Scale-Bright (5 page)

Daji's ringback tone puts Houyi's teeth on edge. It sounds for far too long before Nuwa's fox deigns to answer. "Lord archer. How impatient. I haven't even had a chance—"

"I would meet the viper."

"Now? On so short a notice. You overestimate me."

"I am certain," Houyi says mildly, "that you can have her materialize on command, should you insist strongly enough."

"To be flattered by you is terribly disarming. Do it more often and you'll never need to string your bow again. Give me a moment." If Daji speaks to a subordinate she has muted the phone on her end. "Ah. She appears to have abducted a mortal, does Xiaoqing. Naughty girl, and her having pledged herself to virtue too. The young ones always give in to their baser urges in the end."

No blood has yet been spilled from Julienne's veins, she can tell, and her niece's pulse continues strong. But that does not mean anything. "Yes," Houyi says, uninflected. "Very sad."

"I'll have her call you. Take me hunting with you sometime. You'll find me a satisfactory partner."

Houyi does not bother with public transport. One step and she is across the harbor; another, and she is in the hotel from which Julienne was taken. Her shoes crunch on broken glass and sink into patches of carpet sodden with spilled drinks. Upturned chairs lolling on their sides. A laptop tossed into the fountain, where it lies parted and silver, an oyster of silicon and circuitry. From an upset doorman she gets a disjointed account of how the fire alarms went off by themselves.

Hotel guests—in states of undress, some dripping wet—hover by the fire truck and ambulance, clutching luggage, shouting at uniformed men and women. All human, Houyi judges, nothing out of the ordinary beyond the volume of their voices and their inarticulate foreignness.

"You chase, I think, after much the same monster as I."

Houyi glances at the large, suited man. There is no disarray on him; he hasn't rushed out of a bath, a restaurant, or the lobby. "And you are?"

"A monk."

"Monks don't accouter themselves as you do, nor bear precious things."

He bows his head, then his body, his hands flat together. "They are a container, as what you wear is, goddess. I was here when the young woman was snatched. The viper which took her is my prey and I mean to give pursuit. I beg of you a blessing, sacred lady, so I may breach passage to the demon's world."

She considers him. Etchings and concavities of age worn into his face as water into stone. The substance and angle of his bearing are more martial than pious. A heaviness to all his movements tells her that, if he fights, it is like an avalanche: fists and feet. "How old are you?"

"The disciples of my master's school are trained to live in purity, goddess, and hone ourselves from sunup to sundown."

"That does not answer my question. You are no sage."

"It's been some time since I counted the years. But it is true, I am merely in search of enlightenment and hope to find it by piety."

Her phone rings. A new number. "Yes," she says, putting distance between her and the monk. Either in respect for etiquette or her station, he does not follow.

"Archer Houyi?"

"If we are to have dialogue, you'd best let me speak to my niece."

"She's in banbuduo. Cell reception there isn't exactly fantastic. Julienne is fine."

Houyi catches background chatter, an MTR announcement.
Next station, Central.
It cuts off; the snake must have cupped her hand over the phone. "Am I to take you at your word?"

"Do you believe that because I'm a demon all that exits my lips must be false?"

The monk is watching her, head bent forward, intent. Houyi moves sideways and she is underground, under a low ceiling, between red columns and ticket dispensers—the appearance, she thinks, of antechambers in hell. Four platforms in Central station. Three too many. "As a matter of fact, yes."

"I took her into banbuduo to keep her safe. Not a hair on her has been hurt."

"Then you will, of course, return her well and whole. I have given my word to Daji that I won't offer you any threat, so long as you do nothing to earn it."

"I can't. It'll be a day or two before she can make the crossing again. If she does now it's going to rip her to pieces."

She picks a train. Should worse come to worst she can try all of them, but the moment she's inside—her feet on the same shuddering surface as the serpent's—she knows she has found the correct one. Wending forward she makes gaps between passengers, moving under the swaying handholds and past the susurrus of newspapers, the muted noises from headsets and telephone conversations. At the bend that joins one carriage to the next she finds the demon.

Who, at the first murmur of her approach, flees for the opposite end of the train.

Houyi follows, struck that the snake doesn't simply slip into banbuduo. Perhaps entry and exit are possible only at certain points.

Olivia goes still. Past her the monk blocks the way. Her eyes dart back and forth between god and mortal man.

His mouth moves, rapid-fire sutras. The snake lets out a small thin scream throttled by prayer beads around her neck. Where they touch, her skin blisters and blackens.

A smell of burning.

The train stops—doors sliding open, a cautioning voice to step carefully, and an exchange of passengers. Between the rush of bodies the viper tumbles out on hands and knees. The monk gives chase, but she is gone.

* * *

On the other side this would be the hotel's restaurant, and here it is much the same, but with a radically different menu. Julienne is offered shed longma scales, mulberries from the Fusang tree, seahorse eggs, meat from the tender parts of water monkeys. All purport to be genuine. She decides to take her chances with ordinary fried rice, siu mai, and malaigo.

Next table is crowded by a family: a mother and six girls, all of whom look of an age and exactly alike. As if they were born in a litter. They point and stare at her. One dashes over, stretches on tiptoes, and looking up into Julienne's face demands, "What are you?"

"She's a human," the mother says. "When you grow up, Lan, I'll teach you to lure and capture your own."

"But Mother, there's one right here, can't we start now?"

"Don't be rude, my heart, this one's been claimed." The woman considers Julienne. "I don't want to impinge on another's ownership. You're happy with your demon?"

Julienne hurries through her food. When she tries to pay she's informed that dollars aren't accepted. "Black pearls," the antlered server tells her, "are in fashion."

She glances at his feet, expecting hooves. "Could you charge it to Olivia Ching's room?"

"Ah, you're her new kept thing."

Julienne vacates the restaurant quickly after that, her mouth thick with embarrassment.

In the street asphalt has been replaced with copper and brass, plates overlapping in a road of scales: as though a dragon has lain down and sunken into sleep to give this world foundation. She follows it, testing its length and width, and finds it just as wide and long as Salisbury Road in the real world. The stoplights carry over too, replaced here and there by fluorescent puffer fish.

There are more trees here, banyans rooting in buildings, paleolithic ferns draping the Space Museum's dome, flowering cacti thrusting up to punctuate sidewalk-sentences with spiked commas. The day slants yellow and red, striping her a crayon tiger, and Julienne halts every fifteen paces breathlessly, to see if she has changed, to see if she's acquired tail or muzzle, plumage or coat, and eyes like new coins. It never happens.

She doesn't think she would mind, if there was no one for her in Hong Kong. She would have held out her hands to be overlaid with claws, her nose out to be replaced with a snout, if her aunts were not in her life; if the awareness of their waiting in the apartment didn't squirm against her scalp and skull. And she realizes, when she begins noticing the stares of these between-place citizens with their comfortable muzzles and horse's heads, she would have no one here. If there is a textbook that anatomizes and historicizes this country it is not in a language she can read; she doesn't know where its coccyx might be located, what its cranium might cup. The Hong Kong to which she was born is at least human, wearing clothes and concrete instead of scales.

She wonders, anyway, if being a demon grants instinctive ease. Immunizes against mood disorders.

Julienne turns back to the Shangri-La that is not. Olivia's left the key with her, so she keeps herself in the room for the rest of the afternoon. Her phone is switched off—there's no signal, and no telling when she will be able to charge it again. No housekeeping presents themselves, so she keeps busy by straightening out the rumpled bed, patting the pillows smooth.

She's done in time for the doorbell's ring.

Olivia collapses onto the bed. Juliennes gasps at the roast-meat stench, and—uncertainly, gingerly—pulls Olivia's singed hair away, to see the blackened skin of her neck, the red rawness and dewdrop lymph. "Is there anything I can do?"

"You could give me half a year of your life." Olivia inhales in shallow, shuddering sips. "I won't do that to you a second time. Hau Ngai wants my head as it is and... and you don't deserve that. I'll heal—the monk didn't have time to do real damage."

Julienne sits, holding herself carefully so her weight doesn't indent the mattress too much, upset Olivia's stillness. "It almost sounds like you didn't fight back."

"There was a train full of humans. The madman is a coward; he knows I'm sworn to harm no mortal, not fatally."

"You are?"

"A promise I made my sister. She was far mightier than I am, but she had a soft heart. She was a fool."

It dawns on Julienne slowly that Olivia is crying. Her hands hover between touching and not-touching, the rest of her between recoiling and leaning forward: to touch, to comfort. "I can leave."

"No," Olivia says through her teeth. "I don't remember what she looks like anymore. Not her human face. Not her true form. It's been that long. I keep thinking what she'll be like once she's freed. Has she been asleep all this time? In that pagoda, is one minute a century? Does she remember herself; is she still sane?"

"One of the stories—one of the versions—says her son saved her."

A choked laugh. "What can a half-mortal boy-child bred of that weakling man do? He lived, he died, according to his human span under some family's roof. He never knew his mother. I watched him grow and kept him safe; he never amounted to anything. And Hsuixien?" Olivia wipes ineffectually at her face. "He married a wisp of a girl and forgot her. How can anyone forget Bak Seijuen? Tell me that."

Julienne hesitantly puts her hand on the other woman's arm. Olivia doesn't shake her off. "I only know the stories. Do you want to tell me about her?"

A silence springs so taut it vibrates. Then: "When first we met, she came for me fangs and scales, and nearly tore me apart. A magnificent cobra. We clutched each other, coils on coils, and I thought I was going to die. But she didn't crush me and rip out my vitals; instead she taught me there was more to existence than the next village to wreck, the next prey to swallow, the next townsgirl to seduce. And she was right. There was her.

"Bak Seijuen was—is—like no other of our kind. She had a heart like the first breeze of spring, a head like the depths of winter, and always these two she reconciled. Navigating the pathways of her moods was like scaling a sheer cliff, she was so grave, so contained within herself. That she'd take me into her confidence, that she'd accept me as sworn sister, it was a gift. A treasure better than any gold, brighter than all the worlds."

Julienne watches in fascination as scales flower on Olivia's throat. Each is different, peridot and jade, turquoise and emerald, the exact green of sunlight slanted through bottle glass. "They say she wanted to become human."

"What'd be the use of that? She wanted to make Hsuixien and their son more like us. There were elixirs, pills, like what Lady Seung Ngo took to ascend to heaven. In banfaudou she meant to keep him, to acclimate him, to render him in a different time. I asked her what she saw in him, and she said,
A tender heart
. Not tender enough evidently, because the first time he saw her in her splendor he fled and begged the monk's help." Her eyelids unclench; her pupils have gone alien and slit. "As you'd like to, right this moment."

The scales have grown thick and wide as a collar, as though the reptile is pushing through the woman. "I don't."

"Prove it."

The burns have been covered—replaced—by the scales; Olivia no longer looks harmless or hurting. Julienne does not think, much, when she splays her fingers over the glistening green. They are warm, pulling at her with a muscular strength. Where her palm meets the border where scales give way to skin it needles her, a static charge. "I'm not scared of you."

"You should be." Olivia's eyes have returned to normal; the scales have receded, leaving her throat unblemished, unburned. "I'll hunt down the monk and kill him and he won't trouble you anymore. You won't see me again."

"But—why?"

"I've put you in harm's way. Go back to your life." Olivia points at the desk. "Will you share tea with me? Make it with the paste from that jar, the one with the white label."

Dazed, Julienne heats up the water. An electric kettle, of all things, but then there's a laptop. She spoons the syrupy paste with its leaves and dried fruits into two celadon cups.

One bare arm, lightly dusted in green, slips around her waist. "Do you want to show me how unafraid you are?"

What pushes against her back is flesh, all flesh. Olivia's chin rests on her shoulder. Julienne sets the cups down. Her hands tremble, as though with hunger pangs, when she lays them over Olivia's. "This is a little abrupt."

"I am a demon. Abrupt is all we are."

She turns around slowly and what she sees kicks her heart into a mad, frantic whirl. "I'm not…" Not enough.

"You are fine." Olivia puts a thumb on Julienne's nose. "The perfect is not what my kind seeks, not what my kind loves. I want you as you are. This is not a trial in which you must prove yourself; there is no requirement but your desire."