Fox and Phoenix (Lóng City 1)

Once I regained my breath, I scrambled up the wall, using chinks and knobs as handholds, until I reached a narrow ledge. There, I settled onto my perch and braced my feet in two handy niches below. A nest of ants, disturbed by my arrival, swarmed away in all directions. The air smelled of dirt and pine and a rank scent that spoke of mice and beetles and magical creatures.

/> Lóng City spread over the mountainside in steps and tumbles and folds. From here I could see the Golden Market, the Pots-and-Kettles Bazaar, the warehouse district where my old gang liked to meet, and off to one side, its fat towers shining bright and yellow in the late afternoon sun, the king’s palace.

I slid out my phone and stared at it unhappily. How many weeks had it been since I talked with my friends? More than I wanted to admit. Gan worked in his uncle’s stables and attended a special academy for the king’s guards. Jing-mei spent her days flirting or buying expensive clothes and trendy gadgets. Fun, but she and Gan argued all the time, him saying she wasted her money, her saying he’d turned into a big, ugly stick. And Danzu had started up his own gang, but there were strange rumors about what that gang was up to.

What about Lian?

My fingers hovered over the keys. The talk-phone was the princess’s gift to me after our adventure, and she had coded it with her personal number. She didn’t give that number to many. Me, Yún, a handful of others. Ordinary talk-phones needed a land connection, which you could find in any tea or noodle shop; mine was different. Special connectors drew the magic flux into a knot at the talk-phone’s receptor port. More wires and resistors translated the flux into a braided current, strong enough to carry voices to the nearest transmitter tower.

But if Gan was busy, Lian would be ten times busier, arranging for her long journey home. In spite of the baking sun, I shivered. Autumn rains would make travel difficult through the mountains. An early snowstorm would make it dangerous, if not impossible. The Guild Council had to be nervous to send for Lian now.

As I tucked the talk-phone into its pouch, I noticed a dark smudge on my wrist. Ink. And just underneath my sleeve, where I might not notice it right away. A quick survey of my clothes showed presentable trousers above my knees, spatters of ink below. When I wiped at my forehead, my hand came away stained. No wonder those guards had stared.

I muttered some bad words. Can you help me? I asked Chen.

But either Chen couldn’t, or he had stopped listening, because I heard no answer.

Or maybe he thinks he already has helped me.

Inside everyone, the scholars said, there existed a quiet place, where everything was possible. The old wizards, the magic workers who first climbed the mountains to commune with gods, must have known about it. They were able to work miracles. All I wanted was to clean my face and hands. With a whispered apology to those old and holy priests, I closed my eyes and recited the spell from Chen’s scroll.

“. . . from east to west and north to south, we the unworthy call upon the sunbird and dragon to bring purity to these quarters. . . .”

I recited the spell, taking care over the stresses and the pronunciation. As I spoke the last word, the air went taut for one long, silent moment. Then . . .

Magic snapped and crackled over my skin, which felt raw, as though a fire burned too close. The air rippled bright and tense, like the moment before lightning strikes. I drew a breath, tasted the strong scent of incense on the back of my tongue. Only when the smell faded away did I open my eyes. With a leaping pulse, I saw the ink had vanished. My skin and my clothes were clean and soft, shining with a residual brightness, which even now was trickling away.

So. I have worked my first spell by myself.

I felt strange. Like something had dissected me, plucked my feelings outside the shell of my body. For a time, I could think of nothing except this peculiar sensation. Then my thoughts wandered back to Lian and her father the king, and from there to my own father, dead these past ten years. When my thoughts returned to the now and here, I noticed the sun was dipping toward the horizon. Soon it would be twilight, and the watch-demons would swarm from their lairs to patrol the streets.

I clambered down from my perch and loped homeward. Ma mi had locked herself in her private workroom. In the kitchen, I found soup, rice, and tea warming over the grate. Yún had left a note for Ma mi propped upon the counter. She had come and gone, apparently, while I was out.

Kai?

Chen’s gruff whisper sounded inside my skull.

Not now, I answered.

I dumped the soup and rice outside for Old Man Kang’s chickens, then stacked the dishes in our sink and went to bed.

2

THE KING DIDN’T DIE, BUT HE DIDN’T GET BETTER.

After a while, the shops reopened their doors, and the craftspeople and street vendors and other common folk returned to their work. As the old saying goes, it’s the heart that grieves, not the stomach, and without business, we would all starve. But it wasn’t the same as before. Most of the tea shops closed early, the temples held prayers twice daily for the king’s health, and the city bells were wrapped in cloth by their keepers.

Most important, at least to me, my mother had not reopened her tutoring shop.

Unfortunately, that didn’t mean I was free of lessons.

“Students, attend.”

Ma mi stood behind a lectern in the shop’s drafty classroom, just like always, as though nothing had changed. As though she had not wiped tears from her eyes ten days before. Yún and I both dipped our brushes in our ink bottles and waited, ready to take down her words.

“Man is within the chi, the chi is within the man. From heaven and earth down to the myriad creatures below the soil, there is not one thing that does not require chi in order to live.”

Yún bent over her notepaper and wrote swiftly—down stroke, cross stroke, swooping stroke, and dot—small, perfect characters that marched down, then up the page. She had changed a lot since our street-rat days. She wore clothes bought new from Lóng City tailors, not begged from servants in rich houses, and she’d moved from that tiny set of rooms into a real house along with her mother and aunt. But it was more than that. She spent all her free hours reading dusty old books or memorizing lists of herbs and compounds and all the other useless things my mother gave us to learn.