What Qing called out seemed to rouse something fiercely protective within the watching, local population.
Shaking themselves as if waking from a daydream, they laid down their shopping bags, their crates of vegetables and salted duck eggs, their half-eaten steamed buns and half-read newspapers, wherever they stood. What the girl had said in perfectly pitched Toisanwa, one of the hardest, tongue-twistiest Chinese languages to ever get your mouth around, was:
Save me!
Help me!
And they did; they rallied to the sound of her voice, streaming towards the front of the minibus where Qing was struggling to block, punch, back-fist, palm-strike, elbow-strike and short-action front kick her way out of a seemingly endless army of men, sending out small shocks of blue light that were visible in the bright sunlight. The arcs of painful energy held off some of her attackers, momentarily, before others joined in the fight to restrain the small girl. It was clear to Harley, watching with his heart in his mouth from the rooftop of the bus, that Qing was tiring. She was at the centre of a seething mass of humanity that was being joined, at the edges, all the time, by local people, battling their way in to reach her.
Blows, hooks and kicks were raining down everywhere, and Harley cried out in warning as Vinegar ducked in while Qing’s arms were being seized from two directions by two different attackers to grab hold of the pearl she wore around her neck. He yanked the pearl away from her body once more, raising it triumphantly above his head, though the thing was burning painfully into his palm exactly as it had before. Immediately, Qing disappeared from view as bodies enveloped her from every direction.
Harley and Schumacher exchanged shocked glances. The air remained as hot and dry as tinder. There wasn’t a single rain cloud in the sky. She’d lost her power. They had her. They’d overwhelmed Qing through sheer numbers, even though more local people were streaming out of shopfronts and houses crying: ‘Ger nui! Bong ger nui!’
The girl, they were telling each other. Save the girl.
Schumacher took one look at the boiling crowd at the front of the bus and lowered Harley down onto the ground on the right, now clear of the Grandmaster’s forces. He jumped down seconds later, bunching his huge fists into Harley’s bomber jacket and dragging him up the road, away from the bus.
Harley looked back over his shoulder, yelling when he saw Grandmaster Pang calmly direct some men waiting by the side of the road to bring a large steel cage forward – like something you’d use to transport an animal to market. Harley could just see the top of Qing’s head as she struggled to rip herself clear of the Grandmaster’s legions, but seemed to make no headway whatsoever. The cage moved closer through the seething crowd.
‘We can’t just leave her!’ Harley screamed as Schumacher pulled Harley after him at a run, up the avenue that Qing had pointed out during Harley’s waking dream.
‘You heard her, Junge,’ Schumacher gasped, cursing his poor level of aerobic fitness as they kept plunging through the fringes of the crowd, away from the bus. ‘She cannot be caged. She cannot be held. We have to trust that she knows what she is doing. She is buying us time, Kind. Now kindly lift your feet.’
Harley did the opposite, digging his heels in so hard he almost fell on his face as Schumacher kept going.
Schumacher turned in frustration, pointing his finger at the locals still surging into the fray. They were trying to pull the outermost of Chiu Chiu Pang’s men back from the girl – the small local girl they were convinced was under attack and on the verge of being kidnapped by outside forces. ‘She is like their daughter. They are a fierce people – you can see this in the way they stand, the way they talk! It is like the perpetual angry shouting, this language! So much spitting! I have never heard the like. She has asked for their help, in their impossible tongue. They will not let her be taken away without a fight, you can be sure of that.’
Schumacher pulled Harley forward again, and Harley’s eyes stung with helpless rage as the bus was soon lost to sight behind them. ‘We can’t just leave!’ he wailed. ‘Dad wouldn’t do it – leave a person down like that – and neither should we!’
‘Your dad is not here now,’ Schumacher growled, and Harley’s eyes stung even more fiercely. ‘And you are in charge, mein Junge. Qing will find a way. She is buying us time,’ he repeated. ‘Open your eyes now – she did not show me, she showed you. Do we, or do we not, take this road, Harley Spark? Focus.’
Harley’s gaze sharpened and he stood straighter at Schumacher’s question. It was true – he was the one who should be leading Schumacher to the mountain, not the other way around. Qing had entrusted him with the route, and Harley started to run in earnest, although running, like climbing, was not something he was naturally good at. He kind of ran like a duck. His friends gave him heaps about it, all the time. But put a ball in his hand? And it was a different story. He could dunk, catch or pitch just about anything.
Swerving out from the gutter running up the right side of the avenue, Harley entered the flow of traffic, Schumacher following doggedly behind him, puffing badly. They registered the astonished faces of locals standing on the sidewalks outside their homes and businesses, or inside the cars that nosed crazily in and out of the flow of foot and vehicular traffic, as Harley and Schumacher did what the locals did – took to the middle of the road without fear of the consequences.
Harley found himself running straight at cars coming straight at him and, miraculously, they moved aside at the last second, like magic, without running into him, Schumacher or anything else. It was like an intricate dance with death as Harley and Schumacher claimed the middle of the avenue, waving their arms and screeching like loons as they ran straight up the thoroughfare – the fastest way to the mountain.
Before too long, they found themselves crossing a busy, multi-laned road that cut across the top of the broad north-west avenue they’d been pelting up.
Screaming, ‘We’re going to diiiiiiie!’ at the top of his lungs – which had the effect of stopping traffic just as he had prayed it would – Harley soon found himself in the narrow residential laneway on the other side of the crossroad, remarkably still in one piece. He was joined by Schumacher, seconds later, panting and cursing in German.
The narrow lane was faced with crumbling houses and apartment blocks. Faces peered down at them from open windows as they continued to jog up the lane, dodging stray drips from air conditioners and laundry drying on bamboo rods overhead, and dirty water thrown from the buckets locals were emptying out their front doors.
Harley counted five blocks before the laneway suddenly gave onto empty land on one side and the high concrete side wall of an old apartment complex on the other.
Then even the wall ran out, and they were moving up a gradual incline through the dark, cooler green of trees, thousands of trees, with a looming telecommunications tower in the distance the only thing visible through the canopy.
It was cooler in the forest, but humid and insect-plagued, and Harley’s bomber jacket was soon sticking to him as he flapped at the air around his face and head to keep the buzzing gnats and other things away. Schumacher took off his ripped floral sundress and big bra in relief and left them hanging in a tree, so that he was soon moving through the shade in his customary head-to-toe black like a long, tall shadow. They avoided the base of the enormous communications tower, keeping to the left of it in the safety of the trees, doggedly trying to reach the water that Harley knew had to be there, somewhere. He’d seen it with his own eyes, hadn’t he?
The air smelled of dirt and tree resin, and through the treetops, the slivers of sky that they could see were a hot, blazing and absolutely cloudless blue. Harley had never wished for a cloud so hard in all his life. If there were no clouds, Qing was really in trouble. He tried to swallow down his sense of panic. She should be here with them.
They walked and walked, it felt like, in ever-rising circles. It seemed to Harley as if they’d passed the same trees multiple times; there was just no way of knowing if they were making any progress. Shoulders slumped at the endless uphill climb, the oppressive heat and the dive-bombing flies, he turned to say something to Schumacher when the man’s hand shot out and gripped him hard by the back of his jacket. ‘There’s a road,’ Schumacher said softly, and Harley turned and saw it in the distance, cutting through the trees ahead.
Without having to say it out loud, Harley and Schumacher started following the edges of the road to the north-east, still keeping to the cover of the trees. The road was deserted, but Harley still felt his skin prickling, as if many eyes were now watching.
Schumacher nudged him, minutes later, and Harley saw it. Water. Opaque, still and dark, just beyond the far edges of the road. Still standing inside the tree line, Harley and Schumacher saw that they were faced with a choice – keep following the north-east road or take one of the other three smaller parallel roads that had suddenly sprung up to the right of the first one. All four roads actually crossed the waters of the reservoir into other parts of the mountain reserve.
‘I don’t like any of them,’ Schumacher rumbled. ‘They are too exposed.’
‘Why are there so many?’ Harley wailed softly. ‘No roads for miles and then – boom – there’s four of them. What’s over there that needs so many roads all of a sudden?’
They paced back and forth within the edges of the tree line, hugging one shore of the reservoir as they considered each of the roads, and it suddenly hit them both at once, what they were looking at, so that they began babbling softly over each other:
‘It’s an island!’
‘There’s an island!’
Harley felt a shock of recognition – the channel of water they were pacing up and down flowed around a dense mass of green that sat in the upper area of a bigger body of water. When Qing had somehow held him up there – high in the sky – Harley’s terrified mind hadn’t been able to put the entire picture together. But they had reached the dragon’s tail, Harley was sure of it. And in the middle of the watery ellipse that sat beside the dragon’s tail was a small island, shaped a bit like an egg that had been tipped on its side.
‘There isn’t another island in the whole lake,’ Harley muttered. ‘She showed me the whole thing – from really high up. And it’s a huge lake. It stretches up to the north-east for kilometres. The magician didn’t put the vase on a peak – maybe because that was too predictable! The vase has to be on that island.’
Schumacher nodded. ‘I am not the expert on qì energy, you understand, but it makes good sense. This island is faced by the southern slope of a sheltering dragon mountain and surrounded by water. When the Magier placed the vase there – there were no roads, no easy way to get across. He would have thought it very well protected when he chose this place.’
‘But not anymore,’ Harley muttered. ‘Maybe someone’s gone and built a road straight over the resting place of the vase! If they’ve done that, well, we’ll never find it.’
His shoulders slumped. To have possibly come all this way for nothing! And then with what had happened to his dad, and now Qing, Harley felt like howling.
Schumacher looked thoughtful as he peered through the trees ahead. ‘We don’t want the first road,’ he mused. ‘It does not touch the island at all, but skirts the west bank of the reservoir. But numbers two, three and four each touch the island in a different place. Which road should we take, Kind?’
Harley narrowed his eyes in thought. The second road – the furthest to the west – touched the very western edge of the island. The third and fourth roads were closer together and more distant from the second road, with the fourth road passing almost straight through the centre of the island.
‘I vote road number four,’ said Harley. ‘It takes us straight through the middle of the island. There’s a whole bunch of untouched forest to the right of that road which looks kind of promising.’
They drifted through the tree line until they were directly facing the narrow fourth road bridge Harley had indicated.
Harley and Schumacher looked at each other and all Harley could hear was his own heartbeat pounding in his ears.
‘Run like you have never run before, Junge, okay?’ Schumacher whispered, and they both tensed as they heard muffled shouts in the forest behind them.
The Grandmaster was coming!
With terror etched in his features, Harley plunged through the trees and across the road bridge, Schumacher close behind him, as shouts rang out through the forest at their back.