James Swallow - Jade Dragon

Rope 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.”

Rope 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 Rope’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 Rope across bookshelves, blowing fists of confetti from the rare and antique volumes.

“Philistine,” snorted the killer. Rope 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 Rope’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.

Rope 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.

Rope 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 Rope’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. Rope 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!” Rope 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.

Rope 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.