five

Tell me again, Chung, why you needed to be here?”

“I am the Lady Mei Feng’s runner,” as though that were simply and obviously something to be proud of. “Of course I must be here. What if she needed to send a message, what then? Could you run to the city?”

“Yes, of course. Any of us could.”

Unhappily, that was probably true. They ran up and down the mountains, just for training. But, “Could you find your way around the city? Could you find anywhere at all, except the palace?”

Shen shrugged, and Chung felt a brief spur of victory. Too brief, too soon: Shen said, “Why would I need to? She never sends you anywhere except the palace.”

“That’s only when she’s sending messages to the general; and the general’s here, so …”

“That’s my point. The general’s here. What are you going to do, trot from one side of the tent to the other? He’s come out here so they don’t have to send each other messages. Which means she’s not going to need you. So I repeat, what exactly are you here for?”

For the walk, he could say. Or for you, but that would only make Shen laugh the harder.

“Why,” he said, “are you worried about me?”

Shen frowned and concentrated on his fingers, where they were picking a stone out of dried mud at his feet. Chung couldn’t see quite what it was about that particular stone, but it was suddenly demanding a lot of Shen’s attention.

“Yes,” Shen said distractedly, “yes, I am. Mei Feng worries about the emperor every time she brings him here. No surprise, after what happened before. There are so many people: who knows where they all came from, and what they all want? And if she’s right to worry about his majesty, then of course I have to worry about you. You don’t need rebels and assassins to talk yourself into trouble, you can do it with any old random soldier. I’ve seen you, kitchen boy. Remember?”

“That was you.”

“That’s my point. You get into trouble and you can’t defend yourself. Despite everything I’ve tried to teach you …”

Actually he could, against anyone but Shen, but this wasn’t the time to argue it. Nor the place to prove it. He just smiled and said, “Well then, I’d better stay close to you, hadn’t I? Let you defend me, when I talk myself into trouble. Maybe I’ll do it deliberately, just to watch.”

Now that he’d dug it loose with his fingernails, Shen seemed not to know what he’d wanted the pebble for. He tossed it in his hand, looked to toss it away, changed his mind and wrapped his fist around it.

Probably as well, not to fling it casually aside as he might have done in the valley camp. Here were people all over, who were almost sure not to appreciate having a stone flung at their heads.

It might be amusing, if Chung seized the chance to step in and defend him—but Mei Feng was almost sure not to be amused. Not here, not now.

They were in the middle of the new palace site, between the hill where the palace would rise and the vast sprawl of tents and huts that made the workers’ encampment. Most of the men had been soldiers before the emperor made laborers of them: his own soldiers for the most part, that army that had fled the Hidden City with him. That had kept him safe for a year, for so many miles; that had seen him across the water and installed him here as lord of this shriveled empire; that labored now to build his proper home, and would no doubt defend him in it when the invasion came, if it only held off that long.

So why did Chung—yes, and Shen too—feel as though they crouched in the camp of their enemy?

Maybe it was only Mei Feng’s nervousness transferring itself to them. She had a right to be nervous; nobody could hope to check that every man here was reliable. Nor every woman, either. There had been a little flurry a while back, women with trays, yum cha: tea and dumplings for the emperor and the general. Why bother to assassinate with blades and risk and rumpus, when you could do it with quiet discreet poison and slip away before anyone was even dead …?

The emperor should have a taster, perhaps. Jiao might just be reckless enough to do it—but who would be reckless enough to ask her? Her mood was lethal these days, there was no talking to her.

All the way here she’d ranged ahead, alone. Even now she wouldn’t join the others, where they stood or squatted in a watchful ring around the tent where the emperor and the general were meeting. Mei Feng was in there with them, and so were Yu Shan and his new girl, if that’s what she was, if that’s what had so upset Jiao.

Something, at any rate, had stopped her following them inside. Whether it was the same thing that prevented her from standing guard with her fellows, Chung couldn’t say; but she was very conspicuously keeping herself apart.

This one big tent—this palace of a tent, silk-covered board walls and a carpeted floor, chairs and a table and Chung didn’t know what more—stood at the foot of the hill, just outside the palisade. When the emperor and Mei Feng stayed here, they had another, grander yet, barely any longer a tent at all, inside the palisade. Apparently General Ping Wen was not entitled to presume that far, or else he had chosen to display this little modesty, a hesitation before the gates of greatness.

He had at least found himself a little distance from the common splay, the rough accommodations of the men. Some had actual tents, or at least a share of a tent; some had rude improvisations, a length of greased fabric and a couple of poles. Some, many, did the best they could with less than that, branches and dried reeds.

There were paths all through the encampment, beaten by many feet many times over, giving it a semblance of order. Here men slept, here they washed, here they ate together. Here were the yards where wagons came, all day and every day, to offload what they brought: ropes and timber and iron, stone and sand, oil and charcoal and rice. Here were the smithies, making tools and pegs and nails, chains and hinges. Here was the path, almost a road, that led the men from yards to smithies to the palisade with everything they needed for their work within.

Within was not so different, except that the worn paths made a map around ditches and terraces, land cleared to build on. Out here the paths were the only clear spaces; they took their winding ways between chaos and confusion, too many men pressed too close, their dry clothes and precious few things stored in their cooking pots and woe betide any other man who came to steal them. There was always someone offsite, resting or injured or sick, and so free to watch over his things and his neighbors’. And there were always thefts despite that, and other quarrels besides, and so the emotional ground among the men was as crowded and messy and insecure as the ground beneath their feet, with very few paths that were clear and safe to walk on.

Nevertheless. The men did bind together, as men will, in cliques and clubs and gangs; and Jiao was out there mixing with them, crouching in a circle rolling bones.

She couldn’t talk to her own people, apparently, but she could roar and point and jabber, laugh and roll with strangers, chew something unsavory and spit between her legs.

Jiao was in full land-pirate guise, dress and manner too: the tao on one hip conspicuously balanced by the heavy knife on the other, both blades flaunted here where the workers were forbidden them. She swaggered, she cursed, she turned a shrugging shoulder on those she had come in with; she muttered something that made all the men in hearing choke on illicit laughter, that they struggled manfully, failingly, to suppress. Some coarseness, then: some comment about the emperor, perhaps, that could see a man’s head struck from his shoulders if he made it, if he was overheard. Or else about the general his majesty had come to see. A man who was not quite master could be doubly sensitive of his honor …

Chung wasn’t comfortable here, with any of this. Those men that Jiao was raucous with: conscripted once into the emperor’s flight, fighting their way all across the empire and losing all the way, crowded at last onto this one small island with nowhere else to run; conscripted again into this, building a luxury palace for an idle boy while starvation threatened on one hand, war on the other and a dragon overhead; they had no reason to be loyal, except to save their own skins for one more day of labor. The mainland had already risen in rebellion, and Chung wasn’t the only one who feared that the same might happen on Taishu.

If it was fear that kept the men obedient, then it was Ping Wen they feared; the emperor himself was too remote. Certainly Chung was afraid of him. He didn’t suppose for a moment that the general would remember either him or Shen, or care a whit if he did remember; and certainly no one, not even he could touch them while they stood in the emperor’s protection; and even so, Chung was afraid. He hadn’t even seen the general today, and he was afraid.

The general’s personal guard ringed the tent, just as the emperor’s did; they interspersed each other, more or less. And didn’t talk. It was why Chung’s comrades stood so unnaturally still, or squatted so watchfully on their heels, hands on hilts; it was why he and Shen talked in such soft murmurs, why Shen was actually so anxious about Chung’s being here at all.

Jiao was playing at bones with the soldiers who worked here, and it felt as though she were tossing chances with an enemy in overwhelming numbers, who might turn on her and all of them at any moment.

The emperor was in discussion with his closest and most trusted general, while their own people kept watch outside. It should be the easiest, the most comfortable embassage for both sides, all friends together; and yet, and yet. It seemed more like negotiations for a truce, when neither side trusted the other for a moment.

Maybe life in the valley was breeding paranoia and a taste for isolation? Certainly Chung wanted to be back there, himself and Shen, all their new-adopted clan and their charge the emperor too.

In the meantime, he was desperate for something to happen, to break the tension, to remind them somehow that they were meant to be better than allies: friends indeed, all one people under one throne.

And then the dragon came, and he could almost believe that he had made that happen, just by wishing it.

SHE CAME OVER the mountains, high and sudden, abruptly there: a discontinuity, a break, a line like a worm in the sky, alive and deepening, stretching.

Diving, coming down.

SHE FLEW without wings, writhing through the air; but he thought the sun darkened as though she did indeed have wings, as though she spread the wings of her will all across the sky.

He reached blindly for Shen and blessedly found him, so that they could lean into each other as they rose to meet this on their feet. They didn’t kneel even to the emperor, unless he asked it of them; they should not cower before a dragon, who had less right to their lives than he did.

Less right but more power, simply to take them if she chose.

Others were not so proud, around them. Even some of the guards were screaming or cowering or scuttling away. As though running from the big red tent could save them. Chung thought that if she wanted to eat everyone here, she would do that, however swiftly or crouchingly they ran.

Nothing they could do down here would prevent her. He and Shen stood, hand in hand, and watched her come.

There was noise all through the camp. The tent doors flung back, and figures came striding out: the general, yes, and the emperor.

The emperor flanked by Mei Feng, by Yu Shan, both of them pressing close: far closer than custom or court manners could allow, but for once no one was watching. They came out, they looked around, they saw how everyone not running stood transfixed and staring upward; they glanced upward; they stood transfixed.

She came swooping low over the hill, and Chung thought she would strike like a sea-eagle above a silver glinting swirl of fish: slam down with taloned feet extended, snatch and seize and thrust into the sky again.

But in that last moment before she must come down, her head lifted and she rose like smoke on a windless day, coiling and twisting in the air. Chung thought she was dancing, but only because he had no other word for it. It seemed utterly personal, inward, a private expression of herself.

He thought perhaps she did it only because she could, after a long age of the other thing, when she could not.

A rough voice cut their silence, as it cut the screams that still tore through the camp: “Quickly, then. Away from the tent,” that big bright attractor that must stand out in a sky-view like the sun reflected in a pond. “And take that off, have you no sense at all?”

And here was Jiao, whose voice it was, hurtling away from her bone-rolling companions, who were either cowering or fleeing, according to their tempers. She came straight to the emperor, ripped the yellow tunic from his shoulders and hurled it back inside the tent.

Left him his trousers, blessedly, but they had been scarlet once; faded and mud-splashed and soaked, they were nothing anymore, nothing to draw even a dragon’s eye.

Presumably.

“There,” she said, her hands spread against imperial skin and pushing, “sit there,” where she’d sat before, where there had been a circle of men before they’d all run away. “Mei Feng, you with him, of course,” because she wouldn’t be anywhere else. “And you,” snapping her fingers, wanting Shen, “or, no, both of you,” Chung too, then, “you’re no good alone. Sit with him, look ordinary. I want more, too: you and you. Make a crowd around him …”

“Jiao,” the emperor said, quite mildly, “she’s a dragon. If she wants me, I think she can probably sniff me out, don’t you?”

“Perhaps,” frowning, dealing with it, “but if she does, it’ll be the jade she smells. Won’t it? Just being emperor doesn’t give you a different perfume from the rest of us.”

Which was probably heresy, because the emperor was of course a god; but they had lived with him in the valley, some had fought with him, seen him sweat and bleed. Mei Feng said he farted …

Right now she said, “We could smear him with ashes, from the fire there?”

“If you like, but I doubt it would help. This isn’t a jungle hunt. But whatever it is, Yu Shan will smell as strong to her, stronger, if it comes to sniffing.” She turned to him, her orders as impersonal as they had been to the emperor: “Go, run. That way, away from here. Get into the trees if you can.”

“I’m going with him.” That was Siew Ren, of course.

Magnificently, Jiao just shrugged. “If you can keep up. So am I.”

There was nothing more to do or say, apparently, except to snap at the general: “Take your own men about you, try to look no different and go that way,” a nod of her head into the camp. “Look like you’re running, like everyone else. In fact, run.”

One last glance up at the still-rising dragon, and she turned to do the same. It was Shen—from where he sat, obediently next to the emperor, where he had pulled Chung down beside him—who called after her, “Jiao …?”

“Yes, what?”

“What do we, um, do? If she, you know. If she comes down?”

She’s a dragon, he was saying, how do we fight a dragon?

Jiao almost smiled for a moment. “No idea,” she said. “Just—oh, do something, yes? Throw stones at her. Something …”

And then she turned and ran light-footed after Yu Shan, who was keeping steady pace with his clan-cousin when he could certainly have outsprinted her if he’d wanted to.

Chung looked at Shen; Shen gulped a little, and turned to the emperor.

“Um, if we have to throw stones, majesty, your arm’s the strongest …”

“Which would only give away who he was,” Mei Feng pointed out. “I think she’d notice, if he was standing down here hurling pebbles at her.”

“If she’s close enough to reach with a pebble,” the emperor said calmly, “I think she’ll be close enough to know who I am anyway. And if I’m who she wants,” he added almost casually, “do you think I’m just going to sit here and try to hide, while she tears everyone else apart looking for me?”

“Yes,” in a fierce whisper from Mei Feng, “yes, you are!” And her small hands wrapped themselves around his arm, as if she could hold him still and quiet by simple determination, because for sure she had no other way to do it.

He just laughed, and shook his head at her; and then down the dragon came, and her grip on his arm was wholly different suddenly, a match for the way Shen leaned two-handed on Chung’s shoulder, as if they were all equally breathless, all caught in that strange space between wonder and terror.

She came down in a slow spiral, and flew similar turning patterns over their heads, over the hill and all the sprawling camp. She quartered the ground like a kite, almost, head poised and staring down; but whatever she was looking for, she seemed not to find it. At least, she didn’t stoop or snatch, she never came to ground.

They sat very still in her shadow, and she passed over them and moved on, drifting where she would in the windless air, lethally intent, except that seemingly her intent was not to strike.

She looked, she quartered, perhaps she charted this new build, this imminent city in the vast dark recesses of her mind. Then her long undulant body flicked, and she left them.

Left them all unharmed, unmarked except by the passing of her shadow. Which might be a mark that lingered, a lingering kind of harm, but it would need time to say so.

For now—well, for now, no one was moving just here, until the emperor slowly opened his clenched fist, and let a sharp stone conspicuously fall from it.

Mei Feng seemed to choke on an outrage of laughter, and hugged herself against his arm, face hidden.

Shen might not have been the first of the bodyguard onto his feet, but it seemed so to Chung: standing and staring after the dragon where she’d gone, and then reaching down an imperative hand for Chung to grip, so that he was hauled up to stand beside him.

There was nowhere else to look. They stared together at the eastern horizon, where a hair-slender shadow still ripped the sky, promising a spill of tumult from some atrocious world beyond the tear. Who knew what dark ocean the stars had to swim in, or what might leak through?

“Her shortest way to the sea,” the emperor said, behind them.

Maybe so, though she didn’t seem to be in any hurry. They stood and watched—and the emperor moved around to stand directly beside Chung, because Mei Feng couldn’t see over any of them, and she grumbled—until none of them claimed to be able to see any distant living speck of her.

SLOWLY, SLOWLY the camp came back to some kind of life around them. Men dragged themselves up out of the mud, out of the ditches where they had groveled in terror, or out of the tents and huts where they had cowered. Those who had run came back, or some of them did.

Those who had been told to run, they came back, and the one who had told them: Jiao came back, with Yu Shan and Siew Ren together. Nothing looked any easier among them.

Presumably the general would be coming back too, with his bodyguard. Chung wished he could think that a good thing.

Somewhere in the camp, a man was shrieking that the dragon was their special protector; she had destroyed the invasion fleet, and was showing herself now to her chosen people.

Chung thought he had never heard anything madder or more stupid.

But that madness at least made them look at one another. Mei Feng said to Jiao, “Has he told you, what was happening in there?”

Jiao glanced at Yu Shan and said, “No.” Of course not, her body said. “He hasn’t told me anything. What?”

“Ping Wen wants to go to war with the rebels. On the mainland. And I think my lord the emperor,” my lord the idiot, she seemed to be saying, “is planning to say yes.”

“Of course I am,” he said, mildly enough, but with that mild implacability of stone that need do nothing, that only has to sit there in the certainty of its decision while lesser forces break themselves against it. She glowered up at him—smaller by any measure, lesser by definition, stormy and unreconciled—and Chung felt a shiver like the first hint of an earthquake, that time when the sea had slipped wrongly out of harbor against its own tide and all the hairs on his arms had stood erect, just before the ground tore itself open all through the city.