Trust me!
I do, Ko replied, the answer surprising him.
The Mask grabbed a handful of the boy’s jacket and dragged him off the floor. Ko’s eyes snapped open and what Monkey King saw there made him hesitate. A new and iron-hard determination, ancient and inviolate.
The katana spun in an arc and took off the guardian’s hand at the wrist.
“It’s been a while since I cut meat,” snarled the youth, a strange dissonance in his words. “But you never forget how it’s done.”
The bodyguard fell back, momentarily confused, and the youth attacked with skilful, aggressive motions. Monkey King’s mask broke with a bone-snap crack as the polycarbonate samurai blade sank into his skull, cutting clear across the orbit of his right eye.
Old Yee hobbled from the cracks forming in the street, his barrow falling into a void spitting with noxious smoke. The noodle seller tripped and fell. Overhead, in the low and hateful clouds, he glimpsed something huge and monstrous. A tail the size of a metro train clipped the hippo Centre in passing, and the old man died in the rain of glass and concrete.
The quarrel lodged between the second and third of Heywood Rope’s ribs, to no ill effect. Fixx discarded the crossbow and vaulted away from the Josephite’s attack, rolling and drawing the SunKings. Selecting three-round bursts, he followed Rope across bookshelves, blowing fists of confetti from the rare and antique volumes.
“Philistine,” snorted the killer. Rope jerked his wrist and the blade of the ghost knife shot out on a wire, hissing furiously. Fixx fired at the thing, but it wove around the bullets and cut dozens of shallow nicks before retreating. He moved and went to fully automatic; a metre of yellow flame shrieked from the muzzles of the pistols as he unloaded the rest of the magazines. High-impact armour-piercing rounds punched chunks from stonework and blew out windows as the Josephite evaded. The op adjusted aim on the fly and found his target. Bullets ripped away great ragged lumps of Rope’s left arm and shoulder, drawing out a howl. The breeches on the SunKings locked open, spent and fuming. Fixx let the empty guns fall from his hands and went for his sword.
Rope came hard as the monomolecular blade whispered free of its scabbard. Edge met edge with a glass-shattering impact, hot metal sparks stinging. They fought sword to knife, strike and feint, lunge and riposte.
Rope made a snake hiss and Fixx glimpsed a momentary ghost-glitter of silver sunglasses, of burning hellfire behind his eyes. The op pressed the hilt of the sword forward and twisted it, baring his teeth. Fixx didn’t much like holdout weapons-unsportsmanlike, really-but there was a time and a place for that sort of behaviour. Like now.
The one-shot ScumStopper Xtreme hard-jacketed slug in his sword hilt discharged into Rope’s chest with such force that it blew the man back into a hanging d-screen, bringing the flickering console down upon him. Burnt plastic and cordite gusted through the air.
Fixx limped to the young executive handcuffed to the oak lectern. “Mr Lam?”
“Fuh-Frankie,” came the reply.
He tapped the cuffs with the sword. “Hold out your hands, Frankie.”
“Wha-?”
The sword whistled through the air and the casehardened chain split beneath the blade, scattering links across the stone floor. Frankie swallowed hard and pulled himself away.
Fixx nodded at the room. “You know a way outta here?”
The exec’s face telegraphed his terror even before he could give it voice. Fixx turned on his heel, bringing up the sword as a shape exploded from the wreckage of the screen. Rope flew across the room, pressing the ghost knife down in his grip. The red orchard of slash-wounds across the sanctioned operative made him seconds too slow.
“Stab stab stab stab!” Rope collided with him, burying the ritual weapon in Fixx’s torso over and over, fast as lightning. He felt the sword tumble from his nerveless fingers, felt the velocity of the attack shove him across the tiles. Blood slicked the floor, and Fixx’s chest and gut contracted as the auto-routines built into his armour kicked in, dosing him with shots of TraumaNix.
Rope hazed into view. “This amusement pales, pagan. I must get back to my work.” The ghost knife’s blades shifted and changed, fractal edges turning like origami razors.
In the Yip apartment, there was the whispering hiss of cutting flesh. The boys had made a good job of slicing out each other’s vocal chords, and now they were painting a pentagram in their mother’s blood. Through the heat-hazed windows, the cilia of a starborn thing followed them about the grisly work.
The Jade Dragon grew, its tail looping through the streets, crossing over the bay and back. The demon embraced the waves of hate and desire on the air, tasted the foetor of the blue as it rose up in the minds of its food-thralls. Flexing its muscles for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, it released experimental thrusts of power, warping local pockets of reality. It picked a man at random and had him explode into a horde of questing tenticular masses, probing and penetrating through the corridors of a tower block. In the dark night overhead, the King of Rapture disintegrated orbital spy satellites from a dozen different multinats; across the world, the operators jacked into them in Novograd, Seattle, Kyoto, Dublin and Sydney died instantly from serotonin overdoses. Transcontinental airliners vectored straight into the runways at SkyHarbor, swan-like fuselages turning into balls of fire and steel as the flight crews tore each other’s hearts out. The Dragon’s influence washed out across the water, sinking junks and sampans, forcing the simple bio-brain of the Macao hydrofoil ferry to drown itself. These things it did without really thinking about them, these small mischiefs easy like breathing for the beast.
Ise made it to the doors of the church just as Father Woo was pushing them shut. The priest held a shotgun like he knew how to use it. The go-ganger thought the padre was going to leave him out there, out on the street where the shadowy crawling things and maddened people ran riot; but then the priest beckoned him sharply. Ise threw himself through the doorway as the gun barked, killing something behind him.
It was only a fragment of the Lord of Lusts, a mirror-piece of the Master of Ecstasy’s monumental horror; but still the Jade Dragon boiled with inchoate power, the bubbling potency of unbridled animal hungers spilling into the world. The city reeled and went mad. Those who saw the beast in dreams over the past weeks gave it their minds, never understanding that to believe in it only made Him more real. Those who had been fortunate enough to avoid the taint spread by Tze’s Cabal were fortunate no more. There was nowhere in Hong Kong where the touch of the blue did not reach. Each mind formed another link in the chain, released more caged passions and horrible secrets. Millions of people found themselves hating and loving, needing and yearning for bloodshed and lust.
With great care, Alice nailed her feet to the floor and arranged it so she could seat herself on the bed. She drew the last of the cabbalistic shapes on the milk-pale flesh of her forearm with the shard from the mirror, then took the gun and rested the muzzle on her lower lip. The weapon tasted of oil and steel, and she had to fight back a gag reflex. Teasing the end of the barrel with her tongue, she squeezed the trigger and waited for heaven.
The song pealed around her mind, never-ending, looping in an infernal circle. Juno tried to stop herself from speaking the words, but they forced themselves from her mouth, the unstoppable meme washing out across the audience.
“We adore you, Juno!” came the screams. “You complete us! We love you!”
They echoed her, line for line, beat for beat, a flock of worshippers growing by the second as more minds in the city fell into the power of the Jade Dragon. The throbbing subliminals in the backbeats and the flickering hypno-commands in the screens made slaves of them, and Juno was at the core of it. Floating camera drones and emplaced lenses followed her every movement across the stage, holding her and broadcasting the image citywide.