DAC 3 Precious Dragon (36 page)

Mrs Zhu looked frostily gratified. "Why, thank you. Irzh. Now. About your grandfather's heart."

"Right. We gave it back to him. He took on the Emperor of Hell, they went into the reactor together. That was why it blew."

"So," the Minister of War said. His lizard voice hissed out across the plain, sibilance sending sand skittering over the ridges and ripples. "A new Emperor in Hell and a new one in Heaven."

"We don't know who that will be yet," Mrs Zhu said.

"I think I do," Chen said. His mind went back to a little, half-ruined temple on the outskirts of Singapore Three, a calm young man, and the ghost of a girl. Mhara was next in line and Heaven was known to be highly traditional. "He's got rather different views about the relationship between Heaven and Earth." Thank God. Literally.

"Hell is in disarray," the Minister said. "We need to return."

"You're going up?" Chen asked. "If so, we'll hitch a ride."

It seemed that the order had already been given, because Hell's troops were beginning to rise, the tattered remnants of trucks and other vehicles lurching up from the floor of the plain and drifting upward into the clouds. Chen was looking around for Pin H'siao, but the spirit was nowhere to be seen.

"Come on," Zhu Irzh said in his ear. "Looks like we're leaving. Including my fiancée." Chen could not tell whether the demon was displeased or not. Jhai and her new bodyguard were already taking their place in one of the trucks, which were forming a disorderly queue behind the Minister's tank. Zhu Irzh swung up and Chen followed him. The truck started to rise.

The reactor was gone. Pin could not believe it. He and the other demons came back down from the rocks and wandered around the little pools, the gentle hollows, the lilies. The reactor had been hideous but at least it had produced something, it had been useful, and this pretty landscape was not. He was at a complete loss. Everyone seemed to feel the same way; no one was saying very much. He came over the crest of one of the hills and looked down, and his heart gave a jump.

Mai was kneeling in the middle of the hollow, by the side of one of the lily pools, and in front of her was a little boy. As Pin started to hasten down the side of the hill, the child reached out a grave hand and touched Mai's bent head. She shimmered and began to fade.

"Wait!" Pin cried. Mai had done so much for him, given up so much for him, that he could not bear to think of her leaving before he had a chance to say thank you. But as he reached the floor of the hollow, Mai was gone.

"Mai!"

The child looked up and Pin saw that his eyes were completely blank and dark, like looking into empty space. For a moment, he looked like something else entirely, but Pin could not have said what it was.

Then the child blinked and the world changed.

They were somewhere else. The place had the familiar smell of the dressing room: powder and the musty odor of the ceremonial costumes, mingled with sweat and cheap perfume. Pin thought that he was sitting on the edge of one of the divans on which the actors rested, but it was too dark to see properly. He felt heavy and hot. He raised a hand and it seemed incredibly weighty. He smelled of meat and there was a weird thumping in his chest, a whistle as he breathed in. It took him a minute to realize that he was back in his own body.

There was a brief flare as someone lit a lamp. He blinked until his eyes adjusted. The little boy came to sit beside him, swinging his legs against the bed. Pin looked around him wonderingly at the seedy comfort of the dressing room.

"I'm back," he said. "This is the Opera, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," the child answered. "I have brought you home. You should never have been in Hell. Is this where you want to be?"

Pin shrugged. "I don't know anymore. In Hell—it wasn't so bad. There were more opportunities, that's for sure. At least I had some dignity." He looked down at the small figure next to him. Now, the child's eyes caught the lamplight and held it, burning a smoky yellow somewhere far within. They reminded him of the demon's.

"Can I make a suggestion?" the child said.

"Sure."

"Go to the temple of the son of the Emperor of Heaven. It's now the Emperor's own temple. Say that I sent you and give them this." He placed something in Pin's hand. Pin looked down: he held a shining bronze-green scale, like the wingcase of a beetle. "Things are changing. You'll find they have opportunities. I think that Hell might be rebuilding, too. They'll want people who know how things worked. And Pin, your mother is there. She's still looking after you, you know, as best she can. She saved you from the kuei. She wants you to take this chance."

"I think," Pin said, swallowing hard, "I will do that."

He saw the Opera with new eyes: not as a trap, but as a beginning. Somewhere to start, and somewhere to leave. "What time is it?" Pin asked.

The child gestured toward the heavy curtains. "Go and see."

Pin pushed the curtains aside. There was a faint pale light over the city.

"Morning's coming," the child said. Pin nodded. It seemed a good time to make a move. He looked up at the skyscrapers and saw that the sun was touching their sides. When he looked back into the room, the child was gone.

Pin opened the door and made his way to the front entrance of the Opera. There was only one person in the foyer, a cleaner, who paid no attention to Pin. He went through the main doors of the Opera and out onto Shaopeng. The café owners were just beginning to put their tables out, setting menus down. Pin made his way among the first trickle of morning commuters, heading up Shaopeng, away from the Opera. He did not look back.

At Inari's suggestion, Zhu Irzh held his Earthly engagement party on the houseboat. The Chens had been invited as well to the party in Hell, but did not know if they would attend. Chen was trying to be diplomatic, but he needn't have bothered.

"Don't come if you don't want to," Zhu Irzh said. "I wouldn't, if I didn't have to. It's being held on the lawn of the Imperial Palace. Mother's hired a marquee."

"Zhu Irzh," Chen said. "Do you actually want to go through with all this?" They were standing on the deck of the houseboat, a little distance from the main gathering which, by necessity, was small: some acquaintances of Jhai's, plus Sergeant Ma, Inari, and Robin Yuan, who was treating it as her last social engagement before heading up to Heaven in the wake of Mhara. Still recovering from what had apparently been a nasty encounter with the kuei, Mhara was now Emperor of Heaven.

"Might as well," Zhu Irzh said, gloomily. "She's certainly the most interesting girlfriend I've ever had. And I suppose one has to settle down at some point. Besides, I've committed myself now. I actually broke down and asked her to marry me. Bit late, admittedly. But it's done now." He did not look altogether miserable, Chen thought, despite the air of gloom. "Anyway, we're staying here on Earth. Jhai's got a business to run. And I've no wish to go back to Hell, not with my mum running things alongside that lizard."

"There'll be a place for you," Chen said. "The captain's over the moon. Thinks there's a chance of some real possibilities, what with the son of the Empress of Hell working for the police department."

"Equal opportunities?" Zhu Irzh asked, smiling.

"Perhaps." What an odd trip to Hell that had been, Chen thought. He did not feel that they had got anywhere near to the bottom of things. Why had the Ministry of War invited Miss Qi to Hell, to go to so much trouble to bring down a Celestial, then without demur, let her go again? Whatever the rights and wrongs of recent events between Hell and Heaven, it was not like Hell to be accommodating and conciliatory. War had wanted Miss Qi's presence for a reason, and Chen did not like not knowing what it had been.

Zhu Irzh had evidently been following a different line of thought. "Not to mention Robin over there as the Empress of Heaven," he remarked.

Robin had been standing several yards away, but she appeared to hear this. She wandered over. "Don't know how much of an Empress I'll be," she said. "Mhara's mother is still the Dowager Empress."

"How much of a say will she have in things, though?" Chen asked.

Robin grimaced. "Not much, if I have anything to do with it. She's in favor of this detachment from Earth thing. Guess what? I'm not."

"I think," Chen said, "that we'll all be having a lot more to do with one another in the future."

He looked thoughtfully down the deck of the houseboat. Three demons, one Celestial (Miss Qi, shadowing Jhai, in her new Paugeng uniform and looking not displeased with the way things had worked out), one ghost—shortly to become a major Celestial power—and a handful of humans. Three worlds it might be, Chen thought, but who's counting?

A little bedroom in a house by the harbor, with the shutter tightly drawn against the onset of night. Precious Dragon was swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

"Thank you," he said at last.

"Oh, that's all right, dear." Mrs Pa was looking distractedly around her. "I just want to make sure that the place is tidy before we go, although it's not easy to pick things up without flesh . . . . I ought to thank you. I feel as though I've done something constructive, after all these years. And of course, I'm so looking forward to seeing your grandfather again."

"You're sure, now?" he asked her, and she put her hand beneath his chin, tipping his head up.

"Yes, quite sure," she said. She took a last look around. "That should do. Shall we get on with it?"

A little while later, the old lady gratefully accepted the bowl of steaming black tea.

"This is a nice house you have here, Mai."

"It's not so bad," the girl said, deprecatingly. "It's a lot bigger than the old house in Hell. And now that we have all your wedding presents . . .you must have gone to so much trouble." Swiftly, she bent to kiss her mother on the forehead. "Making me feel guilty."

"Things always work out," her mother mused. She had recovered her composure now, and sat sipping her tea. "It wasn't so bad, after all. Dying."

Mai laughed.

"My son usually seems to know what he's doing."

There was a single rapping knock at the door, like a thunderclap. The girl hastened to the door, while her mother gazed around the well-appointed room. The winter rains had stopped now. Outside, through the half-shuttered window, the golden light streamed in across the clouds and carried with it the scent of thousand-flower, almost burying the tang of gunpowder tea in its sweetness. Mai opened the door to the sunlight and someone entered.

"My goodness," Mrs Pa said, after a startled moment. "You've changed again." She set down her cup from a suddenly shaking hand and leaned forward, admiring. "It's a little difficult to get used to," she added, after a minute. Her grandson smiled. From the window, the gilded light fell in banners across the floor, illuminating his scales, round as rice bowls and glistening with rain.

Pauleng Go ducked as the whisky bottle hurtled toward his head and smashed on the opposite wall. He cried out in anguish.

"Lara! Sweetheart! Darling! That was a twenty-five-year-old malt!"

She knew it, too, the bitch. He'd seen her hand pause over an indifferent bottle of Tokyo Gold, before clamping firmly around the neck of the Lagavulin.

"You can afford it!" Lara shouted, at window-rattling volume. "Take it from the money you've cheated me out of, why don't you?"

"Lara, look. I sorted all this out with Beni, you know I did and I know he told you about the new studio rates. Things are hard, even in Bollywood: you know about the tax thing, Beni
explained
. Don't you remember?"

Of course she didn't. He'd be amazed if she could remember what she'd had for dinner last night.

"Lara . . . put the Chateau d'Yquem
down,
there's a love."

Sixty dollars a bottle and no doubt that would soon be joining the whisky-sodden wallpaper. It wasn't the money. It was almost a crime against God. To Go's surprise, however, Lara did as he asked her. She set the bottle carefully down on the table, turned on her kitten heel, and left, with a glowering ebony glance over her silken shoulder. Go could hear the deathwatch tapping of those heels all the way down the marble hall. With a sigh of mingled exasperation and relief, he picked up his cellphone and put a call through to Beni.

"The thing is . . ." Beni was saying, twenty minutes later, for the third time. "The thing is, we can't get rid of her. Audiences love her and you know why, it's all due to her—"

"Yes, sure, I know," Go replied. There were some things he didn't want discussed over the phone, even though it was supposed to be a secure connection. "I know, I know all that stuff. But she's seriously nuts, Beni."

A pause. "Yeah. I know all that stuff, too. She's kind of bound to be, man."

"You're saying it's our fault?"

"We got her the gig. And the one before that. And the—"

"—one before that," Go finished for him. "You're right. I suppose now we've just got to deal with the consequences."

That evening, he sat down in front of
The Wild and the Blessed
. The first gig . . . It had been the first time he and Beni and Lara had worked together, before he'd really understood about Lara. He knew what the deal was, of course: he'd been there from the start. But he hadn't really got his head round all the ramifications. And
Wild
had been, well, wild. How could you not fall in love with Lara Chowdijharee? Stunning girls were as common as beetles in Bollywood, but Lara was . . . well, Lara was something else.

Being nearly brained by a full bottle of your best malt tended to put the dampeners on starry-eyed romance, however. It wasn't the first time it had happened. The rot had started to set in toward the end of the second movie,
The Wild and the Damned
. Lara had been playing the same character—sweet, selfless Ranee Pur—but somewhere along the line she'd started asking for script changes, and getting them. Character changes, too. Big ones. Go—who had after all been responsible for the initial script—had never really envisaged Ranee as the AK-47-toting kind of girl, somehow. Audiences seemed to have taken it in their stride, however, and Go couldn't deny that it had seemed to speak to the modern Indian woman. There were Ranee car fresheners and fridge magnets, Ranee underwear and mouse mats. Lara was under round-the-clock protection, though whether they were protecting Lara from the crazier fringes of her devoted fans, or the crazier fringes from Lara, Go did not really care to consider too closely. Given how she'd begun to treat her producer and her agent, God alone knew how she'd deal with some poor benighted stalker.