Heart and Soul (35 page)

RESCUING THE MAIDEN

Nigel found the sign with the tiger easily enough and
for a moment stood outside the shop, looking up at the sign, and at the bolts of cloth within the shadowy shop, wondering whether Jade was indeed inside and what he could do to rescue her.

It seemed more and more that his life was defined by people expecting him to do impossible things. Killing lions and rescuing maidens and keeping carpetships flying in the face of great odds, until he wondered what would happen next. But it always ended right, somehow, he thought, and sighed.

Here he was, in a Hong Kong street, with the little covered arcades on either side, in case—as John Malmsey had told him—it should piss with rain as, supposedly, it did quite often in these latitudes. On one side of him was a store filled with dark carved furniture. The owners appeared to him to be Indian, though perhaps he mistook the matter. To the other side of the fabric store, past the narrow alley, was some sort of restaurant, from which the smell of ginger and roasted meat came through to tantalize his palate. Farther down the street, a store advertised—in quite large letters, on a street-placed sign—inscrutable prices.

It seemed like not at all the place for a daring rescue. But he remembered Jade in his dream—how preoccupied she’d looked. And he understood that her position—as princess or pirate leader, or whatever it was—would entail certain dangers.

He walked around the building and stood facing the brick wall where, from his dream, he knew a small room lay. And in it would be Jade. They’d given her some potion to prevent her from changing shapes, of course. A dragon would be much harder to confine than a frail young woman. The memory of her in his dream mingled with the memory of her as he’d seen her on the deck of the carpetship—an angel in native attire.

He sighed at the thought of her, in either attire, then put his hand to the brick wall. There was a problem—a very great problem. Certain magics Nigel knew, certain magics he’d learned to use from earliest childhood—tending to the crops by making sure both the soil and the weather were propitious. And making sure that his father’s tenants and livestock were healthy.

Other arts he’d learned from tutors and at Cambridge—the things that were expected from a gentleman who might have to serve his country in time of need. He’d learned to charge a powerstick. He’d learned to create minor illusions, which could confuse an enemy. And he’d learned a hundred other incidental things. One of them—apparently a rare talent and therefore not often taught, because few people had the ability to put it in action—was the ability to set fire to things at a distance. But none of these was a magic that could be used to tear bricks down and make them float away one by one.

Something tickled at the back of his mind, as he went again over his meager abilities. At that moment, seeing someone come down the alley, he faced the wall and pretended to be relieving himself against it—something that, judging by the smell just here, was quite often done.

As the people passed by, a Chinese couple chatting animatedly to each other and barely sparing him a look, his mind gave him back one of his abilities in stark and clear vividness:
fire starting.

He stood up straight and blinked, bewildered, at the wall. It could not possibly be used here. How could it be? Surely, if he started a fire, there was a good chance that Jade would be injured before he could rescue her.

But how else could he save her? The store was full of people, including the one who’d kidnapped her, and doubtless full of natives in the back room as well. The idea that he could go into the store and slip to the back was a forlorn hope as well. How could he? All these people looked alike enough to not be noticed if one of them edged away—except for him. His pale blond hair would glimmer like a light in those shadows. It would call attention to him and to anything he did. Besides, from what he had seen yesterday, any foreigner entering a native shop immediately became a target for obsequious, almost maniacal attendance.

So he could not go in. He could, however, start a fire in several bolts of silk at once, so that everyone would have to come out of the shop. If he was lucky, one of them would retrieve Jade and carry her with them. Which would bring the problem of rescuing her to the more manageable level of stealing her from amid a crowd of people, rather than the insanely unmanageable one of taking a building apart brick by brick.

Of course, fire-starting—magical or not—was a serious crime throughout most of the empire. But then, denying Her Majesty the rubies she craved was a crime, too. Though perhaps not one that was entered in any law books. Nigel chewed his lower lip as he thought, and then shrugged. If it must be done, as someone or other had said in Shakespeare, it would be best if it was done quickly.

As a last precaution, he checked on the rain clouds and found that they were quite nearby and could be herded in by his weather-controlling facility at a moment’s notice. Which would be good, in case the fire either spread or it proved a danger to Jade.

Slowly he walked toward the street again, and stood across from the shop he was targeting. With a good view—through the open door—of the interior, he targeted those silk bolts that were farthest from the room where Jade was being held.

His capacity was a little rusty, but not too much. Once he had the location in mind, he wished impossible heat to various spots at once.

Within seconds, he was gratified to hear a high-pitched, terrified scream, followed by a series of others. The word repeated was always the same, and though in Chinese, Nigel could imagine it meant
fire.
As if to confirm this, he heard the word
fire
repeated a few times. It wasn’t long before a crowd came running out of the shop, screaming.

He heard a distant clang that was probably a fire alarm, or the bell of the fire department.

But Nigel had been watching as carefully as he could, and Jade had neither come out nor been brought out. He looked at the store, from which, now, a billow of smoke was emerging.

“Very well,” he said to himself, since there was no one else to hear him. “I suppose it must be done.”

He plunged into the smoke blindly, going on his memory of where the room in which Jade was kept prisoner lay. On his way through the smoke-filled room, where bales of silk had caught fire, one after the other, he grabbed blindly for the first thing that might help him open the door. It was a yard stick—two inches by two inches and of course a yard long, and from the feel and color of it, made of teak—and Nigel had just realized it was a singularly inappropriate tool, when a creature jumped out at him from the roiling smoke. Without looking—without even thinking—Nigel did what he’d done so many months ago, it seemed like a whole lifetime, in the African savannah. He lifted the yardstick in the direction of the huge body falling toward him, and felt the stick hit and penetrate. He jumped out of the way.

The tiger—as he realized the creature was—fell and writhed, and Nigel would have taken the time to be horrified, except he could hear fists pounding on the wood from behind the locked door, and Jade’s voice calling something indistinct.

He couldn’t see a key. He couldn’t even look for a key. He set his shoulder to the door—got a running start and hit it, once, twice. The door burst inward. Jade ran out coughing. Nigel grabbed for her hand and started leading her toward the back of the building, where there was also an exit. On the way there he stepped over the body of a young man with a yardstick protruding from his chest.

It wasn’t till they got to the back alley—after bursting through yet another door—and while Jade was coughing and fighting for breath, that Nigel said, “I’m sorry. I thought…I didn’t realize…” He felt sick all of a sudden, and leaned against the wall. “I didn’t realize it was a human being. It sprang at me. I thought…”

Jade looked at him, frowning a little. She shook her head. “You mean the were-tiger?” she said. “What else could you do but defend yourself?” She wrapped her fingers around his wrist. “Come. No time to talk. Not here. It’s not safe. Come. The Tiger Clan will be after us. Nowhere in Hong Kong is it safe.”

She pulled him through a maze of streets. Soon, he saw they were in the British part of the city, in the shopping district by the warehouses. He didn’t know if she had meant to go here, or if she had walked at random, and luckily ended up here.

Of course, saying they were in the English part of the city didn’t mean that there were no Asians there. On the contrary, a steady procession of women engaged in transporting all kinds of goods—from food to bricks—in baskets suspended from a pole held across their shoulders walked down the middle of the street.

Also in the middle were workers—mostly women—busy with repairing the street itself. But on both sides of the street, there was a sort of little arcade made of wood, like a covered veranda, no more than a step off the ground. There, the shoppers could take refuge during the quite frequent rainstorms that whipped through the city. And there, English misses and their chaperones mingled with Asian and Indian women, whose attire was wholly English and who clearly came from well-to-do families.

Nigel had only just had the thought that he and Jade wouldn’t attract any attention when he realized that they were indeed attracting attention, and that people were staring at them—particularly at Jade’s fingers around his wrist, pulling him.

Jade must have realized it at the same time, because she let go, and led him into what seemed at first to be a small park, but was revealed to be just a few trees and grass growing next to one of the warehouses.

“We must talk,” she said, looking disturbed—or rather, perturbed, like one who speaks out of a turmoil of mind. “We must leave Hong Kong. I don’t know how far this conspiracy reaches, but I doubt we can be safe. I have no way to take you into China now. Not only do you not have any means of disguising yourself, but I do not possess the means of transporting you. What shall we do?”

For a moment, Nigel was as much at a standstill as she was. This entire adventure, he’d done what he had to do, more or less, but now there was nothing he could do. And then his dream came to him, as a premonition, a way forward. “Lady Jade,” he said. “What if we go by carpetship and you disguise yourself?”

She looked at him with quite a blank expression, and he sighed. “Look,” he said, “I worked as a carpetship flight magician most of the last year. I know that though China is closed to foreigners—and I’m not going to argue it’s not justified in many cases, or even that it’s not for our protection. Your present rulers endorse xenophobia and encouraged the Boxer Rebellion, but I don’t suppose my people’s continued attempts to force your empire to import opium have helped.”

She shrugged, as if to say that it was all a muddle anyway, and that she wasn’t going to discuss it, and he nodded. “But while I realize that most of China is closed to foreigners, I know that I’m allowed to fly into most carpetship ports. I think this is because your native power—”

“Is not concentrated enough for the carpetships,” she said. “European power is different, because of what Charlemagne did. That is why you can fly the carpetships, but most Chinese can’t. So we have to be dependent on you.”

“Though you can fly boats,” Nigel said.

“Only the were-clans, and we are officially proscribed throughout the land, though the laws aren’t always as ruthlessly enforced as in Europe. As usurpers and foreigners, the current rulers don’t want to give us any power. Keeping us in the shadow is a way of protecting themselves.”

Nigel nodded. Lately, since he’d come to think about the rules and the laws that had informed his life as less than preordained, he’d wondered often if that was the reason that weres were so strongly forbidden in the West. Because their special powers and particular magic—not always quantifiable or teachable—made them more difficult for those in power to catalog and control.