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  Scale-Bright

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead are purely coincidental.

  SCALE-BRIGHT

  Copyright © 2014 Benjanun Sriduangkaew. All rights are reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without express written permission from the author.

  Cover art © 2014 Richard Wagner. All rights are reserved.

  Limited hardback edition published by Immersion Press, 2014.

  Table of Contents

  Foreword by Aliette de Bodard

  Book One

  Book Two

  Appendix

  The Crows Her Dragon's Gate

  Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon

  Chang'e Dashes from the Moon

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Foreword

  Aliette de Bodard

  The first story by Benjanun Sriduangkaew I read was "Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon", a bold and atmospheric re-imagining of the Chinese legend of Houyi, the Divine Archer, and Chang'e, the Goddess of the Moon, with both main characters as women. I was struck both by the familiarity (it was a retelling of a legend I had heard many times as a child, and it had that indefinable air of coming home); and by the maturity of the prose.

  Benjanun is a magician with words—she uses language to evoke everything from the texture of a festival meal ("The rabbit makes cakes, viscous lotus paste inside and the salted yolks of ghost birds: they were pale rather than orange, but they taste no less rich."), to the violence and despair of Houyi fighting against a demon ("blood warms her, filling her mouth with the aroma of coins, as the demon sinks teeth into her flank and wraps her close with the snake of its tail"); from the feeling of being resurrected from the dead ("the knife of her consciousness peeling off death in layers: this is how she wakes"), to a goddess watching the rise of modern cities ("she watches the houses in the mortal realms change and lengthen, until they become towers which pierce the clouds, until their cities are thick and thronged and she can’t imagine locating her kin anymore in the million-millions that overwhelm the streets").

  Since then, Benjanun has gone on to make quite a splash in the genre, with publications in high-prestige venues like Clarkesworld Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, listings on the Locus Recommended Reading lists, and stories being name-checked for major awards. Though her focus has shifted to a majority of science fiction (she writes wonderful space opera), she's retained her core strengths of beautiful language and exquisite worldbuilding in which she slyly questions gender roles and gender performances as well as colonialism, cultural imperialism and the role of memory and history.

  The novella that you're about to read is not science fiction; in fact, it's a sequel of sorts to that very first story I read. It features the wonderful characters of Houyi and Chang'e, now living in modern Hong Kong, keeping an eye on one of their descendants; and it is also a smart retelling of a Chinese tale (I'm not going to tell you which one, for fear I'll spoil the experience). It's urban fantasy, and it's utterly wonderful.

  See for yourself.

  Book One

  1.1

  Julienne is in a crowded train when a man whose skin gleams smooth as stone appears to inquire after her heart's desire.

  He wears white paper creased into sleeves and robe, and on his head black paper folded into a cap. His faceted eyes are amber glass on an ivory face. But it is when the rush hour parts around him that his inhumanity becomes beyond dispute.

  Smiling he bares blunt shoeshine teeth and again asks, "What is it that you long for best, that clenches teeth and claws over the ventricles of your heart?"

  She ignores him, gazing out the window where the tunnel blurs by in a gray-black haze. Overhead, the indicator blinks green between one station marker and the next. Fortress Hill, Tin Hau. The man disappears before her stop. The crowd flows back into the space he left behind without ever acknowledging he was there.

  Afterward she does not remember what the man looks like and his words fade. This is the first strange thing she encounters that day.

  (Julienne does not count her aunts as strange. It would be rude, and they are the best relatives one could hope to have.)

  In the afternoon, having spent her half-day off in pursuit of a low-calorie lunch, Julienne goes to work. Sunlight around her neck noose-tight, she encounters the second strange thing: a woman bleeding under the clock tower. She wears a vivid shade of good emeralds from eyeshadow to stiletto heels, marred by that one slash of red. The woman bears this coldly, eyes straight ahead, only now and then caught by a spasm that tautens her lips over her teeth. Her gaze catches Julienne's and holds fast. Some ten meters separate them.

  Julienne looks away, hurries into the Ocean Terminal where conditioned air loosens the heat's chokehold and lets oxygen pass into her lungs again. There is a woman in so extraordinary a color; there is a woman who bleeds—and no one has noticed. So there must be no woman, or there is no blood.

  Her aunts have taught her that Hong Kong is not quite the city she knows. Not half so safe; not half so dull.

  She works, finishes, and has an indifferent dinner with coworkers in the food court. She buys pastel notepads and browses books at Page One, heavy hardcovers on architecture and interior design that take up far too much space to justify their purchase. The requirements of normalcy having been fulfilled, she makes her way out assured in her expertise of ordinariness. In the face of the peculiar it's best to shore herself up in an ecstasy of the mundane.

  At an hour bordering on too-late, she goes back to the harbor with its familiar smells of sea and fast food, with its crowds clustering around taxi and bus stops, salt-sweat of an evening. For the length of a hesitation, she pauses before the turnstile to the Star Ferry. She goes past.

  The woman remains at the precise same spot, bathed in yellow light. Blood has stained her shoes and pavement an uncertain black. She remains upright, but she has become so pale her eyes look immense, tinted as though with expensive jades ground down to dust.

  When the distance between them has shortened to nothing Julienne purses her mouth, licking off her lipstick, cloying mango-scent. "Do you need help?"

  The woman blinks rapidly, shaking herself out of lassitude, setting herself on the correct side of consciousness. "I thought I'd bleed out my life before you overcame your cowardice."

  Julienne stares. "What?"

  "You see a woman bleeding to death and don't think to give her succor until the hours have passed, the sun has set, and she could well be lifeless carcass come the night? What barbarian are you? Did your mother and father teach you no courtesy?"

  She inhales slowly. "Are you going to let me—"

  "Yes," the woman says, imperious, and falls into Julienne's arms: a weight of green like emeralds, a smell of butchery thick as velvet.

  * * *

  The woman's clothes have browned in the way of wilting leaves. She is congealed heat against Julienne on the ferry, on the taxi, then in the elevator ride up to her apartment. Strangers' opprobrium chases Julienne; she must look like she's shouldering a friend drunk into stupor.

  In Julienne's arm the woman is light, as though acrylic on cardboard, bold strokes and bright splashes without dimension. Julienne chews on the possibility that this is a ghost, the possibility that this woman-seeming will fall apart to wood and fabric. She guards against this thought. As long as it is out of sight it won't come true.

  Her door is
numpad-secured. At her old place it'd have been an ugly lock and fumbling with keys, but her aunts can afford seemingly anything.

  She thumbs the light on and lays the woman down on a faux-leather sofa, then props herself against the wall. Her arms ache and she can't think. At the sight of handprints she's left on the switches and door her stomach churns.

  Under the tap cold water numbs her skin, sluicing pink. It occurs to her while she lathers her hands that the woman might already be dead. How many liters of blood in a body? Is it different when she is so obviously not human? There's a medicine cabinet in the living room. Aspirins, indigestion pills, bandages. She can't begin to imagine what she could do with them.

  Logic slowly reasserts itself: an ambulance. "We should've gone to a hospital," she says aloud in the shredded hope that the woman might still be alive and aware. "I'll just make a call. All right?"

  The woman reaches for her. "Don't."

  "You need an ambulance."

  "No." A weak tug. "Stay."

  "You're going to die and it'll be on my head."

  "I'm not; it won't be." A small, desperate noise. She never opens her eyes.

  Gradually her breathing evens out and she eases into what seems more sleep than unconsciousness. Feeling absurd Julienne continues to hold the stranger's hand, her fingers a twitch away from dialing 999.

  A minute passes, or an hour. Morning arrives with an odd abruptness. Julienne is in her bed; on the nightstand her phone flashes. For a while Julienne stares blankly at the LED blinking orange, white, orange, white. A slant of sun peers through the curtains, glares off the floor-length mirror in its art-deco frame.

  She stays under the blanket until she can no longer bear the disgusting thickness in her mouth. The air-con hums; she doesn't remember having switched it on. She touches her blouse where the stains have faded to thin smears, as though they were never blood.

  Toothbrush, toothpaste, nightrobe. The clock says half past five. She tries to recall what it said when she came home last night. Eleven?

  Her skin feels much too cold, the robe much too warm. When she steps into the living room she braces herself against anything, the way she does at general check-ups: against news of sugar level too high, blood pressure too low. Cysts. Cancer.

  But there is just her aunt-in-law reading on the sofa. A faint smell of cigarettes. Hau Ngai takes care not to smoke indoors, and never near Julienne. She sits like a man, ankle propped on knee, in a way Julienne would never dare. "Julienne. How do you feel?"

  "I'm not sure." She tries again. "Auntie." Five months of saying that and still awkward.

  "Sit."

  She takes the wingback chair, flinches when Hau Ngai leans over to cradle her face in a hand rough with calluses. The pressure behind her eyes lightens and the throbbing in her temple slows. What little sunlight there is stops strobing in her vision.

  "I've lent you some vitality. Tell me what transpired."

  "Oh." Julienne looks down. She has never grown past the embarrassment at the deep, intoxicating attraction she felt when she first met Hau Ngai, not knowing who this older woman was, understanding only that she was elegant and impossibly self-possessed. "There was a woman."

  As Hau Ngai listens her mouth becomes thinner and thinner until she's lost all expression. "Did it not occur to you, niece, that there was anything strange? Of all mortals she singled you out. Hong Kong is not small, the crowd was not thin. If it was aid she sought, then she went about it strangely."

  "I... know, Auntie. I wasn't thinking clearly. But she was harmless. I couldn't have walked by."

  "She drank your youth, a few years torn out from the weave of your span. Your charity's to your credit, but what you brought home was malicious; a viper, unless I've misread the signs. Reptiles are beguiling." Hau Ngai shakes her head. "I'll call Seung Ngo."

  "I don't want her to worry—"

  "Your aunt won't forgive me if I did not tell her. But I'll do that tomorrow, if that eases you."

  Julienne pushes herself to say, "I know I'm a burden to you both."

  "You wouldn't have been attacked if they didn't smell gods on you. It's irresistible to demons who extend their centuries by leeching off humans' time. For them the scent of heaven is spice to such a meal. This isn't your fault. It's appalling that neither of us has granted you better protection." Hau Ngai reaches into her shirt and draws out a small metal triangle. "Keep this. Through it I'll know where you are, and be able to answer if you call."

  The tip is weighted, tapering to a piercing point. An arrowhead. "Thank you, Auntie."

  "It's no chore to keep you safe," Hau Ngai says. "You're my wife's niece, and that makes us family."

  Which to Julienne simply sounds like it's an obligation, but she tries not to think that way. Gratitude is the only correct answer; she attempts a smile. "When I was a child I'd have loved to be able to say my aunts were that Seung Ngo, that Hau Ngai. Bragging rights."

  Between curtain-cast shade and dawn-light the archer god might have smiled. "Then other children would've said you meant your aunt and uncle, called you a liar, and pelted you with whatever mortal children pelt one another with these days."

  "Rocks and mud balls, I'm afraid." She yawns and stifles it behind her hand.

  This time Hau Ngai chuckles as she lifts Julienne in her arms without effort. "Mortals," she says as she tucks Julienne back into bed, "never truly change."

  * * *

  When Houyi makes the call to her wife she expects an argument and, as so often, that is what she gets.

  "If you weren't out to butcher every single demon in Hong Kong." The intake of Chang'e's breath is an effort to keep calm. Houyi imagines her in a park, a field, somewhere under an open sky gold-blue with daylight. "If you didn't have this reputation for being a rampaging zealot who massacres indiscriminately. If not for these, do you believe one of them would've been after my niece's life?"

  "Yes," Houyi says, rebalancing the phone. "Demons hardly need encouragement to act on their instincts. Scenting us on her is reason enough."

  "They aren't animals."

  "Technically many of them are."

  Another sharp inhalation. "I'm not going to debate the technicalities of demonkind. Had you left them well enough alone instead of heading out every other night to slaughter them by the score they'd have found no provocation to do this."

  "This is the first time they've gotten close to Julienne."

  "They don't need a second. I'm not going to expect her to defend herself from demons."

  "I could teach her to, but in the meantime I've given her something to carry. I do mean to keep her safe."

  "I know you do; I know you will keep her well. Sometimes I feel like I ran away and left you with an illegitimate child to raise." On the other end Houyi hears an old woman's voice raised in song. Clacking of wood on wood, the purr of thread turning to fabric. "It's not that I don't wish I was at your side. It's not that I don't resent how little time we have together."

  "I understand that. When this has calmed down, I will…" The strength of her reaction to Chang'e—to her wife's absence—always catches Houyi off-guard, like a shot that's gone astray without reason. "I'll find the viper. Perhaps negotiate an agreement."

  Chang'e laughs, without humor. "That'd be new. Do try it, even so."

  The last echo of Chang'e's voice dies away.

  Houyi stands on the first letter of HSBC, ancient myth-feet resting on logo black on red, under which throbs a mad rush of numbers and commerce and machines: trades riding cellular waves and fiber optic, fortunes made and shattered in minutes. She does not shade her eyes. Centuries of driving the sun chariot have inured her; the light and heat only remind her of the trajectory, the making of dark into dawn. It's not a duty she may shirk for much longer.

  The height gives her half of Hong Kong to peel open, but though she can see as far as she needs—and narrow her attention where she wills—the city is a hoarder of secrets, of blacked windows sealed tight, and what do rept
iles excel at if not hiding and slithering in the shade?

  Houyi pinches the strand of hair she's plucked out of the sofa. No scales: the demon was not so slovenly as that, to revert to fangs and a tail as long as skyscraper shadows. From her shoulder Houyi unslings her bow, and choosing an arrow knots the hair to its tip.

  Notch. Pull. Loosen. The motions come easily, an extension of arms and fingers, a release of tension pleasant-familiar as nostalgia. The arrow sails high. It flashes once, a verdant burst.

  A direction; a beginning. She has located the trail.

  Houyi steps off the edge of the building, and follows.

  * * *

  Temple Street at night: too many foreigners, too many smells. Billboards warm the air even in winter, and in summer it is sweltering. Here is too far from waves and harbor, too far from the breathing brine.

  A street opera enacts snatches of drama—behind the powder and paint each actor could be woman, man or elsewise. One plays the part of Daji, Nuwa's fox, luring an emperor to her embrace and his dynasty's demise. Houyi appreciates their grace, their ability to perform in the limited stage eked out from gaps between pedestrians and stalls. The actors are not without aptitude, and the accompanying band if strident manages to spin noise into poetry. But she will not find her quarry here. Too obvious, too garish.

  Vendors hawk stringed coins not unlike what young men used to buy during imperial examinations seasons. Zodiac animals in glaring gilt line tables cheek-to-jowl with paper-mache icons of Chairman Mao. Houyi lets the crowd carry her forward, moving at its pace rather than her natural gait. Intuition and hunter's sense will serve her here, not tracks on asphalt. None exists in any case; the city fleets, overwriting and overwritten.

  She drops onto a cracked plastic stool without invitation or solicitation. The palm-reader looks up at her, startled to find someone who looks so obviously local giving her patronage. She is mid-forties, tired and trying to hide behind cosmetics: young for a palm-reader, which indicates that like most lining this street she is better at reciting a chiromancy manual than reading fate-lines. For foreigners' benefit the woman wears a cheongsam.