“The Langhai wouldn’t have wanted him to die quickly.”
“That’s right. He would’ve made him suffer.”
The circle of horses around Tao tightened. There was no way for him to escape.
But Pema had managed to regroup the bandits. They might have been afraid of flying dragons, but they bravely charged at Jilong’s men who were surrounding Tao. In the confusion, one of them tried to attack Tao, mistaking him for one of the Zhao. His mask had fallen from his face and Tao could see that he was just a boy, no older than himself.
The Zhao reinforcements had scattered when they heard that Jilong had fallen, but one of their captains had rallied them. Pema braced herself to fight as they galloped towards her. She and her Black Camel Bandits were outnumbered at least four to one. Tao had to do something. He felt the qi stir within him and then flow out of him, as it had before.
The air was suddenly full of buzzing. Tao thought he was imagining it. He knew for certain that bees never came out at night, but there they were, hundreds of them, buzzing furiously, attacking Jilong’s guard and the Zhao reinforcements, stinging their faces. The horses were unfazed by the battle, but they were frightened by the bees. They reared and whinnied and shook their heads, trying to dislodge them. The soldiers were waving their swords, though they were useless against the bees, which were only stinging the Zhao, not Pema’s bandits.
“The bees are on our side!” Pema said. “I’ll never tease you about your qi power again.”
But each bee had just one sting, and once it was delivered, all it could do was fly away and find a place to die.
Jilong’s guard were the first to recover from the bee attack. One of them urged his horse towards Tao. He had lost his sword, but as he dismounted he pulled a dagger from his belt and lunged at Tao. Before the guard could stab him, there was a disturbance among the horses. Something else was unsettling them.
A moon shadow that had frightened the horse. Men cried out as the grey apparition passed among them, trailing specks of moonlight in its wake. Tao almost smiled. It was Baoyu. The man with the knife had his eyes on her. Tao had the chance to escape. The Zhao, who had stood firm when then had been attacked by the naga, fled at the sight of the ghost girl. She had regained her power, just as Kai said she would, and Tao had no regrets.
Baoyu turned her hollow eyes on the Zhao soldier in front of Tao. He stabbed his dagger into her shadow body again and again, but it passed through air. The points of silver in her eye sockets held his gaze. She bared her sharp teeth as she circled him, and then she disappeared inside him. Frost formed on his beard and on the dagger blade. He opened his mouth, trying to gasp in air, but his insides were already frozen. Pema ran over and knocked the dagger from his hand. It fell to the ground and smashed into pieces as if it were made of glass.
Those men who hadn’t fled were staring in terror and disbelief as the ghost girl wreathed around them, frightening their horses.
Pema was staring too. “Is that …?”
Tao got to his feet. “A ghost. Her name is Baoyu.”
“You have the strangest allies.”
Tao didn’t have time to explain. A black horse with a jewelled bridle and breast harness and a red plume on its head galloped onto the battlefield.
Tao couldn’t believe his eyes. “It’s Jilong!”
The Zhao leader’s face was bleeding, his helmet dented, but he was still very much alive. His astonished men cheered and called his name. His personal guard, though their faces were swollen with bee stings, regained their deadly calm and rallied at the Langhai’s side.
Then the moon disappeared and so did Baoyu.
The remaining Zhao were still fighting Pema’s bandits, who had no military discipline but were using their sly street-urchin skills to deceive and confuse the Zhao. Jilong had lost interest in the Black Camel Bandits.
“Kill the traitors,” he shouted.
He looked from Pema to Tao, trying to decide which of the two to kill first. It didn’t take him long to make the decision. Pema had tried to murder his uncle, but Tao had betrayed and humiliated him.
“I will take care of the seer.”
Jilong divided up his personal guard. He sent five after Pema, but he led the remaining four against Tao. As Tao turned to run, he stumbled over a body, slipped in the mud and fell on his back. The warlord jumped down from his horse and stood over him. There was an orb spider crawling up Jilong’s sword arm, but he brushed it away. He had conquered that fear. Pema was too far away to help. And in any case, she was fighting off her own pursuers. Time seemed to slow. Jilong’s sword moved towards him in a gentle arc. He noticed that it wasn’t the bronze sword the warlord had when he rode Sunila, but a simple iron weapon with a rusty hilt, the sort of weapon used by common nomads. Its blade was sharp though. Tao gasped as it plunged deep into his shoulder.
He heard Pema scream. She had seen him wounded. Tao covered his wound with both hands and watched the blood seep through his fingers. The Zhao, who had paused to watch their leader kill the seer, turned back, swords at the ready, but the surviving bandits had melted into the darkness. Pema hadn’t escaped though. She was still fighting off four Zhao horsemen.
Tao had fallen on a slight rise in the ground. He watched as his lifeblood ran down the slope and pooled in a shallow depression.
One of the four Zhao horsemen now lay dead on the ground. Pema somehow managed to get past the others. She ran at Jilong, ready to plunge her sword into his heart, but another horseman caught up with her and knocked the sword from her hand. She kept running at the warlord, even though she was weaponless. Jilong stood still and waited for her to come within range of his sword. She ran right up to him until she was breathing in his face. Jilong lifted his sword, but before he let it fall, Pema raised her knee and kicked him in the groin. He crumpled to the ground. One of the other horsemen galloped up to aid his leader. He took a weapon from his belt, a blunt club, and swung it at Pema. She instinctively raised her hand for protection. The club hit her arm. Tao watched as her forearm bent the wrong way and she fell, screaming with pain.
Tao managed to raise himself on one elbow. Before him was the scene from his vision – Pema, her eyes frozen in terror, lying in a pool of blood. But it wasn’t hers. She had fallen where his own blood was soaking into the ground. She was staring at him, white-faced apart from a bruise on her forehead, wide-eyed. She wasn’t dead, and it wasn’t the prospect of her own death that was terrifying her. Her sword arm was broken, but she would live to be taken prisoner. Tao was the one with the fatal wound. As his consciousness faded, he saw the captain of Jilong’s guard, the man with arms like hams and an ear missing, pull Pema to her feet and drag her away.
Tao was overwhelmed by grief and anger. He couldn’t save Pema. He was going to die. His visions had betrayed him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
LAST HOPE
But the knot of qi inside Tao was not ready to give up. Despite the fact that so much of his lifeblood had leaked from him, Wei’s qi was determined that he would live. His allies had fought bravely, but their strength and powers were limited. Though he rejoiced that Pema was alive, she was a captive of the Zhao, and that could be worse than death. He had to save himself so that he could fulfil his destiny. But first he had to rescue Pema.
Tao remembered his last vision. There was one other element that he hadn’t interpreted – the sensation of touching silken cloth. The meaning was suddenly clear to him. He reached inside his jacket and felt a band of silky material that was tied around his chest. It was a strip of his sister’s gown. His shaky fingers undid the knot and pulled it out. He could just see the apple-blossom pattern in the moonlight. Something was wrapped in a fold of the silk – his dragon-stone shard. When Tao left the compound, the only thing Jilong had permitted him to take was his vial of oil, but Tao didn’t want to be parted from the shard again, so he had bound it to him. He held the piece of dragon stone in his hand. Warmed by his body heat, it didn’t have its cus
tomary coolness.
His body was weak, but his mind was still strong. With every shu of his strength he focused the qi inside him. When he’d practised controlling his qi, he’d tried to concentrate it into something small and dense that he could hurl as a weapon. That was a mistake. His and Wei’s qi could never be used to harm anyone, but it could reach out as it had to the insects. Instead of trying to concentrate it, he drew it into a long, fine thread that drifted out from him, thin but strong like a strand of spider web. With the help of the shard, he stretched it further and he directed it toward his family home. He had one friend left that he could rely on. Kai was his last hope, but he didn’t know if the qi could reach that far.
The Zhao took no notice of him, assuming he was dead. They were rounding up the remaining bandits. With one hand, Tao managed to bind the silk strip around his wound. A stillness had settled over the battlefield. But that calm was shattered by a terrifying roar. A huge seven-headed serpent streaked down from the sky. Each head was topped with a jewelled crest glittering in the moonlight. A split tongue protruded from each mouth, spitting and hissing. Each pair of eyes was full of hate and hunger to kill. The Zhao and the bandits alike fell to their knees at the sight of the monster. Those who made the mistake of staring into those eyes were frozen, unable to move. The qi might not reach the Huan compound, but it had reached Sunila.
Tao thought that Pema’s knee had ended Jilong’s part in the battle, but to his surprise the warlord galloped into view. His horse was momentarily startled by the monster swooping from the sky, but Jilong reassured it. He had seen dragons shape-changing before, and the men who had been with Fo Tu Deng had reported the naga’s alarming transformations to him. He steadied his men, assuring them it was an illusion. The Zhao were well aware that, illusion or not, the naga could deliver a deadly bite. They didn’t run, but when Jilong touched his horse’s flanks and rode towards the spitting serpent, only the remains of his personal guard were at his side.
Shape-changed Sunila lunged at Jilong, his fangs bared, but a loyal soldier raised his sword to protect his leader and the fangs sunk into his arm instead. The naga managed to rake three talons across the warlord’s chest, cutting through the metal plates of his armour. Blood oozed through the slits. Jilong, his hand clamped over his chest, screamed orders and his men showered the seven-headed monster with arrows. Wounded, Sunila couldn’t maintain the illusion. He returned to his own shape. Most of the arrows had glanced off his tough scales, but three had found their mark in the unscaled parts of his hide – one in the pit of his left foreleg, the other two in the underside of his tail. He grasped the arrows and pulled them out. Purple blood oozed from each wound.
Sunila was almost spent. He didn’t have the strength to shape-change or to create a storm. All he could do was breath mist. Zhao arrows had grazed his wings, but they had not been pierced, so he took off. A few Zhao had weapons left, but they were weary and their arrows fell back to the ground, unable to reach him. As the naga swooped above them, he exhaled again and again, and the cold mist sank to the ground, covering the battlefield with a white fog. The Zhao stumbled around, unable to see where they were going. Sunila retreated into his own mist.
Tao was sure his allies were all defeated, but the moon came out from behind the clouds and Baoyu reappeared. She was the only one who could not be harmed by the weapons of men. She swept over to the nomads, showing her decaying ghost face and leaving cold fear inside every man. She spooked Jilong’s horse. It reared, threw the warlord off, and galloped away.
Tao managed to get to his feet. The wound in his shoulder was so painful that he thought he was going to pass out, but he gathered his remaining strength and searched for Pema. He found her bound together with some of her bandits. He cut them free with his wolf tooth.
Pema grasped his hand. “I thought you were dead.”
“Not yet.”
The sky to the east had turned pale grey. The sun would soon be rising.
The Zhao were reduced from more than fifty men to less than ten. Baoyu was continuing to terrify them, allowing the surviving Black Camel Bandits to escape. The battlefield was strewn with bodies ripped open by awful wounds or bearing the puncture marks of a naga bite. Riderless horses with wild eyes fled from the battleground. The wounded were crying out. This place was more like one of the realms of hell than anything Tao had experienced when he was trapped underground. And he couldn’t imagine that hell itself could be any worse.
He smiled at Pema. She held her broken arm against her body. They were both injured, but they had survived.
An arc of brilliant sunlight appeared over the walls of Luoyang. Baoyu faded to nothing.
Jilong walked out of the shreds of mist, which were all that remained of Sunila’s fog. The chest wounds the naga had inflicted had weakened him, but he was determined to finish off his two worst enemies.
Tao didn’t have the strength to fight even a wounded Jilong. Instead, he gently put his arms around Pema, partly so that he could protect her from the warlord’s blade, mostly because if he was going to die, he could think of no better way to depart this life than with her in his arms.
Jilong unsheathed his sword as he approached. “There’s no escaping this time. A seer is no use if he’s a traitor as well.”
Two of Jilong’s guards grabbed Pema and pulled her away from Tao.
The warlord examined Tao as if he was a freshly cooked haunch and he was thinking about the best way to carve it. Tao’s qi was depleted. His allies were exhausted, wounded or dispersed by the sun. Dead wuji littered the battlefield, their short lives sacrificed for Tao’s cause. Jilong smiled as he raised his sword.
And then a dragon leaped out of nowhere. Green, strong and proud, he looked bigger than he really was. With his tail, he knocked the sword from Jilong’s hand. Kai had used his mirage skill to hide himself until he was almost upon them. He held Tao’s staff in one paw and he threw it to Tao who caught it easily. The Zhao quailed when they saw yet another unnatural foe.
“Don’t worry about the dragon,” Jilong said. “He may seem fierce but it’s an illusion. He is weak from being chained, and your iron swords will render him as fragile as a newborn foal.”
The soldiers held back, unconvinced. As they turned to run, Kai attacked them, raking their flesh with his talons. The sight of the dragon, fresh and strong, despite having run all the way from the Huan compound, gave Tao new hope. This was why his vision had told him to leave Kai behind! He was needed at the end of the battle when all Tao’s allies were spent. Kai collided with Jilong, knocking him over. The Zhao leader was soon on his feet again with his sword drawn. But he had little strength left. And Kai was angry. Jilong’s guard were reduced to six men. Pema took care of two of them.Tao could hold only one of them at bay, blocking his sword with his staff. The dragon head on the staff glowed in the dawn light, making it seem like more than a piece of wood.
The other four guards ran towards Kai, but the dragon swept them over with one stroke of his tail, as if they were pieces on a board game. They got to their feet, looking around for the dragon, but Kai had disappeared. He couldn’t make himself invisible like Sunila could, but he could shape-change into something small that they didn’t notice. Tao saw a mouse scamper behind Jilong and turn into a tiger. Kai’s roar didn’t sound like a tiger’s roar, but it terrified the surviving Zhao soldiers. Kai turned into a monkey and then a vase of flowers. He was ready to have some fun with them, but Jilong didn’t have a sense of humour. He took two steps forwards and ran his sword through the vase. Tao gasped. The dragon took on his true shape, purple blood seeping from a wound in his flank. The point of the sword had managed to slip between two scales. Kai groaned and staggered as if he was about to collapse. The guards moved to finish him off.
“Leave the dragon,” Jilong said. “I wounded him with an iron weapon. He will soon die. Get the seer.”
The sight of the dragon’s blood reawakened the captain of the guard’s lost courage. He strode over
to Tao, who held up his staff, but even the thought of immediate death couldn’t raise another shu of energy from his battered body.
Pema tried to come to Tao’s rescue but she was still fending off one of the guards. The other lay at her feet. The captain aimed his sword at Tao’s heart. Kai leapt at him. The cinnabar, Tao thought, Kai had remembered to eat more. He’d pretended the wound was serious. The iron sword had done little harm. Tao saw the dragon’s eyes change from brown to red. Kai lowered his horns. The Zhao soldier tried to run, but Kai was at full strength and he could have outrun a galloping horse. It wasn’t a fair contest, but at that point Kai had no interest in fairness. He was a beast, a wild animal intent on his prey. He reached for the nomad with the talons of his left paw and grasped him as easily as a tiger catching a rabbit. He tilted his head to one side, cold and calculating, and aimed his horns at the gap between the front and back panels of the captain’s armour. Tao wanted to cry out to stop him, but his voice wouldn’t come. The dragon’s horns sunk deep into flesh. The captain was surprised to see his own blood pooling on the ground in the dawn light. But Kai hadn’t finished. He thrust his horns in deeper so that they found the heart, lungs and liver. The soldier’s legs crumpled as if he was made of nothing more substantial than paper. Kai pulled out his horns. The captain was dead before he reached the ground, a gaping hole in his side.
Kai turned on Jilong, blood dripping from his horns. He loped towards the warlord. This was no instinctive attack brought on by a rush of anger or fear. Tao could hear Kai’s thoughts as he decided where to land a lethal blow. Jilong saw the dragon’s red eyes. He whistled to his horse, which returned to his master, despite the fact that there was a dragon about to attack. Jilong swung up onto the horse as it passed.
“Death to all dragons!” he shouted before he galloped away with his three remaining guards. Kai didn’t chase them.