Shadow Sister (29 page)

Tao held up the centipede for Sunila to see. With his excellent eyesight, the naga saw the creature in the moonlight. Jilong was berating him, but Sunila was calmer now. He reached up with one of his back paws and with his dextrous three toes he managed to undo the buckle securing the remaining strap. Then he did a backflip. Jilong plummeted headfirst to the ground and landed with a thud. Sunila righted himself and flew towards the rest of the Zhao. They fled as he chased them away.

Tao let out a whoop of triumph. “Sunila is still with us!”

The ten members of Jilong’s personal guard galloped onto the battlefield. Without the advantage of winged steeds they had lagged behind their leader. Astride their black horses, with red plumes rippling, they looked as magnificent as ever, but their faces were grim and pale. They had seen Jilong fall from the
naga
. Their job was to protect him, and they had failed. They left fighting the bandits to the other Zhao soldiers and turned their attention to Tao and Pema. Word had spread quickly that Tao had betrayed the Langhai, and they all remembered the girl who had tried to murder their Chanyu.

Zhao reinforcements also arrived, at least forty of them. The bandits were now completely outnumbered. Sunila wheeled above them, breathing mist and creating a cloud that covered the moon. He screeched and then torrential rain fell from the sky. The battlefield was soon a sea of mud. The bandits, almost invisible in their black clothes, had the advantage as they ducked around the Zhao horses, which were struggling in the mud. But one of the Zhao was swinging something around his head. It was a length of rope with two metal balls on the ends. He let it go and the balls flew through the air and the rope wrapped around the
naga’s
feet. This threw him off balance. His flimsy wings couldn’t compensate and he tumbled to the ground. Tao couldn’t see where he fell.

The rain stopped, the cloud dispersed and the moon lit the muddy battlefield. Tao saw how few bandits there were, no more than fifteen, and some of them were wounded.

The Zhao were riding towards them.

“Call for reinforcements!” Tao yelled to Pema.

“There are no reinforcements.”

“But there must be more.” He couldn’t make sense of this.

“I have to stand with them,” Pema said.

Tao held her back. “They can take care of themselves.”

“No, they can’t. When I returned from Chengdu, the Zhao had a tighter grip on the city than ever. I couldn’t go back to my home. I recruited my own band of soldiers from the boys of Luoyang.”

“So you are their leader?”

“Yes. It was my idea to wear black, and we met in a house in Bronze Camel Street. That’s how I came up with the name.”

Pema shook off Tao’s hand and ran towards the bandits.

The moonlight revealed Tao alone and exposed. Jilong’s personal guard were the most disciplined Zhao soldiers, the best trained. Their moon shadows led the way as they galloped towards Tao and formed a circle around him.

“It’s his fault,” one of them said, unsheathing his sword. “It was his idea that the Langhai ride that creature. And now he’s dead.”

“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.

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 customary 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.