The Relic of the Blue Dragon Read online

  ‘Right,’ Delia said in the tone of deep and customary disappointment she reserved for her former husband. ‘Who’s for pancakes then?’

  She stalked away from the table and crouched to rummage through the pots and pans drawer below the kitchen counter for the frying pan. Harley stared at Qing and Qing stared at Harley as if they were in Mexico and this was a stand-off.

  No one expected the little silver phone to give a sharp double ping, least of all Delia, who jumped so high that she clipped her head on the edge of the counter and fell backwards onto the floor at Harley’s feet with the frying pan in her hands.

  Shivering violently as if it were cold, the little phone kept double-pinging until Harley stuck his thumb back into the centre of the screen and they all read what was on it.

  Call me now. Your mum’s right. It COULD be life and death. For me.

  Ray’s first words were, ‘I know a bloke.’

  He didn’t even say Hello, Harls; that was how serious it was.

  ‘I sent the pic to two fellas I know, Harley, and this one bloke comes back to me not even a sparrow’s fart later and says, Bring me the piece in question and any other pieces you’ve got. So I say, My boy’s got the piece in question, and he says, Has he told anyone else about it? And I say, Noooo (forgetting to tell him about the other bloke because I can’t get a word in edgeways and, anyway, they hate each other’s guts), and he says, Good, it’s worth a bleeding fortune if it’s legit, because it’s part of one of the rarest pieces in the Pan-Asiatic antiquities market. Everybody who’s anybody is after this potter’s work. Even. Rarer. Than. Hen’s. Teeth. GET YOUR BOY TO TROT IT IN QUICK SMART, he shouts. And bang, the phone goes dead.’

  There was the forlorn, muffled honking sound of a sea bird in the background. ‘Where are you exactly, Dad?’ Harley exclaimed, impressed, despite himself, at the abilities and excellent sound quality of the little silver phone.

  And Ray said hastily, ‘On a parapet in Budapest – well, technically in Buda, not Pest – at a little, uh … travel expo some blokes have organised here.’

  Delia – whose cheek was squished up against Harley’s to hear better – mouthed: A likely story.

  ‘Tell your mum (I know she’s listening) that …’

  Harley went cold with horror at the thought that his dad was about to say something Harley couldn’t ever un-hear, like, Tell your mum I love her and have always loved her.

  He glanced sideways at his mum and saw that her eyes had gone all shiny and her face had gone red the way it always did when she thought about Ray Spark and the things that might have been.

  All the way over in Budapest, Ray cleared his throat. ‘Tell your mother,’ he said, his voice suddenly furtive and low as if he had company, ‘seeing as how it’s life and death for me, being in the, ah, business that I’m in, to drive you to ANTEDILUVIAN HOUSE. Got that? Antediluvian House. Right this minute. To see that bloke. He knows his stuff. Garstang J. Runyon runs an antiquities, uh …’ there was that moment of hesitation again, ‘… valuations and restoration business. It’s the southern hemisphere’s epicentre of Pan-Asiatic antiquities knowledge. No one knows more about broken bits of Chinese pottery than that bloke. He was salivating to see it. He kept saying, The seal! The seal! And I don’t think he meant saltwater-dwelling mammals. You want to help your old man, don’t you, Harley? Doing this safe, simple, tiny thing for me will unlock a thousand favours.’

  The lone sea bird honked again, this time so close to Ray’s mouthpiece that Harley could have sworn he was on the phone to an albatross rather than his dad. ‘Gotta go, Harls,’ Ray murmured hastily. ‘The travel expo is hotting up.’ Then the line went dead.

  There was a loud clatter – the sound a pine dining chair makes as it falls backwards onto a slate-tiled floor. Delia and Harley looked away from the phone, startled, as Qing rose to her feet. Her eyes were going black again – the dark centres edging out the ring of bright blue – and the room was already turning arctic as Delia reached across the table without hesitation. Now was not the time.

  She latched grimly onto Qing’s narrow shoulders – though the static shocks were awful and continuous, like sticking her fingers into a power point – and shook the girl gently. ‘No flying off in broad daylight, love – not unless you want to be taken out by a weather reporter or a police chopper. If, I decide to indulge Ray and his “simple favour”,’ Delia snorted, ‘we’d take the car. I’d find this Antediluvian House much faster than you can because a nice lady lives inside my car’s satnav who can direct us there, all right?’

  Qing blinked twice, rapidly; the ring of blue returned to her dark irises and the air began to edge back from what felt like absolute zero towards maybe two degrees Celsius. She seemed to give herself a mental shake; then she smiled, which broke up the usually serious contours of her angular face in new and charming ways.

  It was the first time she had smiled since the vase broke.

  Harley followed Delia around the kitchen on his knees, resolutely begging, until his mum finally agreed that the first two periods of school were out of the question at a life and death time like this one. A little detour through Chinatown was in order.

  Harley, Delia and Qing crossed the backyard to Delia’s ancient hatchback not ten minutes later, Delia clutching the plastic bag containing all of the broken pieces of the vase apart from the base. Qing flatly refused to give up that bit.

  Harley nudged his mum as she pulled out her car keys. ‘What’s an Antediluvian House as opposed to any other kind?’

  Delia didn’t answer until she’d gently ushered Qing into the back seat and clipped her in, getting another bad static shock for her troubles and earning an apologetic shrug from the girl that seemed to say, My bad, I cause these all the time. I can’t help it.

  Staring over the roof of the car at Harley, who was about to climb into the front seat, Delia replied, ‘Antediluvian means before the Flood.’

  Puzzled, Harley said, ‘Which flood?’

  Delia’s mouth assumed the poker-straight line it always did when Harley asked her a question she wasn’t keen on answering. She got in behind the wheel and pressed the remote on the rear gate that led out into the laneway behind the house as Harley, who was now strapped in beside her, persisted. ‘Come on, Mum. What could possibly be so special about the things inside Antediluvian House and Dad’s “bloke”? He knows heaps of blokes. None of the ones we know of are remotely special. Which flood?’

  Delia backed out into the crooked bluestone lane running down the rear of their house. Still without responding, she woke the nice lady who lived inside her car’s satnav, typing the words Antediluvian House into the little screen sitting on top of the faded dashboard.

  ‘Antediluvian House,’ the virtual lady enunciated brightly, and the girl in the back seat sat bolt upright, all her attention fixed on the front of the car in wonder. Delia watched in the driver’s mirror as Qing looked all around the car’s interior, trying to work out where the sound was coming from and how it was being done.

  ‘Continue north along Oxley Street for 687 metres…’

  ‘Mum,’ Harley shouted over the nice lady droning on about left turns, right turns and northbound on-ramps. ‘Which flood?!’

  Distracted by the flow of directions, Delia replied faintly, ‘The one in the Bible. Even though it’s a gigantic case of false advertising, you can assume that everything inside Antediluvian House is absolutely ancient.’

  Harley shot his mum a shocked look as she added, ‘Like the vase she came out of.’

  The Sparks both glanced at Qing, feeling a chill as they realised the girl was staring straight back at them with a frown faintly pleating her brow as if she’d understood every word they’d just said.

  Antediluvian House turned out to be a three-storey Victorian red-brick building with white painted trim, jammed between two dumpling restaurants in Chinatown. There were three narrow windows on the ground floor and four windows on each of the upper floors. The double fr
ont doors at street level – with the number 116A painted on one of them in a tidy hand – appeared to be made of solid steel and were firmly locked. The glass panes in every single window were completely covered in white paint so that no one could see in, or out. Harley had probably walked past the building hundreds of times in his life, but had never even noticed it was there.

  He banged on the doors with the flat of his hand and looked across the road at his mum, who’d parked in a construction loading zone and was hoping for the best.

  He mouthed to her, ‘What do I do?’ when there was no answer from within the building.

  There was no visible way of getting the attention of whoever was inside. There wasn’t a doorbell, security camera or peephole to be seen. The doors didn’t even have handles on the outside. Their dull red paint was worn, as if many visitors had placed their desperate hands on them, in just the same way Harley was doing now. In order to keep his hands free for doing things like banging on locked doors, Harley had shoved the plastic bag full of ceramic fragments into the front of his zipped-up tartan bomber jacket, and the pieces were digging into his flannel shirt front uncomfortably.

  Beside him, Qing studied the doors from top to bottom, running her hands over the thin seam between the two giant steel panels. Scanning the largely empty street around them quickly, she placed her right hand flat against a point about her shoulder-height and closed her eyes. Her lips moved silently for a moment, though no sound came out.

  Harley felt a distinct, sharp chill in the air.

  Qing pushed on one of the doors and it swung slightly open. She slipped inside noiselessly without a backward glance.

  Open-mouthed, Harley looked back at his mum, pointing furiously at the gap, and Delia’s window slid down. ‘Ray and his simple favours! If you’re not out in fifteen minutes, I’m calling emergency services,’ she yelled. ‘If they don’t arrive first, that is, and give me a big fat parking ticket.’

  The hallway Harley found himself in as he swung the steel door shut behind him was dark and empty. He felt gingerly along the bare wooden floor with the toes of his sneakered feet, hissing, ‘Qing? Qing?’

  There was no sign of the girl. When his face got entangled in something soft hanging at the end of the hall, Harley bellowed in surprise, stumbling and flailing through the curtain into a big room that took up the entire ground floor.

  He gasped; his nose was only inches away from a life-sized, finely detailed horse made of fired clay, pulling a polished wooden chariot. Looking up, he flinched at the looming figure of a moustachioed Chinese charioteer in long robes and full armour, hair in a neat topknot beneath a kind of fan-shaped crown, one fist raised as if to strike Harley down.

  Arranged behind the charioteer, all across the big room, were dozens more soldiers, all life-sized, with different facial expressions and military uniforms – most with armour, some without – hair bound up in neat topknots or wearing crowns or hats or hoods. There were rows of them – all made of fired clay. It was the eeriest, most awe-inspiring thing Harley had ever seen.

  He walked along the front row of standing infantrymen gingerly, so close that he could see tiny flakes of ancient paint still stuck to their faces, hands, clothes and toe-capped shoes. All along the walls, giant tapestries and ink paintings depicted fierce battles, soldiers in chariots and sheaves of flying arrows; men everywhere on horseback, and on foot. On the back wall of the huge room, two steel brackets held up a lethal-looking black sword with a ridged blade and an unusual, elongated hilt capable of a two-handed grip, the whole weapon almost as long as Harley was tall.

  Someone had clearly taken a lot of care with the display; the whole room was lit by soft and modern downlighting, and there wasn’t a speck of dust to be seen on any surface. The disreputable exterior of Antediluvian House didn’t even hint at the wonders inside.

  A soft, very serpentine hiss emanated from a dim corner at the back of the vast room and Harley squinted to see Qing pointing upwards. She placed her foot on the first stair of a narrow wooden staircase and flitted up out of sight. Sucking in his gut so that it wouldn’t accidently brush against any of the warrior statues and send them crashing down like dominoes, Harley wove across the room in her wake, the broken vase pieces jiggling uncomfortably against him.

  Unlike Qing, whose progress upwards was silent and undetectable, Harley set off a different creak in every stair along the way, which meant that when he reached the light-flooded first floor – which had an internal glass skylight set into its ceiling and was filled with priceless pottery, bronze and stone figurines, ornaments and implements in gleaming, lit-up display cases – he found himself face to face with a short, elderly man with at least three chins, and no hair or eyebrows. The man was shaped kind of like a lopsided Humpty Dumpty, but there was no time to feel even mildly amused because he was levelling a black handgun right at Harley’s sternum.

  ‘Who are you?’ the hairless man barked in an American accent, his head suspended like a huge, misshapen bowling ball above a black turtleneck jumper and voluminous beige cargo trousers, their lumpy pockets jammed with tools and brushes. ‘How did you get in?’

  The old man had colourless eyes and bad teeth and was the scariest-looking individual Harley had ever seen.

  ‘I’m Ray Spark’s boy, Harley? The door was open? I brought that broken vase? For you to look at, sir, so don’t shoot me?’ Harley was so nervous everything was coming out as a high, squeaky question.

  The man lowered his handgun a little so that it was now aimed in a slightly friendlier fashion at Harley’s bellybutton instead of at the centre of his chest.

  ‘Perhaps I did leave it open, I’m a little forgetful when I’m working,’ the man muttered through thin, colourless lips. ‘Garstang J. Runyon,’ he barked by way of introduction. ‘Ray’s boy, eh? I was expecting one of Ray’s usual boys.’ The old man’s smile was humourless. ‘One of his six-foot-seven ones in head-to-toe black leather with matching brass knuckledusters and brass toe caps on their military-issue boots. Where’s the seal then? Quickly, lad.’

  Harley patted his front hastily to indicate he was taking something out and Garstang waved at him to do it, although Harley noted he wasn’t putting his gun away. Harley held the plastic bag full of ceramic fragments out to the antiquities expert, who snatched it away quickly, peering inside and grunting, ‘It looks like a particularly fine Ru Ware glaze, nearly white. But the seal’s not here.’ The old man sifted in vain through the bag for the telltale red markings that had been in the intriguing image Ray Spark had sent him.

  ‘She’s got it.’ Harley’s eyes flickered past the armed man in the direction of a ceiling-high painted statue of a god in a Chinese helmet and colourful robes of red and gold and blue. A long, wiry black beard and moustache flowed down his chest, and he held a spear with a curved blade in one hand and a golden sword in the other.

  For a man with terrible posture, so many chins and so few teeth, Garstang J. Runyon swung around pretty niftily on his feet. He gasped as Qing drifted out from behind the giant statue, the piece of pottery with the seal on it grasped in one of her small hands.

  At the sight of the girl, the old man actually placed his gun down on top of the nearest glass display case, bowed in a formal-looking way and addressed Qing in Chinese. Qing smiled and inclined her head, but didn’t respond any further. Garstang J. Runyon turned to Harley, his colourless eyes shining with emotion. ‘I never thought I’d live to see the day,’ he said. ‘She’s wearing full ceremonial court dress from the Warring States period featuring six imperial dragons with hand-carved, C-shaped Hongshan dragons in lapis lazuli on the belt ties. I’ve only ever seen paintings with anything near as fine in them.’

  All Harley could reply in confusion was, ‘I knew it was lapis lazuli,’ as the old man widened his arms expansively and chuckled, ‘This way, children, this way. Honoured, charmed and caught completely off guard – and that doesn’t happen every day.’

  The old man led Qing and Harley up
the stairs to the top floor of the building, quite forgetting to pick up his black handgun as they made their way out of the room of priceless treasures.

  On the uppermost level, the natural light was dazzling, courtesy of an even bigger skylight in the ceiling that illuminated what was clearly the old man’s workspace. The brilliant sunlight cascaded down through the secondary skylight in the floor to the level below. It was an ingenious way to illuminate an otherwise dark Victorian-era warehouse.

  Standing lamps with heads that could swivel or extend were positioned across the room. Around the rectangular secondary skylight set into the floor were arranged long wooden tables with antique artefacts balanced on stands, all in a state of disrepair. Old scrolls, books and papers lay scattered about, some open to particular images, or passages in flowing Chinese script. Across the room, against the back wall, stood the three-metre-tall statue of a beautiful goddess with a traditional, looping Chinese-bun hairstyle in clothes like the ones Qing was wearing, entirely carved out of a pale, almost translucent, polished jade. She was so finely wrought that her clothes – which lifted and curled at the hems and at the sleeves – seemed to be rippling and ruffling in an unearthly breeze. Harley imagined he could feel it, moving through the room.

  Another life-sized terracotta horse stood sentry to the left of the goddess, and Qing ran across to it, face crinkled in delight, running her free hand lightly over the horse’s muzzle as if she recognised the beast that it represented. After a moment, she turned away from the horse statue almost reluctantly and placed the pottery piece with the potter’s mark on an empty stretch of workbench right under the old man’s nose.

  She stepped back and looked at him expectantly.

  Garstang J. Runyon gave a sigh as if he were sinking into a particularly deep and luxurious bubble bath. He drew on a pair of white gloves that lay on a table nearby, then gently removed all of the pieces of the broken vase from Harley’s plastic bag, arranging them around the base piece Qing had just surrendered.