Ko stumbled, his thoughts heavy and indistinct. “Why am I here?”
“For the King!” shouted a reveller, bloody and naked. “He’s come for our love and pain!” A chorus of people mumbled the same words.
Ko looked away, afraid to look out over the bay where the phantom-serpent was forming, coalescing wings and fangs and lizard-skin. The gossamer thing resolved as the people gave it their attention. The Jade Dragon hooted, the sound flattening buildings, shaking the landscape. Ko could not look; his head turned. He could not help himself.
A stinging slap brought him about and falling to the marshy ground. Feng stood over him, fists balled and his scruffy face alight with fury. “Wake up!” he bellowed. “You must not gaze upon the beast! It wants your eyes, it needs your spirit!”
Ko was sluggish as he got up. “She was right… Nikita saw this coming.”
Feng grabbed him, pulled him close. “Sorcery, like the black man said! It lives only through the minds of others! The Dragon is the demon man makes for himself!”
The Road Ronin’s sword was heavy in his hands. “I can’t fight that…”
Feng pointed toward the stage, to a place half-hidden in pools of sickly light. Ko saw Tze up there, lurking in the wings. “Then fight him! ”
Sifu Bruce called the boys to him, had them bolt the doors to the dojo tight and close the storm shutters. They gathered sticky rice to scatter around the perimeter of the building while the old man worked with quick and deft movements, drawing wards on paper banners in sweeping strokes of his brush.
The Jade Dragon arched its back and threw off rimes of frozen interstellar hydrogen. Blood spilt from hundreds of willingly slit throats came together in a wet cloud for the beast to suck in through its teeth. Clawed feet found purchase on skyscrapers; they did not yet fully exist in the plane of flesh, and so they moved ghost-like through the stone and steel, cutting out the souls of those they touched but leaving animate flesh undamaged. The mere presence of the Desire God’s aspect caused spontaneous blood orgies across a ten-kilometre radius from the demon’s point of intersection. Emerald chemicals of a kind that had never existed in this dimension dripped from the tear in the clouds and burned like acid into the streets. The Dragon was slowly unfurling, shaking off the dust of eons. Newborn and yet impossibly ancient, the King of Rapture was pleased to be here once again.
The girl performing oral sex on Hung never surfaced from the shimmering water, and he tried to shift his bulk to see the source of the light flooding in through the windows of the bathhouse. One by one, the other girls turned to him, and where their pretty faces had been there were only nests of worms.
Fixx kept his hands steady, waiting. Rope crossed his eye-line, without apparent concern over the fact that Blue Snake had not disarmed him. The op understood. Rope clearly didn’t think that detail was of any import.
“I’m curious,” said the thin-faced man conversationally. “Do we know the same people?” He recovered the ghost knife from the Mask’s corpse with a sucking pop.
Fixx turned in place, watching him. “Could say that. Crossed paths with the Josephites once or twice.”
“And you’re not dead. That says something for your strength of character… Or perhaps that you’re good at fleeing.”
He shrugged. “Little from Column A, little from Column B.” Fixx shifted his weight. He could get the crossbow from the stance he was in, but he doubted it would do more than just piss the guy off. “Papa Legba always said there’d be a price to pay for that. Just didn’t think it would be today.”
Rope sniggered. “What sweet delusion. As if pieces of cardboard and chicken bones could augur the future!” He made a dismissive gesture. “You think your silly gutter godlings sent you here, is that it? To what end?”
“To stop Tze. I go where fate sends me. I’m the fly in the ointment. Monkey in the wrench.”
“Then we want the same thing, Joshua. It has been my honour to serve the vision of Elder Seth, who sent me on my way so long ago from the Promised Lands of Deseret to this festering anthill,” he bared teeth in a sneer, “here, where I lay in silence, waiting for the day that Tze would recruit me, just as Seth knew that he would. I made myself the perfect minion. We play a long game, Joshua, a very long game. I am here to disrupt the plans of Tze and his conclave of idiots.” He balanced the knife in his grip. “I will stop them from binding the Jade Dragon to their will.” Rope pointed at Frankie with the blade. “This poor wretch, bred from antiquity to be a vessel for the blood that will cage the Lord of Bliss. He’s the last, and when he’s dead, the ‘pattern’ will fall apart. Tze will have nothing. He has compounded his error in trusting me with so vital a facet of his plan. ”
Fixx’s eyes narrowed. “Missing a bit o’ the tale, I reckon. You left out the part where you take the reins of that monster instead. Step in at the last second and leash the beast for yourself. Am I close?”
Rope let out a bark of laughter. “Why would we ever want to put a collar on such a magnificent beast? The Cabal thought they might treat the Jade Dragon like a milk cow, feed it the odd city and in turn suckle themselves off the beast’s teat. Such limited imagination. No, dear fellow, we’re going to release it. Can you imagine what will be wrought in His wake, the world in a rapture of sex and blood?” He licked his lips. “It arouses me just to think of it.”
Fixx eyed the other man. “I’m gonna kill you, you know that.”
Rope beckoned him from across the room. “I so want you to try.”
He went for the crossbow, and in the other man’s hand the ghost knife unfolded like a steel flower.
Ko kicked down the backstage door and vaulted inside, feeling Feng at his side. The sickening riot of sounds from the stage and the audience beat at him. He shook off the sensation.
“Danger-” said Feng, as part of the shadows detached and grew definition.
Monkey King appraised Ko with his expressionless mask, taking in the shabby go-ganger jacket, the Road Ronin katana. Ko thought of the white-masked woman in the parking garage, of her incredible speed; as if Monkey King had been waiting for that moment, the guardian attacked. He punched Ko down, dodging clumsy sword blows, making impact craters where his fist struck the floor.
Ko rolled away, swinging wildly. The Mask watched, measuring his movements, then came in again. Monkey King’s blows were swift, efficient, designed to break and maim. The youth took a glancing hit and stumbled.
“Aim for the weak points,” snapped Feng.
“Can’t,” Ko slurred. “Not a… swordsman.”
Monkey King paused, listening to him speak, then came on, preparing to strike a killing blow.
Close to his face, Ko smelt old leather, sweat and iron. “Then let me,” said Feng. The warrior’s hand slipped into the youth’s and faded into the skin. Ko jerked away “No! Get out!”
“Listen to me!” said Feng. “I know you, better than you know yourself! I know what you fear, why you hate those fools who warp their minds with drugs and wine-because it was one of them that killed your father!”
“Can’t ever lose control,” Ko muttered. “Can’t ever become like those animals!”
“And you won’t,” Feng was becoming smoke, melting around him. “We won’t. Let me in, Ko. Let me in. ”
A lifetime of restraint. Never once had Ko allowed himself to slip, to fall into the easy path that so many of his friends had taken. He had rejected it always, the moment of belief becoming crystal-hard when Chan had informed him, grave-faced and quiet, that his father had been murdered. The child he had been vowed never to have a waking moment where it wasn’t him in charge, in control. But now he felt Feng’s soul pressing into him, filling his body like water into a bottle.