The Equator in Zhulong 2.1

2,457 words.
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Three Poisons: Bird

Abalone was not drunk. At least, he figured he wasn't, seeing as he had woken up that morning with all five of his senses intact. Six, if one included his intuition. Generally, Abalone would not be one to contest the possibility of his being under some sort of influence. Not that it was a habit, but his curiosity ... tended to result in indulgence. At least sometimes. The world was just so very interesting under influence. The leaves on his terrace lianas would change colour. The trains running overhead along the airway express would warp and slither and fall, like many tiny snakes, and Abalone would feel powerful.

But Abalone knew he wasn't drunk today. He wasn't high on anything either. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, bemused. A strange, fiery object was arching above them, leaving a trail of smoke in its wake. It wavered in his vision, at some points looking like a bird, at others reminding him of the hounds his landlord kept chained in the downstairs porch.

'That's not a straw dog, is it?' Abalone elbowed the man next to him, who peered into the sky and grunted.

'Looks more like a fragment of sun come loose, if you ask me.'

'Poetic.' A beat. The trail of fire continued to circle above their heads. 'Mind if I use it?'

Smoke rose from the western edge of the pavilion: several tapestries had caught fire. Abalone could see the burnt heads of the emperor's ornate, wooden screens over the crowd. People scattered and palace guards wove their way through the melee, buckets of sand hanging off the steel rods they balanced on their shoulders. More staff appeared to escort people away from the centre of ... well, whatever it was, although Abalone felt instinctively that Yesim's half-dragon was somehow involved.

The flame bird--dog--streak--suddenly careened toward the ground. The crowd screamed. Abalone flinched, shielding his face with his arms. The Moon Emperor, he thought, half-anxious, half--against his better judgement--excited. If it hits him, we're screwed.

Wouldn't that make for a story.

But by the time he chanced to look up, it was gone, almost as though it had been swallowed by a sudden gust of wind.

After the fire was put out, the chaos settled largely--as did the hats and scarves on the frazzled onlookers' heads. Abalone's assumption proved correct. His sharp, beady eyes followed the Moon Emperor as he descended from his throne, all the way down the palace steps. It was Rén. The half-dragon sat on his haunches, head bowed low, stark in the thicket of it all. Not that Abalone was surprised. He pulled at his velvet collar, feeling even more uncomfortably hot than before. He watched as Rén was led into the palace; the Moon Emperor followed not soon after, his deep purple iris cloak wafting around his ankles in the heat. Medambulators were parked outside the pavilion, their flattish wheels hovering above the stone-paved steps, nurses and doctors running to and fro as they transported the last of the injured away.

The ceremony recommenced, and Abalone sunk deeper in his seat, taking notes every so often as the Symbolists spoke.

But his attention was elsewhere. As Master Puto moved on from the topic of building a Heavenly Tower in Tiangyedan's centre to the idea of conceptual rhythm and symbolic spirituality, Abalone's interest ebbed.

'We can find ourselves within the world,' Master Puto was saying. He shook his sleeves out as he spoke, his short blond hair glinting where it caught the sun. Behind him, the black-robed Symbolists contorted their bodies and formed the character for 'universe', their individual objects balanced precariously on their heads. 'Within every object is a totem for our individual souls.'

The foreigners possess joints in impossible places, Abalone scribbled on his ink pad. Dragonboy possibly receiving a lashing at this present moment.

Looking up, he caught sight of Huā standing at the foot of the stage, her head resting against the wooden banisters, a basket full of bunched bouquets in her arms. Abalone signalled to her. She squinted at him, adjusting her glasses nervously, then plodded closer so they could communicate. Her small, metallic ears poked through her pale hair. Abalone supposed the sun was not making things easy for her vision, although she had admitted that her sight had improved once she had come to the Northern Province.

'Isn't it difficult,' Abalone remembered Yesim had asked once, 'to not be able to see much or hear well either?'

You get used to it, Huā had replied. As long as I can read lips, I'm all right. Although the dialect is strange here. She smiled wryly. But at least I don't have to worry about old-age hearing loss.

Abalone had rarely seen Huā show even the barest hint of worry. Her frigid expression was famous among people in the metropolis--people called her 'blood flower' ironically; they conjectured that someone as translucent as her probably had snow-mottled veins, with not a drop of real blood in her. But her more famous name, the one Abalone had heard people call her by everywhere he went, was Kūwěi.

It wasn't him, Huā signed to him now. I know he can't do that. He is... Abalone could see Huā struggling to process the situation, face contorting strangely underneath her black sun hat as she searched for the right words. He is ... incapable of something like that. Physically.

Physically? Abalone signed back.

Yes. For a dragon, he is absolutely useless. She hesitated. The flower girls will be going into the palace. I will ask them to find out if he is okay.

Can't you follow them inside? Abalone was eager for information, and if he couldn't get it himself, he at least trusted Huā's observational skills enough to get it for him.

Huā paused. Her barely-there eyebrows rose slightly--seafoam eyebrows, her hat rising with them like a ship on troubled water. She rested her basket more comfortably on her hip, lips pressed together tightly as she signalled.

I can try.

~*~

In a small room on the higher levels of the palace, Rén was being poured a cup of tea. He concentrated his gaze on his hands, too queasy to look anywhere else. They stood out especially against the lush, paisley-patterned carpet he sat on: hard and textured and ugly where scale melted into flesh. It was the kind of ugly he had grown used to, the kind of ugly that rose in large patches on his cheeks and arms and legs. On a regular day, Rén would be unbothered by this. But his hands seemed particularly large and clumsy when gloveless, as though someone had stuck cheap gems in badly-formed putty.

His stomach churned. His scales were green today, a colour that was much the same as how his insides felt. It felt as though its contents were being tossed into some kind of salad.

He had never been more confused in his life. A ... dog? on fire? had erupted from the marble he had picked up that day. The dog had turned into a bird, then back, and bully him if he had the slightest idea where it had disappeared to. What had that feathered scroll been, the one the Moon Emperor had been holding? How many people had been hurt? Would the Moon Emperor take his citizenship away over this? He fiddled with his gloves anxiously, debating whether or not it would be impolite to pull them on again.

The room filled with the scent of cinnamon, smoke swirling across the tapestries. It was overwhelming.

The palace maid who had poured him his tea cleared her throat.

'His Imperial Majesty sends the message that he will be with you in a short while, and that he hopes you will'--the maid seemed to struggle to say this, her eyebrows wrestling against one another in a quick battle of unguarded disbelief--'help yourself to some tea. That is all.'

She bowed, hesitated, then added: 'Half-dragon, the palace staff has asked me to deliver to you this warning. In the eyes of the emperor, you may be a child, but in all appearances you are a beast. A beast that threatens all that is pure and noble-minded.' Her eyes flashed. 'High Priest of Fortune calm your fate if you bring harm to our emperor. The necklace on her neck clicked threateningly as she bowed once more. The enamel plate indicating her status as a higher maid swung briefly before Rén's immediate line of vision. 'That is all.'

She nodded stiffly and left, pausing only to lower the dimness of the evening lanterns. The sliding door snapped shut. And there was silence.

Rén blinked, slightly dazed by the encounter. 'Unh...' His temple throbbed.

Outside, he could hear the Moon Emperor and the Caesar, Chang Mul, conversing in low tones. He lifted his head slightly, watching their blurry figures move across the corridor on the other side of the translucent screen. He sighed. Gingerly, he took a sip of tea, grimacing at the cloying taste. He set it down, hands shaking with nervousness.

Pull yourself together. His eyes wandered across the room in search of distraction, narrowing at its opulence: the light-fixtures in their gleaming triangular cupolas; the shelves close to bursting with books, arranged in a complicated pattern not unlike that of tangram puzzles; the polished wooden floors, gaps between them filled with brass; huge ink-and-wash paintings of the Great Partition on silk, faces dissolving amidst the swooshes of colour; a swan-shaped holder for incense, where the palace maid had stood a while ago, re-lighting the sticks ... and more. It was so crammed it was sickening.

What actually caught Rén's attention was the embroidered Mockea card case lying on a glass-enclosed centre-piece, stark in the middle of the tiny room. His eyes widened. It looked old. And valuable. He wondered why the Moon Emperor had not considered it foolish to leave a half-dragon in the same room as something that dangerous.

He smiled briefly, realising--of course, it's because I have nowhere to run. Besides, Mockea was not like rifles or swords. It was not a weapon to be bridled at will. It was a game that was played only on battlefields or in dark alleyways, by warriors and kings, and by those desperate enough to stake their lives on the chance. Foolishness. He stared at it. What sort of cards would the Moon Emperor possess?

Master would know, he thought. I wonder how he is faring back home.

He winced over his own mental choice-of words. His lower lip curled derisively and he wanted to laugh. Even after all he had been through, his mind persisted in calling the pithole he had run away from 'home'.

He shook his head, angry. Neem Garh was where I grew up in. But that does not make it home. There is nowhere that I will attach myself to. Kneadinghis forehead, Rén thought about how much he missed the Water Quail, about rent prices, and whether or not the marble had spit fire as the result of some crazy chemical reaction. It was highly possible, he reasoned, for friction to have set it off. But Rén was no scholar, and he would have to find someone to verify this for him. Stress knotted in his muscles. Perhaps Huā would know...?

The door slid open and the Moon Emperor walked in, only adding to the barrage of anxious thoughts that weighed themselves like an unfortunate set of scales on Rén's shoulders.

He jumped to his feet and bowed as deeply as he could, until his nose tickled the ends of the cords that held his tunic in place. His face burned. 'Your'--his throat felt dry. He cleared it. 'Your Majesty.'

'You may rise, Bàn Rén,' the Moon Emperor said, in a voice that reminded Rén of mint salve. He doesn't sound angry, he thought, gulping. But he probably is.

Rén raised his head, but continued to look down at his shoes as he spoke. 'Your Majesty, I beg your pardon, but that fire--that is to say--I'm certain it was some form of chemical reaction--dysfunction--malfunction, er. Whatever befits it. But--'

The Moon Emperor raised a hand. Rén quietened. 'I did not have you dragged away from the populace to listen to your excuses, child. Whatever damage done today cannot be undone. I will be honest with you. It upsets me.' The Moon Emperor let out an audible exhale. 'Your citizenship is not solely a matter of your honour, but also of mine. Sit down, please. And look up when I speak to you; your face is not so horribly disfigured so as to keep you from meeting eyes with your ruler.'

Rén sat, lifting his chin as the Moon Emperor had ordered. He had never seen the emperor up close before, and the newspaper sketches had never given him much to go by, but it was surprising how ... young the emperor was. Half-circles of rouge were painted under his eyes, eyes which looked tired and worn out, as though an amateur hand had rubbed over the eyelids with sandpaper.

He couldn't have been more than twenty-six, and Rén felt even that was pushing it. He looked smaller, too, clad in just the Imperial twelve-symbol dragon robe, which was similar to the kind that was worn in Mujang--although Abalone had told him the twelve symbols had been changed by the Moon Emperor after Shi Jiāng broke away from the Greater Kingdom. A lot had changed--transformed, fused and melded after the Great Partition three years ago.

A lot, Rén knew, was still changing. The tides were in flux.

And whether he liked it or not, he was part of them, too.

The scarlet-feathered scroll from earlier lay between them. The Moon Emperor's gazed intently at him from over it, and Rén knew that however young he may be, the man in front of him was both powerful and dangerous.

'You look ... younger than I expected,' the Moon Emperor said, finally. 'They told me you were a monster.' He smiled slightly, and his eyes crinkled. 'Although you do need a haircut. I suppose you keep it that way to hide the horns?'

Rén nodded slowly, slightly taken aback by the Moon Emperor's placid tone-of-voice. 'Er, today--' he ventured.

'It was a Fire Dog,' the Moon Emperor said. 'The strangest kind I have seen, and not one that belonged to anyone I know, either. How it attached itself in that form to you I do not know, but it was obviously meant to deliver a message. A message which, as my counsel advised, I took the liberty of perusing before I entered this room.'