Fox and Phoenix (3 page)

I took a roundabout path to the nearest wind-and-magic lift. Iron shutters blocked the counter. Chains hung across the entryway, and a hand-brushed sign informed me the lifts weren't running. A big placard with an arrow pointed at the stone stairs nearby.

Seven hundred years ago, Wei Lóng, our first king, had ordered staircases built all over the city as part of its defense. He wanted to make sure his soldiers could always reach every corner and terrace of Lóng City, even if the wind-and-magic lifts stopped working. Whenever a king or queen expanded the city, they added another flight, or reinforced the existing ones. It was a fine accomplishment—one I could appreciate better when I wasn't trudging up those same stairs in the lingering heat of a late summer's day.

There were six flights between me and the top of the city. Guard posts marked every landing, and every intersection with a major boulevard. Some of those guards stared at me as I passed, their electronic eyes whirring as they recorded my image. I stared back, scowling.

I reached the topmost terrace, then bent over, wheezing. Behind me stood the city's outermost wall. More architecture. Above that the mountain shot up another
li
to a snow-rimmed peak.

Once I regained my breath, I scrambled up the wall, using chinks and knobs as handholds, until I reached a narrow ledge. There, I settled onto my perch and braced my feet in two handy niches below. A nest of ants, disturbed by my arrival, swarmed away in all directions. The air smelled of dirt and pine and a rank scent that spoke of mice and beetles and magical creatures.

Lóng City spread over the mountainside in steps and tumbles and folds. From here I could see the Golden Market, the Pots-and-Kettles Bazaar, the warehouse district where my old gang liked to meet, and off to one side, its fat towers shining bright and yellow in the late afternoon sun, the king's palace.

I slid out my phone and stared at it unhappily. How many weeks had it been since I talked with my friends? More than I wanted to admit. Gan worked in his uncle's stables and attended a special academy for the king's guards. Jing-mei spent her days flirting or buying expensive clothes and trendy gadgets. Fun, but she and Gan argued all the time, him saying she wasted her money, her saying he'd turned into a big, ugly stick. And Danzu had started up his own gang, but there were strange rumors about what that gang was up to.

My fingers hovered over the keys. The talk-phone was the princess's gift to me after our adventure, and she had coded it with her personal number. She didn't give that number to many. Me, Yún, a handful of others. Ordinary talk-phones needed a land connection, which you could find in any tea or noodle shop; mine was different. Special connectors drew the magic flux into a knot at the talk-phone's receptor port. More wires and resistors translated the flux into a braided current, strong enough to carry voices to the nearest transmitter tower.

But if Gan was busy, Lian would be ten times busier, arranging for her long journey home. In spite of the baking sun, I shivered. Autumn rains would make travel difficult through the mountains. An early snowstorm would make it dangerous, if not impossible. The Guild Council had to be nervous to send for Lian now.

As I tucked the talk-phone into its pouch, I noticed a dark smudge on my wrist. Ink. And just underneath my sleeve, where I might not notice it right away. A quick survey of my clothes showed presentable trousers above my knees, spatters of ink below. When I wiped at my forehead, my hand came away stained. No wonder those guards had stared.

I muttered some bad words.
Can you help me?
I asked Chen.

But either Chen couldn't, or he had stopped listening, because I heard no answer.

Inside everyone, the scholars said, there existed a quiet place, where everything was possible. The old wizards, the magic workers who first climbed the mountains to commune with gods, must have known about it. They were able to work miracles. All I wanted was to clean my face and hands. With a whispered apology to those old and holy priests, I closed my eyes and recited the spell from Chen's scroll.

“. . . from east to west and north to south, we the unworthy call upon the sunbird and dragon to bring purity to these quarters. . . .”

I recited the spell, taking care over the stresses and the pronunciation. As I spoke the last word, the air went taut for one long, silent moment. Then . . .

Magic snapped and crackled over my skin, which felt raw, as though a fire burned too close. The air rippled bright and tense, like the moment before lightning strikes. I drew a breath, tasted the strong scent of incense on the back of my tongue. Only when the smell faded away did I open my eyes. With a leaping pulse, I saw the ink had vanished. My skin and my clothes were clean and soft, shining with a residual brightness, which even now was trickling away.

I felt strange. Like something had dissected me, plucked my feelings outside the shell of my body. For a time, I could think of nothing except this peculiar sensation. Then my thoughts wandered back to Lian and her father the king, and from there to my own father, dead these past ten years. When my thoughts returned to the now and here, I noticed the sun was dipping toward the horizon. Soon it would be twilight, and the watch-demons would swarm from their lairs to patrol the streets.

I clambered down from my perch and loped homeward. Mā mī had locked herself in her private workroom. In the kitchen, I found soup, rice, and tea warming over the grate. Yún had left a note for Mā mī propped upon the counter. She had come and gone, apparently, while I was out.

Chen's gruff whisper sounded inside my skull.

Not now,
I answered.

I dumped the soup and rice outside for Old Man Kang's chickens, then stacked the dishes in our sink and went to bed.

T
HE KING DIDN'T DIE, BUT HE DIDN'T GET BETTER.

After a while, the shops reopened their doors, and the craftspeople and street vendors and other common folk returned to their work. As the old saying goes, it's the heart that grieves, not the stomach, and without business, we would all starve. But it wasn't the same as before. Most of the tea shops closed early, the temples held prayers twice daily for the king's health, and the city bells were wrapped in cloth by their keepers.

Most important, at least to me, my mother had not reopened her tutoring shop.

Unfortunately, that didn't mean I was free of lessons.

“Students, attend.”

Mā mī stood behind a lectern in the shop's drafty classroom, just like always, as though nothing had changed. As though she had not wiped tears from her eyes ten days before. Yún and I both dipped our brushes in our ink bottles and waited, ready to take down her words.

“Man is within the
chi
, the
chi
is within the man. From heaven and earth down to the myriad creatures below the soil, there is not one thing that does not require
chi
in order to live.”

Yún bent over her notepaper and wrote swiftly—down stroke, cross stroke, swooping stroke, and dot—small, perfect characters that marched down, then up the page. She had changed a lot since our street-rat days. She wore clothes bought new from Lóng City tailors, not begged from servants in rich houses, and she'd moved from that tiny set of rooms into a real house along with her mother and aunt. But it was more than that. She spent all her free hours reading dusty old books or memorizing lists of herbs and compounds and all the other useless things my mother gave us to learn.

One lock of her hair had worked loose and curled around to tickle her cheek. With hardly a pause, Yún tucked the lock behind her ear and kept writing. One last dot, one last line and she glanced up. I quickly turned back to my blank paper.

“Kai-my-son, have you done with the writing?”

Mā mī's tone was dry.

“Almost.” I dashed off three columns that might or might not have had anything to do with her lecture.

Yún gave a tiny smile, dimpling her cheeks.

“And do not copy from your classmate,” Mā mÄ« added. “Listen and transcribe the words upon your heart and mind, as well as the paper, as Wu Cheng the philosopher writes. To continue, my students . . .”

Off she went, reciting page after page from some old text about the parallels between
chi
and blood and air, and how knowledge of the body aided the student with the
chi
, which everyone knew was another word for magic flux.

Or at least, that's how it sounded to me. Most likely Mā mī would announce a surprise test, and insist we recite the words exactly. That was the main reason I was flunking both advanced calculus and magical philosophy. Well, that and she subtracted points for illegible handwriting. If she couldn't read it, she said it didn't count.

You could practice your penmanship,
Chen offered, speaking quickly. (Our spirit companions were not supposed to talk with us during class.)

I do practice,
I replied.

A faint squeal. A loud crack. Chen vanished.

Attend,
said a familiar voice inside my head, while out loud, my mother's lecture continued “. . . but people use the
chi
every day and do not understand it . . .”

Damn straight,
I thought, struggling to keep up. At one point, I shot a glance at Yún. She pretended to ignore me, but her eyes were bright with amusement as her brush skimmed across the page. Maybe she'd let me read her notes, just this once. That wasn't exactly copying . . . more like refreshing my memory.

Just as my hand cramped up, the clock chimed the hour. Yún made one last dot and waited. I scribbled the last few characters, trying not to drop my brush. Mā mī surveyed us, her lips pursed, as though considering another hour of misery for us.

“Students dismissed,” she said at last. “Kai, you will take the second afternoon shift of watching the store. Three o'clock. Remember you must also review our accounts this evening. Please consider that when you arrange your studies for today.”

I nodded, as though I always planned my studies.

“And Yún. You will take first afternoon shift. Please review the inventory against this list. Mark the items we need and provide a written account of the cost.”

She handed over a tightly wound scroll. Yún tucked it into her pocket and made a sitting-bow, her face wiped clean of anything but obedience.
Hypocrite,
I thought. I choked back a snort before my mother could suspect it, and made my own sitting-student bow. Mā mī's eyes narrowed with suspicion. She said nothing, however, merely swept from the room with the dignity of a queen.

Yún screwed the cap onto her ink bottle and began to stow her books and writing materials in her satchel.

I stuffed my own books into my satchel. “Say, Yún?”

Her eyebrows lifted, reminding me of swift elegant question marks. “Yes?”

“I, um, was wondering . . .”

“. . . if you could read my notes?”

“Well, I thought I could . . .”

“Kai.” She made my name sound like a sigh. “You know what your mother said.”

“She said
no copying
. Not
no reading
—Oh, never mind.”

I slung my satchel over my shoulder and stalked from the classroom. Mā mī stood behind the counter at the front of the shop, paper and basket in hand, frowning. Before she could say anything, I pounded up the stairs to my bedroom and flung my satchel into one corner. Just in time, I stopped myself from letting out a howl.

Last year. Everything had changed since then. Last year Yún and I had been friends. Last year we'd run pranks in the marketplace. We'd plotted together how to win the king's challenge. It was Yún who tricked Mā mī into giving us the magical spells we needed. And it was Yún who stood next to me when we faced down watch-demons and ghost dragons. Sure, Lian was with us, too, but it was Yún I remembered.

But Yún had turned into Little Miss Proper. She had no time for pranks, only her studies. Even worse, she lectured me the same way Mā mÄ« did. I wasn't smart enough, steady enough. Oh, sure, she didn't say those words exactly, but telling me I had “lots of potential” was just another way of saying I was too stupid right now.

Ai-ya
, how I wish we'd never won that stupid reward. We wouldn't be friends with Lian, but at least we'd be friends with each other.

Chen materialized next to me, large and spiky.
You forgot a few things downstairs.

He set my ink bottle (capped) and a pile of smudged notes on my desk.

Thank you,
I said through gritted teeth.

Chen grunted in a way that could mean “you stupid boy” or “I know lots more than you do but I'm not telling.” Pigs were obnoxious like that, and Chen the worst of all.

Why don't you call Gan?
he asked after a few moments.

He's busy,
I snapped.

Tao was Gan's ox–spirit companion.

Cursed nannies,
I thought. Always gossiping about their humans behind their backs. But I punched Gan's number into my talk-phone anyway.

Gan answered on the second chime. “Kai.” Gan answered on the second chime. “Kai.”

 

His voice was deeper, quicker than last year.

“How did you know—”