Journey to Wubang 01 - Earth to Hell (43 page)

‘Brothels,’ Na Zha said with amusement. ‘Demon brothels.’

‘And gambling houses. This is an entertainment district for demons,’ the Tiger said. He opened the door to one of the buildings and peered inside. ‘All the demons are gone though.’ He came back out. ‘The demons that owned this place must have been making a killing.’

‘Demons spend money like this?’ Simone asked.

The Monkey King nodded. ‘They even use normal human currency. Rob people to get it.’

‘But where are all the demons?’ Simone said. She stopped and gasped. ‘Oh my God.’

The third restaurant along the lane had a vat of food out the front, with wooden bowls scattered on the ground. I could smell it before I saw it; the vat was emitting the strong smell of roast beef. It was full of cow’s blood, and the bowls had spilled some blood on the ground. Inside the restaurant on the left, hung the cow’s raw innards, lungs and intestines from hooks off metal racks. The head was on a spike at the front door with the character for ‘cow’ splashed in blood on a sign underneath it.

The next building on the left was also a restaurant, but instead of blood it served demon eggs; each about twenty centimetres across, the shells opaque with age. A couple of eggs lay broken open, the tiny demons inside dead on the ground.

‘This is creeping me out,’ Simone said.

Three stone elemental demons grew out of the floor in the demon egg restaurant and lurched towards us. They were about two-and-a-half metres tall, made of several rocks that floated together in a roughly human form.

Silver and Precious both took two steps back and raised their hands towards some rosewood dining
chairs in the restaurant behind us. The chairs shattered into wooden pieces, which flew into the dragons’ hands. The dragons strode up to the stone demons and shoved the shards of wood into them, then concentrated. The wood sprouted buds and leaves that quickly grew like a time-lapse movie. The demons’ stone faces seemed to register shock for a moment, then they shattered where the wood had been inserted into them.

Precious dusted her hands against each other. ‘That was easy.’ She looked around. ‘Any more?’

‘Let’s keep going,’ the Tiger said. ‘I want to see what’s at the end of this.’

The next restaurant smelt strongly of stinky bean curd. Inside was a charcoal-fired cylindrical pottery stove with a large flat frying surface holding the rectangular bean curd pieces. Another stove held a large soup boiler with a flat metal lid and the flat spoon used to scoop out sweet bean curd. Behind the counter a large number of catering-sized jars of peanut butter stood on a shelf.

‘I didn’t know demons liked bean curd as well,’ Simone said. ‘And look at all the peanut butter.’

‘They really go for chau dau foo and dau foo fa,’ the Tiger said. ‘And you would know this if you went to CH.’

‘Shut up about CH already,’ Sylvie said. ‘She’s already said she doesn’t want to go to school with us freaks, and I don’t blame her.’

‘You’re not freaks,’ Simone said, her voice more gentle.

‘We snakes are used to being on the outside, Princess,’ Sylvie said.

‘My father’s a snake,’ Simone said. ‘And he’s a wonderful person.’

‘Then you’re lucky that you know him. Usually our
parents lay us as eggs and then ditch us. No snake ever has a family,’ Sylvie said.

‘Emo bullshit,’ Na Zha said. ‘You snakes only complain about being alone when it suits you. The rest of the time you’re off by yourselves anyway.’

Sylvie grimaced at Na Zha, then turned towards the end of the street. ‘There’s a mansion there.’

The street ended in a traditional Chinese gate, with a single character—the number six—on it. Instead of statues of fu dogs or lions flanking the gates, there were stone images of Snake Mothers.

‘Well, we know who lives here,’ the Tiger said.

‘The Demon King was right,’ I said.

‘Looks like he had a demon entertainment business going here, and decided to expand upstairs,’ the Monkey King said.

‘He inherited One Two Two’s crime empire,’ I said.

The Monkey King glanced at me. ‘And you let him?’

‘My students regularly shut down their operations,’ I said. ‘That’s what brought us here in the first place. He got annoyed with us and took Leo.’

The Monkey King turned back to check out the mansion. ‘And you’ve known that a demon was running the show in your own backyard for so many years and you’ve never done anything about it?’

‘You know we can’t interfere in demon matters unless they attack us,’ I said.

‘The King was right,’ Simone said. ‘They’ve cleared out. I hope we can find a lead on where they went.’

We approached the mansion. It bore an unsettling resemblance to the paper house effigies that were burnt at funerals: two storeys with a veranda over the entrance. The stone-paved front yard had a few silk flowers in pots placed around the edge. The front door hung open.

Directly inside was the entrance hall, with stairs leading up and around to the first floor. On the left a
living room held a couple of hard-backed square rosewood couches with red silk cushions and a rosewood tea table, still with teapot and cups on it. A widescreen plasma television stood on a more modern-looking veneer television unit across the room.

Simone ducked her head to check out the library of DVDs. ‘He really likes Canto soaps,’ she said. ‘These are all pirate copies.’

The Tiger grunted with amusement. ‘I own one of the production houses—he’s been taking money off me.’

‘The Dragon’s gonna get pissy at you owning so much stuff in the East,’ the Monkey King said.

‘Fuck the Dragon,’ the Tiger said.

‘Dragon Tiger Energy Connection Golden Lotus Tao!’ Na Zha said, clasping his hands together in the prayer position, holding one foot against the other knee, and swiftly making an expression of bliss.

‘You insult the True Path,’ the Monkey King growled.

‘I insult everything,’ Na Zha said. He went further into the dining room, which held a round rosewood ten-seater table inlaid with mother-of-pearl. ‘Nice table. Looks like it came from one of those furniture shops in Wan Chai.’

‘Surprised he hasn’t upgraded to something garish and European,’ Simone said. ‘They usually go for expensive-looking ultra-rococo with lots of gold.’

‘Six is old demon, first generation, he’ll be a traditionalist,’ the Tiger said. ‘Won’t go for that modern rubbish.’

The strong smell of smoke filled the room. Simone unfocused for a moment, then snapped back. ‘The top floor’s on fire!’

We raced up the stairs to the first-floor landing, which was filled with smoke billowing from one of the
rooms. The room was completely ablaze with huge flames from the floor to the ceiling. The human members of the group, myself included, started coughing uncontrollably and raced downstairs to get away from the choking smoke.

A gush of water surged down the stairs behind us, nearly knocking us off our feet, and we heard the hiss of steam. The smoke dissipated.

‘Safe to come up,’ Simone said.

The stones vacuumed the smoke into themselves, clearing the air. Simone gingerly picked her way into the burnt-out room, the walls dripping around her.

‘It was a fake fire elemental,’ she said, looking around. ‘It ran when I hit it with a real water one.’

The room appeared to be a study; the walls were covered in bookshelves but only a few books remained after the fire: old-fashioned Chinese books, flimsy pages bound by large stitches along the edges. The Tiger picked one of them up off the floor. ‘These are lab notes.’

‘What about?’ I said, fascinated. I couldn’t read any of the flowing Chinese cursive script; my ability to read was limited to standard printed characters, and even then not many because most Celestial documents didn’t need translation.

‘From what I can make out from what’s left of it, experiments on stones,’ the Tiger said. He flipped through the remains of the book. ‘This one is about different ways of making stones into slaves.’

The Tiger moved from shelf to shelf reading out their brass labels. ‘Fake stone elements, making of. Planting stones on humans to make them obedient…’ He turned to me. ‘Isn’t that what happened to the Lion?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘At that school thing. You were there—they planted a stone on him and he did what they told him. He nearly killed Michael.’

‘I remember,’ the Tiger said. He continued to look at the shelves. ‘They have more advanced control techniques—implanting stones in people…’ He glanced at me. ‘I’d be checking your students to see if they’ve got any stones implanted in them.’

‘Any sign of where Leo is being held?’ I said.

The Tiger checked through the few remaining books. Most of them dissolved into ash as he touched them.

One of the stones moved forward. ‘We would like to scan the pages of these books and distribute them to the network,’ it said.

‘There’s not much left,’ Simone said, sounding disheartened.

‘Try anyway,’ I said.

‘Then email the results to my lab in the West,’ the Tiger said.

‘Of course,’ the stone said.

The stones moved in a greyish cloud over the books and they floated up to the sodden worktable. The pages began to flip rapidly.

‘While they’re doing this, let’s go out the back and see what’s further along the road,’ the Monkey King said. ‘Might be something interesting down there.’

We headed back down the stairs and through the living room and dining room to the kitchen. It was extremely old-fashioned, with neither a gas nor an electric stove; instead it had two cylindrical ceramic charcoal burners with large woks on top of them.

A narrow path led away from the rear door. Surprisingly, there was vegetation here; real live plants as opposed to the silk flowers shoved into the pots at the front. It formed a jungle barrier at the back of the house, except for the path leading away.

We walked up the path, which curved to the right, narrow with overhanging azalea bushes. The air smelled less fresh here, more full of damp and plant decay.

‘This reminds me a lot of Hong Kong,’ Simone said. ‘Up on the Peak, where all the jungle is.’

‘That’s because that’s where we are,’ Na Zha said as the path led us to an open grassed area surrounded by steep jungle-covered hillside. On the summit of the hill above us stood a tower covered in a complex tangle of mobile phone boosters and satellite dishes. ‘This is Mount Austin. You walk down the hill a bit, you’re at the Peak Tower.’ He turned and pointed west. ‘I think I can see the top of your apartment building from here.’

I looked behind us; the path we’d followed had disappeared.

‘One-way trip,’ Michael said.

‘And this was so close to us!’ Simone said. Then: ‘Oh my God, Gold!’

Gold lay dead on the ground, the two Rabbit warriors lying next to him. The stone that had accompanied them was nowhere to be seen and I felt a jolt of horror.

‘Where’s his baby?’ Simone cried.

‘Look inside him. Is it in his human body?’ I said.

The stone in my ring was silent for a moment, then, ‘No.’

‘Can you trace it?’

‘We’re searching. We can’t find it,’ the stone in my ring said.

Tu Gong Wei crouched next to his dead Rabbit warriors. He grimaced up at me. ‘If you had listened to me, this would never have happened.’ He rose and jabbed his finger at me. ‘I
knew
that having you in charge was going to be a disaster.’ He shook his head, then gestured towards the other Rabbits. ‘Let’s get out of here. Shen or not, this…’ He hesitated, then spoke with force. ‘This
woman
is leading us all into destruction.’ He turned away and gestured behind him without looking back. ‘Bring our fallen comrades.
No more Rabbits will die because of this woman’s incompetence.’

He turned his back on me and approached the Tiger, falling to one knee. ‘I request your assistance in guiding us home, Highness.’

The Tiger gestured behind him. ‘Go wait over there. I’ll finish up with Lady Emma, and take you home.’

The Rabbits lifted their fallen comrades, glared at me, and went to one side of the park, squatting next to the bodies to wait for the Tiger, all with their backs to me.

‘Asshole,’ Simone said, hands on her hips.

‘He just lost two members of his clan, I don’t blame him,’ I said. I looked down at Gold. ‘This is very bad. Tiger, is there any way we can contact the Courts and find out if Gold’s child went with him when he went to be Judged? We need to find his baby!’

‘It will take at least three days to make our way through the bureaucracy to find out what happened to them, and in that time Gold could very well be back,’ the Tiger said. ‘If his child was taken, the Courts will probably be lenient and permit him to return almost—’ My mobile phone rang. ‘See?’

I answered it; it was Gold, ringing from the Peak apartment.

‘I don’t have my child, ma’am, something happened. I was controlled. They…’ His voice broke. ‘They took it. We have to find it!’

‘Do the Celestials in Hell have anything for us to go on?’ the Tiger said.

‘No,’ Gold said, his voice full of misery.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll find it for you,’ I said. ‘We’re coming home now.’

‘Wait there, I’ll bring the Merc down and pick you up,’ Gold said. ‘Dad’s told me where you are.’ He hung up.

‘I want to send a sweep through the demonic side of Hell,’ I said to the Tiger.

The Tiger grimaced. ‘We can’t. Their business is their business, that’s the term of the treaty that Ah Wu worked out all that time ago. Either you have to send in demon agents, or you have to negotiate with the King.’

‘We
have
sent in agents and they’ve found nothing.’

‘Then I suggest you contact the Demon King.’

‘Shit.’ I turned away. ‘Stone, summon the four most senior Celestial Masters—the Lius, Chen and Wong—and the four most senior Generals—Yu, Ma, Gao, Zhou. Let’s get together and plan for a cleanout of this nest, and a negotiation with the forces of Hell.’

I turned to the Tiger. ‘Want to be in on this?’

‘You betcha,’ he growled. ‘I’m sure the other Winds will want to be involved as well.’

‘Where, Emma?’ the stone said. ‘The conference room in Wan Chai?’