‘Tell him to go around Taishan city,’ Ray urged as they entered a maze of pink and white apartment buildings – only seven or eight storeys tall – built at odd angles to each other, with laundry hanging up to dry on wooden rods in almost every open window. There were abrupt junctions and enormous roundabouts everywhere, and the roads were suddenly choked with trucks, vans, hatchbacks and motorbikes changing lanes without warning. Harley stared at the crooked alleyways they passed by, adorned with a profusion of directional arrows and handpainted advertising signs.
Qing shook her head. ‘It’s too late. The driver said there was a turn-off towards a village called Shihuacun, earlier, that would have allowed us to approach our destination the long way, from the east. But we’re entering Taicheng – what you call “Taishan city” in English – right now, and the city is directly south of the place the old magician was last seen – at the southernmost point of Shihua Shuiku.’
Shihua Shuiku? Harley looked to his dad for an explanation.
Ray looked up from searching his own special phone, a twin of the one in Harley’s inside jacket pocket. ‘Shihua Shuiku – otherwise known as Stone Flower Reservoir – which, in the magician’s time, was probably once a vast natural lake. The reservoir has a mountain called Shihuashan – Stone Flower Mountain – directly beside it.’ He and Harley exchanged glances.
Water – tick.
Mountain – tick.
Harley’s skin tingled, as if he could feel their proximity to serious magic.
‘Here be dragons,’ Ray murmured, almost to himself, shaking his head in wonder.
‘Well, possibly one,’ Harley corrected. ‘One dragon. Stuck in a small vase. That we have to locate on an entire peak.’
‘If it is there,’ Qing said quietly, ‘we will find it.’
‘That’s the spirit.’ Ray plugged more questions into his phone with flying fingers. But his expression was worried.
‘So, Freunde, the upshot?’ Schumacher said, jamming his wig of golden plaits back on his head gloomily and stuffing his own hair under it as their bus entered the busy multi-lane main road bisecting Taicheng. ‘Is that we are committed.’
Harley shivered. It meant there was no turning back. He wondered who – or what – was waiting for them as he scanned the boxy-looking shopfronts they were passing.
‘O-kay – so we’re a happy family of three (dad, mum, kid, just nosy tourists), checking out the local nightlife-foodie-shopping scene in Taishan city.’ Ray looked around at the others for confirmation of their cover story.
‘Dad,’ Harley replied, staring at the images of the place on Ray’s special phone. ‘What nightlife? The only thing you may be able to do after ten at night around here is eat an eel hotpot, maybe two eel hotpots if you’re really hungry. Plus, you would never, ever come here for shopping – this website says so right here.’ He jerked his head at the seat beside him. ‘Um, and aren’t we a family of four? Except that Qing doesn’t look like you or me, and she for sure doesn’t look like Mama Schumacher over there.’
Mama Schumacher’s mouth turned down at the corners.
‘What about her?’ Harley insisted.
‘What about her?’ Ray said, just as Mrs Hong Kong had done only hours before, and Harley got the usual chill he did when he glanced in the direction of the seat Qing had just been sitting in, which was now empty.
There was a sting of tiny claws across Harley’s neck then, and in his ear the smallest hiss, which may or may not have been the Mini-Dragon-Qing equivalent of laughter.
The bus ground to a halt on the main drag as a wave of pedestrians simply entered the flow of moving cars, trucks and motorcycles all around the minibus, ignoring the traffic light signals the same way the vehicles were. Some people were holding crates of fresh vegetables or carting whole bags of rice, and they were clearly not stopping for anyone until they reached the other side of the road.
‘I don’t like this,’ Ray muttered as the minibus inched forward then stopped again to avoid hitting people and their belongings. The sun beat down on the van, and the air inside started to heat up as they lurched forward and stopped again.
Ray looked down at his special phone. ‘According to my map, we’re trying to reach an area just south of Stone Flower Reservoir between Taicheng and an area called Chengbeicun. It’s so frustratingly close to where we are now that we could probably run there faster! One moment, this map says you’re standing in civilisation next to an ATM machine, and the next you’ll find yourself in dense woodland, moving uphill. If you ignore the roads they’ve put into the parts of the forest that are immediately around the reservoir, and the rather enormous telecommunications tower in the distance to the south-east, it could actually be two thousand years ago – Warring States era China – in there. It’s all just trees and rising terrain. Qing will feel right at home, I’m thinking.’
‘So we get to the reservoir und what next?’ Schumacher said plaintively, his fat golden plaits casting weird shadows over Ray’s telephone screen. ‘There are acres of the trees.’
‘And it’s not much of a “mountain”,’ Harley added doubtfully. ‘Wouldn’t an all-powerful magician have chosen a massive, unclimbable peak to hide something so valuable as the vase on? You can walk all over this one without too much trouble. It’s not exactly Mount Everest, Dad.’
‘Actually, it looks like a sleeping dragon,’ Ray mused thoughtfully, his finger tracing the ridge of the mountain beside the reservoir on his screen, which did look like the long, relaxed spine of a sleeping creature. ‘See? It’s got its head pointed to the north-east, and there’s its tail to the south. There must be a reason why the magician chose this place. Plus, he was probably in a hurry. Or he was hoping that whoever was coming after him would think exactly the same way you did, Harls – that the magician would leave the vases scattered across high majestic mountaintops, and not on low rural ranges, in obscure locations – and then go looking in all the wrong places.’
‘How will we know where the vase is?’ Harley muttered, his dejected tone echoing Schumacher’s. It seemed impossible – even worse than a needle in a haystack. At least you could find a needle with a magnet. If the vase had been buried somewhere in the ground on a mountainside, over two thousand years ago, they were doomed.
It was uncanny how Qing’s voice chose that moment to whisper in all their heads, as if she had spoken aloud.
You will know.
Danger.
And Harley felt the small weight of her slither down off his shoulders as angry hands began banging on the door to the still-stationary minibus.
Harley, Ray and Schumacher stared at each other, electrified, as the minibus began to rock from side to side, pushed by many hands. Looking out the right-hand window, Harley saw a crowd of men dressed in normal street clothes, shoving at the bus in unison. Had the driver run over something, or someone? Was that why this was happening?
But then one of the men pushing at the doors of the bus looked up, and Harley swore he recognised the triumphant eyes of Chiu Chiu Pang’s chief henchman, Vinegar – last seen, masked and in total black, in the alleyway behind Mrs Hong Kong’s shop. Today, he appeared to be in disguise and was wearing a golfer’s outfit, complete with tartan knickerbockers in a loud yellow and green check, topped off with a bright-pink polo shirt and natty white sun visor. Harley knew he was right as soon as the man caught sight of Ray through the windows and gave a hoarse shout of recognition, pointing Ray Spark out to his legion of bellowing followers. The bus began to rock harder as someone started to smash at the bus doors with a retractable steel baton that they’d helpfully hidden up a shirt sleeve. Car horns began to sound all around them in a cacophony of frustration. It was deliberately orchestrated chaos, and the bus was at the centre of it. Grandmaster Pang was going to have them all abducted straight off a busy main road in rural China! Did his audacity know no bounds?
The driver shot them all an apologetic look from where he was huddled at the front of the bus, suddenly sliding open the large window by the driver’s seat and hooking his hands above the open frame. Swinging himself up and out smoothly, the driver slithered through the open window so quickly that he was soon lost to the crowd of people milling around the bus before Ray could even let out a shout. Just like Happy before him, their getaway driver had very sensibly got away at the first sign of trouble – leaving Harley, his dad and Schumacher clean behind.
‘Dad!’ Harley yelled as the bashing against the sides of the bus increased. He almost lost his footing and grabbed onto a seat back for support. Now someone was taking an iron crowbar to the door, and the man must have sold some unlikely story to the Taicheng locals gathered around the minibus, because eager hands began helping to prise apart the bus doors. A face appeared in the open driver’s side window and, at that, Ray seemed to snap out of the shocked stupor he was in.
‘The windows!’ Ray shouted at Schumacher and Harley. ‘We have to get up and out, too, before they all work their way inside! We’re like sitting ducks in here.’
‘Like the Sardinen in the tin can!’ Schumacher agreed, flapping his big hands frantically at them as he moved towards the front of the bus, away from Harley and his dad. ‘Go!’
Harley watched in frozen horror as a man climbed in through the open driver’s side window, dressed in a stained apron. What set him apart from most cooks, however, was that he appeared, under his apron, to be almost seven feet tall, hairless, shirtless and composed entirely of solid, gleaming muscle. He was also rotating the meat cleaver he was holding in each hand, in exotic, expert ways that had nothing to do with slicing fillet steak and everything to do with dicing up sworn enemies of Grandmaster Pang.
‘Twenty million for you,’ he crowed, levelling a shining cleaver at Ray’s face down the bus. ‘And five million for you,’ he added, sneering at Harley. His gaze upon Schumacher was dismissive. ‘You and your hideous wig are worthless,’ he spat. ‘Get out of the way, sidekick of Spark, or get hurt.’
‘Sidekick of Spark?!’ Schumacher sputtered, his plaits quivering in outrage.
The cleaver guy was abruptly shoved forward by another eager acolyte of Grandmaster Pang’s, who shot feet first through the open driver’s window dressed like a policeman in a dark uniform, peaked cap and white gloves. But something was off about his disguise, too, and it took Harley a few seconds to work out what it was: the man was wearing yellow and black high-top sneakers on his feet. Despite their efforts to blend in to the local population, and even after dropping their all-black warrior outfits, Chiu Chiu Pang’s men still stood out like a brace of sore thumbs.
Schumacher’s eyes narrowed dangerously. ‘You heard your dad, Kind,’ he addressed Harley over his shoulder as he placed his horrible ankle-length dress and imposing frame squarely in front of Ray and his son, facing the cleaver guy, the pretend policeman and the ravening crowd tearing at the rapidly separating bus doors. ‘It’s time for the Sidekick of Spark to knock some heads together. Windows! Now! Schnell!’ he snarled, reaching into his lumpy bosom for something concealed there.
Ray tore at the clasp holding the rear left-side window closed and succeeded in pushing it open. ‘Up!’ he roared at his son.
‘U-up?’ Harley stuttered. ‘Dad, my last school report said I have outstanding ball skills. It said nothing about outstanding climbing skills because I don’t have any!’
Ray picked Harley up by the collar of his tartan bomber jacket and shoved him towards the open window. ‘Be careful,’ he said, his voice hoarse with emotion, and it was clear to Harley what his dad was really trying to say.
I love you, son, and your mum is going to kill me if we manage to get out of this alive.
This was as life and death as it would probably ever get, Harley knew.
He hooked his hands up over the open window rim, but his palms were so slick with sweat and terror that he couldn’t get a strong enough grip to pull himself up and out. ‘Dad!’ he shrieked as Schumacher started throwing empty rollmop jars at the advancing henchmen, more and more of whom were cramming in through the open driver’s window. Schumacher faced a whole group of strangely dressed men with uniformly shaven heads, pushing down the aisle towards him.
With a terrible shriek of rending steel, the bus doors gave way, midway down the aisle, and more weirdly dressed men started flooding up the stairs as well. Mere metres separated Schumacher from their pursuers – the only thing keeping them back being the empty glass jars that had once held pickled herrings coming straight at their faces. Ray could tell by the whites of Schumacher’s eyes, and by his quickly deflating bosom, that he was fast coming to the end of his stash of recyclables. (Being proudly German and environmentally conscious, Schumacher had insisted on carting the empty jars around in his underwear until he could find an appropriate waste recycling outlet for them – he had not once imagined that the scones of Grandmaster Pang’s men would soon serve as target practice for the sturdy containers.)
‘Tempus fugit!’ Schumacher reminded Ray and Harley loudly over his shoulder, fancy Latin for Time flies, guys. Get a move on!
Ray saw Harley still struggling at the window and gave him such a vicious boost up and out that Harley almost fell off the bus before he could scramble up, safely, onto the roof.
‘Whoah!’ he yelled, still clinging to the roof on his hands and knees, as men caught sight of him up there and started pushing at the bus from the right again, in earnest, really trying to dislodge him into the waiting arms of the men milling around below on the other side. It was like trying to surf a particularly dangerous and unpredictable wave, or stay on the back of a bucking bronco. There were no roof racks and nothing to hold on to up there. Within seconds, Ray joined Harley up top, also dropping down to his hands and knees in an attempt to stay on the wildly shaking bus.
Ray scanned the roadway around them and could see no way to safely drop down into the small, open-trayed truck stopped just metres away, its driver staring up at the Sparks, open-mouthed. Nor could he see any way to jump down either side of the bus without being immediately grabbed by dozens of pairs of eager hands. They were trapped. Locals standing on either side of the road looked on in astonishment, pointing and calling out to the Sparks in the local language, Toisanwa, which Harley and Ray had no way of understanding.
It was dizzyingly hot under the noonday sun, and the metal of the roof was burning Harley’s hands and his grazed right knee through the rip in his jeans. The bus gave a sudden, massive heave and, for a heart-stopping moment, Harley felt himself tipping over, then sliding. On his way down, he collected his dad with his legs, who fell heavily onto his side, eyes wild and fingers clawing.
The bus fell back onto all four tyres with a lurch, but it was too late to stop Ray’s slide.
‘Dad!’ Harley screamed, as Ray disappeared over the left edge of the bus with a howl, plunging into a triumphant sea of grabbing hands and roaring voices.