Mrs Pa was relieved when they reached Sulai-Ba, although this time they were coming through the back entrance rather than the front steps. It brought back a strong feeling of déjà vu, although last time she had been to the temple, to collect Precious Dragon, there had been that odd detached sense of dreaming. And now it was as though everything was hyper-real: the dome of Sulai-Ba etched against the sky in sharp relief, iron-gray against morning gold. She felt that she had lost track of the time, somehow, that it should be evening, or a different season. She had been cast adrift on the world and she was glad that Mhara was there. Apart from Precious Dragon himself, Mhara seemed more real than anything else.
"What do we do now?" she said to Mhara, who was waiting for her to catch up.
"We go inside." He put out a hand and steadied her. "Are you all right?"
"I'll be fine," Mrs Pa told him, "as long as Precious Dragon is."
"Grandmother?" the little boy said. His eyes were round. "I'm starting to remember things."
"What sort of things, Precious Dragon?" Mrs Pa said.
"Clouds. And storms. Having to make a choice. But I don't know what it was."
"Do you still want to go back in here?" Mrs Pa asked. Now that they were actually standing before Sulai-Ba, with the iron wall of the temple rearing up over their heads to the broken dome, she suddenly thought: What if he goes away? He had come to this world through Sulai-Ba, after all, Mai's child from Hell. What if this whole strange and uncomfortable journey was no more than the mechanism to send him back where he belonged? She was about to voice her doubts to Mhara when Precious Dragon swung around and looked at something beyond her, something behind—and Mrs Pa looked, too, and saw a sight that made her mind up with lightening speed, for the blackened avatars of the kuei were standing there, in broad morning sunlight, eleven of them in a row and grinning red.
Mhara said, "Go. Go now, I'll hold them as long as I can."
Mrs Pa hesitated, but only for a moment. Then she clutched Precious Dragon by the hand and dragged him as quickly as she could up the back steps to the temple entrance. The door was ajar. With a last look back at the kuei, she forced her way in, shoving Precious Dragon ahead of her. Then she slammed the door shut with all her strength. The last glimpse she had of the outside world was of Mhara on the steps, a blue-clad figure drawing the powers of daylight into himself, as the kuei closed in.
Inside the temple, it was calm and quiet, just as before. Mrs Pa and Precious Dragon did not stop, but ran through the vaults, past rows of skulls on top of enormous jars, past strange skeins of what might have been moss. In one of the vast inner chambers they came across something that resembled a shed skin, still faintly gleaming ivory and blue: scales skimming across the stone floor in a slippery mass. Precious Dragon stared at it and Mrs Pa had to pull him away.
After a little time, they found themselves on the bank of a canal. There was no way across and it looked dark and deep.
"What are we going to do, Precious Dragon?" Mrs Pa whispered. She cast a fearful look over her shoulder, expecting to see the shadows of the kuei slink around the corner, but nothing was there. The temple was silent, echoing with the lapping of water.
"I—remember something. Down here."
Precious Dragon led Mrs Pa through a small, cramped entrance. "I've been here before," the boy whispered.
Mrs Pa was about to say that this was surely where she had collected Precious Dragon that first time, from the skeleton of whatever beast had lain here, for the columns of the vault looked the same. But then she saw that the floor was empty; there was no skeleton here.
"This is the place," Precious Dragon said with conviction.
"Which place is that?" Mrs Pa asked. Precious Dragon pointed.
"Look."
There was the statue of a dragon on a pedestal in the far corner of the room. An Imperial dragon, with whiskers and open mouth and bulging eyes, rearing up on two stout hind legs and holding up a clawed paw. The paw was empty.
"That's it," Precious Dragon whispered.
As he spoke, something rustled at the door through which they had come. Mrs Pa turned and her heart dropped. A kuei was crouching in the entrance, with one hand placed on the ground. Its lensed head swung to and fro, but the lenses were fixed on Precious Dragon.
"Grandson?" Mrs Pa said.
"We'll find out, won't we." Precious Dragon said, in response to a question that she had not asked, and he ran forward. The kuei opened its red mouth and gave a weird whistling cry. Another bounded through the entrance to crouch beside it. Mrs Pa put her hand to her mouth, too frightened to even scream. Precious Dragon clambered up the pedestal but he could not reach the statue's empty paw.
"Grandma!"
Mrs Pa had not known that she could move so swiftly. She picked Precious Dragon up in her arms and hoisted him high enough to reach the claws of the dragon. The kuei moved, as if her own motion had broken whatever spell they were under, but as they bounded forward, Precious Dragon spat the pearl into his hand and placed it between the dragon's claws.
Time stopped. Mrs Pa looked directly down into the storm-riven eyes of the kuei. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the dragon and her grandson blur, whirring as swiftly as a hummingbird's wings as they merged. She cried out. Precious Dragon vanished, as completely as if he had never been. But the stone dragon was coming alive, stretching, roaring, growing, and seething, down from the pedestal toward the kuei.
The kuei shrieked. Roiling clouds of darkness boiled out of the lenses of their eyes and enveloped Mrs Pa. Blindly, she groped out and touched something cool and scaled and huge, that still somehow reminded her of a small child. She clutched at it and found herself falling forward, over the top of a round, hard surface. There was a snarling roar and a sudden iron smell. Thousands of legs stretched out over Mrs Pa's head as the kuei shot above her, and she ducked down onto the dragon's back, hanging on for dear life. The clouds cleared. Mrs Pa was carried up high beneath the ceiling of Sulai-Ba, the stone floor a dizzying span far below. The kuei were gone, the vault filled with coiling centipedal forms, bigger than anything she had ever seen, and that was when the floor of the temple gave way.