CHINA DOLL IV-- IRON CURTAIN
August 27, 1842
Laudanum. Paregoric. Opium Tincture. The mist from the poppy that brought with it the haze that the west so craved. They were mad about the drug, mad from the drug. Mad to be shipping it out of Hong Kong in vessels by the thousands ignoring the threats by the Qing government; threats because the Qing were sick. Sick of the English playing on the epidemic opium addiction of their armies. Sick of the British defying Chinese authority in their own country. And so they went to war…
All of this was far from the mind of Richard Brigton. Brigton, in all of his official glory, or as much official glory as the third naval officer in Her Majesty's vessel The Lottery was entitled to, was enjoying his day off on the isle of Hong Kong. They had done it now, yes by god they had. The Chinese were too damn scared to do a thing about it, in less than a week Hong Kong would belong to the Bloody British-- about time too-- and they'd have free reign over opium trade in the high east. Not that Richard cared too much about the Opium trade, well he loved a smoke of it here and again, but he was strictly a military man. However, this time it was different, once they had Hong Kong under their belts every man in the British Empire would be as rich as the Caliph of Baghdad. Richard decided he wouldn't mind a palace, he would rather enjoy it in fact, especially if it had a harem with all those desert lassies…
As if to give voice to his thoughts, a light lilting song drifted through the thick tropical jungle.
"In the east, lofty mountains Soar up to touch the blue sky…"
Intrigued, Richard wandered closer to the noise. He didn't mind the native maidens in the least.
"Between the peaks plunging voids, Lonely, remote, dark. This is not the work of a craftsman, These clouds were formed by nature…"
Peering through the thick greenery, Richard saw her. She was unlike anything he had ever seen before, her green kimono blending so beautifully into the lush green woods surrounding, she looked like some forest elemental out of a dream. Spread across her knees was a square instrument that she was playing like one would pluck a harp. She surrounded by an air of such magic and ethereality he felt the strong feeling that he had fallen through the barrier to another world.
"What is there in this scene, Which makes me feel the constant changes? Passing under the eaves of this great house, I can live out my allotted span."
Richard heard the pound of his heartbeats, just staring at her… at her unearthly beauty was enough. He felt as if he could live his whole life, suspended there, half-concealed behind a bush watching her. She laughed musically, like a bell, "You can come out, I know you're there."
Richard was too much under he spell to wonder about this statement, and he slowly walked into the clearing, and knelt at her feet. She smelt sickly sweet like poppies, like opium…
"What's your name, darling?" she said, her speech as much of a song as the earlier poem.
"Who are you…" was all that Richard could manage as she gave a playful laugh.
"They call me Sunü," she smiled benevolently, leaning down and putting the awe-struck Richard's head on her lap. Ever so gently she leaned down, so that her lips just brushed the collar of his uniform. "I want you to stay with me… forever."
Richard never even noticed the fangs sliding into his neck.
----
Sirius opened his eyes in some sort of bizarre winter wonderland. The brown tables, chairs and cabinets were now white, bathed in what looked like fresh snow but was actually glass shredded so thin it was like powder. Vix was bent halfway across the countertop, her face frozen in the middle of a silent scream. Isaac lay on the bar, his arms thrown in front of his face, as if trying to protect it. His hands were covered with a thin coat of glass. Orien was stock still, his cell phone in the middle of a drop, suspended indefinitely between floor and ceiling. None of them were moving.
With a shiver, Sirius extended his hand and poked Vix on the shoulder. It was like touching stone, she was cold, rock-hard, in all real respects, dead to the world.
"Sirius?"
Turning around, Sirius looked at Remus, who was unsuccessfully trying to pull Orien's cell phone out of midair.
He didn't get a chance to respond, for at that moment a man stepped through what had once been plate glass.
He stood for a split second, calmly brushing the glass-dust off the arms of his moth eaten black turtleneck, running a hand through his flyaway gray hair, while straightening the over-large square glasses that were sliding off the bridge of his nose. He looked, for all the world like an absent-minded professor but with the carriage of a 60 year old Renaissance man, surveying his work with an almost detached satisfaction.
Neither one of them moved-- breathed-- as the man took a further step into the room, his brown boots crunching on the shattered glass. With a shrewd look circumcising the diner, his piercing blue eyes fixed themselves on Sirius; only once before had he felt a gaze such as this; a gaze with such fierce predatorial power. That was the one and only time he had met Mad-Eye Moody.
"So?" Remus said, walking up from behind him to stand by Sirius, who was retaliating with a hostile gaze of his own. The man raised a single eyebrow... questioning.
"Who are you?" Remus tread carefully, his voice wary.
"What are you doing in my territory?" the man replied, his eyebrow arching like a snake.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Remus said slowly.
The man made no reply.
"Who are you?" Sirius spoke up for the first time, his voice rich with feral hostility.
"Jonathan Whimsy," he said, never faltering in his unblinking stare. The silence passed, its beats quickly becoming uncountable and innumerable as two stared at one, one at two, back and forth and upside down, locked in a unending visual confrontation.
"What do you want?" Remus finally broke; the effort of Whimsy's staring match fraying him along the edges.
"Isaac," Whimsy replied, tilting his head to the side in a purely reptilian movement.
"Why?" The words were barely out of Remus's mouth when Whimsy replied.
"I'm his uncle."
"You won't be able to move him," Sirius said, thinking of Orien's cell phone.
Remus was eyeing the old man shrewdly and a look of understanding slowly began to creep over his features. "It's like the Impediment Curse, isn't it? Only more... permanent, it stops time for people. You cast it."
Whimsy smiled coolly, "The Gravatuus Hex. It only works on Muggles."
"Muggle targeting curses were outlawed by the International Confederation of Wizards in the 1920s," Remus said calmly, regarding Whimsy with quiet accusation.
"All's fair in love and war."
Sirius recognized the quote, still warily watching the newcomer. "War?" He said brusquely, finding it unlikely that the "love" part was applicable to Whimsy.
Whimsy gave a knowing smile. "War," he conceded. Waiting a few more heartbeats until they were suitably uncomfortable, or at least more uncomfortable than they had previously been, Whimsy began to speak. "Have you heard of the Opium Wars?"
"I fell asleep that day," Sirius said curtly, his sardonic tone a danger signal Remus had long since learned to recognize.
"Funny." Whimsy sneered, his face an iron curtain carved of human flesh. "In the middle 1800s the British Empire fought a war against China for the control of the Opium Trade in the Far East. Her majesty won... and Britain got the jurisdiction of Hong Kong until 1997. The opium industry is still thriving here today, but there are two people fighting for its control. Myself, and a man named Su Naoto."
"You're a smuggler," Sirius sneered, his face darkening.
"I utilize the possibilities," Whimsy replied with all the polished grace of a politician. "And as a mass murderer, Mr. Black, you are in no condition to point fingers."
"What do you want with us?" Remus said hoarsely, knowing instinctively that Whimsy had a reason for telling them about his "utilized possibilities".
"With you," Whimsy said coolly. "Mr. Black is a little to recognizable to be of any immediate use to me."
Remus felt a prickling of anger, "And why should I make myself useful?"
"Because if you don't," said Whimsy coldly. "I'll have a dragon to every paper in Asia, even your quaint Daily Prophet, with the exact location of your friend here. I believe the current sentence is Dementor's kiss?"
Remus stood, just staring at Whimsy, whose cold blue eyes shone triumphant. With a wave of self-repugnance, he pulled an indispensable quill out of his pocket. Avoiding Sirius's gaze, he pulled a napkin off the bar and quickly jotted down a few lines. "This is where I'm staying. I'll meet you there when I get back."
Sirius's look of anger dissolved into one of outright disgust. "You're not going with him?"
Remus refused to meet his friend's boring stare, "I'll be back soon."
"Remus!" Sirius threw an arm at Whimsy. "He's a goddamn drug lord!"
Ignoring Whimsy's satisfied smirk, Remus looked up into Sirius's cloud of barely confinable fury. "Trust me."
"I'm coming with you," he replied, fiercely slamming Remus's hastily scrawled napkin down on the bar.
Whimsy raised an eyebrow. "Fine, I suggest an anonymity charm--"
"I wasn't asking for your permission!" Sirius growled.
Whimsy ignored him. "We'll dissapperate to my office. Grab Isaac."
At Sirius's threatening snarl, Remus strode over to the bar and simply beyond caring heaved Isaac over his shoulder. Whimsy made no sound, but looked more than intrigued at the sickly looking man carrying and unconscious body one handed. Staring shrewdly at Remus as if he was seeing him for the first time, he smiled. Then turning, Whimsy aimed his wand at Vix. "Envirate." With a whoosh of air, they disapperated.
----
The first thing Vix heard was a crash of breaking metal.
The second: a slight whisper of air.
The third: a scream she didn't even know she had began.
"Woman!" Snapping her jaws closed, Vix turned to Orien, crouched over the broken remnants of what had once been his cell phone.
Then it all flooded back to her; Isaac, the two Englishmen, the explosion... Glass was everywhere, covering the floors like a blanket of unwelcome snow. The entire front of her restaurant was in shambles, the brown cinder block wall charred black, and they were gone-- all of them-- Isaac, Padfoot, and Remus.
"Whimsy," Orien hissed, sniffing the air like some feral animal. "He did this."
"Shut up with your Whimsy rot," Vix snorted. The last thing she needed right now was Orien on the rampage.
"That boy was one of his," Orien sneered, not listening to her or even talking to anyone but himself. "The foreigners were in on it, they planted a bomb--"
But Vix ceased to listen, for on the bar, on a half-wrinkled napkin was a note, hastily scrawled in an almost illegible drivel.
Sirius-- 218 Ho Chi Mien, Apartment 2A
As Orien's rant simply became background noise, Vix, becoming more and more intrigued, picked up the napkin. Walking to the other side of the bar, she grabbed her coat, which was surprisingly still intact.
"Good-bye Orien."
She didn't even think he noticed as she slipped through the gaping hole in the plate glass.