DAC 3 Precious Dragon (18 page)

"I should be honored to look after him," Inari said. Something in her voice prompted Mrs Pa to say, as delicately as she could, "Do you—do you have children of your own?"

"No." Inari paused. "You see—I'd like a child, of course. We both would. But it would be a big problem to find a hospital that would take me if anything went wrong, and I don't think they'd know what to do, anyway. I'm not supposed to be here on Earth. And if I went back to Hell to have the baby, then there would be other complications. There are problems with my family, you see. And also, well, Chen is human and I'm not. It's not so easy sometimes."

She glanced at Precious Dragon as she spoke, evidently wondering whether this was a suitable subject to raise in front of a small child, but Precious Dragon was considering her with his customary gravity. Mrs Pa said, with a sympathy that struck at her heart, "I know. It's never easy."

"Well," Inari said. "Enough of my problems. I mustn't keep you. Here's my number—let me know when you'd like me to—" Mrs Pa thought that she was about to say "babysit," but that hadn't sounded right the first time, somehow "—look after him," Inari finished.

"I will. And thank you."

Inari put her sunglasses back on, even though it was now long past twilight, and Mrs Pa showed her to the door. The badger rose, too, and moved past her, sinuous now as it slid into the shadows, and she watched them walk up the harbor path, the demon girl and the beast at her side, until the shadows swallowed them.

Embar Dea reached the sea palace toward dawn, when a light as faint and pure as the pearl that she still clutched in her claw was rising over the eastern horizon. Embar Dea looked out across a cold stretch of ocean, dappled with shards and fragments of ice, to where a glittering phosphorescence tracked across the sea. A rush of excitement filled her: she knew what that glitter meant, magical and beckoning—the path of dragons. And just as she saw this, they began to sing, their voices lifting up through the water and bursting into the light, as cold and eerie as the ocean itself. It was a long time since Embar Dea had given voice so boldly, but she did so now, raising her head from the water and sending air fluting through each of the bearded tentacles that surrounded her face.

When Embar Dea began to sing, the rest of the dragons stopped, as if startled, but only for a moment. Then their voices, too, began again, joining in with her song and responding in harmony to it. Embar Dea knew this meant that she had been accepted, and even though there was little possibility that she might not have been, she was still relieved. She was old, and it was long years since she had last spoken with any of her kind, apart from the now-dead in Sulai-Ba. She did not know if things had changed, for territories between dragons were subject to constant subtle shifts, and it was almost certain that the allegiances she knew were no longer in place. Dragons were benign, looking at matters over a great span of years, but dragons played games.

No games this time, it seemed. As the song from beneath the waves went on, a spire rose from the sea. It was a pinnacle of ice, a fretted turret, rising higher and higher into the wan sunlight and bringing the rest of the palace with it. Embar Dea saw huge halls and caverns, green sea ice like precious stone, marbled with silver, encrusted with barnacles and pearls, and at this, she clasped the pearl that she held even more tightly. A staircase of black ice, water gushing and rushing over its sides, surged up out of the sea in front of her and Embar Dea climbed, feeling the ice burning-freezing under her claws before her body temperature adjusted and it became like walking on sun-warmed stone.

Up the steps and into the great central hall of the sea palace. And there were dragons waiting, all nine of the remaining sea dragons of the world of Earth: wild dragons covered in limpets and weed; a dragon from the warm southern seas whose skin was chased with a thousand different colors, gold and scarlet and sea-green, gliding across it in the silent speech of its kind; dragons from the far north who looked like ice themselves, glassy and remote and chill.

Embar Dea moved between the ranks of dragons, all the way up the long hall, with its pillars and columns and lacy balconies. And as she walked, someone came to meet her.

He was black and shining, silver glistening and gleaming about his armored head. Perhaps a hundred feet from nose to tail, bristling with spines, his wedge-shaped, great-eyed head swinging from side to side. Between his horns, a pearl showed him to be of Imperial lineage.

"You are the last," he said. He spoke like the music of dragons. "You are the one from the temple, from the lost place."

"I am Embar Dea," she said, for he had spoken first, as befit his status. But she was full of questions. She knew this dragon: Prince Rish, but if he was here and speaking for the assembly, then where was the Dragon Lord?

"Our King is gone," the Prince said, as if he had heard her thought, as perhaps he had. And all the dragons raised their voices in a terrible song of mourning. Embar Dea bowed her head and felt suddenly, dreadfully old.

"I have something to give to you," she said, feeling that she wanted to give up what had become a great burden. She held out the pearl from the Veil of Day, and explained how she had come by it.

The dragons mourned again, voices raised in icy keening. "This is the pearl of the old King," the Dragon Prince said. "This is the pearl that went missing from Cloud Kingdom, and thus stole his life away. And now we have it back, but it is too late, the old King is dead and the new King gone."

Embar Dea knew that she was not at fault, but she could not help feeling somehow to blame. "If I had been earlier—" she started to say.

"It would have made no difference. This is many years in the making. We have this now, it is returned to us and we thank you, because I believe it is a sign that we will prevail."

"Please," Embar Dea said. "What has been happening? All I know are signs of danger and loss, but I don't know why."

"No more do we," said the mottled, shifting southern dragon, in a voice that suggested that speech did not come easily to her, a voice like rusting metal. "Signs and portents, of danger and woe, but we don't know where it comes from."

"We must go to Cloud Kingdom," the Dragon Prince said, and Embar Dea's heart lifted at this, for she had not seen Cloud Kingdom since she was a child, born there like all dragons before being sent to the many worlds. "And now you have come," Prince Rish added. "We are able to leave."

They searched the room again and Chen performed a basic locating spell, but there was no clue, either physical or magical, to Miss Qi's disappearance.

"I don't suppose," Zhu Irzh said in the hopeless tone of the unconvinced, "that she'd have just popped out for a breath of fresh air."

"Don't be ridiculous." Worry made Chen uncharacteristically snappy. If Miss Qi had gone missing in Singapore Three, he would have been calmer, but here, with so few resources, the situation struck him as bleak. "This is Hell. There is no fresh air, and anyway, it's hardly likely she'd have popped out in it."

"How are we going to explain this to Heaven?" was Zhu Irzh's next thought.

"We're not," Chen replied. "We won't have to. Because we're going to find her."

He warded both window and door, then closed the door to the room. On Earth, his wards were stronger, since he had jurisdiction there, but not in Hell, yet they still possessed a certain degree of power and would stop any curious minor demons from entering the room, if not one of Hell's hierarchy. Zhu Irzh watched approvingly. Then Chen, followed by the flustered desk clerk, went back downstairs.

"Call the staff, please. I want to see if anyone knows anything."

He didn't hold out much hope and, indeed, what little he held was not fulfilled. The staff—a motley, shifty assortment of demons—had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. They shuffled their ill-favored feet and stared at the ceiling or the floor.

"If anyone does know anything," Chen said at last, "then you know where to find me. It doesn't matter if you have to wake me up—" not that demons would worry overmuch about disturbing other people's sleep "—as long as you let me know."

"Is there a reward?" one of the staff members said, a small, ragged person with a backward-facing head. Lords knew what he'd done to deserve that: having your feet reversed was a common punishment, but it wasn't usual to see folk facing in the wrong direction. As it was, he had to stand with his back to Chen.

"We might be able to arrange something," Chen said cautiously.

Zhu Irzh nudged him. "Go for it," the demon whispered. "It's the only way you'll get anything out of this bunch."

Chen knew he was right, and he let the tentative offer stand. He went back upstairs with Zhu Irzh to await developments, and sure enough, they were not long in arriving, via a soft knock on the door.

Chen was not surprised to see that it was the reversed-head person.

"I saw 'er," he said, without preamble. "Your mate. They took 'er out the back."

"Who was it?" Chen asked. "Did you see?"

The demon's maltreated face became sly. "Yes, but—"

"All right," Chen said with a sigh. "How much are we going to give him, Zhu Irzh?"

"Five hundred dollars," reverse-head interrupted.

"What! You're joking. I'll give you fifty."

"Do I look like an idiot?" the demon howled. And so on. Five minutes later, Zhu Irzh was handing over fifty dollars with the promise of a further hundred.

"Right, well, there were three of them, see. I think two of them were blokes but I'm not sure about the third."

Chen was taking notes. "When was this?"

"About an hour and a half ago."

Chen did a rapid mental calculation. Given the time that the search and enquiry had taken, Miss Qi had been abducted while he and Zhu Irzh were on their way back from the birthday dinner. That meant that anyone who had been at the banquet could have taken Miss Qi and, somehow, Chen thought that this was significant.

"And what did they look like?"

"The two blokes were in black, shadow-wear. But the other one—maybe a woman, I told you, I don't know for sure—was in red, from head to foot."

Zhu Irzh, who had been listening intently, perked up at this.

"Red? A lot of people at the Min of Lust like to wear red. Lucky color, you see."

Chen decided not to investigate the implications of that last sentence. "Ministry of Lust?" Interesting. Throughout their trip, the twin threads of the Ministries of War and Lust had been interweaving. He turned to the informer.

"You're sure about this, are you?" One could hardly chastise a denizen of Hell for lying, but at the same time, one had to make sure. Chen took out his rosary and flicked it around the demon's reversed head like a boomerang. It shot back into his hand, leaving a scarlet flame in its wake, slowly fading. The informer gave a cry of pained outrage. But he had been telling the truth.

"Sorry," Chen said with a shrug. "You never know."

"Quite right, too," Zhu Irzh remarked. He rose from the seat in which he had been lounging and grasped the informer by the front of his robe. "Excuse me. I just want to try something." He spoke a word that made both Chen and the informer flinch. Fascinated, Chen watched as words tumbled out of the informer's mouth, spiky ideograms bursting like red leaves in the air. As they began to disappear, a picture formed instead, tiny and perfect as if unreeling onto a screen. Miss Qi, backed against a wall with the midnight sky of Hell far above her, fighting grimly. One of the shadow-forms went down, but the others—one black, one dressed in bloody red—stepped up behind her and threw a cloth like a fragile web over her head. It glowed briefly, and Miss Qi sank to the floor. The two demons in black, moving with a curious jerkiness, picked her up by the head and the feet and ran with her down the alleyway, followed by the lithe shape in red. Then they were gone and the image glowed once, searingly bright, then faded, leaving a little glowing coal which fell through the air into Zhu Irzh's outstretched hand.

"Impressive," Chen said. He knew Zhu Irzh had magical abilities, but he did not often see them demonstrated: the demon preferred to rely on his sword.

"Thanks." Zhu Irzh gave a modest shrug. "I had to wait until he'd spoken and you'd proved that he was speaking the truth. I can't do that on Earth, in case you're wondering. Too many restrictions on what I can and can't do. Here, it's a bit easier."

Chen nodded. It was the same for him, down in Hell.

"Can I go now?" the informer spoke with the truculence of fright.

"Yes. But not before giving us your name and your address."

The demon did so, with a very poor grace, then gathered what dignity he could and stalked off into the depths of the hotel. Chen was not confident that he'd been telling the truth this time.

"Well," Chen said with a sigh, "I suppose we're a bit further along. We've seen who took her, even if we're not sure where they come from."

"I didn't want to say so in front of our friend, but there was something familiar about that figure in red."

"Was it female, do you think?" Chen had been unable to tell although there had been a supple litheness about the red-clad figure that suggested that the informer had been right.

"I don't know. I think so."

"And do you still think that they were from the Ministry of Lust?"

"I don't know, but we can find out," the demon said. "Follow me."

Chen went with him to the room that had been Miss Qi's. He was at once praying that Zhu Irzh was right and hoping that he was wrong: he did not want to think of the pure Miss Qi in the clammy, collective hands of the Ministry of Lust, but at the same time, they needed to know where she had been taken.

"Right," Zhu Irzh said. He took the coal from his pocket and placed it on the table. Then he extracted a small feng shui compass from his other pocket and held it over the coal, which began to glow and expand. Once again, Chen saw the scene unfold in the air before him: Miss Qi fighting, being overcome, and carried limply away. The needles of the compass were swinging wildly, veering around the metal surface.