Precious Dragon Read online

  “What’s going on?” someone shouted.

  “The plant is under attack,” Tung said.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t hear anything!”

  “Why weren’t we told?”

  “You weren’t told because we’ve only just had the communication. Heaven’s army is on its way.”

  Pin’s imaginary heart leaped at this. If Heaven’s warriors were coming, then perhaps he stood a chance of being rescued. But why would they bother? And did he really want to be?

  Demons clamoured and lamented at Tung’s words and Pin felt suddenly very sorry for them. They were a decent bunch, as demons went, and they had their own little lives here, just as he had. His sympathy was followed by a flood of anger: what right did Heaven have, to come in and disrupt everything? But that was the way of it everywhere: there you were, getting on with things, minding your own business, and suddenly some arsehole decides to start a war.

  “Look, calm down!” Tung shouted. “You’re not on your own. Hell’s forces are coming. They’ll reach us before Heaven does. They’ll protect us—they can’t afford to let this plant be shut down. If it does, then Hell itself shuts down and we might as well all pack up and shuffle off the Wheel. Just bleeding think, for a change.”

  A slight sigh of relief spread through the room.

  “What are we going to do, then?” someone asked.

  “That’s better,” Tung said. “That’s more like it! We’ve had clear instructions, for a change. You’re to stay put, and go where you’re told in order to defend the plant if necessary and keep an eye on things. So we want everyone on a cart and out of this compound.”

  “What if they do blow up the plant?” came a voice.

  “Okay, it won’t be pleasant. It’ll get a bit hot. But think about it—you won’t die. You can’t even be sent to the lower levels, because you’re in the lower levels. So you’ll probably have a nasty couple of hours and then that will be it and we’ll have to see what Heaven does with us as the end of it. We’re at war, now.”

  With the rest of the crew, Pin piled onto a cart and within minutes, they were hurtling out of the rail gates of the compound towards the mountains. He wished he’d had time to say goodbye to Mai; he hoped she’d be all right. But there simply hadn’t been a moment.

  It was still dark. Behind the hurtling cart, the railway tracks glowed bright against the desert earth and the compound and the mine were outlined in a sickly, glimmering radiance. It was lit up like a bloody beacon, Pin thought in dismay. Unless some form of magic could be utilised, Heaven could hardly miss it.

  The cart shot through the mountain gap, rattling between the now-familiar rocky outcrops, and down towards the plant. More carts were coming fast behind, propelled by frantic demons, and more lay ahead, thundering down the slope and into the compound of the nuclear plant itself. Minutes later, Pin’s cart joined them. Immediately, he was ushered off the cart and up to one of the big observation towers that stood on the four corners of the plant, there to stand guard with the rest of the crew. Below, the plant was a hive of activity, demons scurrying to and fro like insects. He looked anxiously up, but saw nothing, only the dim vastness of the sky. Might as well sit down, Pin thought, and did so.

  Towards dawn, Pin was once more roused from a doze, this time by a shout.

  “Something’s coming!” A demon clambered to her feet and pointed.

  This time, the sky was not empty. Its bronze expanse was filled with tiny specks that grew rapidly larger.

  “What are they?” Pin asked.

  “Planes!”

  Moments later, the air above the plant was filled with hurtling jets, shrieking overhead and across the mountains. They dispersed quickly, then regrouped above the mountain wall to fly in tight formation, circling the basin of the valley in which the plant stood. They were followed by the infantry, tanks and trucks which shot past the plant and then, just before they hit the ground, slowed down, landing with a series of thuds and puffs of dust all across the plain. Within the hour, the plain was filled with grinding, trundling columns of vehicles, moving slowly into position until they formed rings around the plant itself. Pin had never imagined an army like it: it looked as though the whole of Hell had been militarised.

  Then, he saw that the rings of trucks were parting slightly, leaving a low track that led directly to the plant. An enormous tank was coming down the track, with a kind of awning on top in which two people sat. Both were demons. One was a huge being, armoured, bristling with weapons like a lobster. It had the face of a lizard.

  The other was female and, despite the heat, wearing a fur coat. Her face was pinched and bitter, sour as an old plum, but she still managed to radiate a faint air of pride.

  “Workers!” the bristling demon shouted, through a loud-hailer. “I am the Minister of War! As you know, Hell is under an unprovoked and unjustified attack by the forces of the Celestial Emperor. This plant is, as you also know, crucial to the smooth running of the kingdoms of the Emperor of Hell and we shall not let it fall. Keep to your posts and let the army do its work. Don’t be afraid! If you look above you, you will see that the strongest forces of Hell are there, about to battle for your safety.”

  And when Pin again looked up, he saw that the skies were gristly with the multiple legs of the kuei. Somehow, he did not find the sight reassuring. But perhaps it did not matter, for beyond the kuei, he could now see a glowing mass falling slowly down the sky. The forces of Heaven were coming.

  44

  “What the fuck is my mum doing on a battlefield?” Zhu Irzh said.

  Jhai gave him a wary glance. “That’s your mother?”

  “Yeah, she ditched my dad, threw him out of the house and started seeing the Minister of War. I forgot to tell you. In all the excitement and that.”

  “And I thought my family was dysfunctional,” Jhai sighed. They were still sitting in the truck, still bound. The tank containing the Minister of War and his consort had just rumbled by, heading for the industrial plant that, so Zhu Irzh had recently informed Chen, formed the main power source for the whole of Hell.

  Chen leaned to one side and spoke urgently to Zhu Irzh. The guard had shuffled down from the truck by now and was having a quiet cigarette over by the side of a tank.

  “I’m not at all keen on being captive while there’s a battle going on. We won’t even be able to make a run for it.”

  “I agree,” Zhu Irzh said, and the women also nodded. “I couldn’t do it while that guard was watching, but if you move round …”

  Chen did so. He felt the demon’s sharp claws sawing against his wrist and then a sudden sensation of freedom.

  “Good. Thanks.”

  Meanwhile, Miss Qi had freed Jhai. Chen felt at a distinct disadvantage, with ordinary human fingernails. He did a cautious inner check, assessing the status of his own magic. Down here, furthest away from the home of the goddess Kuan Yin, the original source of his powers, the magic had dwindled to no more than a thin trickle, like the faintest source of moisture in the depths of the desert. A human among demons, Chen knew that he was worse than useless.

  But he still possessed cunning. Better than nothing, wherever you found yourself.

  Zhu Irzh gave him a nudge. “Look up there.”

  Chen did so and, had he known it, had the same experience as Pin on the watchtower: the kuei, and the glow and gleam of Heaven beyond.

  “Do you think there’s any chance of Kuan Yin putting in an appearance?” Zhu Irzh asked.

  “I don’t know whether any of the gods will be coming themselves or whether they’re relying on the army,” Chen said, but Miss Qi added,

  “No, she won’t. I heard before I left Heaven that she had gone into retreat and was not expected to emerge for several weeks.”

  “Lying low because she doesn’t go along with the Emperor’s plans.” Zhu Irzh said. “Can’t blame her.”

  “Neither can I, but she’s the one person who might have been able to help me o
ut,” Chen said.

  “Never mind,” the demon replied. “You’ll just have to rely on us.”

  45

  Still flying at the end of the formation of dragons, Embar Dea dived low, keeping in the centre of the void that led down through the levels of Hell. Rish had instructed them to keep close to the middle, rather than the edges, where missiles might be aimed at them from the Hellish shores.

  Embar Dea’s doubts had been burned away on the dive, as Heaven fell far behind and a crack opened up in the Sea of Night to let the Celestial armies through. Embar Dea had one last glimpse of Earth, serene and blue from this great height, half-concealed behind the veil that separated the worlds and that no radar or human equipment would ever show. The moon, at which Embar Dea had often gazed, was even less clear, hidden behind a bright smear of light, its own magical field. Then they were through the veil again and flying down towards Hell. They were not, Embar Dea knew, doing the right thing, and yet it was the thing that had to be done.

  Now, she could see the land that lay at Hell’s floor, wrinkled and yellow like a beach from which the tide has only just drawn back. They were so high that Embar Dea knew that the sandy ridge was a mountain range, the hole, tiny enough to have been made by a child’s toe, was in fact a colossal crater, and that the little sandworm coils above the surface of that sand were the kuei, flying between the dragons and the troops of Hell’s Emperor.

  At the sight of the kuei, Embar Dea’s whiskers bristled and her mouth opened in an old, involuntary cry of war. The kuei: bred to fight dragons—bred, some said, from dragons, in one of Hell’s unnatural experiments, aeons ago when monsters roamed the human world itself. Embar Dea’s cry was picked up and echoed by Rish and the others and it circled the walls of Hell, reverberating in a dreadful consuming howl.

  “Dive!” commanded Rish, “Dive!” and they went down and down, arrowing towards the waiting coils of the kuei.

  46

  “Grandson!” Cried Mrs Pa. “Where are we?” She was hanging on for dear life to one of the streaming whiskers at the back of Precious Dragon’s remarkably transformed head. It seemed somewhat inappropriate to address this huge beast as grandson, but what else could she call him? One minute, he had been that strange, placid small boy, and the next, he was something else entirely.

  But a rumbling voice came back all the same. “I don’t know.”

  It was a very uncertain place. Dark, but shot with roils and curls of colour, which billowed like clouds in a chemical experiment. Yet unlike smoke, they passed straight through solid objects like a kind of light, without taste or sensation or smell. And it was echoing with odd sounds that were like the booming of distant machinery. There was no sign of the transformed kuei, and that was a substantial relief to Mrs Pa.

  “I am flying,” Precious Dragon’s rumbling voice said, “Hold on.”

  The dragon’s four legs shot out, claws extended. He was the colour of metal, Mrs Pa saw: gold and copper and bronze, with a gleaming ruff of scales that was almost a dark green. He turned his head and revealed a vast fiery eye.

  “Where are you going?” Mrs Pa asked, She did as he had instructed, and clung on. Seizing one of the thinnest whiskers, she wrapped it around her waist and tied it tightly.

  “Down. The air is pulling me down.”

  But Mrs Pa could feel no breeze against her face and when she held out a tentative, shaky hand, the air was hot and still. Far in the distance, there was a line of light, almost like the coast seen from far out to sea.

  “I did not know,” Precious Dragon said.

  “Did not know what, Grandson?”

  “That this was what I am.”

  “I should think not!” said Mrs Pa. “A dragon, indeed! What an idea. It’s a pity you didn’t realise sooner—you could have made mincemeat of those kuei.”

  Precious Dragon gave a huge booming laugh. “I did not know how to change into this form.”

  “I can’t work out why you were a child in the first place. And my own grandson!”

  “I have a memory now,” Precious Dragon said. “Things are beginning to come back. I had to hide, from Heaven—I could not stay in Cloud Kingdom. I don’t know why. But I decided that the best place to hide would be in Hell, because no one would follow me there—I forgot about the kuei. I suppose one of them smelled me out and then my mother sent me to you.”

  “But whatever can you have done?” Mrs Pa said, “to make Heaven come after you?”

  “I made someone angry,” her grandson replied. “Dragons often do.”

  47

  Standing on the observation tower of the Lowest Level nuclear plant, Pin had a ringside seat for the first clash between the dragons and the kuei. Both converged on one another, and then two were battling it out in the sky above him and the rest were hovering back, as if by some ancient and recognised law of combat.

  When Pin had watched all those battles in the Opera—it seemed years ago, now—he had never thought that he might witness something similar in real life. The Opera had been melodramatic enough, but this was truly dreadful: he watched, appalled, as the kuei twisted round and gouged a long weal in the dragon’s flank. The dragon shrieked, filling the air with a sound that grated on Pin’s spectral ears like a blade scraping down glass. Drops of hissing hot blood spattered down around the observation tower and one of the demons screamed with pain as the blood fell across his shoulder.

  “They didn’t warn us about this!” someone said.

  “Get an umbrella,” said another voice. Pin did not think the blood could hurt him, but you never knew. He scrunched against a stanchion of the observation tower and tried to keep out of the way. The dragon leaped across the sky and buried its teeth in the kuei’s spine. The kuei began whipping to and fro, causing dust storms in the desert and a blasting wind that made the observation tower start to sway. Demons moaned and clung on.

  It struck Pin that, sooner or later, one or both of these creatures would drop out of the sky.

  And this was only the first fight. There were many dragons, many kuei.

  Sure enough, this was exactly what happened. The dragon and the kuei had wound themselves into a raging knot. One of the kuei’s sharp pincers tore into the dragon’s wing and the dragon could no longer sustain its height. It fell, and Pin saw the kuei struggling to free itself, but it was too deeply twined up with its foe. Both the dragon and the kuei plummeted with the noise of a downed fighter jet. Below, troops scattered as they realised what was happening, fleeing out from the estimated point of impact. Some of them did not make it in time. The fighting creatures struck the floor of the valley with a tremendous reverberating echo and the entire nuclear complex shook.

  “What in hell happens,” one of the demons shouted, wild-eyed, “If one of those fuckers falls on here?”

  Pin decided, straight away, not to think about that. He looked out across the valley to where an immense crater had appeared, behind walls of billowing yellow dust. The bodies of the dragon and the kuei could still be seen, writhing. A jet streaked across the sky, undertaking reconnaissance.

  “Well.” Someone had evidently decided to reply to the demon’s question. “It’s not going to be pretty.”

  48

  Chen, Zhu Irzh, together with Jhai and Miss Qi, had sidled one by one out of the truck and bolted to the makeshift shelter of one of the tanks.

  “Wish we still had No’s invisibility spell,” Zhu Irzh said. “I just tried to replicate it. Can’t. Can’t do much down here, it seems.”

  “Do we even have a plan?” Jhai asked.

  “Yes,” Chen said. “Stay out of the way of the action.”

  “That’s not going to be easy.”

  Chen pointed to the rocks, the ragged boulder field that led up into the mountains. “Not a lot of people up there.”

  Jhai squinted narrowly. “No, you’re right. In the absence of anything better, let’s go for it.”

  Each of them broke cover from the tank and sprinted across the short st
rip of desert that separated rocks from army. Chen, as he did so, felt that at any moment the alarm would sound and bullets or spells would be shrilling at his heels. The reality was a welcome anticlimax. He reached the rocks in safety and was hauled down by Zhu Irzh. The women were already there.

  “This feels safer,” Miss Qi said.

  “Qi, that’s a nuclear plant,” Zhu Irzh told her. “You won’t be used to that, coming from Heaven. If that thing goes up, we’ll be fried. We’re well within the blast zone.”

  Miss Qi looked understandably uneasy. “What will happen to us then? We will not die.”

  “We’ll probably just glow for the rest of our lives,” Jhai said. Then she pointed. “Fuck! Look at that!”

  They watched as kuei and dragon hurtled towards the valley.

  “See what I mean?” Zhu Irzh said. A second dragon was flying in to take the place of the first, a kuei in hot pursuit.

  “Do they battle it out first?” Chen asked.

  “No.” It was Miss Qi who replied. “This is ritual combat. They will continue until no dragons or kuei are left. See? Everything else is taking place around them.”

  She pointed to a line of dust advancing across the desert. Chen shaded his eyes against the glare and saw white and gold shapes in the front line, great prancing creatures with glittering manes.

  “Kylin,” he said. “Heaven’s using lion dogs.”

  “Must have just landed,” Zhu Irzh said. Hell’s tanks were turning, forming a wall, but one of the lion dogs, complete with an armoured rider, raced ahead of the rest and leaped up and over a tank, leaving dented footprints in the metal. Inside the hastily improvised blockade, it set about tearing demons to pieces, dismembering pieces of scattered limbs that crawled blindly about of their own accord. There was the shriek of machinery as someone brought a rocket launcher around and fired. The missile hit the lion dog broadside and blew it to pieces in turn. Bits of hairy flesh shimmered and disappeared.