“Did you steal from him?” Michael was taken aback by what the man said. He could hardly imagine the bandit Wuzha was himself the victim of a looting frenzy.

  “Those are spoils of war. We didn’t take a dime from the regular people. The Germans and their associates are our enemies! — I was so close to the battleship…” Suddenly, his face twisted in sad memory of his last moments. “I was almost within reach of the HMS Triumph. Imagine if I could only load all that treasure onboard with me. I could almost swim to it!” He cried, and presently water spluttered out of his opened mouth. The man clutched at his own throat and gasped desperately. He was drowning.

  Michael shook his head in pity and leaned back. He never wanted to see the tortuous faces of souls when they re-experienced the horrors of the last moments before their deaths, hallucinations that would never go away as long as they hold on to the world of living and don’t let go.

  “Admiral, I encourage you to think beyond your past life. It’s over now. You must learn to repent before it’s too late. If you don’t reflect on what you have done wrong before they take you to the Ten Tribunals, you will have grave punishments.”

  “What have I done wrong?!” The admiral’s voice boomed from the other side of the wall. “Destroying the enemy to protect the interest of our Empire is my job. If killing the enemy is condemned, then who shall be left to protect the Queen? I do everything for the crown and glory!”

  Michael did not want to get into a discussion of right and wrong about wartime activities between nations. He was lucky to be working in modern times Hong Kong where there hadn’t been any souls of war criminal coming his way. He might not know how to judge war crimes, but there was one thing he was certain about the man, “Your vanity and pride that will make you suffer till eternity.”

  “Nonsense! I’ll find a ship and take everything back to England. And I’ll slay Wuzha Sam. Eternal glory will be mine!” The admiral basked in the beautiful hallucination and laughed, throwing his head back and his arms in the air. He was reluctant to acknowledge that the road had ended for him. Very soon he would be sent for his turn at the Ten Tribunals, and there would be no turning back.

  “Young master!” Michael heard the Black Commissioner shouted. “Commander Zhizhu is here! We must leave at once!” He felt a hand grabbed him by the arm and a black cloak of rotting stench enveloped him, snuffling the flames on his fingers. The belch of the Black Commissioner was so powerful Michael could hear the Admiral choked within his cell.

  The city guards may not see them in the darkness, but Commander Zhizhu was a reformed spider demon. She could see with through scents. As the whiff of smells from Michael’s noble blood stimulated the sensors one by one on her right, the Commander knew immediately to veer right for her prey. Her guards followed her by listening to the shuffling and clomping of her eight furry feet closely.

  “You can’t hide from me!’ The commander threatened. This was her turf. Not only was her magic powers superior to that of the Celestial magistrate from the tiny island of Hong Kong from the thousand years of training, she had also been secretly sucking the energies of weakened spirits they locked up here waiting for their turns at trials. Everything was under her control.

  Yet she had forgotten one thing, that she was a demon after all, and all demons were susceptible to a single piece of yellow paper with a restraining spell written on it in hurry with the blood of a saint, Michael the unborn, that Black Commissioner had flown out of nowhere and stuck on her head.

  “Tian Xia Tai Ping!!” Black Commissioner chanted an incantation that was also the four characters written on his tall hat, ‘Peace Be On Earth’ in Chinese. It activated the power of the cursive spells.

  Frozen suddenly, her forward momentum caused her whole stiffened body to crashed into a wall and smashed the shell of her skull. “ARRRGGHH!” She cried, unable to move under the control of the yellow spell paper.

  Unaware of their commander’s plight, the guards behind her slammed into her bodice as the piece of paper got scrapped off her head on impact with the wall. In a mad frenzy to right herself, the poor guards got shoved, kicked and trampled under her many feet.

  “Let’s go!” Michael said to the Black Commissioner and rushed everyone up the steps out of the dungeon towards the light at the entrance of the gaol. When they got to the mouth of it, they could see more city guards were rushing up the stony steps for them. The Black Commissioner looked at Michael knowingly, who peered at the steep cliff on the other side of the mountain, gauged the risk for a moment, and gave a confirmatory nod to the commissioner.

  Swiftly, the commissioner gathered everyone and wrapped his long and useful tongue around their waist.

  “Three, two, one!” He counted, and he jumped off the cliff, carrying everyone with him. He spread his arms out like wings and then he realized something was missing, his magic black cloak that was supposed to act as their parachute!

  The Vision

  “Where is Michael?” Elise asked to the White Commissioner as they wounded their way down to the port where Big Eye Fish was. They had chosen to take cover in the thick fog of spirits by hiding in plain sight.

  The Ghost City at the moment was still bustling with festive activities from Yulan Festival and paid the fleeing group no heed at all. Commotions were common sight at the peripherals of the Hell Gate after all, and none was suspicious of them. The took advantage of moving close to where the smokes of souls were the thickest, such as the markets and the temples, so that their scents could not be so easily traced. The downside was the low olfactory ‘visibility’.

  “I can’t see anything!” She fanned the air in front of her. The bracelet on her wrist rattled.

  The White Commissioner had telepathic connection with his partner. He shut his eyes for a moment to clear his internal vision. What he saw, however, surprised him. — A stumbling Black Commissioner, or someone in his clothing, was moving awkwardly through the forbidden forest in the undeveloped side of the Capital Mountain. Michael and the others were nowhere in sight, and Black seemed to have completely lost his way.

  Unable to believe what he saw, he scanned for the closest offerings and spotted a giant bronze pot on the side of the road crowded with tourists offering incenses to the spirits of the Ghost City. He loomed over the pot without them noticing and sucked in a mouthful of it. The offering invigorated him. He closed his eyes once more and concentrated his thoughts on his companion. And this time, he could see the Black Commissioner, together with the young master and their wards, rolling off the other side of the mountains, their bodies bouncing down from one boulder to another before they landed eventually on a rocky beach. Above them, a group of city guards were conversing franticly and making orders to their eagles for his master’s capture.

  “They’re on the other side of the mountain,” White Commissioner said to Elise. “We must hurry!”

  Then without waiting for her consent, he carried Elise in his arm and leaped on to the edge of the giant bronze incense pot. From there he jumped above the crowd to another one across the road, then to another one in the direction of the quay in great speed. Behind him, the crew of the ship followed. Their sudden movements and use of magical strength attracted the attention of two patrolling city guards who rushed after them, but White Commissioner easily outpaced them. He placed Elise on the bow of the Big Eye Fish and went back to fight their followers as the captain and the crew also started to arrive and climbed on deck.

  “Get the ship ready for sailing!” He shouted at the crew. One of the marines immediately went about pulling up the anchor, as another lowered the sail. The captain rushed to the bridge with the quartermaster and prepared their route.

  “All of you, come away from the ship!” They recognized that it was the Big Eye Fish from Hong Kong, which had been temporarily quarantined due to an earlier dispute with the British warship Imperieuse. “Don’t make us use forces!” One of the patrol shouted at the White Commissioner who stood between them and the ship.

  White Commissioner smirked and pulled out a fan hidden in his sleeves. With one flicker of his wrist, he produced a gust of wind so strong the patrols were blown a mile away. Behind him, the wind had caught the sails of the Big Eye Fish also. It struggled to move away from the dock. The commissioner untied the ship from the dock anchor pole and sprung on board himself.

  The Eagle

  Giant shadows appeared over their heads and shaded the city in waves. Maide looked up at the sky. Hungry vultures had been dispatched and were circulating the city, looking for their victims.

  “The guards have found out!” Maide made a guess and jumped down the structure before anyone could react. The cone-shaped hat and the neck of the cloak fell onto that of the psychic who was sitting right under Maide just a moment ago. Perspiring, the psychic scanned the people around him for any sign of sudden attention, but it seemed that because they, or the Black Commissioner was much taller than anyone else, the changed happened above their eye levels. If anyone spotted something, they might just assume that the commissioner merely shrugged.

  “Why did you come down?!” Nogai hissed at his brother. His sudden movement had made the structure wobbly. He shifted his body weight to balance the load on his shoulders and arms once again.

  “They have dispatched the eagles to capture us!” Maide fell in step with the skinny man who was shuffling his feet as fast as he could.

  “Really?!” Nogai lost his focus at the mention of hunting eagles and also lost his balance. Everyone came tumbling down on top of him and the he in turn on the skinny man, pinning him to the ground. Maide went over to peel the black cloak off and tied it around his waists, ignoring the surprised glances of people around him. If their positions hadn’t been known earlier, they were made known now.

  “We’ll move faster individually!” He helped the men up one by one. There was a horse stable not far from where he stood by the entrance of the market. “Come! Let’s take these horses!” He sprinted by the mares and started to untied them from the stand. The horse valet rushed over to stop him, but was quickly dismissed by a simple grunt in foreign tongue of the Mongol warrior. There were many horses, enough for all of them to have one each.

  “We can’t ride horses! Can you ride, Ian?” Chad shouted, and looked back at Ian. It was then he saw his best friend had his back turned against him, running back the way they came.

  “I need to go fetch Elise!” Ian shouted.

  “What?!” Chad cried after him, exasperated. Suddenly, he felt a hand grabbed him by the arm and flung him on horseback. It was the skinny man. The man kicked the flank of his horse and pulled the rein around so the horse trotting over to Ian’s side.

  “You’re not going back!” The man bent down and grabbed Ian by the waist, while behind him, a terrified Chad was hugged his chest tightly for balance.

  Kicking and screaming, Ian shouted, “we can’t leave the girl alone here!”

  “Don’t forget that she’s dead while we are not!” Even in total panic, Chad had a point.

  “She’s already on the Big Eye Fish!” The psychic shouted from the back of another horse and fell in step with theirs. He shared one with the chemistry teacher, who was equally as terrified being atop a galloping horse as Chad.

  “You’re not lying just to get me out of here?” Ian asked, hoping sincerely that it was true, for he had no plan as to how to get her out of safety himself after they meet, being a mere mortal in a city full of supernatural beings.

  “No!” The psychic assured him. “She’s onboard together with the crew. They’re setting sail! We must hurry!”

  “What happened to running away on our own?!” The arsonist asked weakly.

  The skinny man had thrown Ian in the direction of Nogai, the older twin. He landed at the man’s arms and was flipped on top of the horseback with one swift motion, as if he was made of feather. In an attempt to one-up Chad, he merely held on the leather strap on the horse’s saddle for balance. Chad made a face at him.

  “The young master must be in trouble! The vultures are sent for them, not for us!” The psychic explained his vision.

  “Really?! Then we shouldn’t be joining them! We should go off our own way!”

  “No! No!” Ian shouted before the group could align on it. “We’re going to join Elise at the ship, and we’re going back to Hong Kong!”

  Nogai turned to look at Ian with a look that was undecipherable. Maide knew what it was. Nogai wanted to go see their hometown in Persia, not go back to Hong Kong, where they had died in battle some eight hundred years ago.

  “Remember what Mr. Burke said about assisting the Hong Kong celestial court and joining the army? We’ll be shown extra leniency if we choose that path! And you guys won’t be forced down reincarnation and potentially be turned into a dog or a pig in your next life! Think about it! You won’t have to drink Lady Meng’s potion at the Nether Bridge and have all memories of your time on earth wiped out! Isn’t all these reasons enough?”

  Nogai focused his gaze on the road ahead. They had almost reached the quay. He agreed with the man. If they were captured, which was only a matter of time, they would be forced down the path of no return. He had lived more than eight centuries with his brother, and before that with his family and comrades. He wouldn’t trade anything for those memories.

  “Who wants to be an army when you can just go free?!” The arsonist tried to appeal to the sense of the psychic with who he shared a horse, but the psychic ignored him. The psychic lived according to the near future he saw in his vision. He was unaccustomed to switching strategies and having his own opinion. “Seriously, people!” The arsonist blurted.

  “Don’t be a coward!” Maide shouted, as his horse rammed into a wall of city guards between them and the dock. The guards were splattered in all directions from the force of impact. The others galloped down the end of the dock and jumped off their horses.

  “Ian?!” Elise noticed the commotion at the dock and leaned over the side of the ship! “Hey! Stop the ship!” She shouted and waved her arms hysterically at the captain, but the captain was busy instructing the quartermaster how to make a sharp turn around the shallow waters. The naval officers on deck were too junior to move without the orders of the captain. They froze on the spots and refused to give Elise a hand.

  Elise rolled out the rope ladder that was tied to the side of the ship on her own as fast as her clumsy hands could, doing this for the first time. It fell to its side, but now already brushing the surface of the water that was getting deeper and deeper as the ship moved away.

  Ian jumped into the water without thinking twice and swam frantically towards it, Chad and the arsonist followed suit, but they couldn’t get near. Desperate, Elise tried to repeat the earlier feat and let the bowsprit sprung out to the complaining hoots of the cold-blooded naval officers, but it was too high above the water. None of the swimmers could reach it. The captain had finally noticed what she was doing, but he was reluctant to slow down the ship. They had to save their master on the other side of the mountain. That was the first priority.

  The Mongolian twin might be excellent horse riders, but they were stumped by the churning sea water and could only stand by the edge of the dock in despair. The psychic, however, saw what they had to do already. He pointed at the eagle swooping down on them and shouted to the twins. “Catch it!”

  Maide and Nogai understood what they had to do immediately.

  Maide whistled a signal that he had made to his hunting eagle from the eight hundred years ago. It was sharp and ears-piercing. Despite what he expected, the psychic was unexpected by the pain that pierced his ears and had curled up on the ground bracing his head.

  To everyone’s surprise, the eagle retracted its wings and landed peacefully in front of them on the dock, its head cocking to listen to the curious tunes the warrior was making. Nogai went over gingerly and murmured a series of Mongolian words to it. At first the psychic wasn’t sure it would work, but suddenly the bird blinked, and pushed his fluffy head towards the warrior and purred.

  Nogai put his hand on the bird’s and stroked its feather gently.

  “Amazing!” Ian shouted to Chad who had also turned around to look at it in the water.

  The older twin was enjoying playing with the bird, but there would be time for it. Quickly, he pointed at the men bobbing in the sea, and ordered it to go. The big bird flapped its wings twice. Nogai and Maide, with the psychic carried on his shoulder, ran on to the talons of the big bird and were lifted off into the air. Nogai slipped down and hung himself with one arm onto the bird’s finger when they were directly above the heads of the swimmers and pulled them up. They dropped themselves on deck of the Big Eye Fish as the bird flew over it.

  “What on earth!” The captain shouted, his spectacles dropped lower on the bridge of his nose as he saw the motley crew on board of his ship. He motioned his officers to go recapture these men and put them back in the cellar.

  “Where’s he going?” Ian asked no one in particular when he noticed that Nogai was still hanging onto the claw of the big beast as it lifted off to go.

  “He’s going to save the young master,” Maide said proudly and took a look around. The shocked expression of the naval officers staring at them with their hands in their mouths made he want to laugh.

  “Scram!” He blurted, in no mood to be locked up by the less incompetent once again. He was going to sit wherever he wanted on the ship this time.

  “Give them a hand!” Elise shook her bracelet and Jade zipped out of it. Being a natural caregiver, she immediately took it upon herself to help the men get on their feet and get water wrung out of their wet clothes. The snake woman had also crawled out of it. Spotting the pregnant woman of exceptional beauty, Maide went over to help her to the bench on the side of the ship.

 

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