DAC 3 Precious Dragon (32 page)

"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 color, 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 color 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 is what I am."

"I should think not!" said Mrs Pa. "A dragon, indeed! What an idea. It's a pity you didn't realize 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."

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 while the rest were hovering back, as if by some ancient and recognized 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 entwined with its foe. Both the dragon and the kuei plummeted with the noise of a downed fighter jet. Below, troops scattered as they realized what was happening, fleeing 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, straightaway, 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."

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 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 strip 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 toward 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 armored 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.

"It will return to Heaven," Miss Qi said, sounding suddenly quite calm, as though she were discussing a game of chess. "It will not see the rest of the battle."

The main line of the lion-dogs had come within yards of the tank wall now, and the creatures were either leaping across or being torn apart. Something like a long iron spear shot screeching down from the sky and buried itself in a puff of dust not far from Chen and the others. It stood, quivering and emitting a mosquito-whine.

"What in gods' name is that?" Chen said.

"Leg of a kuei," Zhu Irzh answered. "Dragon's winning this time."

More iron legs showered down from the sky like giant needles, impaling luckless demons and spearing a tank through its engine casing. The machine howled. Steam poured out of the vent made by the kuei's leg and the tank glowed red hot. Demons fled as it exploded.

"It strikes me," Zhu Irzh remarked, "that Hell's not doing all that well at the moment."

"I don't know," Chen replied. "There's a dragon down."

Two hours or so later, Chen and Zhu Irzh were still trying to formulate a plan of escape. The demon's latest notion had been to seize one of the small planes that had now landed across the desert and fly it back up to the higher levels. This idea suffered an early termination when it transpired that no one knew how to pilot an aircraft.

"Besides," Jhai said, "you'd have to get past the rest of the air forces, and that lot." She gestured upward. Five of the kuei and three dragons had now perished, although it was rather difficult to tell how many of each remained through the clouds of smoke. Now the kuei had retreated to one side of the sky, where they formed an enormous writhing knot, and the dragons to the other. Qi thought that they had agreed on some kind of breathing space while the rest of the forces went into battle, but Zhu Irzh disagreed.

"Kuei don't give up," he explained. "They're relentless. There must be some other reason."

Jhai half-rose, shielding her eyes. "What's that plane doing?"

One of Hell's bombers was shrieking across the desert, low over the shadowless sands, heading in the direction of the mountains. The sound of the battlefield—lion-dogs and the big spike-horned, moon-colored unicorns that had made mincemeat of several rows of infantry—had diminished to an ominous hum.

Chen and the others watched the bomber until it became no more than a speck on the horizon. Then it began to grow larger again.

"It's coming back," Chen said.

Zhu Irzh surged to his feet. "It's heading here!"

Moments later the bomber roared overhead, sending a hailstorm spatter of bullets down into the rocks. Chen and his companions threw themselves flat. The wail of the bomber was retreating again but Chen, glancing up, saw that it was turning. Beneath them, the ground shuddered, casting a shower of little stones down the hillside.

"For fuck's sake!" Zhu Irzh said, bitterly, brushing dust from his coat. "So much for staying out of the action. An entire battlefield to choose from and they pick on a bunch of noncom escapees."

"Zhu Irzh," Chen said. He'd just seen what was rising out of the shaking ground, beyond the demon's shoulder. "I don't think it's us they're aiming at."

After a while, Pin grew less frightened than bored. He had a nasty moment when one of the kuei's severed legs shot down into the nuclear plant, but it fell short of the reactor and speared a small hut instead. The bulk of the tanks were keeping Heaven's forces well away from the plant itself, although from his vantage point on the observation tower he had an excellent view of lion-dogs and unicorns and various other beasts in Celestial zoology. It still reminded him of various performances and if he ever got back to Earth, what an opera he would be able to write!

Above, with dragons and kuei fighting, the air forces were in a quandary: no additional aircraft could take-off from the ground, and those in flight couldn't get through to the lowest level. So, for the time being, Pin felt reasonably safe, even in such a precarious position. Some of the demons still clung nervously to stanchions, peering out across the desert, but a number of them were crouching in the shade. A card game was in progress.

Then, Pin noticed that dragons and kuei were drawing back. He did not know why this should be. The observation tower shook a little. One of the demons engrossed in the card game looked uneasily up.

"What was that? Earthquake?"

"We don't get earthquakes here," somebody else replied. "There's nothing underneath us."

Pin was thinking that this was surely likely to produce more quakes, not less, when one of the other demons shouted and pointed toward the rocks. "Look!"

At the summit of a band of rocks, a ridge was appearing under the soil. That they could see it from this not-inconsiderable distance suggested that something huge was breaking through, like some enormous worm. Then a black many-pincered head broke the surface, scattering a burst of yellow soil in all directions, and a segmented body shot up after it, towering some thirty feet or so above the rocks.

"It's a kuei!" a demon said. "Where did that come from?"

Four little figures—presumably demons—had broken cover from the rocks and were now racing across the desert toward the nuclear plant.

"Maybe it's one of the ones that fell from the sky," a demon replied.

Pin said nothing. He knew where the kuei, now rearing in a column of waving legs high above the desert, several times the height of the observation tower, had come from. It was the kuei that had pursued him and Mai down through Hell and had, so it now seemed, buried itself in the sands of the desert. And now it was back.

Chen could not only hear the kuei rustling and chittering behind him; he could also smell it, a rank, foul odor like cat's piss magnified by several thousand degrees. A fetid wind blew past him, causing him to stagger on the already uncertain footing of the desert: the kuei, exhaling. Chen did not think that centipedes breathed, but then, this was not a centipede as such and neither was it the time for naturalistic speculation. He mustered a burst of speed that took him level with the sprinting Zhu Irzh.