As she reached out to lift and smash the planks aside, Asha listened carefully above the surface and below it. There were souls everywhere, people-souls thronging the dock above and crab-souls thronging the harbor floor beneath her feet, and all of them humming and ringing and clanging in her ears, but through the noise Asha focused on the water right in front of her and found the faint and fading murmur of one lone little boy.
She dove beneath the surface, driving her fists and feet through the flotsam surging up and down through the filthy harbor water. A red veil passed over her eyes, casting the world in warm crimson tones, but in that red world a dim white shape appeared. Asha kicked and clawed her way past the remains of two more crates, tearing through layers of cloth and smashing through jars and bottles that hung suspended in the water, neither rising nor falling. She found the boy just a few feet beneath the surface, spread-eagled and face-down with a small dark cloud near his head. He wasn’t moving.
For a brief moment, the sight of the boy refueled the anger in her heart and Asha felt the dragon stirring again, felt the throbbing in her temples where the spirit wanted its horns and the throbbing in her back where the spirit wanted its tail. In her mind, she repeated a few words of one of the chants that Priya had taught her and the dragon settled, a little.
Asha reached out and snaked her arm around the boy’s chest and surged toward the surface, dragging him upward. When she broke into the cool morning air and lifted the boy up beside her, a shout went up on the dock. She swam to the dock and glanced up at the sheer stone wall rising above the water. Then she reached up with one golden hand to grab at a crack in the wall, and hurled herself and the boy up onto the dock in a single motion.
She landed on her feet, but only just barely. Her ankles throbbed and she shivered as the water streamed down out of her thick black hair over her skin. The scales were gone, along with the anger and any thought of the doctors far away in the Ming Empire. Her only thought now was for the boy in her arms. A small crowd pressed in around her, arms reaching and hands pointing, voices muttering and clamoring. Asha wondered if anyone was going to go and fetch help. She doubted it.
The boy’s skin was cold and she couldn’t find his pulse or hear him breathing. Asha rolled him onto his stomach and roughly massaged his back to pump the water out of his lungs, and then rolled him back over. She struck his chest once, and then again. The boy stiffened and gasped, choking and coughing. She rolled him over again to let him spit out the foul harbor water on the stones. He looked up at her, eyes lidded and lips trembling. Asha nudged the dragon soul within her, just a bit, and then she exhaled gently over the boy’s face and neck and chest, and he stopped shivering as his lips regained a bit of color.
His eyes opened again and he said, “Your breath…”
“Hush. I know. It’s very hot.”
He shook his head. “Your breath stinks.”
Asha smiled.
3
A moment later three middle-aged women shouldered their way through the crowd of dock workers, shouting and slapping and swatting at the men to get out of their way. They encircled Asha and the boy with blankets and gentle caresses and wrinkled looks of concern, and Asha politely extracted herself and let them bundle up the boy and carry him off, away from the harbor.
After wringing out her hair, Asha picked up her shoulder bag and turned to walk back through the slowly dispersing crowd to find Priya when a harsh, rapid shouting drew her gaze back to the pile of broken crates. The two dock workers stood side by side, heads lowered, hats in their hands. The man doing the shouting was shorter than either of them, and heavier than both. He wore a dark green robe and belted at his considerable waist was a familiar short sword. The robed man stopped shouting for a moment, and one of the workers turned to point at Asha.
The man in green strode straight for Asha and began barking at her when he was still only half way to her. “You there! What did you think you were doing, smashing my wares, tearing my cloth? These are costly goods! They were worth a fortune!”
Asha slipped her left hand into her bag, feeling around for her scalpel. She inhaled slowly, reciting the tisarana in her mind as Priya had taught her.
I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the Dharma.
I take refuge in the Sangha.
The words were meaningless to her and to her token devotion to Shiva, but it was the repetition that mattered, the act of clearing her mind, of calming both herself and the soul of the monster inside her. She said, “If your things were so valuable, then you should have hired more careful men to handle them. And you should have invested in stronger crates. The crates broke on their own, and your men fell into them.”
“But the jars and cloth might have been salvaged if you had not destroyed them!” He pointed at the water.
She looked down and saw that where there had been a pile of half-crates and bolts and jars in a small island there was now a vast sea of tiny splinters and shards and shreds. “Oh that. Well, I had to save the boy’s life. Next time you should be more careful.” She turned to leave.
The man grabbed her wrist. “Next time you’ll be dead.” He drew his sword and the blade smoldered with a dark amber light.
Asha forgot the tisarana utterly at the touch of the man’s hand on her body and her mind sank into a white- hot pool of rage. Rage at the knowledge that this man carried a sun-steel sword, rage for all the innocent souls he had imprisoned in its blade, rage at all the people like him who strode through the world trampling human lives for their own petty desires.
In her heart, the golden dragon roared.
She turned back to him, seeing only a white figure against a veil of crimson. The man hesitated at whatever he saw in her face, but then he drove his sword straight at Asha’s chest. Just before it touched her skin, she caught the blade with her bare hand, her bare hand armored in golden scales and ruby claws. Dimly she felt the heat radiating from the steel in her hand, but only dimly.
“What? What are you?” the man stammered.
She could barely hear his words over the hammering of his heart in his chest. Asha constricted her fingers and claws around the sword and felt it warping, curling, bending, and twisting. Steam rose from her hand. The man let go of his sword as the blade snapped in half, the two pieces of it clattering to the cobblestones at their feet, the metal now dark and cold as the aether mist spilled out of it.
They’re free. All of the souls are free.
Asha’s vision shifted. The sky became bright blue and the road became pale gray. She looked at the man in the green robe, who had taken several uncertain steps backward. For a moment she imagined impaling him on the broken shards of his own sword, of shredding his flesh with her claws, of throwing his mangled corpse into the sea. She held up her blood-red talons in a curled half-fist.
“Asha?” Priya’s voice was soft but clear, and very near.
Asha swallowed.
I take refuge in the Buddha.
The golden scales on her hand melted back into her smooth brown skin, and the claws slipped back into her soft fingertips.
No, not the Buddha. Or Shiva, or any god. I take refuge in the forests. I take refuge in the mountains. I take refuge in the harmony of all living things. I take refuge in the wind and the water, and the sun and the stars.
The dragon’s spirit fell quiet, nestling back down deep inside her, returning to its own refuge within her soul. She shivered in her own skin, still dripping from the harbor. Asha exhaled and looked at the frightened man. “Go back to your masters in Alexandria. Tell them what I did here. Tell them to repent what they have done. And tell them that I am coming.”
“Why? What do you want? Who are you?” He stumbled back another step.
“I’m the woman hunting you. I’m the woman who isn’t afraid of you. And I’m the woman you can’t hurt.” She
