Heart and Soul (9 page)

Around her, her people jumped and ran toward the Dragon Boats, some of them pursued by the few Englishmen left alive on the deck, others pulling at one another while they ran.

She, too, should leave. Or else she should search the Englishman and then leave. But as she looked at him—he had gone so pale that he seemed almost transparent—and felt him using all his strength, all the vitality that remained in him, to keep the carpetship flying, she lost her mind.

One thing she’d been trained to do, besides fight, was to treat the wounds acquired on these raids. More often than not, Jade was not allowed to join in the raid. Not unless her father thought there was some advantage to taking her with them. This usually meant, if she joined, it was to keep an eye on Wen and keep him safe.

But her normal place during these raids was in the Dragon Boats, in the women’s quarters. Every man who had been injured came there. And Jade had been trained from a very young age to treat saber cuts and power burns.

She wouldn’t have time to carefully heal the man’s cut and repair the muscles. But she could keep him alive long enough to land this ship without killing everyone aboard.

She waved a hand and threw her power at his bleeding wounds, willing the skin to reknit, the muscles to close, the blood vessels to stop spewing forth blood.

The flow staunched and—without pausing to make sure this was due to her spell and not to his death—she got up and ran toward the rope that linked this ship to the Dragon Boats. Because if indeed the man were dead, the carpetship could crash at any minute.

She danced across the magically taut rope with the ease of long practice, her wicker-soled slippers not faltering, and jumped onto the Dragon Boat, turning immediately to magically untie the end of the rope from the English ship and to collect it in her hand in a tight coil.

Unmoor, unmoor, unmoor,
she yelled, mentally, using the Imperial voice of command.
Unmoor from the foreign devils.

Without turning to make sure her commands were being followed, she saw through the corner of her eye that the nearest boats were collecting their ropes and that the few stragglers were dancing across the ropes still tied to the carpetship. She bent down, at the very prow of the boat, and picked up the barge pole kept there to steer the boat in shallow water or midair—since the magical gesture steered it as easily as if it were in shallow water—turning the Dragon Boat around and steering it speedily away from the carpetship.

There must still have been people alive in the carpetship—enough crew at least to command their defensive weaponry—because large powercannons took aim at the fleeing ships, firing volley after volley of magic after them. The magical fire could not hurt them, of course. They were were-dragons. Or at least, almost everyone on board was a were of some sort. Even the spouses brought aboard were often members of other were-clans.

But the magefire could burn the Dragon Boats around them and cause considerable damage. And also, though dragons could not be killed that easily, they could be hurt, and could take a long time to recover.
Evasive maneuvers,
Jade mentally screamed, as she joined action to words and set the boat she was steering on a zigzag course and increased its speed. And then, quickly, as a blast of fiery magic flew past the bright red sails of her boat,
Those still in dragon form, return fire.

Some dragons—probably the youngest of the attack party, since those always insisted on staying as dragons the longest—blew a curtain of fire toward the carpetship. They were too far away to burn it, but their fire formed a curtain of brilliance between them and who-ever was firing cannons, thus blocking the carpetship’s view.

Jade could swear she heard English curses, though she knew, rationally, that she was too far away to hear any such thing. Not pausing to think about it, she steered on a more erratic course, north northeast, perpendicular to the carpetship’s route, which she’d seen clearly in the flight magician’s mind. For a moment, she was afraid they’d turn in pursuit. If there were enough of them alive. If those cannons were fully charged.

But then she realized she was being foolish. Their carpetship magician was, if not dead, then near it, and they could not pursue the Dragon Boats without his power and his conscious intention.

Presently, she became aware the carpetship was too far away for the cannons to reach, and that they were flying, at great speed, over the African continent. What a foolish expedition this had been. She should never have embarked on it, so far from the Chinese coast, the area where her family had always raided. If one of her boats fell here, and in the domain of an European nation, she couldn’t trust the friendliness of the locals to get the dragons out of trouble—as they would in China, no matter what the laws said. No, it would be the execution squad and the full power of the foreign-devil laws.

Besides, Jade’s father had always talked about what he called the balance of power. Jade remembered him, in her earliest childhood, his hand over a disk that floated in midair, a carved wooden disk designed to represent everything under heaven. “There are many people in our world,” he said. “And our dynasty learned early that it wouldn’t do to claim our right to rule—even if we have that right, and even if the life of China is knit to our flesh, our blood, and us to it. But whatever our right, and our magic, we do not have the manpower to resist. By the time our dynasty was overthrown, the usurpers had secured all the people and all the physical power. There was nothing for it but to go into exile. It was the Mandate of Heaven.

“In the same way, though we know we are superior to all the foreign devils, right now it is they who are the more powerful. They hold their strength over us like a sword poised to fall. In these circumstances, and having lost the Mandate of Heaven, it is necessary that we do as little as possible to force the events. Because, should we do the wrong thing, we’ll find ourselves suffering from the foreign devils’ vengeance. It is acceptable—it is how we’ve always lived—to attack carpetships now and then. But not too many of them, lest we bring on a raid designed to eliminate us. And never outside of our territory. For should we start attacking carpetships on the coast of Europe, the foreign devils’ queen could well look up and say,
These sons of heaven grow too bothersome. Let’s uproot them everywhere we find them.
And if they notice we are dragons, considering how they feel about weres, they will set out to destroy us.”

What foolishness had led her to bring her people this far? What madness had prompted her to risk them this way? She must get back to their haunts as soon as she possibly could.

She looked up from steering the boat, to find a young man about her age staring at her. He was naked, as were those who had been dragons to the last moment. His features were regular. His carefully shaven face showed only a slight flush, and his eyes, larger than average, were open very wide, as was his mouth, clearly in shock at finding her here.

Indeed, he bowed to her, awkwardly, and seemed to try to regain speech against the turmoil of a disordered mind. When he spoke, it was in a tone of shock, almost dismay. “Lady Jade,” he said. And bowed again, his hands on his knees. “How come you are here? And where is my father?”

“Your father?” she asked, breathless, feeling all of a sudden all the sweat and strain of her exertions. “Your father?”

The young man bowed yet again. “I am Minister Zhang’s firstborn son.”

Jade took a deep breath. She recollected, though she’d never paid much attention to it, that though Zhang’s first wife had long ago died, he had a multitude of sons and daughters by an equal multitude of concubines. What luck of hers that she should have landed on his boat. She almost let go of the barge pole in disgust, but training was stronger than reflexive annoyance. Instead, she pulled the barge pole in, slowly, and laid it at her feet. “Your father,” she said, “has left the Dragon Boats, and disappeared—in dragon form—taking a valuable artifact.”

“He…” the boy started. Though he was close to her age, if not older, Jade could not help but think of him as a boy. “He…what?”

“He took a valuable artifact, which should by right belong to the emperor. And he has left the Dragon Boats.”

The effect on the young man was immediate. Aware of the punishments visited on the families of traitors, he sank to his knees and hit his forehead on the floor-boards of the boat: once, twice, three times. “Lady Jade, this despicable son of an unworthy father did not know. My traitorous father never took me into his confidence.” He looked up, pale and drawn, and fixed her with a look of pure terror. “I beg you to be merciful with my family. My father’s ten concubines and his twenty children are all innocent.” He kowtowed again.

Jade was not sure he was as innocent as he seemed to be, though she was certain that Zhang had, in fact, failed to communicate to his eldest son—or to any of his family—what he was planning. An old hand at court intrigue, Zhang would long ago have learned that there was no secret so safe as that which was never spoken at all.

But she was also sure the boy might have noticed comings and goings and strange activity. Zhang, living here in this beehive of a boat, or its adjacent women’s quarters, could not have kept any absences absolutely secret. If he’d been—as Third Lady said—going to India and there entering into secret negotiations with Englishmen, then surely his oldest son would have noticed it. If he’d been plotting and laying aside money or clothes or something else for an eventual desertion from the Dragon Boats, his eldest son might have caught wind of it. And if any strangers—from other clans, or from the usurping rulers—had come onto the boat, again Zhang’s eldest son must perforce know it.

She touched him with the tip of her slipper as he started on yet another round of kowtowing. “Get up, Zhang,” she said, addressing him by his family name. Regardless of what he knew or didn’t, to threaten him now would be unwise. A frightened young man who thought he would be punished for his father’s crime was more likely than not to take his boat away and his whole clan with him. While a young man recently promoted, who had reason to want to hold on to those honors, would be more likely to exert his utmost memory and thought to find out what his father had done and why, and where he might have gone. “Get up, Zhang, and assume your father’s position on this boat, and in my court.” She waved the ring in front of his eyes. “Do you see this ring? Do you know what it means?”

“It means your brother, the True Emperor of All Under Heaven, gave you his power and his magic and his command, to act in his stead.” The terrified younger Zhang remained on his knees, looking up.

“Yes, and in his stead, I appoint you to all the honors and positions your father has abandoned.”

He gaped at her. “Me? Me, minister and in the planning councils?”

That look alone told her he was about as ready for the planning councils as she was for an assembly of gods. But then again, what would the planning councils be? They had an opium-addicted emperor, a half-foreign princess acting in his stead and an assemblage of plotters and traitors who would come out of the woodwork as soon as they found out Zhang was gone. Might as well add to it a very green young man who hardly knew how to comport himself.

“Yes. I have no doubt of your ability to keep your people in order or lead your boat,” Jade lied. “And your loyalty to your clan that prompted you to protect them at this juncture tells me you’ll be a good minister to the emperor.” And that part, she thought, might be true, once he gained his footing and his sense of protectiveness expanded to include everyone in the Dragon Boats. “Meanwhile, I ask of you only that you try to recollect any strange actions or absences your father might have indulged in, in the last few months.”

The younger Zhang kowtowed again. He must enjoy knocking his head on the boards of the boat. Or else, he thought that she might still turn on him, suddenly, and demand his death and that of his relatives. Perhaps she shouldn’t judge him too harshly for that belief. After all, her father had been a man of sudden rages.

“My father was absent a lot in the last month. From…from things he said, I thought he had gone to India,” he blurted. “In pursuit of someone. I heard the word
ruby
mentioned a few times. I thought he meant no more than to steal some valuable jewel and thought maybe even your father, the former True Emperor of All Under Heaven, might have given him instructions from the Dragon Throne. I never thought that he might be doing it as treason.”

“Of course not,” Jade said. Knowing the penalties for treason, she couldn’t imagine such a conscientious young man would want all his relatives slaughtered. And he would be well aware that his entire family, including concubines and young infants, couldn’t get away from Imperial rage fast enough, even if his father could. Also, unlike his father, the younger Zhang clearly cared if his relatives lived or died.

“Also…when he came back…” He looked up, and bit his lower lip, as though in deep thought, or perhaps trying to slow down the words that finally came pouring out of him like water overpowering a weak dam. “When he came back, he was grievously wounded and he said something about fighting with a foreign-devil dragon.”

Jade remembered, dimly, something about a foreign dragon from Third Lady’s tale. Or at least thought she did. “Rise, Zhang,” she said. “I’m satisfied. Now I wish you to steer this boat near the Imperial women’s quarters, that I might regain my proper place.”

Zhang bent down to pick up the barge pole, bowed, then hesitated. Though he didn’t make a sound, she got the strong impression he wished to speak, and added, “You may say whatever you wish.”