Scale-Bright (12 page)

"I can eat your spirits." Olivia's mouth curls.

"But they would taste of nothing very much. Between the two of us we've less than five hundred years. Insipid fare to one such as you." The lute spirit produces a key. Its head is shaped like an old coin, square-holed, brightened with gold tassels. "We'll open the pagoda momentarily."

"I know whom you serve."

The ivory face cracks a smile. This is literal; Julienne can hears the noise of a material with no give being made to contort. "Then you should also know, madame, that the archer commands no rank or position. That she continues to exist and carry out her part is a mere technicality."

Olivia tosses her head. "What does she have to do with anything?"

Julienne reaches for the arrowhead and immediately drops her hand.

The door gapes, spilling a gust of heat. Neither spirit follows them as they enter, and behind them there is a sound of locking.

Inside it is sauna-warm and silent. The walls are close and tight, windowless; Julienne is used to pagodas being airy and ventilated, but this is anything but.

"Siuching?"

"You didn't think I'm actually called Olivia? I use that for convenience; in Hong Kong everyone is expected to be a bit colonial, even demons." She circles the stairs. "We just walked into a trap."

"Then why did you—"

"Because I'm not afraid. You shouldn't be, either. I know what you've been told about snakes, but when I said I would honor you always I meant it."

Julienne turns her eyes to one of the bas-relief faces in the wall. She cringes when she realizes it looks back, with pupils that move and eyes that blink: thick heavy lashes, etched to fine detail. "Stop saying things like that."

"Why?"

"It doesn't mean anything."

"Perhaps when such words fall through human lips they don't. I'll give your aunts no cause for complaint. Or a reason to avenge you, either on me or on Daizeon."

Red marble lines the next floor, which is lantern-lit and far larger than fifteen by fifteen—or even thirty by thirty. Immense candles clutch the walls in waxy grips, and to one side the statue of some war god looms, bearded face locked in a scowl, hands clenched around a sword hilt. The monk stands under this icon, sekzoeng held in the crook of his elbow. He doesn't dress as he did in Harbor City, Julienne observes with a peculiar dispassion; instead it is vestments, red on yellow, and a head shaven clean.

Olivia's hand rises, falls; with the lynx she was furious, uncontrolled. Now she is exact and what bursts from the monk's throat is so viscous and carotid it sprays black.

A moment later the monk grabs Olivia and flings her into the candles. He rebalances himself and starts toward Julienne.

Olivia tears into his back, opening his chest wide; from where she is Julienne can see diaphragm straining and lungs rapidly inflating and deflating against the damage.

"Go!" Olivia's hand clutches at the lungs. "Find my sister. Up—at the top—she should be there, I can sense her. I'll put him down as many times as it takes." And saying that she tears the lungs loose.

Julienne runs.

* * *

She runs until her gorge and mouth seem one; she runs until her ribs are spears in her sides. The steps rise steep, grease-slick, and she clings to the railing thinking if this is now the moment to call; if Hau Ngai would answer. Her aunt would. It will be simple.

For bringing down the suns Hau Ngai was stripped of rank and divinity. What would be her sentence this time, if she's thought to collaborate with Olivia? On Julienne goes, though eventually she slows down to a walk. Then a crawl on hands and knees.

She pulls herself up, every joint creaking. There's no more stair.

The table is small and alone, shaped as though it's been made expressly to bear this. On it, a vase long and tall, painted with pictures of snakes. Snake with snake. Snake with men. Snake with women. A plump-cheeked child. Yellow paper charms obscure more than half the illustrations.

Julienne does not know what to expect, and if she weren't ragged mindless she mightn't have done anything. When she touches the vase there's no fire to burn her, no curse to rupture her eyes. Just celadon polished and near-frictionless. The paper talismans are made to guard against demons.

"Leave that, girl."

His footsteps drag leaden, but the monk is whole. Beside him the lute and seal spirits close ranks, blood on their hands and on their mouths.

Julienne tries to breathe past her panic. "What did you do to Olivia?"

"What is fitting for her kind. Step away from that."

She doesn't move. Her arms, weak and quaking, clasp the vase. "No."

"I've no quarrel with you. As such."

Julienne tears off one of the charms.

"The snake must've fooled you into being her accomplice." He pushes himself forward; Daizeon's servants follow.

She scratches off another yellow paper. Her nails slip on glazed ceramic. Her stomach feels far away from her, sinking deep. "Do you know who you'll have to answer to if you hurt me in any way?"

The slightest pause. "The archer will not be in time."

She heaves the vase as high as she has the strength to, and dashes it on the ground.

There's nothing but the spill of pottery shards and shattered snake-pictures, and then there is something: scales so white, diamonds and moonstones, platinum and fresh-cut ivory. A breadth and length impossible to take in; a breadth and length that fill the room to bursting.

A monk bitten in half. Two heads torn off that roll and clatter, like dolls of wood and ivory.

Then the room is empty and there's a woman, naked, her hair snarled all the way down to her thighs. She holds a heart in her hand, veined black, hissing with embers. "You'll have to do this," Bak Seijuen says and points at the sekzoeng. "I've sworn to bring death to no human, which he still is, if only barely. Stab it through, just like so."

The heart is braced against the table. Julienne moves on autopilot. Lift. Drop. The end of the sekzoeng is filed to a point. It meets resistance inside all that softness, a gold gleaming object that Julienne without thinking extracts and slips into her pocket.

While she is still staring at the organ's final throbs the white cobra takes her chin and frowns at her. "Are you my descendant? Siuching's?"

"I—no. Olivia... Siuching is downstairs."

The way down is quick, and it is no time at all to find Olivia lying still and unbreathing on the red marble. Julienne's composure tips over, dropping her to her knees even as Bak Seijuen takes Olivia in her arms, and brushes her lips over Olivia's forehead, then eyelids, then mouth. There she lingers the longest, breath or power passing from her to the younger snake.

A convulsion. Olivia opens her eyes, which brim as she throws her arms around Bak Seijuen. Her shoulders fold and unfold, and she pours high wailing sobs into Bak Seijuen's breast. Even before—in banfaudou, in that room—she didn't cry like this, and Julienne looks elsewhere, voyeuristic, knowing that this isn't where she should be. That she doesn't belong in this moment, if she ever belonged at all.

When Olivia has quieted the cobra looks up. "The seals could've been removed only by a human. Bak Seijuen pays what she owes, always. Speak your desire, mortal child, and within reason you'll have it. Remember that once I've given it you must seize the wish and make it yours, or else have only emptiness in your fists."

What is it that you long for best, that clenches teeth and claws over the ventricles of your heart?

Think about what you want, child.

Julienne swallows past a throat gone to desert. Olivia hasn't even looked at her. They are in love, or at least Olivia is. She has no right. "I want," she says and her pulse pounds thunder. "I want your sister Siuching."

They both train their gazes on her, and there's an unblinking stillness—reptilian—that makes her regret having ever said something so fiercely stupid.

"That's very forward. And not entirely within reason." Bak Seijuen shakes her head. "My prison comes apart. Let us be quit of it, for sure as teeth cut through meat, I've had enough of this place."

2.7

The pagoda crumbled with less noise than a sand castle.

Julienne is told they are back in Hong Kong and though she does not know where this exact spot is—a low-end apartment, laundry strung out from window to window like dead moths—the heaviness of her body lets her know heaven is far behind. There's blood flecking her sleeves. She has already forgotten what it is like to be brave, to have said and done half the things she did.

She flinches when Olivia tries to touch her. Shutting her eyes—it seems necessary somehow—she whispers a name. Almost instantly Hau Ngai takes her into familiar arms, and then home.

The bathroom tiles and shampoo bottles look like alien landscape, and habit alone keeps Julienne lucid through the shower. In the living room she deposits her head in Hau Ngai's lap, and lets herself be held for a very long time. This gentleness from her aunt she thinks the oddest thing, odder by far than demons and monks who refuse to die.

"Auntie?"

"Yes."

"You were right. About everything."

"You don't need to concede that so quickly. Being young permits you to be wrong, though it's becoming that you are willing to admit so. Why did you not call for me?"

"Daizeon's servants said—you exist on a technicality."

"Heaven comprises of nothing save technicalities. There are eternal scribes devoted to the task of documenting such. They type every hour of every day without pause."

Julienne turns her face to her aunt's fresh, crisp shirt. "I found—I don't know what it is, after the monk… died. Do you want to see it?"

She fishes the coin out of her jeans, a small hexagon with one character etched onto it: silence. There's a dent from the sekzoeng, but the rest of it is unblemished gold. It must signify something, for Hau Ngai clenches it in her palm and smiles slowly. "This is well done, Julienne."

"What is it?"

"I will tell you one day, but this will please a certain goddess very much. Did you find what you wanted in heaven?"

Traffic noises outside. The flat next door is loud with two children chatting excitedly about a school trip to Ocean Park. She expected to return in the dead of night, an hour full of gray shadows, but instead it is an afternoon: mundane.

"I'll need to think on that." To her surprise she's no longer shell-shocked. "Have you eaten, Auntie?"

"No, but we can go out."

And she reflects that the thing she went searching for is this after all, not Olivia. This sense of a weight excavated from deep within her and spat out. The proof that she can go through anything and emerge on the other side whole. This peace.

Humming quietly, she returns to her room to change.

* * *

The judgment passes without incident. A small, private thing. His Majesty has permitted Xihe's name to be stricken from Dijun's house; they are no longer wedded spouses. That is the beginning and end of the sentence—there was never sufficient proof to indict the sun's father. But it is more than nothing, and as they make sunset on the chariot Xihe's smile is radiant.

It is an odd expression to see; even her son does not inspire this easy joy. Rage has always sculpted Xihe's jawline, tautened the planes of her brow. They have softened and perhaps this is what the goddess looked like before marriage and childbirth, before so much bitterness.

In the sky Xihe says, "It was underhanded of you. Sending a mortal child to do it."

"It was not planned. But to see you pleased is a blessing."

"You mean that it increases your chance to have another year of liberty."

Houyi does not refuse or admit. "It gladdens me that your mood is lifted, even but for a time. Too long I've seen you troubled."

"It'll hardly delight your wife to hear you say that of another woman. Have your year. It's not even four hundred days. You could have bargained for better."

"I bargained for what you might give."

"You believe me without mercy, archer?"

"I believe you will show me so much mercy as reasonable."

Xihe's expression flickers into amusement. "Is being flatly blunt how you've kept your wife?"

The chariot lands. Houyi straightens and extends her hand. "I tell her what is true, and that seems to have been adequate."

Xihe looks at Houyi's hand, but takes it, a touch of warmth on warmth: Fusang's fruit remains in Houyi, Xihe's flame biding like heat behind lamp paper. "Someday it will not be. I would attribute your inertia, your changelessness, to your provenance—but then, as you were born whole and suddenly on heaven's shores, so was I."

Houyi must have betrayed her surprise, for the goddess laughs. "Did you believe yourself the only one born immortal rather than raised to it, as Chang'e was?"

"It isn't that. I've never had an opportunity to ask another of the difference."

"There is one, and there isn't. At your age you ought to have puzzled it out."

They part; sea and mulberry tree fade.

* * *

Olivia is waiting for her under the clock tower, armed with the absence of Bak Seijuen. Julienne stares at her for a minute before saying, "Oh. Hello."

"Oh, hello?" Olivia's forehead crinkles. "That's all you can say after you demanded—not asked—my hand from older-sister?"

"How is she?" Shifting the subject sideways.

"As well as can be expected. Better, even. It'll take her a while to adjust to… everything, but she's still herself after all that time. She'll want to track down her descendants, no doubt, if not that man's reincarnation—" A grimace. "He's left the cycle of life, it is to be hoped."

"Did you tell her you were in love with her?"

"Older-sister has always known I would give her my heart. She never wanted it."

"Well," Julienne says and tries to make it brusque, "I'm a decent second-best then. Or whatever number I am down the line."

"Second—is that what you thought? I'm entirely single-minded." Olivia crosses her arms. "You asked her for me. What will you do now?"