Then they’d begun fulfilling them.
With a creak, the rickshaw’s wheels turned. The wind was up. It tugged at Lily’s hair, which someone—Ah Hai again, no doubt—must have braided for her while she slept. It hurried the scattered pedestrians along the paths and whipped a few big, fat drops of rain on ahead of the coming deluge. Thunder rolled. A flurry of pigeons erupted from the Frisbee atop the mystery tower, making Lily think of her lunch. This was not a happy memory, given the way her stomach was churning. Swallowed rage did not digest well.
She’d had to swallow and keep swallowing.
She knew now why the Zhuren wanted the lupi children. And it was the Zhuren who wanted them, not the Great Bitch. Toby, Ryder, First Fist, Sandy, Noah . . . a babe of three months all the way up to a boy of eleven. They were the deal the Zhuren had struck with her. Them, and what she would do to them.
Not death magic, no. That was too simple an abomination.
She was going to have to tell Cynna. She dreaded that. She was pretty sure she could find Cynna’s mind from this far away, but maybe she shouldn’t use mindspeech for this news. Cynna would react. No way she could keep herself from reacting, and they didn’t want anyone wondering why Cynna suddenly started throwing things or trying to pound a hole in the wall or whatever. They had to keep the mindspeech a secret.
If they weren’t already aware, that is. Lily had used her mindsense when she first met Kongqi. And the spawn could surely see her Gift . . . but did they understand what they saw? Did they know what to look for? Telepathy, sure, they must know about that, given the likelihood of people like Helen Whitehead showing up in their descendants. The spawn must know that dragons communicated mentally, but they might assume that was all telepathy.
Mindspeech was not telepathy. It was a separate ability, a learned skill, not innate. The spawn clearly knew a lot about Earth—Kongqi knew about peptides and ganglia, for God’s sake, which was more than Lily could claim—but mindspeech was all but unknown back home. However, they apparently had contact with one or more of the sidhe realms as well. There was that thingie that blocked Cynna’s magic—what had she called it? A magic cage. Plus Cynna thought that the guards might have a translation charm, which meant some kind of traffic with Edge or another of the sidhe realms. Those charms relied on mind magic; the spawn wouldn’t be able to make them.
She needed to ask Cynna why she thought that. Her fingers twitched with the urge to jot that down. Damn, but she missed her notebook.
Lily had the vague notion that those in the sidhe realms were aware of mindspeech. Their tech was magic-based, after all. So maybe the spawn had heard of mindspeech through their sidhe contacts. Had Kongqi indicated any awareness of it in their long discussion this afternoon? Not that she’d noticed. She’d told him about her first sojourn in hell, when she’d met Sam, and he’d asked questions, but carefully, concealing how much he already knew about “the sentient dragons.”
And there was a term that raised a whole lot of questions. Hadn’t Cynna said something about getting info on the wild dragons as part of her deal? Lily was guessing that “wild dragons” referred to the ones from botched hatchings, the mind-dark dragons, but what if—
An explosion of birds burst out of a nearby tree, startling her. A second later, she saw what had startled them—and yanked her mindsense back inside her.
The man who floated down to land between two trees wore a red-and-gold shenyi that was as impervious to the wind as the ornate hat on his head. His black hair was in a braid down his back. His mustaches were braided, too, twin ropes that ended in gold beads at the jawline. Husky build. A hooked nose, like a raptor. Small, deep-set eyes dark as raisins gave him the appearance of peering out at the world through slits.
The rickshaw bearer stopped. Everyone stopped.
The man stepped closer, eyeing Lily as if she were up for sale but he had grave doubts about the price being asked. “I am the Zhu Dìqiú,” he declared in a voice deeper and less musical than Kongqi’s. “I am told you speak the Tongue of Heaven.”
Zhu Dìqiú. Master of Earth, aka Dick Boy. Better be careful with this one. She bowed over her bound hands. “I speak some Mandarin, qiānsùi.” The honorific literally meant “you of the thousand years” and had been used to address empresses and crown princes in imperial China. She and Beth used to call their oldest sister qiānsùi. Drove Susan crazy. Lily had no problem using it for one of the spawn, who wouldn’t know how sarcastically it was meant. “I do not know the dialect spoken here, but I can understand some of it.”
“You were with the Zhu Kongqi for several hours. You will tell me what you spoke of with him.”
Lily expected rivalry among the spawn, but this was appallingly direct. Kongqi would hear about this confrontation. Was that the point? Did Dick Boy suspect Kongqi of making a deal with her? Lily hid her confusion with another little seated bow. “Of course. Is this one permitted to ask a question?”
“No.”
Damn. She’d wanted to know if Dick Boy thought of her as Kongqi’s captive. Kongqi certainly seemed to. He’d used the possessive repeatedly, and when dragons said “my,” they meant it.
“What did he want from you?” Dick Boy demanded.
She needed Dick Boy to think she was cooperating so he didn’t start breaking other people’s necks to motivate her. Best thing, then, was to cooperate like crazy, burying what she didn’t want to say in a deluge of information. God knew she’d had perps do that to her sometimes. “We drank tea,” she began. The raindrops were falling thicker and faster now. “It was very good tea. He explained why the sting of the pain ants had caused me to hallucinate. I am afraid I do not remember the correct terminology, but it had something to do with peptides and ganglia—”
“Stop. He did not [unintelligible] to talk about ants.”
“Your pardon, qiānsùi. Perhaps I misunderstood. Do you wish me to speculate on his motives?”
“You annoy me. This is not wise.”
“I am trying to respond as you require. If you do not wish to hear about the ants’ sting, I will skip that. We also discussed integrity. Should I tell you about that discussion?”
“No. What else?”
“He asked me questions. I told him about my first trip to Dis, when I was split in two by—”
“You were what?”