Sam’s voice.
EIGHTEEN
TEN feet up and fifty feet away horizontally, a wedge-shaped head the size of a small car emerged from the shadows of the arched entrance. The base of that huge skull was decorated with a lacy frill the color of fresh blood that dwindled into a thin streak of color along the neck.
It was a very long neck.
Bring Cullen Seabourne here, Sam told them. He will be safe nowhere else, and we may need him. Think about his wound for a moment so I may see . . . Think clearly, if you are at all able. No mistaking the acerbity in that command. Ah. Blood magic, and it is sustained by his own blood. That may be tricky to unknot. I will assist. I expect I will dislike having him underfoot, but I concede the necessity.
“Mr. Seabourne is injured?” Li Qin said, distressed.
Rule spoke to her softly. Lily couldn’t pay attention to his explanation, caught as she was by the sight of the black dragon leaving his lair.
Sam was a very large dragon, sleek as a serpent if wider in girth, his length upheld by four short, powerful legs ending in talons. The cop in Lily tried to guess his weight. Three elephants’ worth? Four? How much did an elephant weigh, anyway? Were Sam’s bones heavy like an elephant’s, or light like a bird’s?
She had no idea.
Black and steel, sleek and huge, with the origami folds of the great wings riding along his back, Sam flowed down that ten-foot “step” onto his landing pad like molten midnight.
This midnight, however, was the black composed of all colors, not their absence. He sparkled. In the morning sunlight his scales cast a rainbow iridescence—fugitive gleams of blue, purple, red, gold, and green.
Lily found herself on her feet. Impossible to meet such huge and deadly beauty while sitting on the ground. Rule, too, had stood. He took her hand. Even Li Qin rose, though somehow with her it seemed more a courtesy than an instinctive response.
Sam’s landing pad was as wide as a football field and about twice as long. He settled himself into a comfortable coil that occupied some thirty feet of it. His head remained raised about twenty feet in the air as he looked at the two of them.
I greet you, Rule Turner. I greet you, Lily Yu.
For a second, Lily forgot to breathe. For a second she forgot all the safeguards and looked directly into eyes that were all black and silver, with no white at all . . .
Falling. She was falling and falling, air whistling past like the cold shriek of hell—then someone said, Remember!—and then she—
“Lily.” Rule’s arm was around her waist. Holding her up. “Are you all right?”
“Dizzy.” She shook her head, throwing off the lingering sensations. “It’s passed now. I . . . It was the dream.” He knew what she meant. The dream returned occasionally, though it wasn’t really a dream at all, but a memory.
The memory of her other self. The one who had thrown herself off a cliff and fallen and fallen so the gate could be opened and the rest could return home from hell.
So Rule could come home. So he would live.
That self was part of her, part of her soul—but a largely voiceless part. Now and then, she touched those memories. They’d never made her dizzy before. Lily straightened and frowned at Sam. “How is it I can hear you, anyway? Shouldn’t my Gift block mindspeech?”
Your essential nature is unchanged, I see, regardless of what you remember or do not remember. A faint whiff of amusement flavored the near-painful clarity of Sam’s mental voice. You still acquaint yourself with the world through questions. Direct your questing to more urgent matters. Li Qin, you will continue with the story of the Chimei’s history with Li Lei, as you understand it.
“Of course.” Sedately Li Qin reseated herself and looked up at Lily and Rule. “Please sit. This will take a little while.”
She waited while they did, then said, “Lily, your grandmother takes much pleasure in retaining the mystery of her past, even with her family. But it is not only for pleasure that she does so. Many places in her past cause her great pain, even today. The occasion of her enmity with the Chimei is one such time.
“She was a headstrong young woman, as I have said, and was raised by a mother who had . . . They called it demon blood in those days. Some in China still do. We would say she had a Gift, a strong Gift.”
“What kind of Gift?” Lily asked, leaning forward slightly. “Grandmother didn’t . . . Ah, I’ve always thought she wasn’t born being able to turn tiger. Was I wrong?”
“No.” Li Qin smiled faintly. “Nor was her mother able to. Li Lei’s Gift was Fire, though there were other, less common aspects to her inheritance. She was an only child. Perhaps because of this, her father was indulgent. He allowed her many liberties which were uncommon for women at that time in China. Many in her family believed this unwise, but few withstood Li Lei, even then, when she was set upon a course. And her mother was, from what I can tell, a most unusual woman, and she wished Li Lei to understand her full nature.
“Sadly, Li Lei’s mother died when she was thirteen. Her father remarried very soon. Li Lei blamed her family for this haste, believing they pushed the marriage on him. I suspect they did, for he was a prosperous merchant with no son. Her new stepmother gave him that son, as well as two more daughters, and attempted to steer Li Lei toward more conventional ways. Instead, Li Lei grew even more difficult to handle.”
That, Lily thought, sounded inevitable.
Li Qin paused to sip at her cooled tea. “I am guessing at some of this, for she has not said these things exactly as I say them. I like the English expression: I read between the lines. But this much is true. One day when she was fifteen she was wandering alone on the mountain near her father’s mine, which no well-brought-up young woman would do. And she met Sam.
“Perhaps it was this meeting which decided her course. I believe so. She says she would not have, later on, disobeyed her father had her stepmother not chosen so poor a husband for her. And truly, she was aware of what she owed her family, as any Chinese girl of that time must have been. But I believe she would not have accepted any marriage. She had been offered another choice, which was so very rare then for women. From that moment, she was set on becoming a scholar of magic.”
Hmph. The mental snort was accompanied by a physical one, a gentle pulsation of warm, cinnamon-and-metal-scented air that startled Lily. Her head swiveled.
Sam’s head rested in the dirt some ten feet away. He’d lain down fully and she hadn’t even noticed, so riveted was she by the story Li Qin told of Grandmother’s early life.
A scholar, indeed. For once the chill, precise voice was neither cool nor impenetrable. Emotions seemed to echo up from the depths of the mind behind the voice. . . fondness, amusement, joy, loss. Li Lei was not born to be a scholar. She was born to meddle.
“You would know.” There was rebuke in Li Qin’s voice.
Lily looked back at her, surprised more by the tone of Li Qin’s voice than the content of her words. “Sam meddles?”
“Oh, yes.” Li Qin looked as placid as always. “His meddling may be in service of a worthy goal. I believe he considered his goal with Li Lei worthy. He knew the Chimei would come to Li Lei’s city, you see, and that great suffering and destruction would result. When he accepted her as apprentice, he did so with the hope that, when the time came, she would destroy the Chimei’s grip on this realm.”