Precious Dragon Read online

  Chen wanted to reassure her, but it was a question that was preoccupying him somewhat. “How did you find your entry onto Earth?” he asked, stalling. Miss Qi’s reply confirmed his fears.

  “Why, it was a simple, pleasant matter. I merely stepped through into our version of a celestial temple and the next moment, I was in its Earthly counterpart. They were very kind to me—they brought me tea before contacting the police station.”

  “Well, the temple monks must have been very pleased that a Celestial being had graced them with her presence,” Chen said. “But I’m afraid you’re right. Hell will be a different proposition—to some extent, to Zhu Irzh and myself as well. We’ll look after you to the best of our ability. And we are honoured guests.” Well, guests, anyway.

  “That didn’t seem to make too much difference to that clerk,” Miss Qi said. “He practically interrogated me.”

  “From what I saw last night, you don’t need much help.”

  Miss Qi looked down at her hands. “I know a few things.”

  “Oh, come on,” Zhu Irzh said. “You’re a Celestial warrior, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes. I am.”

  “So why are you pretending to be this helpless little thing?”

  “It is important to be humble and modest,” Miss Qi said reprovingly.

  Zhu Irzh looked as though he didn’t even know what she meant. Chen said, “So, did they tell you what was happening?”

  “Yes, although I had to ask the clerk several times. He said that we had to wait here until boarding was called.”

  Chen looked around. “There don’t seem to be many other passengers,” he started to say, but then he realised that this wasn’t true. The antechamber in which they sat, which had previously appeared empty, was now filled with people: some apparently human, some very definitely not. Close to Chen and his companions sat two individuals, wearing full armour with war bonnets, the dress of ancient China. Beneath the helms, however, they had the faces of boar: fierce tusks and black bristles, with little black eyes like seeds. They were both staring at Miss Qi with a kind of avidity. Chen felt his heart sink; the last thing they needed was to attract attention to the Celestial, but it seemed that this was going to be inevitable. He couldn’t tell whether they were aware that she was a warrior or not; nor which option was preferable.

  At that moment, however, the reverberation of a gong sounded throughout the antechamber and a disembodied voice said, “Boarding for tonight’s passage to Hell will commence shortly. Please have all documentation readily available.”

  “Here we go,” Chen said. “Good.” He wanted to get this trip over and done with, but then, he could have said the same about any visit to Hell. Miss Qi looked frankly alarmed and Zhu Irzh said moodily, “With my luck, my mother will be waiting on the damn dock.”

  Chen had forgotten about the demon’s family celebrations. “I’m sure she’ll be too busy.”

  Members of the crowd were starting to stand and a milling throng, too disorderly to be termed a queue, was forming around a desk at the far end of the room. Chen, Zhu Irzh and Miss Qi joined the back of the crowd and waited their turn. People were staring at them; Chen could feel it. He observed them covertly, policeman’s tricks, noting who was human and who was not. Two of the men he recognised, but he did not immediately remember where he knew them from. Then, just as they were approaching the bored, black-clawed clerk at the boarding desk, he realised. He had seen the men at the party at Paugeng the other night, the party at which the girl had gone missing.

  Interesting. Chen did not believe in coincidences. He might not sense the puppetmaster hand of the gods, but that did not mean that it wasn’t there. He nudged Zhu Irzh, knowing that the demon would have too much sense not to look at once. Sure enough, Zhu Irzh ignored him, but a moment later, cast a casual glance around. His gaze lingered fleetingly on the two men: human, middle aged, conservatively dressed and with very little to distinguish them from any other businessman in Singapore Three.

  Once they had passed through the gate, Chen leaned over and whispered, “What do you think?”

  “They were at Paugeng,” the demon breathed back. “I don’t know who they are. Jhai will know, though.”

  “Jhai’s not here.”

  “I’ll call her later.”

  Slowly, they were shuffled through onto a platform, dim-lit by wall sconces.

  “I’ve never travelled to Hell by train before,” Chen said.

  “I didn’t know you could.” Miss Qi seemed impressed. She looked around her at the towering black marble walls, shot with silver, at the gleaming rails on the track beneath.

  Zhu Irzh snorted. “Of course we have trains. Who do you think runs most of the world’s railway services?”

  Moments later, the train itself appeared, startling Chen with its speed and appearance. It was bullet-shaped, black and silver like the station, but metal and coruscated with magnificent ornamentation. Its engine was encased in the head of a centipede: of a kuei, and the name on its side read STORM LORD.

  “Wow,” Chen remarked. “It’s certainly baroque.”

  Zhu Irzh radiated a faint national pride. “We’re a high tech society, Chen. So many new developments originate in Hell.” He touched a frond of silver leaf and a door slid open. “After you.”

  Chen stepped inside to find a comfortable, black-velvet interior: seats that were practically armchairs, and small fixed tables. There was more than a nod to Art Nouveau. “This is certainly an improvement on the boat, that time. Or having to go through Yellow Dog Village.”

  “I’ll say.” Zhu Irzh was fervent in his agreement. “I might be from Hell but the Night Harbour is bloody tedious.” He selected one of the seats. “I could get used to travelling in style.”

  The train did not remain long in the station. There was a rushing, gliding sensation beneath Chen’s feet and the train pulled out. Chen, feeling like a child, pressed his face to the window but little was visible beyond it; a gleam of sea, a bulk of shadow that could have been the mountains through which he had traversed with Zhu Irzh and various other folk, in which Yellow Dog Village lay. Then the train was shooting through rocky gorges, lit high above with flickering lights, and across vast plains and fields in which nightmare crops were growing. Zhu Irzh leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes, sleeping with that frozen quality Chen had come to associate with him. But Miss Qi appeared as interested as Chen himself, and looked out of her own side of the window, her expression wary.

  “It’s not like Heaven, is it?” said Chen?”

  Miss Qi shook her head. “Oh no. Not at all. Is it always so dark?”

  “Not quite. Hell has its own cycles of night and day, but it never gets very light.”

  “Just as Heaven never becomes very dark,” Miss Qi mused. “It is like the essence of Tao, a balance.”

  “In that case, the balancing point is Earth,” Chen said. “Yet I wouldn’t describe Earth as a balanced place.”

  “I see Earth as being the place where the dynamic of balance is worked out,” Miss Qi said. “And so it is always in flux, never static, always changing. Again like the Tao. Change around a still centre.”

  “An interesting philosophy,” Chen said. “When I last had dealings with Heaven, however, there was a move to withdraw from Earth, from humankind. Some of the Celestials disagreed: the Emperor’s son Mhara, Kuan Yin. Do you know anything more of this policy?”

  Miss Qi’s pale face looked troubled. “I am no politician,” she said. “But it is an argument that has raged—politely, of course—in Heaven for many years. I would hope that we would not withdraw. I feel we have a duty to Earth; it was formed alongside Heaven, after all. I think it would be a dereliction of our duty to abandon it.”

  “I hope Heaven comes to feel as you do,” Chen said.

  “Maybe it will. But you know, because of what we are, we cannot afford to become divided amongst ourselves. So we will believe what the Emperor decides for us.”

  �
��You mean you will choose to believe it,” Chen said, seeking clarification.

  “No, I mean that there is no choice. Once the Emperor has decreed it, we will simply believe, because we are all one.”

  “I didn’t realise Heaven was so united,” Chen said.

  “That is what makes it Heaven.” Miss Qi was very earnest.

  If that was the case—and as a Celestial, Miss Qi would not lie—Chen was given yet another reason to be uneasy about the nature of things in the heavenly regions. On this account, one might infer that Heaven was the ultimate dictatorship, an insect hive with all faces turned radiantly towards the Emperor. But of course, that was exactly why Heaven had survived in this form for so long. Chen wondered whether the Emperor’s son, now partly resident on Earth, was subject to this policy, or whether he was permitted to have a degree of independent thought. That the Emperor’s decrees were essentially benign, Chen had no doubt: the fact that debate was allowed at all was a positive sign.

  But unease remained. And with it came an even more personal and disturbing thought, one that had been troubling Chen for the last few years. He was not immortal. He was a human man, in his forties and therefore middle aged, with not all that long remaining to him even if he lived out a natural span and didn’t succumb to some peril of the job (as seemed all too likely, on occasion). When he died, as a devoted servant of the goddess Kuan Yin, Most Merciful and Compassionate, he might reasonably expect to enter Heaven himself. Okay, he’d married a demon. His right-hand man was from Hell. On a previous, unfortunate occasion, he’d used the goddess’ sacred image as a battering ram. Good thing she was Merciful and Compassionate, really.

  But did he actually want to go to Heaven? Even if he was reincarnated later, as usually happened. Chen was not arrogant enough to consider himself enlightened: he was a policeman, not a monk. He muddled along, but he didn’t have much time to spend in contemplation and meditation, purifying his soul in preparation for removal from the wheel of karma. His meditational practice usually took place during a snatched ten minutes in the precinct locker room, not a harmonious hour in the local temple. So even if he did end up in Heaven, he was unlikely to remain there for all that long and then he’d be hauled back down to Earth, a baby again. At least it would give him a chance to get some sleep.

  And then there was the central issue in all this.

  Inari.

  He couldn’t take her to Heaven. Even if Kuan Yin swung some massive dispensation and allowed it, Chen did not think the denizens of the Celestial realms would take kindly to a demon in their midst. Impossible to explain that Inari—so gentle, so kind—was really in the wrong place to start with, would have been so much more suited as a child of a family of Heaven. Oh, he doubted that anything would be said. If anything, the Celestials would probably be too kind, and that sort of patronage would eventually grate, even on one so self-effacing as Inari. It would certainly grate on Chen. And when he was reincarnated, what would happen to Inari? This was the thing that really made Chen’s heart beat slow and coldly. He would be gone, and it was improbable in the extreme that Heaven would allow her to stay. That would throw Inari back onto the highly dubious mercy of her family. They might even try to marry her off again, to the same vile personage from the Ministry of Epidemics that had led Chen to have to rescue her from Hell in the first place. Back to square one. He could think of only two choices: placing her under the protection of Kuan Yin, perhaps as a temple priestess or, at the least, a handmaiden, or placing her under the protection of Zhu Irzh.

  Strangely, Chen thought that Zhu Irzh would rise to this particular challenge. He treated Inari as a younger sister these days, although Chen was fairly sure that he had at one point entertained a rather more romantic interest in her. But now there was Jhai, and Inari had become part of Zhu Irzh’s adopted family.

  At least there were choices. Also, Chen didn’t want to make the mistake of treating Inari like a child: she might have equally viable ideas about her own future that simply hadn’t occurred to him.

  He stared out of the window and realised that the sky was lighten­ing to an uncomfortable, rosy red and that the train was coming into the outskirts of a city, presumably the sprawling metropolis that was Hell’s counterpart to Singapore Three. Chen looked out onto rows of slums, weed-infested backyards in which the occasional hungry ghost could be glimpsed, narrow streets filled with litter and overlooked by towering tenement blocks. The train shot past a gap in the houses, a strip of black grass on which a rail-thin, red eyed cow was grazing. Chen thought of Senditreya, mad goddess of geomancy, who had recently been transformed into her bovine avatar and confined to Hell. He doubted she’d be happier as a cow. But frankly, who cared?

  Miss Qi was looking out of the window with her mouth open, revealing teeth like little pearls. “It’s horrible,” she whispered.

  “It’s Hell,” Zhu Irzh replied, without opening his eyes.

  The grim suburbs were passing by. Further on, Chen could see the great summits of the central city, the Ministries and Departments that ran the rest of Hell. He had never got to the bottom of why these buildings were here, rather than in the Hellish counter­part to Beijing—Zhu Irzh, when asked, had professed not to know—but he’d heard rumours about an enforced relocation, continual problems with the Communist administration that had obliged the Ministries to move. Singapore Three was an economically free zone, answerable to the Chinese government but largely separate from it, and Chen suspected that this in some manner gave Hell a lot more leeway.

  There on the horizon was the Ministry of Epidemics, now rebuilt after an earlier disaster. That massive ziggurat was the Ministry of War, bristling now with high tech defences and plated with enormous slabs of iron: a literally armoured building around the summit of which lightning played in a constant eye-splitting panorama. That fleshy, pulpy red building was the Ministry of Lust, and around these were innumerable sub­departments, metal turrets and stone columns haphazardly placed with no regard for the harmonies of feng shui and monstrou­sly displeasing to the eye.

  “Are we nearly there yet?” Zhu Irzh asked.

  “Take a look. You’re home.”

  “Oh god.”

  “Do you want me to see if there’s anyone who might be your mother waiting on the platform?”

  “Yes,” said the demon, opening his eyes and sitting upright. “Actually, I do want you to do that. You can look and I’ll hide.”

  The train was slowing to a halt. It stopped, disgorging a horde of passengers, but there was no one waiting on the platform and Chen relayed this to Zhu Irzh.

  “Perhaps you are simply being paranoid,” Miss Qi said to the demon.

  “No such thing where my family are concerned.” But Zhu Irzh stepped down from the train and made his way into the station concourse with the others.

  Chen kept a lookout, partly for anyone who might be Zhu Irzh’s parent, but also to see who—or what—else might be lurking in the concourse of Hell station. There seemed to be a lot of shadowy forms milling around the ticket offices, an ambience of despair and disappointment, but the concourse itself was empty once the other passengers had hastened through the vast iron doors. Above, the ceiling of the concourse disappeared into what looked like a stormy sky: perhaps there was no ceiling after all. It was hard to tell—like many of the civic buildings of Hell, the station was difficult to look at directly.

  “Where must we go now?” Miss Qi faltered.

  “Someone was supposed to be meeting us,” Chen said. He followed Zhu Irzh through the doors, ushering Miss Qi ahead of him, and was hit by a blast of heat. The station was evidently air-conditioned in some manner, but this weather was typical of Hell: sultry, stuffy, humid and stinking, with the feeling of an approaching storm continually hovering at the edges of consciousness. Miss Qi’s face grew even paler and Chen noticed a film of moisture across her brow. Glowing, again.

  In front of the station stretched the distant arch of a main road, with traffic hurtling along it:
enormous limousines, and other vehicles, too, drawn by beasts: drays loaded with barrels, chariots, private coaches. One of these coaches was standing patiently in front of the concourse, a round black thing, with two horned beasts between the shafts. They were like gigantic, demonic deer; red and black striped, nightmare zebras. One of them stamped at the pavement and caused a little crack, then tossed its horned head. Miss Qi blanched even further.

  On the side of the coach was an insignia: a spiked symbol which was vaguely familiar to Chen. Zhu Irzh brightened.

  “Ah! That’s the symbol of the Ministry of War. It must be for us.”

  Chen was not inclined to be as optimistic—things rarely went so smoothly in Hell—but just as Zhu Irzh spoke, the door of the carriage opened and a young female demon, wearing boiled leather armour in spite of the thundery heat, stepped down and came over to Chen and his companions.

  Usually, when dealing with underlings in Hell, Chen had grown accustomed to surliness and indifference. A smarmy obsequiousness was generally the best that one could hope for, and even then it was customarily followed by an outrageous demand for money or an outright stab in the back. But the chauffeur from the Ministry of War was of a different order altogether.

  “Inspector Chen, Seneschal Irzh, Miss Qi? Good day. I’m glad you have arrived on time. I trust your journey was a smooth one?”

  Chen was so taken aback by this that he did not immediately reply, leaving Miss Qi to say, with manifest gratitude, “Why yes. Have you been so kind as to come to meet us? And our journey was most interesting.”

  “I am Underling No,” the demon replied. She pushed back the flaps of her helmet, revealing a dark red face, a thin and elegant nose, small sharp fangs. To Chen, she looked even less human than many of the denizens of Hell, and yet she was not unappealing, with huge black eyes and a bouncy step. “I have been sent to collect you, by the Ministry of War, and to take you to your hotel.”

  “I’ve never stayed in a hotel in Hell,” Chen remarked, somewhat impressed, at the same time as Zhu Irzh said, “Which hotel, exactly?”