Free DAC 3 Precious Dragon by Liz Williams Page A

demon said. They had come out onto the topmost landing of Step Street. The derelict buildings of Shaopeng stretched below. Where the Eregeng Trade House had stood in his own city rose an immense pagoda. Its peaked roofs were wreathed in cloud. Balconies and balustrades covered its sides; carved dragons writhed. There was a subtle and indefinable wrongness about it.

    "What," Pin said, inside the demon's mind, "is that?"

    "That is the Ministry of Epidemics," an echoing thought replied. He had the impression that the demon was outraged at being addressed by a mere spirit.

    "We're going there?" Pin asked in horror, but before he could protest, the demon had leaped from the top of the steps. Even in this disincarnate state, however, he was thankful to be leaving behind the needle teeth and hollow tongues of the hungry ghosts of Shaopeng. The city wheeled below, glimpsed through the massing clouds. It was as though someone had made a rough sketch of the landscape of Singapore Three. The main roads, which followed the meridians, were still present and he could see the dark energy lines which ran beneath them. The principal buildings of his own city were also mirrored. The pagoda towers of the Ministries of Storms, Water, Epidemics, and Fire occupied their place, named silently by the demon as they passed, and there were other buildings, too, which Pin did not recognize. The Ministry of Lust: a fat, scarlet blob below. The Ministry of War: a towering iron ziggurat, and at this the demon's heart inexplicably leaped. Fires burned blue in the spaces between the streets, and beyond, where the sea should be, stretched a troubled darkness. Pin could hear the beat of the demon's heart, like a drum in a well. The storm streamed by and the demon plunged, to come to a graceful landing on the steps of the Ministry of Epidemics.

    "Where now?" Pin quavered. The demon did not answer. She strode through the double doors of the Ministry and stopped.

    The queue, Pin saw, stretched down a corridor so long that the end of it was invisible. A thousand pairs of eyes turned curiously toward the new arrivals. Everyone smiled, politely, and gave a little bow. Muttering, the demon began to pace down the line. Pin looked into each face as they passed. Every manner of illness was represented here. He saw traces of smallpox and leprosy; cancer and Jiangsu fever and illnesses that he could not even name. The polite, ravaged faces turned away once the demon had passed, to resume their passive stare at the opposite wall. They were preserved in a dreadful patience. It is the manner of your death that marks you, Pin thought, not your life at all. What did anyone remember of his mother, except that she had been the chorus girl who had succumbed to a hemorrhage? How long had these spirits been waiting here? Pin wondered.

    To him, the ordered line of the dead seemed sad but proper, a progression from the chaos of their last illness to this quiet hallway. Some of them wore costumes that had gone out of fashion a hundred years before, and their wearers seemed frail and thin as paper, bearing their wounds and tumors with a dignity that only the dead can attain. The demon blew lightly upon the doors and they swung open without a sound.

    Inside, the Ministry of Epidemics was quiet. The demon closed the door behind her. Pin gazed around him. The fragile, courteous ghosts in the corridor seemed to present little threat. The office in which the demon stood was a cavernous room, divided by screens and cooled by fans set into the ceiling. The desks were hidden beneath mounds of paper; Pin recognized the red seals and ornate parchment coils that were thrown into the graveyard fires to placate the restless dead. Presumably, this was where they ended up.

    "Oh, so much to be done," someone mused.

    "I have to speak to Lu Yueh," the demon said.

    From around the corner of a desk stepped a small elderly gentleman. "Good afternoon," he said.

    "Good afternoon. I need to make an