“That,” Grandmother said, “is a poor choice of terms. Gates do not rest. They do require a period of what might be called recalibration.”
Alice shrugged. “It is the term I was given for the process. I do not know precisely how long the interval of rest—or recalibration—will be.” She glanced to one side, where the unconscious Li Po lay trussed on the ground. “I have often wanted to do that,” she commented, then looked back at Grandmother. “I am very interested in speaking with you. Perhaps later?”
“It seems unlikely,” Grandmother said. “But I do not predict the future. You need to go.” She stepped away from the door.
Alice told her squad to line up, single file, and to move quickly when she did. She reached out and unlatched the door, swung it open wide, then made a complex series of gestures and spoke a single word. She stepped forward . . . and vanished.
So did each of the Fists as they followed her.
Grandmother moved back in front of the door and raised her arms. The circle of fire sprang up again.
Five Zhuren raced out of the Home of the Seven. With a pop of displaced air, two vanished—and reappeared floating directly overhead.
“Uh-oh,” Gan said.
The flames went out. Iridescence slid up from the ground.
One of the Zhuren above them raised a hand and hurled something invisible at them.
The fairy-dust glimmer closed overhead.
A blinding flash turned the world white. The ground shook.
About a 4.5, thought the California girl as she blinked dazzled eyes until she could see something other than smears of white light. Grandmother still stood, her arms straight out. Her gaze wasn’t at all abstract. She looked seriously annoyed.
“Do not!” shouted a deep voice. “They have tied the ward to the nodes!”
All of the spawn were in the air now. Dick Boy was circling the ward slowly, studying it. Tú’àn hovered near Kongqi, who was one of the two who’d—teleported? Arrived first anyway. Kongqi wasn’t the one who’d hurled the whatever-it-was with such great pyrotechnic effect, however. Shēngwù had done that. He, like Dick Boy, was studying the ward up close. Shuǐ was doing the dragonfly zip toward the bathhouse—no, he was aimed at the four Fists who must have decided that duty meant trotting toward the Zhuren.
All of the Zhuren wore pure white shenyi with white trousers beneath their robes and white slippers. All of them wore their hair the same way, in tight knots at the crowns of their heads. Ritual garb, Lily assumed, her lip curling at the thought of the ritual they wanted to perform.
She glanced to the west. The sun hung low now. Did they need to perform their ritual before the sun set, or before the moon rose?
Tú’àn drifted to the ground. The beads in his beard today were clear crystals. “Ah Wen,” he said sadly. “Why are you here?”
The old man stood. The boy beside him popped to his feet, too. Ah Wen set a hand on the boy’s shoulder and walked slowly toward Tú’àn. “You shine brightly today, Zhu,” he said in a creaky old-man voice, stopping a few feet from the spawn, the ward glistening faintly in the air between them.
“Why are you here?” Tú’àn asked again, his expression as sad as his voice. “Do you defy us? Betray us?”
“We fulfill our charge,” Ah Wen said gently. “We do not try to correct every error. That is not our task. But this thing you plan is a terrible wrong and will damage all of you forever.”
“We are damaged now!” cried Shēngwù. “You have always told us so. If we can assume our rightful forms, we erase that damage and regain our heritage! Perhaps then we will learn what this empathy is that you prate about, although I hope not. I see no value in it. True dragons have no interest in emotion.”
Lily snorted. “Dragons are beings of vast passion.”
That startled three of the spawn into turning to stare at her. They’d probably forgotten the trees could talk.
“Absurd,” Shuǐ said.
Dick Boy landed several feet away. “The ward is designed to repel magic. It would, I believe, repel any being who possessed magic—either that or strip their magic from them if they did manage to force entry.”
“Impossible,” Shēngwù snapped. “This is, however powerful, a single ward. A ward can either block the magical or the physical. It cannot do both. Admittedly, crossing this one might be difficult for a human. It might even prove uncomfortable for one of us. But hardly impossible.”
Kongqi landed about ten feet from Shuǐ. The spawn didn’t like being too close to one another. It was very dragon of them. “It pains me, but I have to agree with Dìqiú. I believe you will as well if you examine the ward closely.” A bit of a dig there, as Shēngwù had already studied it. “It is quite cleverly made, and as it is being powered by the nodes, beyond our ability to destroy by force. Attempting to do so might cause the nodes to explode.”
Dick Boy nodded. “They nearly did. I contained the earthquake that resulted from Shēngwù’s hasty strike, but—”
“I didn’t know it was tied to the nodes,” Shēngwù protested.
Dick Boy snorted. “And you accuse me of acting first and thinking later! As I was saying, I contained the earthquake, but I did not stabilize the nodes. Which of you did so?” He looked around. “Well?”
Shēngwù’s mind was working along a different track. “If we can’t use magic against the ward directly, we need another way to reach inside. I believe purely material objects will neither affect nor be affected by the ward.”
“You suggest we throw rocks at them?” Kongqi asked with the type of politeness that sounds like an insult.
“It would probably work.” Shuǐ was jogging toward them with three of the four Fists who’d been left at the bathhouse. The fourth Fist, Lily saw with a quick glance, was running all-out toward the Justice Court. They’d have more company soon. “We could kill or disable them that way. But the block on magic will make it difficult to control our projectiles carefully. We might also damage or kill some of the claimed.”
Shēngwù’s lip curled. “Have they not betrayed us? Are they not acting against us even now?”
Kongqi’s eyebrows lifted. “You do not object to killing the claimed?”
“If they do not leave, they must accept the consequences of their decision. Is that not what they have always told us? That we must accept the consequences of our choices?”
“I am unwilling to act in a manner which causes the deaths of some of the claimed.”
“We have no time to find a gentler solution. The ritual must take place very soon.” Shēngwù scowled. “This assumes that you want the transformation to proceed. You argued against it at first.”
Dick Boy’s deep bass broke in. “I think the old human woman kept the nodes from exploding. She is maintaining the ward.”
“Her?”
“Surely not.”
“It must be the other one, the one whose magic we caged.”