Precious Dragon Read online

  Embar Dea reached the first filter, reached out with a claw, and waited for its heavy lock to swing open. The current, released, bubbled around her and she went through into Second Filter Channel. One more to go, and then she was out into the side channel that led to the canal. Already the water had a different taste, and Embar Dea, used to purity, wrinkled her muzzle at its sourness. When she reached Third Filter she almost turned and swam back; better to die a quick and bloody death at the hands of a friend in cold clean Sulai-Ba than breathe this filthy stuff. But friends may be dead already: she did not know where Onay and Merren Ame were. Out at sea, or dead, rolling to rot in the stinking waters of the canal or pinned to the bottom of a trawler with an illegal harpoon through the lungs? She had not heard from them for such a long time, and so she continued to swim, coming out with a snort and a gasp into the reeking water of the side channel.

  When she came to the round outlet that led into the main Jhenrai, it was not so bad. The canals were supposed to be flushed every few days by opening the big sluices that led off from Ghenret. She could taste a cleaner undertone of salt through the acids and detergent, and the water seemed to be flowing fairly quickly. It was dark at the bottom of the canal; Embar Dea, afraid, had no wish to be seen making her journey. Boats tethered at the surface swung and knocked in the flow, the black bulks of their hulls rose above her in the darkness. Someone threw something over the side, an unpleasant mixture of solids and acid which drifted down through the tainted water and which Embar Dea swerved to avoid. She was following the salt, coming up towards Ghenret. Her instructors had told her when the sluice was to be opened, and she would have to pass through or be penned in the muck for another three days. Thus Embar Dea hurried, an elderly water dragon, travelling quickly and unseen through the silted canal to the harbour.

  4

  It was evening when the visitors came for Pin H’siao. The performance had just ended, and Pin was in the process of folding up his costume when he turned to find Miss Jhin standing nervously behind him.

  “Pin,” she said, encouragingly. “There are some people here to see you.” In a lowered voice she added, “I think they want to make a, um, a booking.” Miss Jhin, delicate soul that she was, preferred to turn a blind eye to the more sordid activities of her chorus; he could see the distaste in her eyes.

  “All right,” he told her, wearily. “I’ll sort it out.”

  “Thank you, Pin,” Miss Jhin said, her face betraying gratitude. Pin tidied himself up and followed her out of the dressing room. Two people were waiting in the hallway. One was a woman in early middle age, with the trademark blackened teeth and lacquered hairdo of a professional madam. The girl who stood by her side had a pretty, empty face, reminding Pin uneasily of the lost Maiden Ming, whom he had not seen since the night of the Paugeng party. That had been two days ago now, and he had heard nothing from the policemen. Ming had not returned. Guiltily, he could not bring himself to feel too sorry about that.

  “How may I help you?” he asked.

  The Madam gave a slight bow.

  “We are interested in your company this evening, at a small soiree in Shaopeng. Not very far, and possibly for no more than an hour or so.”

  “I see.” Well, that didn’t sound too bad, Pin thought. But he’d been wrong before, Gods knew. “All right. Would you like me to accompany you now?”

  “That would be most acceptable. We will, of course, want to come to some sort of arrangement: I have a list of the rates from your charming chorus director.” Holding out the list, she indicated the higher end of the fee scale.

  “Most acceptable,” Pin said, echoing the Madam. If he could get more bookings like this, he thought, he might be able to start saving to get out of here. This decision had come to him on the morning after the party at Paugeng, which he had spent in a daze, thinking about the demon. He needed a goal, he had decided. He followed the Madam and her assistant out into the balmy evening air of Shaopeng.

  They took a circuitous route, bypassing the downtown station and heading down a maze of back alleyways to a long, low building with a red lacquered roof. A neon sign hung outside the door, and as soon as he set eyes on it, Pin stopped dead.

  “You didn’t tell me that this was—that sort of place,” he protested, trying not to sound too accusing.

  “Please don’t worry,” the Madam replied, rather sharply. “This is not the usual kind of service.”

  Pin stared unhappily up at the sign: which bore, in bright pulsing letters, the word for Hell. He had only ever been in a demon lounge once before, but his visit had passed in a haze of narcola and panoline. The lounges catered for the more exotic end of the market; the services in which a wide range of drugs played a major role. It was said, beneath people’s breath, that the inhabitants of the lounges were no narcotic-induced hallucination, but were real: minor denizens of Hell, conjured up on a short-term lease to service the clients of the lounge. It was not, by anyone’s definition, safe sex.

  Pin’s memories of that event, which he did not care to examine too closely, were a blur of images: elegantly contorted limbs, bright, inhuman eyes and waves of pain. It had not been an experience that he was eager to repeat.

  “I’ll double the fee,” said the Madam, through pinched painted lips. Pin sighed. He might as well go through with it, he thought. The money he could save would help him to escape from his life all the sooner. Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the door into the florid decor of the hallway.

  The Madam’s assistant led him through the labyrinth of passages into a small, circular room. Here, he was invited to kneel before a low, ornately carved table, and the assistant left. Pin waited apprehensively. At last the door opened, and a group of people filed in to kneel in a circle around Pin, arranging their robes around them. He looked warily around the room. Their faces were in shadow, but nine pairs of eyes stared back at him with a consuming eagerness. The woman closest to him, wrapped in a brocaded dressing gown, was the Madam. Her raven hair was piled upon her head with pins. She gave him a thin-lipped smile, and turned up the lamp so that it cast flickering shadows across her face.

  “Now, you don’t need to worry about a thing,” the Madam said, kindly. Pin shivered. Her motherly concern did not reach her eyes, which were as flat and depthless as pools of oil.

  “Nothing at all,” one of the other women breathed in a soft malicious voice, and giggled. Pin thought: Ming, this is your spiritual home. Rising, the Madam stepped forward. She held a braided crimson cord.

  “Now, bow your head,” she told Pin. Trying to focus on the subject of money, Pin did so. His hands were tied behind his back and the Madam placed a palm on the back of his head, forcing his head further down.

  “Are you sure he’s suitable?” someone said, in a low voice.

  “He comes from the Chorus,” the Madam snapped. “An artiste. A sensitive person. Of course he’ll be suitable.”

  There was a disparaging snort of laughter.

  “The other one wasn’t.”

  “The other one was a fragile soul,” the Madam replied frostily. Ming? Pin wondered with a sudden pang of guilt. He still felt responsible for his fellow-chorus member. Had she been brought here, for who knew what purpose? He struggled to rise.

  “Keep still,” the Madam hissed, adding, “Light the braziers.”

  The room began to fill with the acrid tang of incense, and there was something beneath the gunpowder smell which Pin thought he recognised. It was a heavy, musky odour, not unlike opium, and then he knew. It was a narcotic called sama: opium combined with nepenthe. It was useless to struggle; he would only draw more of the drug into his lungs. Raging and helpless, he let it take him, and as it did so the chanting began, rising and falling in hypnotic rhythm. The words made no sense to him, but he knew they were dreadful: they sounded forbidden and wrong. They were interspersed with a wailing incantation from the Madam in ordinary Cantonese, “Hsun Tung, great master of the gateway, minister of lightening … we summon you �
�� we bring you in …”

  The chanting rose to a crescendo. Pin opened his eyes and saw, appalled, that the world had gone. He was in a place that was dark and yet blinding, empty and filled with chaotic movement. He was going to Hell. Pin squeezed his eyes shut. He thought he could hear someone screaming, very far away, and then everything stopped.

  Then Pin found himself once more in the middle of a circle of faces. They were all looking at him, curious and predatory, and their eyes were crimson, and gold, and jade green. Pin gaped at them. He could feel the air flowing through him, as though he was made of smoke. Their faces were burnished, ebony and bronze, resembling the masks that hung around the balconies of the Opera House. One of them laughed, and it sounded like dry leaves in a winter wind.

  “What are you? Where am I?” Pin breathed, but no sound emerged. One of the circle reached out towards the lamp on the table and slipped her sharp fingers into the flame. When she withdrew them, Pin saw that they burned. She blew the flame towards him and instinctively he drew away. The fire streamed through the air and dispersed him. Then he was pulled down towards the circle, settling unsteadily into something that was hot and steaming and smelled of old blood. It was another body. Slowly, jerkily, Pin raised his hand. It was covered in a loose velvet sleeve. It had long, polished black claws.

  “Ohhhh,” everyone said, in a collective sigh. “It’s working.” From somewhere inside the house, a clock began to strike the hour. Silently, Pin counted. It went on and on, and then at the stroke of thirteen, it stopped. Sunlight poured through the open window. It was noon, the clock said, but it felt like midnight. The demons looked at Pin and grinned.

  They wanted him to answer questions. They asked him about people he had never heard of, places he had never visited, and Pin was utterly unable to help them.

  “I don’t know,” he kept saying, mouthing the words with difficulty from his strange new throat.

  “Tell us,” they hissed. “Tell us about your city. What is happening there now?” Pin had no idea. He knew about his own small world of the opera, and the fragments that fell into his uninterested ears at the occasional party, but apart from this he had very little knowledge of the city at large. Around him, the demon’s body stretched and gasped. Pin was more interested in exploring the being that he currently possessed, but the others were looking at him with expectation. He racked his memory for details.

  “It’s been very hot,” he said, whistling through the demon’s teeth.

  One of the circle got to his feet with an indignant fluttering of robes.

  “What good is this? We haven’t gone to all this trouble for a weather report. Send it back to wherever it came from.”

  “But it’s only the second one we’ve ever reached,” someone pleaded. The demon waved a dismissive hand.

  “What good is it to go to all the trouble of holding a séance, to violate natural laws and face the fury of the kuei—if they ever find out, which lands forbid they ever will—only to summon up a being with all the wisdom of that—that table top! The first one could not take it and this one is an idiot. The whole thing’s been a waste of time.”

  “Yes,” Pin breathed. “All a terrible mistake! Send me back.” He might plunge like a stone straight back to where he came from, but even the disquieting confines of the demon lounge were preferable to Hell itself, although he had to admit that it looked ordinary enough, apart from its inhabitants. The room was plain; the walls made of a substance that looked like waxed paper. Sunlight streamed over the windowsills, yet the demons cast no shadow. They were still watching him; their pointed faces anticipatory.

  “Poor little spirit,” one of them said. “Let’s keep it for a bit. It might become more amusing.”

  Pin felt the stirrings of protest in the mind that he occupied. The demon who had spoken earlier snapped, “Do you have any idea of the risk we’re running? This isn’t a game! We have to find out what’s happening on the mortal plane, to find out why the kuei are there; we have to seize our opportunity! If this thing knows nothing, then we must summon one who does … Send it back.”

  He plunged a taloned hand into the depths of the brazier, sending up a shower of bitter sparks. The eyes of his kindred glowed meteor-bright, and once again an unnatural chanting began. Pin felt himself squeezed and constricted and forced along the demon’s fiery veins, racing down its twisted neural pathways. He battered behind its eyes, and it wailed and cried aloud in something that sounded remarkably like pain. The voice was female, he realised. He felt her head fall forward like a broken toy.

  “It’s not working!” the demon lord hissed. “Harder, harder!”

  The diabolical mantras began again, and Pin was forced from one part of the demon’s mind to another, but he could not break free. At last there was a terrible pause. A little, frightened voice said, “The kuei … I can hear them. They’re coming!”

  The demons panicked, throwing the table aside and rushing in all directions. Slowly the sunlit room began to dissolve. First, the paper walls peeled away and began to shred in the rising wind. Coiled filaments whirled around the table and as they spiralled past Pin could see the patterns which marked them. It was not paper of which the walls were made, but human skin. The shreds of dermis wreathed upwards and were gone. Beyond, lay a chaotic mass of cloud. It made Pin sick to look at it. The demon that held him was rocking to and fro, hands clutching at her head. With a lurch, she staggered up and sprang into the rising wind. There was the rattle of something big, above him. Horrified, Pin saw that the house had been standing on an iron column, rising out of the boiling clouds. He looked out of the demon’s eyes, up into the red wind, and saw three beings, vast and armoured and many legged, coiling through the storm. The sight was so awful that his spirit fled screaming into the demon’s head and stayed there, hiding in the suddenly fragile shell of her skull as his hostess fled into the depths of Hell.

  5

  Over the last day or so, Mrs Pa had been busy, haunting the go-down markets and buying presents, flowers and food. All the money she’d saved over the years went towards the wedding, but Mrs Pa didn’t care. It was worth it, to see Mai settled at last.

  On the designated evening she visited the Kungs, as arranged. They lived in Murray Town, not far from Sulai-Ba, in a small shuttered house on the Taitai waterfront. Both parents were lab assistants, not for Paugeng, but for Somay. However, this did not affect their religious affiliations, Mrs Pa noticed. During the devotions before the celebratory meal, Mrs Kung ceremoniously opened the doors of the little kitchen shrine to reveal not only the disgraced Senditreya holding her compass and theodolite, but also the severe, pretty face of Paugeng’s Jhai Tserai and the pudgy features of the Somay heirs, on either side of the major deity, acolytes in the homemade triptych. Worship fell where it could these days. Mrs Kung lit candles and set them in the slots at either side of the icons. The gods, old and new, disappeared in a light pall of smoke. Mrs Pa sat back and nursed her jasmine tea. She liked this family: they were sober, respectable people. She liked their pleasant, moon-faced daughter, soon to be her own daughter’s sister-in-law, and the studious younger son. And, of course, she liked the bridegroom, Ahn, who so unfortunately could not be here just yet: such a well respected young man, the same age as Mai. Things had worked out very well.

  “We were so pleased to receive your daughter’s name from the broker,” Mrs Kung confided. “My father remembers your husband well; they worked together on many occasions.”

  The two families fell into reminiscing about the past, the old days. The Kungs were from Beijing, a place which had become no more than a story, bright as neon in memory: the parks and the restaurants and the old city. Mr Kung had left when he was a boy. Mr and Mrs Pa had come later, from Guangzhou, traded between the mining companies who were then expanding their operations to the east of Singapore Three. They shared stories, shared experiences, and then at last the two families went down to the dock, to wait with anticipation and excitement, and behind it al
l a little fear, for the wedding boat.

  The sun had long set in a last rosy burst of light, and now the blue dusk was filled with the mast lights, at anchor in Ghenret and beyond, riding the evening tide. It was a mild, damp evening. That afternoon, Mrs Pa had sat in her kitchen and listened with increasing anxiety to the rain humming on the corrugated iron roof of her house. But early in the evening, the rain had stopped and the washed sky had cleared over. The two families waited nervously for the arrival of the wedding boat.

  “When do you think it will come?” Mrs Kung whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs Pa replied.

  Along the edge of the wharf the marriage broker and her assistants had placed long tubes of incense, which flared and smouldered in the damp air. They had lit a fire in a stout iron brazier, sending a stream of sparks into the water. The broker pranced and stamped about the wharf, wheeling and clapping her hands to ward off undesirables, and occasionally striking a small fringed drum. The amulets tied around the edges of her shawl danced with her.

  “Such a lot of energy!” marvelled Mrs Kung. A few faint stars rose above the city mists. There was no moon tonight. Water lapped against the wharf, loud in the sudden silence. The broker fell silent.

  A junk was coming, sailing up the sooty waters of the harbour, stealing into port. Its sails were as red as a hibiscus blossom, ragged and burning in the ship’s own light. Phosphorescence trailed in its wake, a black lantern hung from its prow. From the wan illumination that it shed, the junk’s name appeared briefly on its side: Precious Dragon, just as Mai had said. Next to Mrs Pa, the broker threw back her head and gave a long, thin cry. Mrs Pa craned her neck, trying to get a glimpse of her daughter, and then the junk was sidling against the dock. The broker threw a sudden handful of firecrackers onto the brazier. There was a series of startling explosions, and as the fire flared up Mrs Pa saw her child’s pale face smiling over the edge of the deck. Mrs Pa had not actually set eyes on Mai for thirty years, since the cholera epidemic that had taken, in one long night, her husband and her three year old daughter, but she would have known Mai anywhere. She jumped up and down, calling excitedly, and beside Mai, the bridegroom beamed.