Blue Dragon

Louise, don’t do this to me, please,’ I said. ‘I won’t hurt your baby, I swear.’
    Louise grinned. ‘I just want to eat in peace, Emma. The food’s here.’
    ‘Really?’ I said.
    She reached across the table and gave me a push. ‘Sure. I’m not worried.’
    ‘I am.’
    ‘Don’t be, you’ll be fine.’
    She waited until the plates had been placed on the table and the waitress and Beanie had gone, Beanie carefully closing the door behind her.
    ‘Matt, go with her,’ Louise called at the door. ‘I’ll be safe with the Dark Lady.’
    ‘Ma’am,’ Matt said from the other side of the door.
    ‘Does the ring talk?’ Louise said.
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘Show me.’
    ‘Oh, no, Louise, it’s asleep right now. Don’t wake it up, it’s a pain in the neck.’
    ‘The stone sleeps ?’
    ‘It’s a Building Block of the World. It’s really old. Like an old man, it sleeps a lot.’
    ‘It’s a what?’
    I sighed. ‘You know the story of the Dark Goddess?’
    ‘Nope,’ she said, shaking her head over the udon.
    ‘Okay,’ I said, and took a deep breath. I tapped the stone.
    ‘Yes, Emma?’
    ‘Say hello to Louise,’ I said.
    The stone didn’t say anything.
    ‘It’s really rude sometimes, don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘Okay. Anyway, a long time ago there was a battlebetween two elementals, or between a demon and an elemental.’
    ‘Two elementals,’ the stone said. ‘Thunder and water.’
    ‘Was that it?’ Louise said.
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘It sounds English.’
    ‘I know. Anyway, one of them knocked down one of the Four Pillars holding up the Heavens, so the Dark Goddess, Nu Wa, had to build it again. She collected stones, made a new pillar, destroyed all the monsters that had entered the world and were terrorising her children—’
    ‘Her children were humanity. She created humanity,’ the stone said. ‘She fashioned the human race from clay. But she became tired, and after a while simply dipped a rope in the mud and threw the clay to make people. Noble people are those she created directly. Common people are those from the rope.’
    ‘It’s hard to tell what’s true and what isn’t with this stuff,’ I said. ‘And there are so many different versions—’
    ‘She also started the Shang-Zhou wars because the Shang King insulted her,’ the stone said. ‘She was mortally offended by his disgraceful behaviour, and sent a fox spirit to take over the body of his favourite concubine and lead him into performing such atrocities that his own generals rebelled and toppled him. It led to a civil war so vast that the whole country was plunged into anarchy. Many, many people died. At the end of the war, the mightiest and most courageous warriors were all Raised.’
    ‘Xuan Wu was one of them, wasn’t he,’ I said.
    ‘Yep,’ the stone said. ‘In human form. The White Tiger too. A lot of them had their human forms Raised because of their noble deeds.’
    ‘Was the fox spirit called Daji?’ I said quickly.
    ‘Yes, she was. But back to me, I’m the important one,’ the stone said, and Louise snorted.
    ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘when the sky fell down, the Dark Goddess built a pillar to hold it up. She had some stones left over from building the pillar, and they are old and powerful and extremely annoying .’
    ‘How did you come by this one?’ Louise said.
    ‘I think Xuan Wu’s had it for a very long time,’ I said.
    ‘Yes,’ the stone said. ‘A very, very long time.’
    ‘Go back to sleep,’ I said.
    ‘I certainly will,’ the stone said. ‘I was in the middle of a lovely dream: I was a mighty snow-capped peak with the frozen corpses of failed mountaineers adorning my slopes.’
    ‘Is it useful for anything?’ Louise said. ‘Or is it just annoying?’
    ‘It can come in handy, but I really wonder sometimes whether it’s worth the suffering.’ I shrugged. ‘Enough.’
    ‘Yeah, that was the last one,’ Louise said. ‘I thought you could do all of those things, so I mostly win. But some of the stories they tell about you are obviously ridiculous. Like, they say that you took out a level fifty demon with your bare hands—’
    ‘Yep,’ I said through the udon.
    ‘Damn,’ she said softly, ‘I really should have brought a video camera. They say you told the King of the Demons to his face to piss off—’
    ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘You should have seen the look on John’s face.’
    ‘John? You call the Emperor John ?’ she said, incredulous.
    ‘It’s his English