Journey to Wubang 01 - Earth to Hell (24 page)

‘Still alive? Oh well, can’t have everything. No, he hasn’t. He might be busy with something else.’ He glanced up at me through the plastic-rimmed glasses. ‘Actually, it occurs to me that I should keep you updated when he’s trying me out, because he only tries to kill me when he has nothing better to do. If he’s not trying to kill me, then he’s plotting something.’ He glanced down at the stone. ‘And he hasn’t tried to kill me at all since about the middle of September.’

‘He’s certainly been trying the Celestial,’ I said. ‘We are suffering constant attacks from Hell from both your father and his assorted children. With the Dark Lord gone, it’s becoming very hard to hold things together.’

‘You can do it, Emma,’ Ronnie said, and picked up the brush. He squinted at a piece of rice paper that was
about twenty centimetres long and five wide. ‘Now go and get your Retainer.’

‘Damn, Ronnie, is there anything that goes on that you
don’t
know about?’ I said.

He grinned up at me. ‘Not much.’

‘You
sure
you don’t want a job at the Academy?’

He snorted with derision and began the complex process of writing the symbols onto the paper that would create the seal. ‘No, thanks. I’ve managed to remain solo and avoid the King’s assassination attempts for close on three hundred years now. I quite like being a free agent.’ He nodded to me. ‘I appreciate the offer though, Lady Emma, and if there was any organisation I would join, it would be Wudang.’

Ronnie rose with the paper in one hand, the ink still slightly wet. He waved it to dry the ink, then went to the front door. He stood in front of the doorframe and concentrated. He flashed brilliant white for a second, then the white energy coalesced onto the paper, making it almost too bright to see. The paper was ripped from his hand and smacked into the left-hand doorframe, glowed painfully white, and disappeared.

‘One down, six more to go,’ he said.

‘There are more windows than that,’ I said.

‘That’s just this door alone,’ Ronnie said. ‘If I do my job right, both of us are going to feel mighty uncomfortable every time we go through this door.’

‘That’s what I like to hear,’ I said. ‘I’d better go, they’re waiting for me.’

He returned to the coffee table, knelt on the carpet again and pulled out another seal. ‘Go. Let me know how it ends.’

‘Somehow I have the feeling that I won’t need to,’ I said.

Ronnie grinned at the seal he was working on. ‘See you later, Ms Donahoe.’

D
enis double-parked on the busy Sham Shui Po street to let me out of the Mercedes. ‘Do you want me to park and join you, or circle the building?’ he said. ‘There’s a government car park across the road.’

‘Park on the street if you can, otherwise cruise,’ I said. ‘Hopefully this won’t take long, but we may need to get out fast if we find what we’re looking for.’

‘Good luck, ma’am,’ he said as I closed the door, and he pulled away to find a park.

Although it was 9.30 pm, the street was full of young Hong Kong locals, some driving souped-up Lancers and Nissan imports. People crushed the sidewalks and overflowed onto the streets, a typical evening in the busy area around the Golden Arcade. This part of Hong Kong was one of the most densely populated areas in the world; the buildings were all packed high rises, stacking minuscule apartments with tiny windows over sprawling block-sized shopping malls full of similarly tiny shops. The sidewalks and gutters overflowed with trash; it had been a long time since the morning pass-through by the street sweepers.

The Golden Arcade filled the basement and first two floors of one of these apartment complexes. About
three hundred metres long and a hundred wide, it twisted through narrow passageways from two entrances. The large entrance on the corner was for the basement and ground floor; a tiny entrance halfway along the building allowed access to the first floor.

None of the Disciples in our team were visible. They had all merged into the crowd. We would meet up inside.

The interior of the mall was low-ceilinged, with small shopfronts on either side of the meandering narrow corridors. Each shop, only about two metres square, had its speciality laid out on the counter: video cards or network cards, the prices written large in marker on cardboard cut-outs. Shoppers would cruise from store to store seeking the best price for the particular piece of hardware they were looking for.

As I entered, a young man called to me, ‘Copy software, ma’am?’ but I ignored him and headed down the stairs and further in. If I’d said yes he would have taken me to a shopfront around the corner further away; the mall was closely watched by customs officers. There would be a small shop selling handbags or candy with a false back wall, and behind that would be another store selling cheap mainland-made copies of any software or game the user could imagine.

The Academy kids occasionally practised their skills on these copy CD shops, running through and closing them down using the more advanced energy and Arts techniques. There was no fear of them being reported because they were shutting down criminals. The underworld outlets were excellent targets and we’d probably decimated the income the Triads received. If the demon Six had inherited Simon Wong’s underworld empire, it looked like the backlash was finally catching up with us.

I moved down the stairs to the basement. The lower stores contained stacks of DVDs in shrink-wrapped bundles of a hundred, colourful novelty peripherals such as mice and keyboards, and cheap computer accessories—mouse pads and printer paper. The store holders glanced curiously at me, but none accosted me to buy. Wrong race, wrong gender, wrong age.

As I went further in, the stores became smaller and their goods cheaper. The floor hadn’t been washed in a very long time and piles of dirt and dead insects crusted the corners. Some of the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered.

Simone was waiting for me at the end of the corridor. A small flight of stairs led up to street level, with a metal chute next to them for throwing boxes of stock down into the basement. The corridor the demon had mentioned was on our left, stretching the complete length of the arcade. The ceiling was low and angular in places where it fitted under the stairs. There was a single pull-down roller door halfway along, with boxes containing computer cases stacked in front of it.

As I neared the door, the Disciples came into view. Simone had hidden them with a simple charm that only made them visible as they were approached. They weren’t wearing Mountain uniforms, just jeans and T-shirts, but their T-shirts were black in unspoken acknowledgement of their Master. Nobody told them to wear black; they did it out of a sense of unity. I smiled inwardly; without thinking, I’d worn a black T-shirt too.

It was something of a crush with fifteen Disciples, Simone and myself. I went to stand next to Simone and the Masters and looked at the door.

‘Will anybody see if someone uses PK to break the door?’ I asked.

‘No need, Emma,’ Simone said. ‘Michael’s here.’

Michael shimmered into view behind Simone, strikingly different in his white T-shirt. ‘Sorry, forgot you can’t see much. I’ll take down the door for you.’ He nodded to the Disciples around us. ‘Be ready, there may be something on the other side. Nobody can sense anything.’

‘Wait,’ I said, raising my hand. ‘You can’t sense anything?’

Both Simone and Michael shook their heads.

‘Might be similar to what happened under Kowloon City Park, Emma,’ Simone said. ‘But I don’t remember that well, and that charm dissipated shortly after the demon was destroyed, so we couldn’t study it. We’ll just have to play it by ear.’

I tapped the stone in my ring.

‘What now!’

‘Stone, they can’t sense what’s on the other side of the door.’

The stone sounded chagrined. ‘Oh. I see.’

‘I hate to ask this, but…’

‘No,’ the stone said. ‘All my children are accounted for. So if this demon has used stone essence to line the walls and make them spyproof, he’s used Shen outside of my family.’

‘Are your kids the most powerful stone Shen?’ Michael said.

The stone hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘No. The children of other Building Blocks, and direct descendants of the Grandmother herself are more powerful than mine.’

‘Could one of their kids defeat one of yours?’

The stone hesitated again, then, ‘Yes.’

‘Bad news all around,’ I said, studying the door. It was plain grey steel. In human form I couldn’t check any further.

‘Let’s just do it and see what we get,’ Liu said. ‘The other shops are closing, the ones nearby are deserted. Let’s go.’

‘Everybody,’ Michael said firmly, and the Disciples stilled to hear him. ‘I’m going to change this door to mercury to make it open silently for us. Just hold your breath until it solidifies at the bottom—mercury is pretty toxic and you don’t want to inhale any.’ He glanced around. ‘Got it?’

The Disciples nodded.

‘Okay, doing it now.’

Michael raised one hand towards the roller door and it changed from dull steel to shiny mercury, then slid into a puddle on the floor. The mercury splashed against an invisible force field—he had ensured that it wouldn’t touch us—then solidified into a grey lavalike lump on the floor.

‘All clear, it’s steel again,’ Michael said.

The interior of the store was obviously a front. The shelves were unoccupied except for a couple of empty display boxes for hardware more than ten years old. The counter was a tired-looking office desk with no chair, and the cash register’s power cord hung forlornly down the back of the desk, not even plugged into the wall. There were no other doors or apparent entrances to the demon’s nest, however, and the Disciples began to search for the way in.

‘Nothing,’ Simone said, casting around. ‘Michael?’

Michael concentrated. ‘Nothing here either. Appears to be just a room.’

‘Stone?’ I said.

‘Strange.’ The stone was silent for a moment, then Lee, one of the Disciples, stepped forward. The stone drifted out of my ring and grew to about the size of my fist, still square and polished green. Lee took True Form, a red granite stone about the same size. The two stones
circled the room, occasionally moving to the centre of the room and then drifting out again—an elegant dance that seemed to have no pattern to it. Finally they drifted only millimetres above the floor, side by side, and covered nearly every square centimetre.

Lee stopped just inside the shop door and hovered slightly above the floor.

The stone returned to my ring. ‘Under there.’

‘There is a hollowness of some sort directly beneath me,’ Lee said. ‘Other than that, we can’t really be sure, ma’am.’

Simone and Michael stepped forward and both crouched to put their hands on the floor, concentrating. They shared a look, then stood again. Lee returned to human form and joined the silent group of Disciples.

Michael shrugged. ‘Concrete. Too much for me, unless we go for physical force, which will rock the building and probably bring the authorities.’

‘Isn’t there a latch or something?’ I said.

‘If there is, it isn’t anything obvious,’ the stone in my ring said. ‘Probably something only a demon could open.’

Simone shot me a look.
Don’t even think about it. The last thing we need is you running out of control right at the entrance to a nest.

I stood on the spot the stones had indicated, then crouched and put my hands on the floor, wondering if my demon nature could detect anything. I jumped back as the floor slid smoothly open, revealing a black stone ramp leading down. A strong breeze came from the hole, surprisingly fresh with the smell of mown grass and greenery.

The Demon King, in his usual human form of a mid-twenties Chinese with maroon hair in a short ponytail, poked his head through the hole and grinned at me. ‘Hi, guys, just got here. Mind if we tag along?’

‘We can handle this ourselves,’ I said. ‘Get lost.’

His smile didn’t shift. ‘This is demon business. By rights I could tell
you
to get lost, but in the interests of Hell–Celestial relations, we’ll just come along and see what happens.’ He raised his hands. ‘Strictly hands off, we’ll just observe. I promise.’

He’s right, Emma
, the stone said.
This is a demon matter. The demons in this nest haven’t attacked anyone as far as you know, and the King is within his rights to claim territory
.

‘I’m well aware of that,’ I said.

I proceeded down the black stone ramp, ducked to pass under the floor and crouched until the ceiling of the tunnel was high enough to stand. The walls quickly closed in around me, leading to a narrow, low-ceilinged black stone passage, its sides unfinished and rough.

The King had brought Martin along. He stood behind him, waiting in the tunnel.

Simone hissed under her breath when she saw him. ‘I don’t want him here.’

‘My choice, Princess,’ the King said. ‘You don’t have much say in the matter, I’m afraid, dear.’

‘Don’t call me dear,’ Simone said, and moved to push past the King.

Martin leapt forward, hands out, to block her way. ‘Mei Mei, take care, we don’t know how much damage your touch will do to the King. Please stay back.’

Simone gestured angrily to push Martin away from her. ‘Don’t call me
Mei Mei
!’ Her eyes flashed black then returned to normal, still full of fury. ‘You are no brother of mine!’

The King’s and Martin’s faces went blank with shock, then Martin recovered and bowed slightly. ‘As you will, Princess. All I ask is that you take care with touching Wong Mo.’

‘Go then,’ Simone said, gesturing down the tunnel. ‘We can’t sense anything up ahead, so you first.’

The King and Martin turned and headed down the tunnel. It was just high enough for us to stand without bending, but the sides were so narrow that we had to squeeze through, the walls brushing against us.

‘I hope nobody’s claustrophobic,’ I said. ‘This is intense.’

I am
, the stone said.
This is awful.