I exhale the breath I have been holding forever. “This is it,” I say, but then get a cold shot of the doubtfuls.
This is nuts, that’s what it is.
For a strange, dizzy instant, I feel that undertow again and I wonder if I haven’t gone completely and seriously napoleon. My upper lip is sweating and itching like crazy and my eyes are wonkier than they’ve ever been in my whole life.
“Jade,” I say to my conspicuously silent wife, “what do you see?”
“I...I’m not sure,” she says, and her hushed, uncertain voice puts tears in my eyes.
“Do you see...do you see the clearing and the shabu dong?”
I feel her nod, ‘cause she’s pressing into my back. “Yeah.”
“Do you see the Dream Lodge? And is the whole place glowing?”
There’s a pause, or at least I think there is. Then she says, “Yeah. Yeah...glowing.”
I lick my very dry lips. “This is it, isn’t it?”
“Del, if you say this is it, then this is it. What do we do next?”
The undertow lets up and some confidence flows back. I don’t know if she can see the Lodge or the Technicolor grass — she believes I can see it, and that’s enough.
“The Lodge,” I say and step into the glade.
I expect Something to happen at this auspicious moment. I mean, after all, the magics are here, right? Something really ought to happen. But nothing does; the glade is still waiting for something.
Okay, maybe if I get closer to the Lodge; maybe if I go inside. Maybe then, the Dolores will come out. And Pedro. I want Pedro to be here. I want that so bad I can taste it. I want it so bad, I see someone standing in front of the Lodge. I move faster, Pedro’s name on my lips.
But it’s not Pedro at all.
“Chen!” cries Firescape, and before I can do more than croak, she brings her AK up and fires. Or at least, she tries to fire, but instead of a spray of bullets, there’s just this funny mechanical cackling.
Chen echoes it pretty effectively. “Pathetic,” he says. “Did you honestly think you could kill me? Obviously, you still don’t know me, or you’d understand how futile your puny, mortal weapons are.”
“Damn!” says Firescape with much gusto. She checks the magazine, hits it with the flat of her hand, then gives me this apologetic look.
Me, I’m just glad she can see this jake. More confidence flows.
“You’re Huang-ti,” I tell Chen. “Yellow Emperor and father of China. And Lao-tzu, father of the soul of China.”
He nods his head. “Clever. I was once known by those names. No longer. You have two pieces of the puzzle, and you have used up one of your three guesses. But my name is not Huang-ti or Lao-tzu.”
“Then,” I say, “it’s Huang-Lao.”
I guess I expect him to go up in a puff of smoke or melt into the ground crying, “What a world! What a world!” But he doesn’t do this. He just smiles at me in that irritating Red Dragon way of his and says, “Was that guess number two?”
“Sonofabitch,” says my wife and launches herself in the general direction of Chen’s throat.
He points one of his fingernails at her and says, “Jade,” in a Voice like a little storm.
She stops like she’s just run into an invisible wall. You ever play Red Light-Green Light? Like that. A growl rumbles in her throat. Chen just laughs and beckons with another fingernail and out of the shabu dong come these two ninjas. They grab Firescape, disarm her, and pull her to where she cannot come between me and their Dragon Master.
I try to leap into action. I fumble with the rattle and nearly drop it.
“Del!” Firescape cries. “Get the hell out of here!”
But I can’t get the hell out of here without her, so I face Chen mano y Dragon.
“Let her go,” I command, as if this will actually make something happen.
What it does is make Chen crow like a damn rooster.
“Your soft spot, merlin?” he cackles, then waxes philosophical. “One who wishes to hold real power must not have such...faults. Yes, weaknesses are like that, are they not? As faults underlie this land, so they lie deep in a man’s spirit and make him weak and able to be shaken.”
He makes a chopping motion toward Jade and spits her name like a curse. She cries out and crumples like she’s been gut-punched.
I think of our baby and it’s all I can do not to throw myself at Chen and try to disassemble him, which, of course, is just what he wants. Tears leap to my eyes. For the first time in my life I wish I had spells that could kill. What spells I do have are suddenly locked up tight somewhere in my Scarecrow brain.
Chen smiles. He’s got a hook in me and he knows it.
“You only postpone the inevitable. Come here, Taco Del, and bring me the magics, or your pretty young Jade and your unborn child will die.”
Jade cries out again on cue, and the hook in my soul gives a demon yank. I fight, but Chen is reeling me in, step by step.
“Del.” He says it with much power, curling his fingers, and the hook digs in deeper.
The air around us shimmers and darkens. The colors of the glade drain away and I see dark, huddled shapes that don’t belong here. They come with the smell of incense and the sound of chanting, which is not a sound made by your average forest.
Suddenly, I understand what Chen is trying to do; he is trying to magic us off the Mountain and back to his shrine over the Tin Hau where he will be in complete control and where, no doubt, the headband waits for the other artifacts. The chanting I hear is the voices of monks, dark and smoky, heavy and sweet.
Showered in cold fear, I sweat. I feel my immortal soul being sucked away, pulled off the Mountain. That’s when I remember again how big the magic is. It’s as big as the Mountain, and the Mountain is under my feet. I inhale evergreen and think Tree. I root my thoughts in the rocky soil of the Mountain and I dig down.
“Come, Del,” says Chen again, pulling up on me, trying to shake me loose. He sounds a little ticked, like this is taking longer than he’d like. “Del!” he commands again and the glade loses some more of its color.
No! I think. I gotta be better than this! I gotta have more than this!
I dig deeper; my thoughts are roots; my roots are firm. They go down forever into the soil and rock. The wind sways me, but I barely bend and I don’t break. I am the Mother of All Trees and my roots go down to the heart of the Mountain.
For a moment — just a moment, ni dong — I think I hear it. The Voice of the Mountain. Calling me down. My thoughts are roots.
And then I hear this other voice, this sweet, angel voice that says, “Del” in a way that has always turned my insides warm and runny, and I remember that I also got Jade. She speaks to me again.
“Del!” she says sweetly. “Del! Snap out of it!”
Something smacks me upside the head. Hard. It’s Chen, and now he’s got both hands wrapped around the rattle. I try to hold on, but my head is a mish-mosh of incense and evergreen and pain. There are shouts and the sound of footfalls coming hard behind me. Someone grabs me from behind, yanks me half backward, then reaches into my coat and drags the pipe out of my belt.
I fall, and when I fall, I let go of the rattle and Chen lets go of my soul. My roots come up out of the Mountain and what’s left of the Tin Hau rips away from around me like wet silk and disappears into the shabu dong of the mountainside.
Chen stands over me, holding the rattle high, but he is not gloating, as I expect. He is glaring at it, as if it has just called him a very bad name, and he is swearing loudly in Chinese.
Someone grabs my shoulders and drags me up.
“Up!” Hoot shouts into my face. “Go!”
But where can I go without the rattle? I give the glade a frantic glance and see Creepy Lou, of all people, standing in front of the Dream Lodge grinning at me. He waves the pipe over his head. Then he turns and disappears into the Lodge. Just like that.
I boggle, ‘cause in the back of my mind all this time was the idea that the Lodge wasn’t, you know, real.
Chen is boggled, too. “How has he disappeared?” he demands. “Where has he gone?”
He has the rattle tight in his claws and is shaking it like nobody’s business.
I gotta guess he wants to get that magic going right this minute. I also gotta guess he can’t get it going — not without the vest, which I am still wearing, and the pipe, which has just disappeared into a place he can’t see. I do the thing that makes the most sense under these circumstances. I dash for the Lodge and dive in.
This Dream Lodge is different in some way I don’t get right away. I am wrapped in mist and dark. So far so good. I smell the Ohlone incense of smoke, pine, and sweat. A fire crackles and paints the mist with its colors. But this is no itty-bitty upside-down bowl I’m in here. This place is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside — really big, like I got the whole Mountain wrapped around me.
I move toward the fire, a warm, bright, hazy spot in the big dark. There is someone waiting for me there. No surprises this time; it’s Lou.
“Yowza!” he says, his face all crawly with firelight. “This is pretty cool, huh? Is this where the Whithpers come from?”
“Yeah,” I say, and I wonder where the Whisperers are now. “You got the pipe?”
He hands it to me and it tingles my hand to touch it. The vest answers with a tingle of its own. A ghost-thread reaches out to join the two magics together. The mist around us eddies and the Mountain sighs, or the Lodge does, or Something in the Lodge does.
Okay, I think, something’s doing here, after all.
I pray I have blundered fortuitously. I’ve got two pieces of the magic in here and Chen has the third piece out there. In order for him to get what he wants, he’s gotta come in here, and in order for me to get what I want — which is for the magics to be united in the right spot — he’s gotta come in here and I gotta get the rattle away from him.
For once, I seem to have a pretty clear agenda. I say all this to Lou.
“Problem is,” I add, “I don’t think he can even see this place. You should’ve seen the look on his face when you popped in here."
“But you thaw it and I thaw it,” Lou observes.
“Maybe ‘cause the Dolores wanted us to.”
Lou shrugs. “Then maybe they can make him thee it too.”
Sounds good to me. I address the Whisperers accordingly. “Pedro and company, I’m not sure, but I think it might be a good thing if the appropriate persons can see the Lodge so that the rattle might somehow make its way inside. My preference would be for Hoot and Firescape to get the rattle away from Chen and bring it in here, but if having Chen bring it in is most do-able, that’d be fine, too.”
The mist is eddying again, looking most Spielbergian. I pray, bite my lip, and tuck the pipe back into my belt. I have barely finished this little task when Chen appears like one of those little, winky fake candles. Flash-pop!
He doesn’t waste any time, but comes right at us, his lips doing mumbo-jumbo at light speed and his fingernails making julienne out of the mist. I tuck in shoulder-to-shoulder with Lou, which puts the spirit-fire between us and Chen, and spread Chouyan incantations all over the place. The mist thickens toward shabu status.
I am Chouyaning, hoping to confuse Chen, when the Dragon speaks my name. I feel the hook sink into my soul and send shivers down my spine. He says it again, and again. My bones go cold to the marrow and my feet shuffle underneath me.
Before I can think Tree, Lou’s arms are all of a sudden wrapped around my shoulders.
“Del!” he says. “Del!”
I am boggled anew, ‘cause my good buddy Lou does not just say my Name of names, he says it with power. This is not the same as just speaking a name, you know. You gotta know how to speak it, and Lou apparently knows how, ‘cause Chen’s hook slips a little.
The next thing I know, I’m in the middle of a tug-o-war. They pull my name back and forth, while I bob around like a channel buoy, trying to think tree-like thoughts. The shabu gets thicker and I see, clearer and clearer every moment, the little ghost threads of magic that bind the three relics together.
I see something else, too. I see that Chen, for all he is big and terrifying in his Dragon robes and priestly hat and with magic dripping off his fingertips, is having a problem with the rattle. It keeps shaking in his hand, which is going every-which-way — up, down, around. At first, I think Chen is doing the shaking, but when he keeps throwing it these weird looks, I realize something else is going on and Chen is being distracted by it.
Finally, with this wheezy roar of rage, he stops waving his fingernails at me and grabs hold of an amulet he’s wearing around his neck. It’s one of those Egyptian things — an ankh — and it glows jade green through his fingers. He spouts a long stream of Chinese mixed with some language I don’t get and next, I’m looking out at the world from inside a dense, dark, velvety fog.
I can’t see Lou anymore; I can’t hear him chanting my name. Instead, I hear the voices of the Tin Hau monks and smell their sweet incense. The air shimmers and the ground under me feels suddenly not so grounded. In the freezy marrow of my bones, I know that if I lose the Mountain, I lose everything.
I try to send down roots again. It takes all the will power I got, but I manage to tear my eyes from Chen’s glowing amulet put them on the threads of magic between the artifacts — on how they seem to get brighter and fatter the closer Chen gets to me.
But Chen is strong. He makes me want to look at him; at the glowing amulet.
I gotta not do that. My eyes on the threads, I reach for my own amulet bag. But there’s no Doug sprig in it any more and my hand closes on a flat, hard lump of stone.
The Mountain moves under my feet.
I raise my head and look the Dragon straight in the eye.
“Shen!” I cry. “Your Name of names is Shen!”
His face is red with fire and surprise. He gasps, staggers, roars my name aloud.
I roar back; so does Lou, and so do two other voices from somewhere in the dark around us. A moment later there are two solid figures — Hoot and Firescape — moving toward us through the mist. They are chanting Shen’s name.
I don’t know if they’re a power or just an annoyance, but the strange dark fog scrams. The shabu dong that lives in the Lodge swirls and dances. The swirls pull into spirals and thicken into columns and a sighing breeze licks at my face and at the fire, which leaps up to tango with the mist. I hear Whispers now — many Voices that are one Voice.
Shen, they say, Shen.
I think even the Mountain says it.
The Red Dragon falters, stumbles, and drops the rattle. It hits the ground with a shower of sound and rolls to my feet. I snatch it up, expecting all hell to break loose, but nothing happens except that the connecting threads glow brighter. Strange thing is, one of them still connects to Shen.
I get this at the same time I get that he’s not finished with me yet. Leering like he knows a whole lot I don’t, he tears the amulet from his neck, casts it into the fire at my feet and shrieks a Chinese incantation at the top of his lungs. Then he hurls himself at me.
In two heartbeats, we are in a bubble inside a bubble inside the Mountain. The fire is between us, but everyone else is outside the bubble looking in. I can see the Dolores (sort of) and Firescape and Hoot and Lou. Their lips move, but no sound comes in here.
We are alone, Shen and I, and we know each other’s names.
But I got the magics, I tell myself. I got the relics. Why isn’t he outta here?
As if I’ve said this aloud, Shen smiles at me and raises his hand, shaking back the long sleeve of his robe. The shaman’s headband is wrapped around it. A bright ribbon of magic connects us. The air inside the bubble tingles.
”You make a habit of underestimating me, young merlin,” he tells me. “You may have stolen the power of my name for the time being, but you will not defeat me. Your magic is so... transparent. You thought you could hide in this place from me because it was, itself, hidden in the coils of Time. Yet I pried it from its secret place into plain view.”
I wonder if this is an auspicious moment to tell Shen I actually asked the Dolores to let him see the Lodge, but before I can impart this info, he goes on. He doesn’t just want to win, ni dong. He wants to rub it in.
“This place I have brought you to,” he informs me, “is outside of time. It is a place into which neither your mortal friends nor your spirits can reach. I have constructed it carefully, so that we might have our final...conversation.”
He lets out this weird little sound that’s half wheeze and half laugh. “This body of mine is failing. It is time for me to move on. True, I will have immortality when I have done here, but who would want to face eternity in this?” He taps a golden fingernail to his breast. “Better to have a young, virile, healthy body. One pleasing to the fairer sex. One like yours.”
Whoa. What’s he chewin' on here — body snatching?
He cackles at me again. “You think I can’t do it? Hmm? You think I can’t acquire your body, if I wish? However do you think I’ve lived this long? In my second incarnation, as Lao-Tzu, I discovered the secret of transferring my Self to other forms without having to trust myself to the forces of death and rebirth. Only my body disappeared into the mountains — my real existence continued, after a fashion. I have lived a myriad lives — I have been Khan and king, emperor and storyteller, philosopher and astronomer. I took whatever form lent me the most power. It was immortality of a sort, and very handy, I suppose you might say. It saved much time in the way of having to relearn the basic capacities of thought, speech, action. It saved the toil of having to learn who I had been and ferret out what I had known. I’m sure you appreciate how much time could be wasted in such activity, not to mention childhood. Much better to let someone else waste the time.”
“Then,” I ask, suddenly curious, “how did you get here?”
His mouth goes all twisty. “A miscalculation. This body belonged to a scholar whose force in the community I overestimated.”
“Yeah, okay, but why bother with this other stuff? Aren’t you basically immortal now?”
“I have not beaten Death, merlin. I have merely cheated it, tricked it, outrun it. I would spend eternity in one body, holding all of the knowledge I have acquired, keeping all of the skill, without ever having to relearn any of it. You see, even with the ability to transfer my Self, I still must invest much time in making each new body uniquely mine, and in getting the mind of its owner to acquiesce. Then too, sometimes I am not in a position to choose propitiously. I have to take what the gods place in my path. I do not take kindly to being at the mercy of the gods. This time, the choice is mine.
“You should be honored, Taco Del, merlin, that you will become the vehicle for my complete victory over Death. Your knowledge of the arcane will be added to my own and yours shall be the form that is known as the Sovereign Lord of a united Gam Saan. You will be pleased to know that my first actions after toppling Hismajesty and his inane counterparts will be to drive the alien invaders from my Empire and to construct a Great Wall that will forever deny them access.”
My Alice bone tickles. “I can see how jakes like Lord E might wrinkle your universe, but what’ve you got against Hismajesty?”
“I have against him that he and his forebears have weakened my people. We are buried in the Gee Gah, our virility sapped, our power depleted, our ancient Tongs demoted to mere community service groups. We should be rulers of the Gam Saan, not its scurrying servants.”
He is silent for a moment, already decorating the Imperial Palace, I bet, and I wonder how much of this stuff is for real.
“Bullshit,” I say — I mean, what’ve I got to lose, right? “You don’t fool me. You’re the one who’s been demoted, Shen, and you don’t like it much. You don’t like it so much, you’ve gone shining, napoleon, and seriously fruit-cake.”
“Del!” he snarls.
“Shen!” I cough.
He waves a foot-long hand in my face. “Enough of this nonsense. Playing for time will do you no good. You will never possess as much of that commodity as I do. And let me squash any hope you have that your friends will fight me. They won’t, because they’ll see you emerge from this noplace victorious. While the being they knew as Master Chen will be seemingly annihilated. But, once again, I shall be the victor. I, Shen Ah Nen, shall be the only true Immortal. I shall have conquered Death utterly. So you see, you may as well give up. Give me the relics, Taco Del. Surrender, and perhaps I shall leave a part of you alive, give you a corner from which you can watch your world through my new, young eyes.” He gives up this big, sigh and adds, “It has been a long time since I have held in my arms a woman as beautiful and courageous as your Jade.”
Well that just does it, you know? I mean, my eyes have glazed over by now and anything else he might’ve said would’ve just gone in one ear and out the other, but that — I mean, the thought of this creepy old Dragon getting his claws on Jade — even if they’re my claws materially speaking — is just too much.
In a heartbeat, I am beyond mad. Through this wave of high and righteous dudgeon, I see that the threads of magic between the artifacts have become fat, bright, virtual ropes of magic. This gives my Alice bone a sharp poke, and I hold up the rattle and say, “Say, Shen, what do you see?”
He looks annoyed, but says, “I see an ancient spirit rattle, which I want.” He opens his hand and smiles as if he really expects me to just give it up.
“That’s all? Look again. Don’t you see it glowing, Shen?”
He chuckles. “No, I don’t. And don’t imagine that you can make me see something that isn’t there. You are no match for me, merlin. Cease these futile games. Surrender.”
He moves closer to the fire, and spirit flames leap toward his face. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“Um, watch out for the fire.”
“There is no fire, merlin. Come. Your time is up.”
Okay, that clears that up. I gaze at the fire for a moment, then I step into the flames. These are spirit flames, ni dong, so they don’t burn me, but they do amazing things to my eyesight. I see Shen as the Red Dragon he is, jaws wide and hungry, eyes bright and hot, with a black, rotten peach pit for a heart.
Whoa. Don’t go there, Taco, I tell myself. I focus instead on the blazing cords that bind the magics — on the ghost flames that now leap over my head.
With a cackle of satisfaction, the Red Dragon steps into the fire he cannot see and grabs the rattle with the same hand/claw that is wrapped in Paguin’s headband.
His dragon mouth opens wide on a shriek like a gale force wind, but it’s lost in the sound of heaven and earth splitting wide open. We are hit with a shock of light and heat and wind and the Mountain twists and opens up under our feet. And then Shen is just gone, like he got sucked right out of his dragon scales down into hell. His out-of-time bubble collapses.
Prodigious.
I am still standing in the fire, but I am fully back in the Dream Lodge among family and friends, with a whole lot of fully-formed Dolores looking on. Pedro is there, and there are two other guys next to him. One looks a lot like Pedro, only younger, and the other I know without asking, is Paguin.
The spirit shaman steps into the fire with me.
“Honored,” I say, and mean it.
The shaman raises his hands, palms up, and I know it’s time for me to give back his stuff. I tuck the rattle into my belt, take off my coat, my shirt and the vest that is underneath them. I fold the vest ceremonially and lay it across Paguin’s hands. Then I lay the pipe and rattle on top of that and, last, I fetch the headband, which is lying across the toe of my boot.
Then I wait.
Paguin looks at the things, smiles and bows his head to me. Then, it’s like he just dissolves down into the fire. Well, the artifacts got burned after all, which means I did obey Pedro’s wishes, after a fashion.
I turn to Pedro. “Is that it? Did we do it? Did we save the world from Wiwe?”
He nods gravely. “The world is safe from Wiwe. Your magic is as big as the Mountain and your wisdom is the wisdom of the Mountain, for you listened to the Mountain, where once, I did not.” The corner of his mouth seems to twitch. “But, you did not listen when I told you to burn the magics.”
“I listened,” I say. “I just...improvised a little.” There’s something I just gotta ask. “Shen said that he was gonna take my body and...and pretend to be me. How do I know that hasn’t happened?”
Pedro laughs. Really laughs. “Only you, Taco Del, shaman, would ask such a question, and so, answer it. Shen is now in our world; he is no longer in yours. Go now. You have done well.”
“You found your son?” I ask quickly, in case he means to suck himself back from whence he came.
He nods and tilts his head toward the younger version of himself. “I have found my son. He is in my world, as your son will soon be in yours.”
There is a vast, silent Moment and then Pedro and the Dolores and the Dream Lodge and the fire are all sucked away by the cosmic Vacuum of Time and the rest of us, me and Firescape and Hoot and Lou, are left standing in a foggy clearing on the side of the sacred Mountain.
There’s no sign of Master Chen’s ninjas. There’s no sign anything but trees and rocks and grass. Birds chant instead of monks or spirits.
The Sun chooses this cosmic Moment to slip through the clouds and turn everything to emeralds and diamonds and gold.
“Wow,” says Creepy Lou.
“Amen,” says Hoot.
Firescape just runs into my arms and cuts off my air for a minute or two. After that, Hoot comes and slaps me on the back, and then we are all hugging and laughing and back-slapping.
When we turn to go back down the Mountain, my foot nudges something on the ground. It clinks. I pick it up. It is an ankh on a silken thong, one the late Master was wearing around his neck not that long ago.
“What is it?” asks Firescape, peering over my shoulder.
“A souvenir,” I tell her. I pocket it, and we go back the way we came.