groaned under his claws.

  Doesn’t anyone knock any more?

  He roared. Barrow Hill Road rocked to its foundations. Neck coiling back, horns raking the eaves, his vast shadow fell over the street and the assassin standing there, who quickly removed the round silver object from her back and brought it up before her as he vented a mighty rush of flame.

  Fire filled the day, a wall of heat. The deluge slammed into the parked cars, blasting them from their spaces, the parking meters and lamp posts melting into absurd shapes, folding to the pavement on wilted stalks. Tarmac blackened and cracked. A tree went up in a blustering whoosh. The houses on the other side of the street danced in the heat haze, soot painting their façades and windows, their front gardens scorched to ash. The air sizzled and thinned, consumed by an untold heat, as magical as it was fierce, usurping the grip of winter.

  When he ran out of breath, Ben glared down at the street, his nostrils smouldering. No human could withstand dragon fire. He expected to see a charred skeleton standing in place of the True Name who had dared to destroy his home.

  There wasn’t one. Instead, he found himself gazing down at a glowing red disc, the shield large enough to cover the Sister, who was crouching in the road—or almost cover her. He noticed that the toes of her boots smoked a little, a broad black ring around her, but that was far from enough to satisfy him.

  What is this shit?

  Through his rage, the realisation came to him, another echo of the past. Knights, saints, slayers, and all their wyrm hunting tricks … Charmed swords. Diamond-tipped lances. Poison … Of course, the Chapter would keep certain relics in its arsenal. After all, the order guarded a fragment of the harp. Why not another of the treasures of Britain? There were several that he knew of, besides the Cwyth. Caliburn, for instance, King Arthur’s legendary sword. Arawn’s Cauldron. The Singing Stones. Because he found himself looking at one of the treasures, Ben was sure, although at first he struggled to place the artefact.

  A shield capable of withstanding dragon fire. Wonderful.

  The sight tugged at a distant memory, an old tale, something about a wandering saint and a legendary knight, but before it was clear in his mind, he found out the hard way that he’d only grasped the half of it.

  The shield pulsed, growing brighter, aglow with some bastard enchantment. The next moment, the same jet of fire that had spewed from his throat roared back at him, blustering around his craggy head. Blinded, he staggered backwards, his shifting bulk tearing at the house, a cascade of rubble rumbling around him.

  Joseph of Arimathea. Sir Percival. That was it …

  The heat couldn’t do much to harm him—his scales were naturally resistant, stronger than any charmed shield—but the blast had caught him off guard and, rear legs tangling, he tumbled heavily into the guts of the house, half of the kitchen ceiling shattering over his snout. He shook off the dust in time to see the woman in the road pluck a pin from a grenade with her teeth and lob the explosive in his direction.

  The kitchen wall blew out in a rush of heat, hurling a shower of bricks into the back garden. Skull ringing, he looked up to see the Sister, all scars and ugly teeth, climbing the smoking mound at the front of the house, the debris of his sham existence crunching under her boots. Confident of his stunned state, she had discarded the guns and the grenades in favour of a short curved blade, a sickle that was somehow more mean-looking than any of her other weapons. He had felt its sting for himself when he’d chopped off his hand on the oil rig. He didn’t much fancy feeling it again.

  Peering at him over her shield, the Sister entered the shattered living room and clambered up onto his belly, striding boldly over the paler ridges of scales towards his exposed throat, her sickle swinging.

  Ben cursed. He had broken something, something vital, but no amount of profanity would hurry along the healing process. He scrabbled feebly at the ground, trapped by the fallen rubble, penned in by the collapsing walls, his head spinning.

  The Sister reached his throat, lodging the sickle into his scales to steady herself as she unclipped an object from her belt. He didn’t welcome the sight of that either.

  The lunewrought manacle!

  The radiance of the thing, an unholy silver, glimmered in the True Name’s eyes.

  He had to get out of here. Had to give himself room to escape.

  He shrank back to hominid size, his tail curling in, his wings folding. He maintained a layer of scales for protection, his suit as bulky as armour. His abrupt shift made the Sister lose her footing, sending her sliding to her knees on the littered living room floor.

  Grimacing, Ben knocked her blade from his chest, blood pooling around him. Rolling onto his stomach, he dragged himself through the mess, crawling through patches of fl
ame and falling bricks towards the shattered rear wall, to daylight and escape. He’d made it halfway when the Sister emerged from the smoke, stamping down hard on his back.

  Ben roared in pain. The butterflies were back again, swarming in front of his eyes, unconsciousness rising to claim him. In a last bid for freedom, he reached behind him and grabbed the Sister’s boot, twisting her leg away from his spine. With a cry, she lost her balance, once again crashing to the floor beside him. But she was up on her knees at once, thrusting her bulk towards him. He’d only just managed to flip onto his back when her hand closed around his throat, a vicelike hock knocking the wind from him. Snarling, she brought the manacle down, aiming for his wrist, the circular band ready to snap shut, bring this struggle to an end. The lunewrought restraint chilled his flesh, any chance of transformation slipping away from him, drowned in silvery light.

  Fuelled by adrenalin alone, Ben shot out his hand. He managed to grab the Sister’s forearm, the manacle jarring to a halt an inch from his flesh. The woman growled, pressing down, forcing her weight against him. Then her expression changed. Ben went ahead and squeezed, his fist closing just enough to crunch gristle, snap bone. The assassin tried to mask her agony, beads of sweat dripping from her forehead, her jaw clenching. Vaguely, Ben suppressed a pang of admiration, the sense of it lost as he met her gaze. The fire in her eyes, devout, determined, refused to grow any dimmer.

  For a minute, the two of them wrestled in the collapsing house. Outside, distantly, he heard the approaching wail of police cars, the howl of a fire engine. A dog yapping. Neighbours shouting about the End of Days.

  Then Jia was there, a flash of green and gold. Retaining human form, the sin-you dropped down from the landing, alighting in the room. Before her feet touched the ground (hooves, he saw), her butterfly sword was in her hand, a leg darting up over her head, her body a practised spear. She aimed a kick at the Sister’s head, knocking the woman to one side, her shield clanging under her. The manacle rolled out of her grip, spinning like a silver dollar in the smoke.

  It came to rest between Jia’s hooves. Silver and gold. For a moment, the sin-you stood there, looking at the thing. Then she looked over at the Sister, sprawled in the smouldering rubble. Finally she looked down at Ben.

  Through the butterflies, through the smoke, he tried and failed to read her expression.

  But he understood her when she spoke, soft words as she crouched down beside him.

  “Duibuqi. I’m sorry.”

  The last thing he knew before everything went black was the manacle closing around his wrist.

  The Bogue, 1841

  Where do you see its ending?

  That was what her former master, Blaise Von Hart, had said in Xanadu all those years ago. The memory surprised her; Jia didn’t tend to think of the envoy much these days. Didn’t like the ache in the pit of her stomach and the rush of anger when she pictured his face, so pale, so arcane. So unknowable. But she remembered his insistence on the signing of the Pact in the Great Khan’s garden, his promise of progress and peace. And his words came winging back to her the moment she saw the ship.

  Out there on the Pearl River, the prow of the Nemesis broke through the fog, the blade of an axe cutting the morning calm, her great engines rumbling. The “devil ship,” that was what the people hereabouts called the iron vessel, the first of its kind in the known world, 180 feet of sheer black metal, funnels, sails, cannons and a trained crew to boot, all armed to the teeth with sabres and flintlock guns. For weeks, the British fleet had lain at anchor in Kowloon Bay, the Daoguang Emperor trembling under his own procrastinating tactics, his sending of messengers back and forth, the semblance of governmental parley that in truth went nowhere, simply played for time. Now the British sailed forth, their patience worn thin, the delicate dance bursting into the flames of war.

  Here. Here is the British diplomacy.

  On hearing the news of the invasion, Jia had galloped from Canton at full pelt, a blur of green, gold and dust, her single horn spearing through the land. Throwing off her sin-you form in a billow of leaves and churned-up earth, she had reached this vantage point on the cape of Anunghoy Island. From here, she could see to all points of the compass and stood scanning the battleground with narrowed eyes, her butterfly swords in hand.

  A mile upstream, the green cliffs of Tiger Island guarded the mouth of the river proper, the deep waterway winding fifty-odd miles to the Canton docks. Behind her, down the slope, crouched the village of Humen—an unlikely spot to start a war. The little port lay silent in the dawn, the pink mist curling off the estuary, questing through the empty warehouses, the fishing huts and the taverns, creeping down the alleys between the rickety wooden buildings as though searching for signs of life. All the villagers had fled, leaving only the stench of rotting fish, woodsmoke and wine to speak of their presence. Even the smugglers, those salty dogs who shipped contraband cargo of black spice up and down the river, their clippings slipping like silk between the British and the Emperor, had vanished, gone. Those fan-quis! Those foreign devils. Their tongues ever ready with tales for the harbourmasters, their pockets filled with cumsha, the gold sand, bribes for the officials to look the other way.

  Black spice and gold sand, Jia thought, watching the Nemesis crawl upriver. Tea and silk flowed from the country’s ports these days as though the Middle Kingdom had sprung a leak. Into the breach, the black spice flowed in return, like sweet fingers stroking the underbelly of the country, Zhongguo a fat fish in the shoals. Quelling the army, sedating the mandarins, soothing the workers, snuffing out the light in their eyes. To a casual observer, the guards in the island forts with their jumble of spears and rusting cannons, the shoemaker snoozing in his jacquard gown on the bench outside his shop, the peasant asleep in the cornfields might appear harmless enough.

  Chasing the dragon, some liked to say, but Jia knew better. Chasing the embers of death.

  Each user symbolised a widening crack in the walls of the Empire, a fatal shift in the foundations of the dynasty, the Qing ready to topple and fall, just like the Yuan and the Ming before them. The Middle Kingdom was half asleep, lulled by the siren song of western progress and free trade. Noble ideals of the British Empire, granted. Noble ideals advanced through mercantile interest, greased by the profiteering ballad of Jardine Matheson & Company that just so happened to have a hundred thousand crates to sell. As youxia, Jia couldn’t help but admire the strategy. As sin-you, she couldn’t ignore the bitter truth. And this morning, cannon fire burst and shuddered across the Pearl River to awaken the country with war.

  Where do you see its ending? Jia couldn’t deny that the omens, the signs, lay all around her, the corruption and perfidy, the bloody cost of human progress. There had been wars before, of course—wars beyond count—but swords and spears were one thing, guns quite another. Over time, the numbers of the dead had grown from mounds into mountains and honour in battle had become no more than nostalgia, a quaint ideal, a thing of the past. The curtain of the future, it seemed, was rising on a stage of fire and smoke.

  It is the way of things, Jia thought, trying to reassure herself. One empire falls, another rises. One dynasty—but no, the certainty of that escaped her, the sense of unknown tomorrows confounding and troubling her, the age turning towards ruin and war, towards machines like the ship below, machines that, if given free rein, might come to mirror the darkest magic … She closed her eyes, waiting for her unease to pass.

  I am weary. She was older, it was true, in appearance a thirty-year-old woman, her limbs toned and lithe with the rigours of wushu. The ages clung to her and yet her physique lingered at its peak, an illusion of womanhood, a sinewy testament to health. Her long braid remained glossy and black. No wrinkles touched her skin. Yet within …

  You have no memory of your memories, she thought, with a bitterness that surprised her. When did you last look into the Eight Hand Mirror? Almost five hundred years ago now, in the mists of time and Mount Song. When you think of your mot
her and father, Ziyou and Ye, can you remember their faces? Their smell?

  And further back, her mind stretched, mental fingers seeking cracks in a wind-smoothed rock face. She caught a vague recollection from childhood, bidding her parents farewell in the wild-flower meadow outside the palace walls, Ziyou and Ye slipping underground, the earth covering their equine forms … a memory so distant that it ached in her heart, a forgotten scar. Ached alongside the knowledge that she would never again gaze upon their slumbering forms, deep in the cavern under the plains. For centuries, she’d had to content herself that her parents were still there and that, one bright and golden day, when the Xian returned and the Nine Hells froze over, the two of them would awaken and come home. They would all be a family again.

  The wind. It was the wind that pricked the tear from her eye.

  Unable to look away, Jia watched the dark vessel slide into the bay, her shallow draught allowing her access to the delta, a palpable threat to the port city beyond the hills. Canton old and poorly defended.

  Chugging steam to mix with the mist, the Nemesis growled towards the island forts. White-eared herons struck off the water, taking to the sky. As though the birds were a signal, the troops on the battlements gave a unified roar, their drums echoing across the tide. Man-o’-war junks slipped out from the lee of the shore, their dull red fish-fin sails creaking like the joints of fearful elders pushed into the front line of battle, sticks and clubs in hand. Even from a distance, Jia could see that the Chinese fleet was sorely outmatched, drifting into the shadow of that vast black hull, the Nemesis picking up speed, her cannons a primed glut of destruction.