Jade Dragon (30 page)

Fixx’s eyes narrowed. “Missing a bit o’ the tale, I reckon. You left out
the part where
you
take the reins of that monster instead. Step in at
the last second and leash the beast for yourself. Am I close?”

Ropé let out a bark of laughter. “Why would we ever want to put a collar
on such a magnificent beast? The Cabal thought they might treat the Jade
Dragon like a milk cow, feed it the odd city and in turn suckle
themselves off the beast’s teat. Such limited imagination. No, dear
fellow, we’re going to
release
it. Can you imagine what will be
wrought in His wake, the world in a rapture of sex and blood?” He licked
his lips. “It arouses me just to think of it.”

Fixx eyed the other man. “I’m gonna kill you, you know that.”

Ropé beckoned him from across the room. “I
so
want you to try.”

He went for the crossbow, and in the other man’s hand the ghost knife
unfolded like a steel flower.

Ko kicked down the backstage door and vaulted inside, feeling Feng at
his side. The sickening riot of sounds from the stage and the audience
beat at him. He shook off the sensation.

“Danger—” said Feng, as part of the shadows detached and grew
definition.

Monkey King appraised Ko with his expressionless mask, taking in the
shabby go-ganger jacket, the Road Ronin katana. Ko thought of the
white-masked woman in the parking garage, of her incredible speed; as if
Monkey King had been waiting for that moment, the guardian attacked. He
punched Ko down, dodging clumsy sword blows, making impact craters where
his fist struck the floor.

Ko rolled away, swinging wildly. The Mask watched, measuring his
movements, then came in again. Monkey King’s blows were swift,
efficient, designed to break and maim. The youth took a glancing hit and
stumbled.

“Aim for the weak points,” snapped Feng.

“Can’t,” Ko slurred. “Not a… swordsman.”

Monkey King paused, listening to him speak, then came on, preparing to
strike a killing blow.

Close to his face, Ko smelt old leather, sweat and iron. “Then let me,”
said Feng. The warrior’s hand slipped into the youth’s and faded into
the skin. Ko jerked away “No! Get out!”

“Listen to me!” said Feng. “I know you, better than you know yourself! I
know what you fear, why you hate those fools who warp their minds with
drugs and wine—because it was one of them that killed your father!”

“Can’t ever lose control,” Ko muttered. “Can’t ever become like those
animals!”

“And you won’t,” Feng was becoming smoke, melting around him. “We won’t.
Let me in, Ko.
Let me in.
”

A lifetime of restraint. Never once had Ko allowed himself to slip, to
fall into the easy path that so many of his friends had taken. He had
rejected it always, the moment of belief becoming crystal-hard when Chan
had informed him, grave-faced and quiet, that his father had been
murdered. The child he had been vowed never to have a waking moment
where it wasn’t him in charge, in control. But now he felt Feng’s soul
pressing into him, filling his body like water into a bottle.

Trust me!

I do,
Ko replied, the answer surprising him.

The Mask grabbed a handful of the boy’s jacket and dragged him off the
floor. Ko’s eyes snapped open and what Monkey King saw there made him
hesitate. A new and iron-hard determination, ancient and inviolate.

The katana spun in an arc and took off the guardian’s hand at the wrist.

“It’s been a while since I cut meat,” snarled the youth, a strange
dissonance in his words. “But you never forget how it’s done.”

The bodyguard fell back, momentarily confused, and the youth attacked
with skilful, aggressive motions. Monkey King’s mask broke with a
bone-snap crack as the polycarbonate samurai blade sank into his skull,
cutting clear across the orbit of his right eye.

Old Yee hobbled from the cracks forming in the street, his barrow
falling into a void spitting with noxious smoke. The noodle seller
tripped and fell. Overhead, in the low and hateful clouds, he glimpsed
something huge and monstrous. A tail the size of a metro train clipped
the hippo Centre in passing, and the old man died in the rain of glass
and concrete.

The quarrel lodged between the second and third of Heywood Ropé’s ribs,
to no ill effect. Fixx discarded the crossbow and vaulted away from the
Josephite’s attack, rolling and drawing the SunKings. Selecting
three-round bursts, he followed Ropé across bookshelves, blowing fists
of confetti from the rare and antique volumes.

“Philistine,” snorted the killer. Ropé jerked his wrist and the blade of
the ghost knife shot out on a wire, hissing furiously. Fixx fired at the
thing, but it wove around the bullets and cut dozens of shallow nicks
before retreating. He moved and went to fully automatic; a metre of
yellow flame shrieked from the muzzles of the pistols as he unloaded the
rest of the magazines. High-impact armour-piercing rounds punched chunks
from stonework and blew out windows as the Josephite evaded. The op
adjusted aim on the fly and found his target. Bullets ripped away great
ragged lumps of Ropé’s left arm and shoulder, drawing out a howl. The
breeches on the SunKings locked open, spent and fuming. Fixx let the
empty guns fall from his hands and went for his sword.

Ropé came hard as the monomolecular blade whispered free of its
scabbard. Edge met edge with a glass-shattering impact, hot metal sparks
stinging. They fought sword to knife, strike and feint, lunge and
riposte.

Ropé made a snake hiss and Fixx glimpsed a momentary ghost-glitter of
silver sunglasses, of burning hellfire behind his eyes. The op pressed
the hilt of the sword forward and twisted it, baring his teeth. Fixx
didn’t much like holdout weapons—unsportsmanlike, really—but there was a
time and a place for that sort of behaviour. Like now.

The one-shot ScumStopper Xtreme hard-jacketed slug in his sword hilt
discharged into Ropé’s chest with such force that it blew the man back
into a hanging d-screen, bringing the flickering console down upon him.
Burnt plastic and cordite gusted through the air.

Fixx limped to the young executive handcuffed to the oak lectern. “Mr
Lam?”

“Fuh-Frankie,” came the reply.

He tapped the cuffs with the sword. “Hold out your hands, Frankie.”

“Wha–?”

The sword whistled through the air and the casehardened chain split
beneath the blade, scattering links across the stone floor. Frankie
swallowed hard and pulled himself away.

Fixx nodded at the room. “You know a way outta here?”

The exec’s face telegraphed his terror even before he could give it
voice. Fixx turned on his heel, bringing up the sword as a shape
exploded from the wreckage of the screen. Ropé flew across the room,
pressing the ghost knife down in his grip. The red orchard of
slash-wounds across the sanctioned operative made him seconds too slow.

“Stab stab stab stab!” Ropé collided with him, burying the ritual weapon
in Fixx’s torso over and over, fast as lightning. He felt the sword
tumble from his nerveless fingers, felt the velocity of the attack shove
him across the tiles. Blood slicked the floor, and Fixx’s chest and gut
contracted as the auto-routines built into his armour kicked in, dosing
him with shots of TraumaNix.

Ropé hazed into view. “This amusement pales, pagan. I must get back to
my work.” The ghost knife’s blades shifted and changed, fractal edges
turning like origami razors.

In the Yip apartment, there was the whispering hiss of cutting flesh.
The boys had made a good job of slicing out each other’s vocal chords,
and now they were painting a pentagram in their mother’s blood. Through
the heat-hazed windows, the cilia of a starborn thing followed them
about the grisly work.

The Jade Dragon grew, its tail looping through the streets, crossing
over the bay and back. The demon embraced the waves of hate and desire
on the air, tasted the foetor of the blue as it rose up in the minds of
its food-thralls. Flexing its muscles for the first time in hundreds of
thousands of years, it released experimental thrusts of power, warping
local pockets of reality. It picked a man at random and had him explode
into a horde of questing tenticular masses, probing and penetrating
through the corridors of a tower block. In the dark night overhead, the
King of Rapture disintegrated orbital spy satellites from a dozen
different multinats; across the world, the operators jacked into them in
Novograd, Seattle, Kyoto, Dublin and Sydney died instantly from
serotonin overdoses. Transcontinental airliners vectored straight into
the runways at SkyHarbor, swan-like fuselages turning into balls of fire
and steel as the flight crews tore each other’s hearts out. The Dragon’s
influence washed out across the water, sinking junks and sampans,
forcing the simple bio-brain of the Macao hydrofoil ferry to drown
itself. These things it did without really thinking about them, these
small mischiefs easy like breathing for the beast.

Ise made it to the doors of the church just as Father Woo was pushing
them shut. The priest held a shotgun like he knew how to use it. The
go-ganger thought the padre was going to leave him out there, out on the
street where the shadowy crawling things and maddened people ran riot;
but then the priest beckoned him sharply. Ise threw himself through the
doorway as the gun barked, killing something behind him.

It was only a fragment of the Lord of Lusts, a mirror-piece of the
Master of Ecstasy’s monumental horror; but still the Jade Dragon boiled
with inchoate power, the bubbling potency of unbridled animal hungers
spilling into the world. The city reeled and went mad. Those who saw the
beast in dreams over the past weeks gave it their minds, never
understanding that to believe in it only made Him more real. Those who
had been fortunate enough to avoid the taint spread by Tze’s Cabal were
fortunate no more. There was nowhere in Hong Kong where the touch of the
blue did not reach. Each mind formed another link in the chain, released
more caged passions and horrible secrets. Millions of people found
themselves hating and loving, needing and yearning for bloodshed and
lust.

With great care, Alice nailed her feet to the floor and arranged it so
she could seat herself on the bed. She drew the last of the cabbalistic
shapes on the milk-pale flesh of her forearm with the shard from the
mirror, then took the gun and rested the muzzle on her lower lip. The
weapon tasted of oil and steel, and she had to fight back a gag reflex.
Teasing the end of the barrel with her tongue, she squeezed the trigger
and waited for heaven.

The song pealed around her mind, never-ending, looping in an infernal
circle. Juno tried to stop herself from speaking the words, but they
forced themselves from her mouth, the unstoppable meme washing out
across the audience.

“We adore you, Juno!” came the screams. “You complete us! We love you!”

They echoed her, line for line, beat for beat, a flock of worshippers
growing by the second as more minds in the city fell into the power of
the Jade Dragon. The throbbing subliminals in the backbeats and the
flickering hypno-commands in the screens made slaves of them, and Juno
was at the core of it. Floating camera drones and emplaced lenses
followed her every movement across the stage, holding her and
broadcasting the image citywide.

She was the catalyst, at the heart of the expanding reaction. For every
person who joined in the chorus, for each mind that willingly
surrendered itself to the touch of the Z3N, the creature’s manifestation
became stronger. Against her will, Juno led the city into a hive mind
designed and directed by the will of the beast. It was circular, a
self-reinforcing metaconcert—and soon it would reach a critical mass of
human thought and make the Jade Dragon fully real in the material plane.

Juno touched the very faintest corona of the demon-thing’s psyche, and
it sickened her beyond all words. She understood only that to pierce the
veil of dimension from the Outer Darkness where it originated, the beast
needed believers. It could only become tangible when men and women gave
themselves over to the desires that it embodied, the blood-soaked,
conflicting needs to procreate and to destroy.

As the lyrics came around again, Juno saw the flesh-city and the glass
monsters of her waking dreams forming, and rejected them with all her
might. “I’m the quiet muh-mind in-inside,” she stammered. “Pretty…
pretty…” Her chest tightened, the muscles rebelling. She tasted blood
in her mouth and screamed, fighting the compulsion, forcing the words to
shift and change.

“I’m the lying fiend inside!” she spat wildly, “hateful voice! I’m the
bloody smile! Touch my thoughts and
die,
there’s nowhere you can
hide!”

Juno clutched at her skull as spikes of pain wracked her. The singer’s
piercing shriek was repeated by the first fifteen rows of the concert
audience, each of them falling into psychic synchronicity with her.

“I won’t sing!” she snarled, tearing the microphone tab from her cheek.
“I won’t help you any more!” The camera drones closed in, curious at her
sudden change in behaviour.

Juno’s angry cries died in her throat as the brilliant sodium lights of
the stage were snuffed out, plunging the platform into blackness. She
saw a shimmering curtain fall, cutting her off from the audience, and
suddenly the screens blared out new tunes, picking up and repeating the
words to “Touch” over and over. The live feeds from the cameras were
abruptly severed.

From the deep shadows of the wings emerged Mr Tze, his face bright with
rage. “You dare defy me?” he roared, his voice beating at her over the
blare of the music. “You vat-grown, clockwork bitch. You’re just a
grandiose sexclone, a fuck-toy for my bidding.” He brutally backhanded
her. “Sing, damn you. I order you to sing.
Infans simulare! Infans
simulare.
”