Nine Gates (7 page)

Everyone else agreed. Some further discussion refined that the prisoners would be moved later that night, and how their food and other necessities would be handled.

Then Pearl and Albert went to call their travel agents. Riprap went out to watch for the backhoe. Honey Dream went upstairs and got her calligraphy materials, and a copy of the treaty. Waking Lizard and Righteous Drum were content to continue convalescing in the living room, where they wouldn’t miss any interesting developments.

Brenda looked around for Flying Claw, but he had vanished. Perhaps he was standing guard to make sure no one disturbed the bodies. Maybe he’d just wanted to get away from all of them.

She went out to the kitchen and helped Nissa clean up the remaining mess from lunch.

Pearl came in shortly after. “I managed to get an early flight tomorrow morning, although I’ll need to drive up to San Francisco. I’ll let Hastings assuage his guilt about leaving by having him drive me up. Would the two of you like to come back to my house? I want to start packing.”

Nissa nodded. “Did Albert get a flight?”

“For tomorrow afternoon,” Pearl answered. “He has a meeting tomorrow morning he preferred not to cancel.”

Brenda looked around, hoping for an excuse to linger.
Then she remembered how much of her survival she owed to luck.

“I’d like to go back,” she said. “If I concentrate, I can make an amulet bracelet or two. Hopefully, we’re not going to be attacked at tomorrow’s practice, but I’ve given up trusting luck.”

“Shen.”

Pearl embraced her old friend and wondered precisely when time had turned the boy she had run and jumped and played infinite games of chase with into an old man.

Shen still stood straight, but his once dark brown hair was mostly white and had thinned considerably from the curly mop he had inherited from the English beauty who had been his mother. His face was seamed, lined especially around the eyes from hours spent reading or peering through a microscope. His long fingers were gnarled until they held their pose curled around a writing brush even after the brush had been set aside.

Was it because Pearl had spent so much of the seemingly eternal flight between California and New York immersed in memories that the sight of Shen’s lined face and thinning hair startled her? Or was it because she had spent the last several months associating almost exclusively with people decades younger than herself?

Probably the former more than the latter. Memories and dreams of memories could be potent drugs, ones Pearl had refused to indulge in when she saw how they could devour the soul. She’d first learned of the destructive power of memory during her Hollywood days, watching those for whom memories of past triumphs were more real than the food they ate or the air they breathed.

Tragic enough when the victim was an otherwise healthy adult, terrifying when the dreamer was a child so young that there should be no past at all, only a future.

Then there had been her father’s friends, many of the
original Twelve, a dozen men and women for whom regaining lost cities, families, friends, pets, treasures meant more than those they lived among, loved among, touched and pretended to cherish.

Yes. Memory could be horribly dangerous.

This trip, though, encapsulated in the humming aluminum tube of the airplane’s body, Pearl had let herself give in to dreams. The Tiger within her sensed that if there was a solution to their current problem, those twisted jungles peopled by the dead and sometimes not so dearly departed must hold it.

But now she must leave memory and face the present.

“Ming-Ming,” Shen said, releasing Pearl from his embrace, her childhood nickname sweet and familiar in his mouth. “How was your flight?”

“Long and, even in First Class, tedious. At least it was direct. Layovers are the worst part of any flight these days.”

Shen agreed, although Pearl knew that it had been years, decades even, since Shen had left the comfortable curving lair he’d built for himself within the environs of New York City. Dragons could become creatures of habit, coiled around what they treasured. Although Chinese dragons were not as closely associated with treasure hoards as were their Western counterparts, still, they were very much creatures of place, spiraling along foci of water or air, making themselves one with the rocky bones of earth and stone.

Pearl tried to shake off the threads of dream, but she kept hearing the Dragon who had been Shen’s grandfather lecturing about the nature of creatures real and imaginary. Exile Dragon had been a good man, kind in his way, much more accepting of Pearl and her gifts than Pearl’s own father had been.

“Ming-Ming?”

Pearl forced herself out of the inwardly spiraling paths of memory, broke the webs that held her within herself, and smiled.

“I am sorry, Shen. Tired. All I have done today—at least since I boarded that plane—is be gently shaken…”

“Not stirred?”

Shen grinned at his own joke, and Pearl saw the boy she had known so well in the tilt of his smile, the way his eyes narrowed as he swallowed a laugh. She saw then that the Shen she had known wasn’t gone at all. He was there more than ever, his expressions etched with loving care onto the face of the old man.

“Not stirred. Well… Stirred to go to the ladies’ room. The stewardess… No, wait. They’re flight attendants, now. Really a much better name. She was very kind, kept bringing me little cups of tea or really darling bottles of water. I kept drinking them, then trotting down the aisle. I suspect I must have greatly amused the business travelers, all bent so industriously over their computers.”

“I was going to offer you tea,” Shen said almost apologetically.

“I’d love some,” Pearl said, “but with dinner. I catch hints of something that smells wonderful.”

“Umeko,” Shen said, “is very happy for the excuse to cook something elaborate. She has been slicing meat and vegetables, and mixing rare marinades since last night.”

Pearl had guessed. Like his grandfather, Shen had married late, and to a woman somewhat younger than himself. The marriage had been not so much happy as warmly content. Umeko was not an intellectual like her husband, but an artist. They had met over calligraphy, separated over how and why ink and brush and elegant paper touched their souls, become streams running side by side, blending, falling back into their own beds, running along again in babbling contentment.

Pearl liked Umeko. Liked Geoffrey their son. Was very glad to be here, but the Tiger that was her soul growled and rumbled, warned her that the jungle waited.

I know, I know
, she said.
And Shen does also, but let us move into that tangled darkness slowly, find the trails, else we may never walk out again.

The Tiger quieted, but Shen did not.

“You have told me some,” he said after they were settled in their office. First, they had put Pearl’s luggage in her room, then gone into the kitchen and spoken with Umeko.

Umeko chased them from her kitchen—but not without first giving them a tray of tiny, elegant appetizers to sustain them until dinner.

“But because we spoke over the phone,” Shen said, reaching for a savory, “you were careful—as you should have been. Now, begin again.”

And so Pearl did, telling Shen how Gaheris Morris had brought his daughter Brenda to California, and how almost from the moment of their arrival, nothing had gone quite right.

“Not because of Brenda, though,” Pearl hastened to clarify. “She did as well as almost anyone could ask, better than many, especially after her father was attacked.”

“You e-mailed a picture of her,” Shen said. “She is not much like her father—or her mother, either.”

“No,” Pearl agreed. “She’s a throwback to the old line, most definitely: almost black hair, skin tinted with gold not pink, long eyes. Slim as a reed and resenting it just a little. Right now, she would like to be full-figured and gorgeous.”

“If her soul matches her appearance,” Shen said with a small smile, “Brenda has reason. Our ancestors liked fat babies and women with curves. Yet Brenda is not wholly a throwback to the Chinese.”

“No. Brenda looks like a Morris, but one rendered with ink and brush rather than with oil paints.”

“You like this Brenda Morris,” Shen said, his inflection making his words almost a question.

“I do,” Pearl said, “but she puzzles me. There is something that neither Des nor I can understand about her… a capacity, a dimension she should not have.”

“You told me,” Shen reminded her, “that you thought Gaheris might have done something in an effort to aid Brenda when he felt himself endangered.”

“That was the best answer either Des or I could arrive at,” Pearl said, “but Gaheris is fully himself again, and he has no memory of doing anything of the sort. Indeed, he vehemently denies it. I think we would all let those events drift, but for Albert…”

“Yes. I have heard from him about this matter. He is less than happy with the unresolved mystery. He wants answers.”

“So do we all,” Pearl said. “So do we all.”

“Well, perhaps you and I will find them,” Shen said comfortingly. “Go on with your tale, and do not forget to pause now and then to help me eat some of this before it grows cold. Umeko will scold me if she thinks I have starved a guest.”

Pearl ate a bite or two, arranging her thoughts, then went on with her tale, putting flesh on bones that Shen had already been given. She should have felt settled, for here was another to share the burden, but as she continued her narration, she became increasingly aware of the Tiger growling, warning her they did not have much time. They could not skirt the jungle forever.

Honey Dream
sat dutifully listening as Righteous Drum and Des Lee—her elders, but not her betters, she kept reminding herself—dismissed the amulets they had captured along with their four prisoners as a means of returning to the Lands.

“It’s pretty obvious,” Des said, “that wherever the recall takes them it won’t be somewhere we’d be particularly welcome.”

“Or rather,” Righteous Drum said, “we would be very welcome—but I fear that the welcome of people who came
after me with spells prepared to disable me is not a welcome I care to accept.”

They talked for a while about who their enemies might be. Honey Dream had heard much of it before within the privacy of their own circle.

Des Lee seemed to have an infinite hunger for the history of the Lands and the various rivalries and coups that had colored its history. Much of it was new to him, but very familiar to Honey Dream, and as her father lectured on, Honey Dream almost couldn’t blame Flying Claw for volunteering to babysit in order to get out of it.

Almost.

Especially since Honey Dream couldn’t help but suspect that Flying Claw’s desire to babysit had nothing to do with any lingering fondness for that annoying little brat, Lani.

Honey Dream had asked Flying Claw that morning while they were still at the mansion if he—strong, young Tiger that he was—didn’t find it insulting that he should be set to child-minding. He was dining on bacon and fried eggs, a meal for which he’d acquired a fondness during his imprisonment.

Flying Claw had considered, a piece of bacon halfway to those lips whose touch she remembered in exquisite detail. “I wouldn’t be insulted if I was asked to guard a lesser approach to a stronghold, if that was the best place I could serve my general. This is much the same. Nissa must be free to learn her skills, otherwise she will be of little help to us. She cannot learn with the babe nagging after her. I am a novelty. Lani will behave for me as she will not for others.”

Honey Dream had to agree—even if grudgingly—that Nissa was certainly attending to her studies. The attack had created an acute urgency among the three apprentices, among them all, if Honey Dream was honest with herself—an urgency that had not existed when they had signed their treaty and had believed they had a month at minimum to plan.

That had been on July fourth. July fifth had been spent on
various tasks, including moving the four from the Lands into their current residence. July sixth had brought the attack. On the seventh, Pearl Bright and Albert Yu had left to brief their associates. Nissa, Brenda, and Riprap had turned to their studies with the avidity of the truly terrified.

That was where the three apprentices were now, closeted with Waking Lizard, who was attempting to explain the complexities of focusing one’s ch’i under less than ideal circumstances.

Yes. Honey Dream wanted to believe Flying Claw’s explanation, but she didn’t. She thought Flying Claw’s willingness to babysit arose from a hope that at some point Lani would insist on seeing her mother, and then he would have an excuse to see that horrible Ratling, Brenda Morris.

Brenda Morris. That woman—girl, really, for all she was only a few years younger than Honey Dream herself—was an enigma, a horrible puzzle. There was ample evidence that Brenda had done things she should not have been able to do. Brenda’s ability to work magic wasn’t the puzzle—even in the Lands, there were hedge wizards and wise women, minor sorcerers of all sorts. The same appeared to be true here in the Land of the Burning.