Shadow Sister (17 page)

Tao went out searching for the
naga
. Kai was right, of course. If Sunila didn’t want to be found, he would make himself invisible. But Tao hoped the chunk of honeycomb he was carrying would attract Sunila. He tramped around the outside of the walls, walked through the abandoned fields. He searched and called all afternoon. He found some onions and three eggs laid by an escaped chicken, but there was no sign of the
naga
.

Tao went back to the walled compound. He didn’t feel like crawling through the tunnel, so he thumped on the gate. He kept thumping until it swung open. Tao was mortified to see that it was Pema who had managed to lift the bar by herself.

“I couldn’t find him.” Tao looked around. “Where’s Kai?”

“He’s gone searching for Sunila too. He was pacing the walls for hours, worried about you out there alone.”

Dusk crept over the hills to the west and the light faded, but Tao didn’t light the kitchen stove.

“Aren’t you going to cook tonight?” Pema asked.

“I’m not hungry.”

Pema lit a small fire and cooked the eggs and onions that Tao had found.

“You can eat these eggs, Tao,” Pema explained. “The chicken abandoned them. They would never have hatched.”

Tao ate a few mouthfuls. As darkness fell, moths came to settle on his shoulders again. Pema smiled.

“Go on, make jokes about me and the way the insects are attracted to me,” Tao said.

“I wasn’t going to make a joke. It shows what a special person you are, Tao. Like no other. You have something in common with the insects. Everyone else thinks of themselves first. You never do. You are unique in these times.”

She smiled at him again and took his hands. He didn’t pull them away. A short while before, he had been annoyed with Pema. Now he couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving. In Tao’s daydreams of living in a walled community again, she had always been there. He was about to tell her that he wanted to make her home in the compound, but she spoke before he had the chance.

“I’m leaving early in the morning, probably before dawn, so I’ll say goodbye now.”

Tao’s dream disappeared like mist in sunlight.

“Kai will be back,” Pema said, misinterpreting the anxiety on his face. He’s a dragon. He can take care of himself.”

Tao hadn’t been thinking about the missing dragon.

“Where are you going?”

“I have things to do.”

“What things?”

Pema didn’t answer.

“Don’t worry, Bug Boy,” she said. “I’ll come to visit you again soon.”

Tao watched as Pema headed off to the hut she was sleeping in.

The moon wasn’t quite full, but it was low in the sky and seemed huge. Tao climbed into Wei’s bed and closed his eyes, but he could still see the light through his eyelids. He turned away from the window, but the moonlight reflected off everything – the wall, a painting, a bronze ornament.

The ghost arrived. This time it didn’t form slowly from a shapeless patch of shadow. It was fully formed already, in the shape of a young girl. Her grey face, flecked with moonlight, had a melancholy beauty. Her eyes were dark and hollow, as if bruised by sadness. Tears of moonlight fell from them, but evaporated before they reached the path. The ghost girl didn’t walk. She floated. Her body swayed, her arms fluttered, as if she was moving in water, not air. Though the night was still, the tendrils of her shadow hair were stirred, as if by a breeze. The folds of her shadow gown caught the moonlight as it billowed.

Tao knew he wasn’t dreaming. And despite the fact that Pema had persuaded him that the ghosts in the cave had never existed, he was sure that this one was real.

Who was she? He thought back through his life, trying to remember if any young girl had died within the walls. He couldn’t recall one. The house had been there for many generations. Perhaps it was one of his ancestors, a child who had died before he was born and lost the way to her next life, but he didn’t remember anyone claiming they had seen a ghost. Her pale face had a look of yearning. Her eyes were pleading wordlessly with him. She was stuck in the half-life between death and rebirth. Perhaps she had been content in that state while there were people who lived in the community, but now they had all gone and she was alone.

Tao wanted to help her, as he had the other ghosts, the ones in the cave that Pema had convinced him never existed. He remembered the way they had sighed when they were released from the world. In the dead of night, with the ghost girl before him, he began to believe that they too had been real.

“I can pray for you,” he whispered. “I can help you find your way into your next life.”

The ghost girl turned to Tao. She was so small that she barely came up to his waist, but she drifted up so that her black eyes were level with his. A silver point of moonlight had formed in the centre of each eye, making her seem angry. Her tender shadow lips pulled back into an animal snarl, baring sharp, inhuman teeth. The waving tendrils of silver-tipped shadow hair writhed like a nest of snakes. Her delicate fingers bent until they were crooked and twisted like a crone’s. Each one was tipped with a glittering claw, reaching out to Tao as if she wanted to rake them through his flesh and make him bleed. The ghost rushed at Tao, but her insubstantial claws and teeth couldn’t harm him. He shuddered as she passed right through him, like a cold wind, taking his breath away. He turned around, but she was gone. The moon had disappeared behind a cloud. There was nothing but darkness. And he could breathe again.

Even if the ghosts in the cave hadn’t existed, if he and Kai had created them in their minds from nothing more than a gust of cold air and some vague sensations, it made no difference. This ghost was real. He had felt her enter his bones, stop his breath. If she’d lingered in his body, he would have died, he was sure of that. As she’d passed through him, he’d felt her anger and sorrow, which was more tangible than her body. Grief, loneliness and her premature death had turned her into a hungry ghost. Whoever she was, Tao was convinced that she hadn’t got lost on her journey into her next life. She had never begun it.

Tao didn’t want to be alone. Not ever again. He needed companionship, someone to talk to and make the night terrors go away. He went outside. The moon came out from behind the cloud and flooded the courtyard with pale light, making angry crisscross shadows of bare twigs. He didn’t look back to see if the ghost had reappeared. He ran to the hut where Pema slept and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He went inside. Pema wasn’t there and neither were her sword or her sleeping mat. It was still four hours or more till dawn, but she had already left.

Tao didn’t want to go back to Wei’s room. The feeling of safety he’d experienced each time he’d entered it had gone. Now, when he was in the room, all he felt was fear. He sat in the peony pavilion.

Although the ghost girl didn’t trouble him again that night, sleep had deserted him. Thoughts and fears swirled in his head, fighting for attention. If the ghost had appeared the previous night, he could have discussed it with Kai. If she’d arrived a few hours earlier, he could have told Pema. But the ghost girl had waited until he was by himself to take on her full and undeniable shape. She hadn’t uttered a sound, but Tao knew exactly what she wanted. She had left something inside him as she passed through him. A thought. A desire. She didn’t want to begin another life. She wanted her previous life back. And if she couldn’t have that, she wanted revenge for her untimely death. Tao was powerless to help her regain her old life, and he would have no part in revenge.

The orb spider was his only companion. It sat in its web, perfectly still, as patient as ever. But its calm stillness couldn’t soothe the disquiet he felt. What had happened to Kai? He must be in trouble. Something must have gone wrong, otherwise he wouldn’t have stayed away. Would he?

A few days earlier Tao had sat in this same spot sharing a meal with his friends and he had thought that his life couldn’t be improved. He had felt safe in the compound, protected. The walls had done their job and kept enemies out, but they had not managed to keep his friends within. This was the first time in his life he had been completely alone.

Tao felt around by the side of the couch until he found his bag. He reached inside for the familiar shape of his dragon stone. His heart shrank inside him. For a moment, he’d forgotten that he no longer had the shard. Then his fingers brushed something else inside the bag. Something cool to the touch like the shard. But not smooth. Something with many facets and edges sharp enough to cut skin. It was the cinnabar crystals. Kai had gone out into the world alone without taking any cinnabar with him. The sharp edges of the crystals had scratched the tender hide behind Kai’s reverse scales, so he had given them to Tao to keep in his bag. They had planned to stay together.

Tao struggled to stop his mind plunging into a whirlpool of panic. He pictured the shard in his mind – the lovely shade of purple, the milky white vein that passed through it, the faint threads of maroon that were only visible if you looked very close. Kai had used his own shard to find Tao. It had somehow led him to the monastery. Tao was sure the dragon stone would lead him to Kai. But he didn’t have it.

Tao was the one who’d told Kai to search for Sunila. He’d expected that the
naga
wouldn’t stray far from the food they had provided, that he’d be out in the fields and would come as soon as Kai called out to him. Tao had spent a lot of time fussing over the
naga
. If he was honest with himself, he had quite liked the fact that Kai was jealous of Sunila. His life had turned bad, like milk left in the sun. And it was all his own fault.

Tao got up as soon as the first hint of daylight gave vague shape to the familiar things in the courtyard – the ornamental cherry tree, the pavilion, the mountain-shaped rocks – but the morning light didn’t weaken the power of his night terrors. Not this time. His belief in the ghost girl and his fears for Kai refused to fade.

He climbed the steps to the top of the wall, and walked around, searching the landscape in all directions for a dot of blue or green. There was no trace of Kai’s voice in his head. The breeze brought no whisper of Sunila’s cry. He didn’t know what had happened to the dragons.

Tao couldn’t sit and do nothing. He would have to go and search for Kai, though he had no hope of finding him. He wasn’t hungry, but he forced himself to eat some cold rice. He filled his water skin and grasped his staff and, instead of rushing out and leaving the gate open, he carefully made his way through the tunnel. Without the shard he had no idea which way Kai had gone. He turned to the north. Three butterflies fluttered after him. Their ragged wings meant they were old and close to death, but they stayed with him and he was grateful for their company. He hoped it was a sign that he was heading in the right direction.

Tao spent the whole day searching for dragon tracks, calling out to Kai with his mind, but he didn’t find him. Late in the afternoon, he returned to the compound. All day a realisation had been growing in his mind – without Kai, his life was meaningless. He was destined to become Kai’s dragonkeeper. Being a novice monk had merely been preparation, teaching him to disconnect from his family, from the world.

He walked up the road to the compound, exhausted after a long day searching and a longer sleepless night. The gate was open a crack. His heart, already beating fast from the climb, beat faster. He made his tired legs run. Relief flooded through him. He wasn’t even cross with Kai for forgetting to bar the gate.

He barely had the strength left to push the gate open wide enough for him to slip through. The compound was as quiet and empty as when he’d left.

“Kai.” He didn’t speak aloud. “Where are you?”

There were no answering words in his mind.

Then he heard a sound. It was the cheeping hiss of the
naga
, interspersed with happy flute notes. Tao’s heart leaped. Kai had found Sunila! Tao discovered that he did have a wisp of energy left, enough for him to run into the courtyard.

He was about to call out to Kai again, but the words shrivelled in his mouth. Sunila was there. He was curled at the feet of someone lounging on Wei’s couch. A hand was draped on the
naga
’s head, tickling his ears. Sunila was purring. The shreds of hope fell from Tao like autumn leaves from a tree. The smirking face before him belonged to Fo Tu Deng.

“Tao, come and sit down,” Fo Tu Deng said, as if he was welcoming an old friend into his own house. “I’ve made a pot of your excellent tea. I’ve been expecting you. Let me pour a cup for you.”

Fo Tu Deng poured tea from a stout little teapot with a crabapple design etched on the lid. Tao’s mother had taken the best bronze teapot with her to Jiankang. This little one, made from red clay, was the teapot she’d used whenever local elders called by. She had never wanted anyone to think that the Huans were wealthy.

Sunila was stretched out, purring at the feet of the monk who was chatting to him in fluent Sanskrit. The
naga
took no notice of Tao at all.

“This is my house. I want you to leave.”

Fo Tu Deng smiled as he handed Tao a cup of tea.

“In these lawless times, I think anyone can take possession of abandoned property. This compound has such commanding views in all directions, and it’s so comfortable. It will make an excellent base for my activities. I have settled myself into the charming room with the lacquered screen, the large bed and the cabinet painted with mountain scenes.”

That was Tao’s mother’s room. She hadn’t been able to take all her furniture with her.

The monk sipped his tea and patted the
naga
.

“One of my scouts told me he saw a young man wandering around near here with two dragons. It had to be you. Then this poor creature came to me distressed and malnourished.”

He said something in Sanskrit to the
naga
, who purred in response.

“I know something about the dragons of Tianzhu.
Nagas
live in rainforests. Their main source of food is tree frogs, which the adult females collect. The males are rather lazy when it comes to food gathering. Their job is to keep away predators – tigers mainly, and humans of course.” The monk smiled. “This fellow isn’t much good at finding his own food. When my men encountered a shape-changing monster that killed with a venomous bite, I guessed it was a
naga
. I sent three of them to the mountains to find some decent-sized tree frogs so that I could test my theory, see if he would be lured by them.” Fo Tu Deng chuckled. “Out on the plains, nomads don’t have much experience of climbing trees. There was an unfortunate accident, but that encouraged the others to learn how to climb trees more skilfully.”