Lian waited, her hands pressed together in front of her chest, until the outer doors closed. She released a long breath and turned to us, her expression still remote. “I apologize for such rudeness,” she said. “It was . . . he was . . .” She dismissed whatever she was about to say with a swift sweeping gesture. “Never mind him. Tell me why you’ve come to Phoenix City. I’m quite, quite happy to see you, but it’s so strange.”
Yún glanced at me. I opened my mouth, but my voice died inside my throat. After a long moment of silence, Lian stared from Yún to me, then back. “The message said you had news,” she whispered. “What is it, Kai?”
There was no way except the straight one.
“Your father is ill,” I said. “They believe he is dying.”
12
LIAN STARED AT ME. “MY FATHER? DYING?”
A woman popped into sight from behind a painted screen—another servant dressed in the emperor’s livery. She bowed quickly and vanished through a doorway. I heard the susurrus of voices in another room, the hiss of slippers over bare tile, as those other servants withdrew to some farther set of rooms. The gossiping had started already.
Lian’s expression seemed to close in on itself, as if she was thinking the same thing. “Please,” she said, “come with me. We must talk more.”
She swept through the arched doorway, her robes gleaming like a waterfall of blue and silver. Yún and I glanced at each other, then hurried after her.
Lian took us without pause through a series of exquisite rooms. Watercolors hung from the walls. Fantastical creatures built from wire and priceless gems curled around the lamps overhead. And everywhere, just where you might want to sit, were benches covered in brilliant silks of jade and indigo. It was like walking through a fairy-tale treasure house.
I’d hate it here, I thought. Nowhere to kick off your sandals and get comfortable.
Not exactly nowhere. Lian brought us to a small room, off what looked like her bedchamber. Here were several enormous stuffed chairs, the kind where you could curl up and take a nap. Or sit and read. Or just talk with friends. Oh, and there were books—shelves and shelves stuffed with them. A wide desk occupied one corner, with more books and a few papers scattered over its polished surface. I saw a brush and inkwell, a sheet of paper half-filled with writing. She must have been at work when we arrived, I thought.
Lian paced back and forth between the window and the desk. She swung around, her face no longer blank, but alive with a fierce determination. “Tell me what happened,” she said. “Tell me everything.”
Yún and I glanced at each other. Yún nodded. You first.
Right. The ghost dragon king had appointed me the messenger. With a few stops and starts, I gave Lian the story from the beginning, from the trade negotiations, to her father’s sudden collapse at a banquet, to the rumors of plots and machinations at court. Lian nodded a few times—her father must have told her about the negotiations months before—and frowned when I mentioned the rumors. When I told her how the court wizards and physicians were unable to cure the king, her lips thinned into a sharp line.
“Why did no one send word?” she demanded.
“They claimed they did,” Yún said. “They said you never replied.”
“I received no message. Go on.”
I finished up with my mother’s disappearance and the ghost dragon king’s commands, then Yún took over. She told Lian about our arrival in Phoenix City and how we met Quan. The moment she mentioned his name, Lian’s eyes narrowed. “He is an opportunist,” she said, her voice going low and dangerous. “He used your innocence to pretend you needed him.”
“He was not entirely wrong,” Yún said slowly. “We’ve encountered some odd . . . coincidences.”
She named them: the bandits who weren’t really bandits; the thief in Golden Snowcloud; the strange magical disturbance in Silver Hawk City, on the edge of the Phoenix Empire. “Chen and Qi went off to investigate, and they haven’t come back yet. That’s strange, too.”
“Coincidences,” Lian began.
“Yes, but there have been too many of them,” Yún countered. “Magical and mundane. Kai didn’t say before, but he tried a dozen times or more to call you with his talk-phone. He couldn’t. The network said your number no longer existed.”
“And don’t forget about the magic flux,” I said. “Snow Thunder City had none at all. A boy told us it would come back in the spring, but that makes no sense.”
“It might be connected with the crisis in magic flux shares,” Yún said.
Lian waved her hand abruptly. “The magic flux doesn’t matter. What matters is that I go back to Lóng City at once.”
She clapped her hands. Dozens of servants in the emperor’s livery swarmed into the study. A flurry of complicated commands followed—instructions for collecting belongings, fetching trunks from storage, a summons for scribes and runners, and orders to her own maids to lay out her best and most formal robes—then all the servants streamed off in ten directions.
Lian turned to her desk and pressed a series of buttons. The surface split in two; a very sleek calculor machine rose into the air. She tapped the keys. The vid-screen (made from a strange plastic web) glowed a moment, then its background went dark, except for the image of a man’s pale face in the center.
The man bowed. “Your Highness?”
“I request an interview with His Imperial Majesty. An urgent matter.”