The Race for the Red Dragon Read online

  ‘Tai Mo Shan,’ Mr Hong Kong replied equally softly, as if he, too, was afraid of disturbing the wounded creature in the glass. ‘The tallest mountain in Hong Kong, and our coldest and wettest place – where cloud tea grows wild and you can still feel the warm breath of the dragon that was said to have once lived there, rising from cracks in the ground.’

  ‘But what about…?’ Harley interrupted.

  ‘The Wudang Mountains?’ the old man queried sharply as Harley nodded. ‘Not yet. She is near death. She told my, ah, cook – Ah Po – as much when Ah Po placed her inside that glass for safety. There is something at Tai Mo Shan, the dragon told her – under the hill we know as Kwun Yam Shan – that may restore her. Or not. We do not have much time.’

  Chapter 7

  ‘Why did you fill the glass with, uh, water?’ Harley asked as the limo left Sheung Wan at speed and entered a long multi-lane bridge that appeared to be crossing the open water of Victoria Harbour towards another island to the north-east. ‘Won’t she, um … drown?’

  ‘It is their element,’ Mr Hong Kong answered, as he stared at the tiny azure dragon floating limply within the tumbler in Harley’s hands, ‘and their power – as well as the source of their power.’

  ‘I thought their element was fire,’ Harley replied, confused. ‘Aren’t they supposed to be evil, kill dwarves for treasure, and breathe fire?’

  ‘Maybe in your world,’ the old man grimaced, leaning back stiffly in his leather seat, clearly bruised from their encounter with the henchmen. ‘But in ours? They are revered deities of rain and rivers, lakes and seas – they have the power to make clouds on earth, cause storms, typhoons, tornados and floods when angered, grow as vast as the sky or as small as a seed; this we believe.’

  Mr Hong Kong pointed out the window at some apartment buildings they were passing and Harley looked up in astonishment at the sight of towering skyscrapers with huge rectangular holes built right through the middle of them. On purpose.

  ‘We call them dragon gates,’ the old man explained tiredly, closing his eyes behind his heavy spectacles, ‘built deliberately to enable the dragons that live in the mountains and underground rivers to fly down to the sea, spreading their good energy – their qì – to us, their people. Even after all these centuries, that is what we still call ourselves, you know – the people of the dragon. You harm one of these creatures at great peril.’

  Harley sat back gingerly, trying to keep the glass tumbler in his hands as still as possible as the car began to climb, the roadway growing steeper and less populated as they continued to drive northward. A quick glance at his watch indicated they’d been travelling for almost an hour. He gave a start and sat bolt upright.

  ‘Mr Hong Kong!’’ he exclaimed, and the old man’s eyes shot open in astonishment – both at what the boy was calling him (Mr Hong Kong?) and the desperate tone of his voice. ‘Look at the pearl! It’s, it’s … dissolving!’

  It was true. The tiny pearl – like one of those fancy pearls Harley’s mum might wear on a going-out necklace – was shredding before their eyes. They watched in horror as it completely dissolved in the water. The dragon herself – Harley’s mind could not bring itself to connect the girl, Qing, with this tiny, floppy creature in the glass – was beginning to grow mistier, second by second. Soon, she might be gone entirely.

  Mr Hong Kong pressed the intercom button by his seat and barked, ‘Ricotta! Fai di!’

  The limo roared into high gear – zooming at crazy speeds with its high beams on up the increasingly steep mountain road. Harley gasped as the limo spun around a hairpin bend and they broke onto a high plateau surrounded by drifting white cloud. The whole of Hong Kong – and all its lights, skyscrapers, shopping centres, traffic and people – had utterly vanished beneath it. In the bright high beams of the limo, all that seemed visible from up here were the peaks of distant hills and mountains, rising out of that shifting, unknowable sea of cloud.

  The limo stopped abruptly and the water in the glass sloshed forward, almost tipping the limp creature inside across Mr Hong Kong’s impeccable grey trousers. Harley only realised he was holding his breath when he began to see purple dancing spots before his eyes.

  ‘I can’t go any further with you,’ Mr Hong Kong said faintly and apologetically. ‘I’m feeling quite … unsteady. I’ve given Ricotta strict instructions to lead you to Kwun Yam Shan on foot. You may have to leave the hiking trail to find what you seek. Watch where you walk – the ground is treacherous. It likes to behave as if it were … alive.’

  Ricotta opened one of the passenger doors for Harley. He was holding a powerful torch, the beam of which he swept around the leather interior of the limo.

  Mr Hong Kong blinked, and his eyes seemed to go misty behind his spectacles. ‘You have brought me great wonder today, young Harley Spark, though I have lived a long and eventful life and seen many things. I will tell your father that the favour … still stands. It has not been extinguished. It is the least I owe you, for what I have witnessed today.’

  The old man patted the sleeve of Harley’s red and black tartan bomber jacket. ‘Take good care of Qing Long,’ he murmured, leaning back against his headrest and closing his eyes. ‘I have a feeling that all our fortunes may depend on her.’

  Harley nodded, but the old man seemed to have fallen into a troubled sleep.

  Harley climbed carefully out of the car, gripping the glass tightly between his two hands. Closing the door behind him, Ricotta led Harley away from the limo, sweeping his torch beam in broad arcs across the uneven ground. They left what appeared to be the official walking trail and waded into the damp undergrowth. The ends of sharp branches caught on Harley’s arms and legs, jabbing him painfully in the back or the middle when he least expected it. Ricotta was muttering to himself darkly; the big man kept his distance from Harley and the glass he held out before him, but Harley was kind of glad he didn’t have to talk. It was freezing and getting mistier the further they went. He had no sense where he was, and kept stumbling into little cracks in the ground that he couldn’t see, scrambling to keep the water in the glass from sloshing out.

  As they neared the hill known as Kwun Yam Shan, Ricotta’s pace slowed to a creep, dread etching his thick features. The ground beneath their feet was now entirely covered by an eerie fog. It was impossible to see their shoes.

  ‘Hey!’ Harley exclaimed as he stumbled out of another treacherous dip in the wild terrain, ‘the air around here is warm!’

  It was true. Every few metres or so, the air felt distinctly warmer against the damp legs of his jeans. Almost as if the ground were breathing out!

  Standing about twenty metres away, Ricotta didn’t reply. Harley wondered why the big man’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut beneath his peaked chauffeur’s cap and why he appeared to be saying a prayer that had the same four sounds in it, ‘Lóng de qìxí! Lóng de qìxí!’

  By now, even Harley knew that lóng meant dragon, and his skin prickled all over in warning. He hurried to get closer to Ricotta, who seemed reluctant to go any further, and was now looking around fearfully.

  ‘Is this it?’ Harley exclaimed. ‘Kwun Yam Shan? Are we here? What happens now? What am I supposed to do with this?’

  He raised the glass in his hands. Stepping out of the darkness into the edge of Ricotta’s trembling torch beam, Harley—

  Fell into a huge crack in the ground.

  He yelled as he went down, his right leg plunging into a deep crevice in the earth. The contents of the glass he was holding pitched into the air as he fell forward, his left hand the only thing keeping him from smashing face-first into the ground.

  At Harley’s yell, Ricotta turned, failed to see Harley anywhere behind him and emitted his own terrified shriek, which came to a strangled stop when a muffled sound – like the long brassy clang of a single bronze temple bell – seemed to rise up through the soil in answer.

  As the sound died away, the surface of the ground appeared to ripple, almost as if it we
re made of cloth. Harley felt the tremor move up through the soil that held his leg fast, and into the surrounding earth.

  The instant Ricotta felt the ground shift beneath his feet, he bolted back the way they’d come, still bellowing, taking the torch with him and leaving Harley in absolute darkness.

  Harley was so winded by his fall he couldn’t even croak out the words Help me! Everything hurt. It felt like his right leg was stuck in a bear trap.

  It seemed like hours before Harley managed to pull himself up by his fingernails, out of the crack in the ground, groaning in pain as the branches of small shrubs, and the rocky soil, scraped at his grazed hands and knees. After he managed to extricate his bleeding right leg – the right knee of his jeans was torn clean through – Harley lay on his belly for a moment, panting.

  He flipped over onto his back to look up at the cold and distant stars, and remembered – the dragon!

  Harley leapt onto his hands and knees, feeling around for the dropped glass. He hadn’t heard it shatter – which was great – but he couldn’t feel it anywhere on the ground either – which was bad. He crawled around gingerly in ever-widening circles, afraid of squashing anything in his path, unable to see through the fog blanketing the ground.

  The tumbler, and its precious cargo, might have been swallowed up by the earth. They simply weren’t there.

  Harley paused in his search, feeling sweaty, damp, cold and deeply afraid, all at the same time. The tiny glow of his digital watch said it was 2:14 am.

  It was too late. Qing could be anywhere. She could be dead.

  Exhausted and miserable, Harley finally lay back on the ground, a slow tear trickling down his cheek into the soil.

  It was hopeless. He was all alone. This time for real. And he just might have killed her.

  Chapter 8

  As Harley slumbered the slumber of the exhausted on the unforgiving flanks of the mountain known as Tai Mo Shan, he imagined he was warm. Really, uncomfortably warm.

  He frowned in his sleep. The ground no longer felt spiky and hard and rocky against his cheek. It felt soft and bunchy, like a rucked-up blanket. He imagined that he was being pitched and rolled around, as if he were lying on a particularly wobbly jumping castle. And there were distant muffled voices – one deep and booming, the other lighter, but familiar and resonant – conversing together. The deeper one had sounded sleepy at first, then shocked, then incredibly joyful. The other one had sounded faint and strained, but grew gradually stronger as the talking continued into the early hours of the morning.

  Little by little, the air grew hotter until it began to feel unbearably hot – and the ground shifted again, this time sharply, as if a rug had been pulled out from under Harley’s body. As Harley opened his eyes, he had the sensation that he was rolling, then falling. He opened them fully to find that he was falling and gathering speed all the time. The crack in the ground that Harley had stuck his right leg into mere hours before had widened, becoming a yawning, snaking chasm across the entire summit of the hill.

  Harley watched himself falling away from the early morning light breaking over Kwun Yam Shan, which was when he finally realised, with a sizzle of fear, that he wasn’t dreaming. A terrified yell burst out of him then, scattering wild birds, wheeling and cawing, into the sky far above.

  Hands outstretched, Harley continued to fall through a fissure in the earth, unaccountably deep and wide and superheated, that hadn’t been there before. ‘AAAAAHHHHHH—’

  Whump.

  Every last molecule of oxygen was expelled from his lungs as he hit something warm and hard, but also smooth and slightly yielding. He started yelling again as he slipped down a treacherous, glassy expanse like a slide, only to be lifted lazily up towards one wall of the chasm, before being dropped down again, hitting the same warm, solid, but slightly bouncy surface. Harley slid sideways, still howling, and fell off the strange platform onto another platform further below. As he was raised up again, a burst of gusty, booming laughter rang out. Seemingly coming from the centre of the earth itself, it ricocheted off the walls of the great ravine, making Harley’s ears ring.

  As he continued to be lifted, slowly but inexorably, back up towards the surface of Kwun Yam Shan, the weak dawn sunlight flared off a stretch of bronze-coloured scales – each one the size of a cartwheel – right by Harley’s head.

  Harley’s insides twisted as he realised what he was sliding around on: the shifting coils of a colossal bronze-coloured dragon, far larger in size and scale than the azure dragon he’d seen in the alleyway. So big, Harley couldn’t see where the dragon ended or began. The way you try to keep a hacky sack up in the air with just your feet, the dragon was flipping Harley from coil to coil to stop him from falling straight down to the bottom of the chasm in the earth.

  For a moment, a gigantic coil overhead blocked out the light before tightening around Harley painfully as he was deposited, gasping, onto the newly scarred surface of Kwun Yam Shan. He surveyed the top of the hill in amazement – it now appeared cracked open, like a broken egg.

  Getting to his feet unsteadily, he almost fell over again trying to avoid the jet of boiling hot steam laced with sulphur that suddenly shot out of the massive chasm before him. His arm over his face to protect himself from the flume of gaseous vapour, Harley didn’t catch the titanic, snake-like shape leap swiftly from its place of long slumber. It seemed to ride unseen waves in the air, undulating away to the north at tremendous speed, before being lost to sight.

  The crevice belched forth another acrid jet of superheated air. Gagging and reeling back from the fumes, Harley stuck his face inside his bomber jacket and fled back down the hill that had seemed so impossible to climb in the dark.

  He pulled up abruptly as he reached the bottom of Kwun Yam Shan. Like the weirdest mirage you could possibly imagine, Mr Hong Kong’s elderly cook was standing there, in the middle of the wilderness, her hands clasped patiently together in front of her. Warily, Harley walked all the way around her at a safe distance just to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. She was dressed in the same plain, long-sleeved Chinese-style dress she’d been wearing the day before, her snow-white hair still scraped back into a severe bun. The only things that were missing today were her gravy-stained apron and smoke-stained wok. Her smiling eyes followed Harley as he completed his recon.

  ‘Hello, Harley.’ The old woman warmly extended one gnarled hand to be shaken.

  Without warning, Qing peeked out from behind the elderly cook, wearing her usual floor-length historical clobber, looking completely unruffled and wrinkle-free.

  Harley knew she hadn’t been there a moment ago. The shock of seeing her made him sit abruptly on the ground, his head in his hands, convinced now that he really was hallucinating.

  ‘You,’ he muttered, flapping one hand in the direction of Qing’s embroidered black slippers. ‘I’m pretty sure I killed you. And you, lady—’ He glared at the sensible tan court shoes of the old cook. ‘I’m pretty sure we left you, and your wok of death, back in the kitchen at Mr Hong Kong’s …’

  ‘Mr Hong Kong?’ The woman let forth a peal of delighted laughter. ‘Is that what you call him? How extraordinary.’

  Harley shielded his eyes and looked up at them both with a deeply pained expression. ‘He answered when I dialled Hong Kong on the special phone my dad gave me. I didn’t know what else to call him because he never said who he was …’ His voice trailed away. Harley couldn’t keep his unspoken fear for his dad from his tone.

  The old woman’s wrinkly, smiley, apple-shaped cheeks dropped immediately, her expression turning serious. ‘Where is your father now?’

  Harley’s gaze dropped to his feet and his shoulders lifted in a small shrug. He blinked hard, struggling not to cry.

  ‘What did the old man promise you?’ the cook said softly.

  ‘He said the favour still stands,’ Harley replied, squinting upwards. ‘Whatever that means.’

  To his confusion, she replied, ‘And we will honour th
at promise, never fear.’

  She extended a small, crooked hand to Harley and yanked him to his feet. Her grip was surprisingly strong, although her fingers were bent out of shape with age and use.

  Still holding Harley’s hand, which didn’t feel weird but strangely comforting, the old cook turned and addressed Qing as if she were resuming a conversation that had been interrupted. ‘And what did the fúcánglóng tell you?’

  Harley could hear the wonder underlying the old woman’s words. ‘The what?’ he exclaimed, looking from one to the other.

  Qing turned her azure-rimmed black eyes on Harley briefly. ‘Dragon of volcanoes and hidden places,’ she replied, then returned her attention to the old woman. ‘He said there was another vase. The old magician who imprisoned me and my sisters—’

  ‘Tiān Àn Jìn?’ the old woman queried sharply. ‘The imperial magus of the Diamond King of Heaven known as Mo Li Qing? The very same?’

  Qing nodded. ‘When I awakened the ancient one, he told me that the magician intended to disperse the vases across the four corners of China, but that he only made it as far as the Taishan mountain range of the Southern Yue people before all sightings of him ceased.’

  ‘There was another vase?’ the old cook repeated, trying to quell the eagerness in her voice.

  Qing’s eyes seemed to glow gold for a moment. ‘The fúcánglóng said the painted dragon upon it was rumoured to be vermilion in colour.’

  At the bewildered look on Harley’s dirt-streaked face, Qing added dryly, ‘Red. It was red.’

  ‘Oh.’ Harley’s face cleared.

  ‘The legendary Zhu Long vase!’ the old cook breathed. ‘It is a day of wonders, indeed. So you find yourself in an interesting predicament, lóng tǐ,’ she added sternly, addressing Qing with the same honorific Mr Hong Kong had used. ‘Go directly to the Wudang Mountains, scene of the last stand between your father’s and your uncle’s forces, or hunt down the vase bearing the image of the vermilion dragon – over two thousand years after it was last seen.’