I
n the dining room, Emma,
John said into my head mid-afternoon.
Gold and John were waiting there for me. Gold was in his usual human form: early twenties, slender and jolly, with cute dimples and a kind smile under his shock of golden brown hair. Architectural blueprints covered the table.
Gold wore a smart tan suit, but both John and I were dressed in our usual at-home clothes. John had on a pair of scruffy black cotton pants with a shredded hole in one knee, topped by a fraying faded black T-shirt. His long hair had already come out of its tie. I wore a pair of plain jeans and a shirt, and my hair was a mess as well.
‘Where’s Jade?’ I said.
‘She’ll be along later, to do the costing,’ John said. ‘Right now she’s trying to find someone to reset the seals on the apartment. They are completely blown, anybody can come straight in.’
‘What about demons?’ I said.
‘After the Attack there aren’t that many left, but we will have to be vigilant,’ John said. ‘Make sure the front door is locked at all times.’
‘Okay.’ I looked down at the blueprints. ‘Are these the Mountain?’
‘Yes.’ Gold spread them out. ‘Each page covers about half a hectare.’
‘Western measures?’
‘We took an architectural firm from New York to the Mountain,’ Gold said.
‘You took architects from New York to the Celestial Plane? What did they say when they found out they were going to Heaven?’
‘They thought they were in China,’ John said. ‘They were very impressed. Some of them went back to Hubei Province later, and were thoroughly confused. The Earthly Wudangshan is nothing like this one is. Was,’ he corrected himself, wincing.
The blueprints were a mass of yellow highlighter. ‘Is the highlighter the damage?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Gold said. ‘Areas completely destroyed have a cross through them with highlighter. Partial damage is just marked.’
I checked the sheets. There were about twenty pages of detailed plans, with a single master plan showing the whole Mountain. The buildings clung to the hillside below the seven peaks, surrounded by a wall. Yellow highlighter splashed all over the plans: about two-thirds of the buildings had a cross through them, and every other building seemed to be marked. It was obvious where the demons had broken through the wall—it was covered with highlighter; with more yellow where they had cut a swathe through the buildings.
‘Holy shit,’ I said softly. ‘This is really bad.’
‘Emma!’ John said sternly. ‘Really!’
‘What?’ Then I understood and grinned. ‘Leo said you’d dismiss me if you heard me using language like that.’
‘He wasn’t wrong,’ John said. ‘Most unfitting.’
‘Deal with it.’ I flipped through the blueprints. ‘So what’s first?’
‘We need to get the school up and running,’ Gold said. ‘Right now there is no training taking place. We have lost an extensive number of both Disciples and Masters. There are insufficient Disciples to defend the Mountain if the demons attack again.’
‘It will be a while before they try me again,’ John said. ‘Every demon in Hell was called to the Attack.’
Gold looked at John, wide-eyed. ‘Every one?’
‘Every single one.’
‘No,’ I said, and they both looked at me. ‘We had four down here as well. A house demon, a Shape Shifter, a Snake Mother, and Simon Wong. Those four are the ones that blew the seals on this apartment.’
‘You faced a
Mother
?’ Gold said with awe.
‘Leo took it down,’ I said. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with it.’
‘You looked a Mother in the face and didn’t run?’ Gold said.
‘Run? I was protecting Simone. Of course I didn’t run.’ I grinned. ‘Ugly, aren’t they?’
Gold shook his head. ‘Remarkable.’
I glanced down at the blueprints. ‘We’ll need a list of the remaining students, a list of the remaining Masters and their areas of expertise, and what we have left in the way of training spaces. Then we can match them up and see how we go.’
They were silent, so I looked up. They both stared at me, speechless.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Is that wrong? Do they train differently on the Mountain to how we do here?’
John grinned. ‘I’ll go out and leave you to it.’
‘Don’t you dare! You know your students and Masters better than anyone.’ I jabbed my finger at him. ‘You stay right here!’
Gold’s boyish face lit up and I rounded on him. ‘What?’
He raised his hands. ‘I don’t have those lists, ma’am, the link between here and there is down. I’ll have to return to the Mountain, log into the network and copy them onto a CD.’
‘You have a LAN there? Wait, you have a
link
between here and there? Between Earth and Heaven? How does that work?’
‘Rather complex use of Celestial Harmony. Did it myself. I put in the Mountain LAN after I was assigned to the Dark Lord, that’s a standard network. Had nothing before I arrived,’ he said, looking pointedly at John, who ignored him, ‘but most of the hardware was damaged in the Attack. I had an off-site backup in the Western Palace, so the systems are already up and running, but the link between here and there is down, so I’ll need to go myself and take a copy of the lists.’
‘Go then,’ I said. ‘And bring back a hard copy as well, if it’s not too big.’
‘My Lord?’
John didn’t look up from the blueprints. ‘Orders from the Lady Emma are to be treated as orders from me.’ Then he glanced sharply at Gold. ‘Make this clear. To all.’
Gold bowed slightly. ‘My Lord. My Lady.’ He disappeared.
‘Sorry, John, I don’t mean to tread on your toes,’ I said. ‘Let me know if I cross the line.’
He looked at me, expressionless, then his eyes wrinkled up. ‘I think you’re drawing a new one.’
While we waited for Gold to return, John flipped through the plans. ‘Only about a third of the buildings are useful, and none of them are training or residential.’ His voice softened with pain. ‘Hall of the Purple Sky, East Hall, West Hall, Dragon Tiger Hall, all gone. Some
of those buildings were more than a thousand years old.’
‘We’ll rebuild it, John. It will be better than it ever was.’
He dropped into a seat at the table. ‘I don’t know what to do. It will take years to rebuild the training pavilions, and the dorms have been demolished. The White Tiger has been a true friend in looking after the Disciples.’
‘How long can they stay at the Western Palace?’
‘As long as they need to, he says. He doesn’t mind at all—the Disciples are providing a useful exchange of skills with his Horsemen.’ He sighed and tied his hair back. ‘The training pavilions are gone, and there isn’t any open space suitable for training Disciples because of the steepness. Only the most indestructible Celestial Weapons made it; all of the other weapons are gone. And my Disciples have nowhere to live. The Mountain is effectively out of action and nobody will be learning the true Arts for many, many years.’
‘Can the Masters teach at the Western Palace?’
‘Not with the Tiger’s women around. The Disciples are confined to barracks.’
‘I see.’ I sat next to him, and pulled the plans closer. ‘Monica!’
Monica poked her head in the door. ‘Ma’am?’
‘Tea,
tikuanyin,
and three cups, please.’
‘Ma’am.’ She pulled her head back into the kitchen.
‘You’re a mind reader,’ John said.
‘Will she ever call me Emma again?’
‘Nope.’
‘John.’ I turned to him. ‘Should I tell her about the situation? That I can’t marry you until you come back because you’re a Shen?’
‘Monica has made it very clear that she doesn’t want to know anything,’ John said without looking
up from the plans. ‘When Michelle hired her she tried to explain that we weren’t a normal household, and Monica said, “Don’t tell me, ma’am, I don’t want to know. Just tell me what to do.” She’s terrified of the strange things that happen, but she loved Michelle, and she loves Simone, so she stays and puts up with us.’
‘We have to protect her then, and make sure that nothing scares her.’
‘That’s what Michelle said.’
‘How long were you and Michelle married, John?’ He hesitated, expressionless.
I turned away and shuffled the plans. ‘Sorry, don’t bother.’
‘We were about to celebrate our fourth anniversary when it happened,’ he said, wistful. ‘Simone was only two.’
‘Oh my God, you were hardly married any time at all!’ I lowered my voice. ‘Does Simone remember much?’
‘I don’t know. She won’t talk about it.’
Gold reappeared with a stack of printouts. ‘My Lord. My Lady.’
John rose and pushed the blueprints aside. ‘Okay, let’s see what we have here.’
I stood up and riffled through the lists. ‘Hey, many of these names aren’t Chinese.’
‘Of course not,’ John said. ‘I take the best, it doesn’t matter where they’re from.’
A good proportion of the names were Chinese, but there were some recognisably Anglo-Saxon ones, plus Japanese, Korean, and even African names. It was a complete cross-section. I scanned the Anglo names: many of them were women.
‘Did you have separate dorms on the Mountain?’ I said.
‘For the different nationalities? No, of course not,’ John said, and then, ‘Oh, for men and women, of course. Except for those who are married or bonded to each other.’ He saw my face. ‘No, I’m not slow. I’m just cold-blooded, like you said.’
‘Get out of my head.’
‘I’m not in it,’ he shot back. He turned over the lists. ‘Let’s see the Masters.’
This list was much shorter. There were only about fifteen names.
‘So few, John?’
‘They gave their lives for the students, Emma. Even the human Masters. They were killed by the demons.’ He put his hand on the list. ‘These are the Immortal Masters that have returned. And a small group of mortal Masters who were too old or frail to take part in the battle.’
‘How many students died?’ I said.
He sighed with pain. ‘Almost half. Nearly three hundred.’
I flopped to sit. ‘Holy shit. Masters?’
‘Nearly all of them. About fifty.’
‘How many of the Masters were human?’
He sat next to me. ‘Of the ones that were killed? About three-quarters, love.’
‘How will you tell their families?’ I whispered. ‘Three hundred and fifty people.’
He put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Do their families know where they were?’
John was silent.
‘No, my Lady,’ Gold said. ‘Most of their families thought they were learning martial arts on Earthly Wudangshan. This is the greatest loss that the Mountain has seen in centuries. Even the Celestial Ones have become involved in dealing with this issue. A decision is yet to be made, but the consensus is that the
Celestial will erase the existence of the students from the Earthly.’
‘They’ll never have existed at all?’ I said.
‘It’s the kindest way, Emma,’ John said into his hands.
I was horrified. ‘How often do you Celestials interfere with us like this?’ I said. ‘You just make people
not exist?’
‘This will be the first time in history, my Lady,’ Gold said with remorse. ‘There has never been a need for it in the past.’
John dropped his hands, but didn’t look up. ‘There is some argument that the Mountain should not recruit humans if they are in danger from attack like this.’
‘If there are no Disciples learning, then the Celestial loses its defence against the demon horde,’ Gold said. ‘It won’t happen, my Lord. All of Heaven needs your Disciples, they are the best.’
‘But they
died
,’ John moaned.
Gold sat and rested his elbows on the table. ‘I carried out your orders, my Lord. I went to the Western Palace and gathered the remaining Disciples. I told them that you felt they were in danger and that they should return home. I ordered them home.’
‘Good.’
‘I know what they did, John. Not a single one went.’ I gestured towards Gold. ‘I bet they threatened to kill themselves if they were forced to return home.’
John glanced at Gold.
Gold smiled slightly.
John leaned back and put his palms on the table. ‘Not a single one?’
‘Not a single one, my Lord. They would rather die than discontinue the training. They love the Arts more than their lives.’
‘And that’s why they’re on the Mountain,’ I said. ‘Face it. You’re stuck with them.’
John sighed with feeling.
I turned back to the lists. ‘Let’s look at the Masters.’ Most of the names had either an ‘I’ or an ‘S’ next to them. Many more of these were Chinese, but there were still some names from other nationalities there. ‘I?’ I said.
‘Immortals,’ Gold said. ‘“S” is for Shen.’ ‘What’s the difference?’
‘I thought you did some research,’ John said without looking up from the list.
‘Cut it out, old man,’ I said. ‘What’s the difference between an Immortal and a Shen?’
Gold snorted with amusement.
‘Answer the goddamn question,’ I growled.
‘For our purposes, nothing; we just refer to them as the Celestial Masters,’ John said. ‘Immortals are humans who have gained the
Tao.
We Shen have always been immortal; we are more like spirits than people. Most of the mortal human Masters on the Mountain didn’t make it. There were some tremendous acts of valour witnessed that day.’ He glanced up. ‘Gold.’
‘My Lord?’
‘Are the records being made?’ Gold nodded. ‘My Lord.’
‘Some of them attained the
Tao
and were Raised. It was a sight to see. But it will take them slightly longer to return.’
I flipped through the list again. ‘The Energy Master is a European woman?’
‘Meredith was a missionary’s daughter,’ John said. ‘She lived in Hubei Province about three hundred years ago. She was incredibly talented at
tai chi,
so I took her to the Celestial Mountain to teach her. She is one of the most talented human energy workers I have ever seen. She married one of the Immortal Masters, Master Liu, and they’ve been happy together for hundreds of years.’
‘I’d really like to meet her.’
‘You already have. She was at the ceremony where everybody swore allegiance. I didn’t introduce you; you seemed slightly overwhelmed to have gods bowing down before you and swearing allegiance and obedience.’