Journey to Wubang 01 - Earth to Hell (3 page)

Hien clasped and unclasped her hands in her lap.

‘Yep, you’re probably thinking: more lies. But this is actually easy to prove because I can have any god or
demon wander in here and take their True Form and scare you to death. I won’t do that though.’

She studied her hands carefully, still too traumatised to talk. This would take time.

‘Some of the staff and students here at the Martial Arts Academy are dragons,’ I went on. ‘Dragons are fierce fighters with impeccable honour and completely loyal to us. They are also incredibly fickle in love. They tend to love humans and then leave them without thought; not out of malice, just because that’s the way they are. We’ve been working here to explain to the dragons that this sort of behaviour isn’t really acceptable where humans are concerned. That if you produce a child with a human partner you’re expected to hang around and help care for it. Dragon children hatch fully able to care for themselves, but half-human dragons are generally the same as human babies.’

She sighed gently. I was boring her now.

‘One of your parents took off when you were a small child, Hien, leaving the other to care for you. Was it your mother or father who left you?’

She frowned slightly but didn’t reply.

‘Please answer me, Hien. Was it your mother or your father that left you when you were a small child?’

She tilted her head slightly, still hiding under her long fringe. ‘Mother,’ she whispered.

‘Your mother left when you were little. Your father probably has nothing but good things to say about her, and says that she left because that’s the way she was. He might even say that he still loves her.’

She glanced up at me through her hair.

‘Your mother is a dragon, Hien.’

She looked down again. Lost her.

‘You’re a dragon too, if you can learn to transform. You can be very powerful, able to swim and fly. But you must make this hidden dragon nature emerge.
If you can, you will never again have to worry about anybody harming you.’

She remained still and silent.

‘I have one of the Academy dragons outside the door, Hien. She’s been translating for me. I can’t speak a word of Vietnamese.’

A small lie, but worthwhile in the circumstances. Amy wasn’t translating for me; all languages were understood within the walls of the Academy.

‘Right now she looks like an ordinary young woman. She can transform into a dragon to show you, if you like, and then you can decide whether you want to be a dragon and learn what you are capable of, or whether you would just like to go home.’

Hien sat unmoving, thinking about it.

‘Come on in, Amy,’ I said.

Amy opened the door and Hien jumped. Amy smiled reassuringly at her, and sat in the other visitor’s chair.

‘I know this is shocking for you,’ she told the girl. ‘I didn’t know I was a dragon until I was twenty-five years old; my father never told me he was a dragon too. We have a community of dragons here at the Academy and we go out and swim and fly together. It’s great fun. And we’re fierce fighters too; we never have to worry about being hurt.’

‘Amy will look after you now, Hien,’ I said, ‘and introduce you to some other dragons. All of them will be in human form. When you’re ready, you can ask her to show you her dragon form, her True Form. Take a few days, meet the other dragons, then at the end of the time decide whether you would like to learn to become a dragon yourself, or whether you’d like to go home.’

Amy held her hand out to Hien. ‘Come with me, I’ll look after you. Nobody’s going to hurt you any more.’

‘Go with her, Hien,’ I said. ‘And good luck. I hope one day I see you in dragon form. I’d like to see what
colour dragon you are. Amy is the most beautiful black dragon with gold fins that I have ever seen.’

I nodded to Amy and she smiled back at me. As she gently guided Hien out, she turned back to me. ‘Don’t worry, Emma, I think we’ll bring her round.’

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘She’s had a lot of bad stuff happen in her life. It would be nice to see something good happen.’

I was about halfway through the end-of-year leave requests when there was a knock on the door. ‘Enter.’

Lee came in, looking grim, with Silver, one of the Academy dragons. They took the visitors’ chairs and Silver placed the Academy’s video camera on the desk.

‘What did you find?’ I asked.

They both shook their heads.

‘Nothing,’ Lee said. ‘I wasn’t wiped this time. In fact, nothing at all happened. We went right through the place and didn’t find anything. You can watch the video, but it’s basically a tour of a down-market Mong Kok brothel. Four stones and Master Sit came with us, and absolutely nothing happened.’

‘Let’s see,’ I said.

Lee picked the camera up off the desk, flipped open the LCD screen and turned it on. He glanced down at the screen and his face filled with shock.

Silver leapt to his feet and changed to Celestial Form—nearly two metres tall with long, flowing, shining grey hair and scaled silver armour. He summoned a spear and held it to one side in the small office.

‘Don’t attack,’ Lee said to Silver without looking away from the screen. ‘That’s Lady Emma’s serpent form.’

‘
What?’
I said.

Lee turned the LCD screen around so that it faced the same way as the lens. I could see myself in the screen; the camera was on record mode, not playback.

I stared at myself. ‘Holy shit.’

Silver changed back to human form, but his hair remained long and grey. ‘The Dark Lady is a serpent?’

‘Nobody knows why, but I can change into a big black snake. Not many people know about it, Silver,’ I said, watching with fascination as the enormous black serpent in the tiny screen also opened its mouth to speak. ‘We’d prefer not to freak out the students.’

I took the camera from Lee and watched myself. ‘I never knew I’d look like that on video; on still cameras I appear human. Wait!’ I looked up. ‘Stone, Simone took a home video about six months ago when we went to London and I was human in that. What the hell?’

‘No idea, Emma,’ the stone said. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘This information isn’t to be shared,’ Lee said to Silver. ‘Many of the human students would probably take it quite badly.’

Silver nodded. ‘I understand. How long have you been able to do this, Lady Emma?’

I paused, embarrassed.

Lee glanced at Silver, obviously sharing the information by telepathy, and Silver’s face cleared. ‘Sharing mind and body with the Dark Lord. That could very well bring out an inherent serpent nature.’

I could feel my face growing red, and Silver grinned. ‘In this respect you are still very human, ma’am.’

‘And I’d like to stay that way, thank you very much,’ I said.

I changed the camera to playback and watched as Lee and Silver swept through the brothel, pausing to focus on the untidy metal beds in each room with their cheap polyester quilts. ‘You were right. Down-market.’

‘Very,’ Lee said. ‘But we didn’t find anything.’

‘I had a serious look around for anything that would give us more detailed information on the nature of these
demons,’ Silver said, ‘and I too came up blank. No paperwork, no messages, nothing. I’d say it was stripped clean but they never came back to do it. Which means there was never anything there to link the demons to the operation in the first place.’

‘Credit card machine? EFTPOS?’ I said. ‘Any cables you could hook into to get information, Lee?’

‘They had an EFTPOS line to the Hong Kong Bank. I traced it back and it was listed to a company registered at the brothel’s address, but with names of nonexistent people as the directors,’ Lee said. ‘Drawing a blank, ma’am. We have nothing.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave it for now. Warn the third years, and keep an eye on the criminal operations for these demons.’

‘They’ll probably keep a low profile for a while now,’ Lee said. ‘But I’d really like to know what they did to me.’

‘Are you okay?’ I said.

‘I’ve been checked over, I’m fine.’ His mouth tweaked in a small smile. ‘I’ve just been erased.’

‘We’ll let the others know. The stone network is on the lookout. That’s basically all we can do,’ Silver said.

‘Thanks, guys,’ I said.

They stood patiently in front of my desk.

‘Dismissed!’ I said. ‘And you know you don’t need to wait for it!’

Silver bowed slightly, grinning knowingly. ‘Serpent Lady.’

‘And don’t call me that!’

They both disappeared.

I
’d just finished the last of the end-of-year leave forms when I heard a soft sound and a red box materialised on my desk. Thank you very much, Heavenly Bureaucracy: 7 pm, a hell of a day, and this lands on my desk. I hoped it wasn’t urgent.

I pressed my thumb to the elaborate gold filigree clasp on the front of the box. Inside was a single scroll, dun-coloured vellum tied with a red ribbon. I opened it and perused the black Chinese characters. Not written in red, so not an edict from the Jade Emperor, but from the complexity of the large square seal at the bottom of the document it was from someone quite high up. I couldn’t read the flowing Chinese calligraphic characters but the Celestial nature of the scroll made their meaning apparent as I scanned them. My heart leapt when I saw Leo’s name.

Lady Emma Donahoe, Grand Master (Acting), New Wudang Academy of Martial Arts; Probational Regent of the Northern Heavens

Madam,

Your application to attend to the matter of your
Retainer Leo Gerald Alexander has been reviewed by the Office.

In light of the nature of the circumstances it has been decided that this matter will be forwarded to the Secretary for Underworld Affairs for further consultation.

Signed and chopped

Undersecretary for Review of Promotion

Yes.
Finally we were getting somewhere. The Secretary for Underworld Affairs was the head of the Department of Hell and Yanluo Wang’s second in command. Yanluo Wang, Lord of the Underworld, answered only to the Jade Emperor when it came to the judgement of those found Worthy for Immortality. After eight years of tedious bureaucratic blockades I was close to being able to enter Hell and talk Leo into coming out.

I grabbed the scroll, rolled it up and shoved it into my handbag. Simone would be thrilled. I was meeting her for dinner at a Thai restaurant nearby and then we were going shopping in Pacific Place. I walked to the door, then stopped when I heard a soft sound outside. I listened. Quiet voices. Damn, in this form I couldn’t use my Inner Eye to check.

I tapped the stone, then put my hand over it to signal that it should stay silent.

I hear them
, it said in my mind. It paused.
Demons, Emma, big ones.

Not again. And right when I was about to go home. This was becoming ridiculous.

Yep
, the stone said.
It’s only three weeks since the last bunch.

I dropped my bag on the floor of my office, strode out the door, down the hall to the lift lobby, and switched on all the lights. There was a soft exclamation, then silence.

I stormed back into the middle of the main office cubicles, stopped in front of the demons, and crossed my arms.

They had taken the form of ordinary Chinese teenagers: two boys and a girl. I studied them carefully. The stone was right: really big ones. The girl was a shape-shifter; the two boys were humanoids.

‘Looking for me?’ I said.

The demons shared a look, then the girl stepped forward. ‘Are you Emma?’

‘Yes I am.’

She smiled and tilted her head. ‘We found your wallet downstairs and wanted to return it to you. But I left it back at my apartment. Can you come with us and I’ll give it back to you?’

Wow, that was lame even by their standards.

‘I suggest you leave right now,’ I said, ‘before you find yourselves in serious trouble, kids. How did you get in past the seals anyway? I just had them reset three weeks ago.’

Her eyes glazed over. ‘Seals?’

Great, a genius leading the group.

‘Yes, seals. Ours are some of the best. Who helped you to get in?’

A fleeting expression of vicious cunning crossed the face of one of the boys. Ah, the real brains.

‘We don’t know what you’re talking about, Emma,’ he said. ‘We just have your wallet and want to give it back to you.’

‘You were told by the Demon King that if you brought me to him in one piece, he’d let you back into Hell,’ I said. ‘What did you do to piss him off? You’re the fourth bunch of kids since November.’

The girl recovered herself. ‘I’m sorry, Emma, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Don’t you want your wallet?’

‘It’s in my bag back in my office,’ I said. ‘And now I’m giving you fair warning. Turn, and I will take you in. Run, and you’ll probably starve to death locked out of Hell. If you wish to take the third option, I will oblige but I won’t be happy about it. You could attain humanity if you just gave it a try. I’m a generous master to all my demons, you can ask any of them.’

When I said the word
demons
they stiffened slightly.

‘Very well,’ the smart one said. ‘You know what we are. Fine. Come with us and we won’t hurt you. Our dad just wants to talk to you, that’s all. Come along, and we promise nothing will happen to you.’

‘I can take all three of you down, you know,’ I said.

The girl snorted with laughter. ‘Yeah, right. We’re all spawn of the King himself. No chance, lady. Come quietly or you’ll regret it.’

The cunning one studied me appraisingly.

‘We can take her,’ the girl told him. ‘Dad said she’s just an ordinary human. We can do it.’

I held my hand out. ‘Three against one is hardly fair. May I use a weapon?’

The second boy shrugged. He hadn’t spoken yet, and his presence radiated apathy. The follower. ‘Whatever. We can take you, doesn’t matter what you use against us.’

‘Anything at all?’ I said. ‘How about this then?’

I called the Murasame, the Destroyer, and it appeared in my hand. I held the katana in front of me and used my thumb to slide the blade five centimetres out of its scabbard in a visible threat. ‘So who’s first?’