Shanghai Sparrow Read Online Free

your Ladyship.”
    “Explain.”
    “A child has spent hundreds of hours searching for this pebble. She has collected and discarded stone after stone, to find the perfect one. She knows it must be perfect. She has built a cairn upon the grave of her little cat; this stone is to mark the apex. She has ignored calls to supper, she has searched in the rain and as darkness fell, and despite scoldings and beatings. Only if she found the perfect stone could she finish the shrine, and release her grief.” He paused, and added, “She is seven years old.”
    “Hmm.” The scales on her slippers became still, the colours those of a lake beneath an empty sky. He kept his eyes lowered.
    “Seven,” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “A significant number, even to them.”
    “So I believe,” the fox said, and silently cursed himself. A misstep.
    “You do not believe; you know.” But her tone was musing, not yet dismissive.
    “Yes, lady.”
    “At such an age, constancy of that nature is a rarity among them.”
    “Indeed.”
    “A pity to waste it upon a cat.” She disliked cats; those with the knack passed between the mortal and magical worlds without shame, they refused to grovel, and they could go where she could not.
    “Alas.” The fox himself admired cats; they tended to be, like himself, survivors.
    “Now, little fox.” She bent down and put one long, pale finger beneath his chin, tilting his head up so that he must look into her eyes. “You know that if you were wrong, on a matter of such delicacy, I would be... displeased?”
    Enough to skin me alive and hang me writhing by my own pelt from the arm of your throne, to provide amusement to your guests for a hundred mortal years? He let a little of his genuine terror show, but only a little. Though, of course, she would use fear, she did not bask in it. She far preferred adoration. He narrowed his eyes as she scratched his chin, and let a small moan of pleasure escape his throat.
    “Good. Then fetch it for me.” She sat up. “And when I have it, you may receive a gift of your own.”
    “Ma’am.”
    The fox bowed and danced his way out of the Presence, careful to display nothing but delight. Smugness was something the Court preferred to keep entirely to themselves.
    The child would know something had changed, of course, when she next visited her little shrine. The heart, the soul, the intention would be gone. What was left would be just a stone. She would probably believe the change was in her, the first dulling of the gemlike passions of childhood.
    With the cat, who might choose to be irritated, he would have to make other accommodation. Find something it wanted, or could be persuaded it wanted, and obtain it – or provide a means of getting it. That was what the fox did, and he was exceptionally good at it.

 
    Shanghai
     
     
    H OLMFORTH RETURNED FROM booking his flight at the aerodrome to find a letter lying on the table. His houseboy was packing, flipping crisply folded shirts into a clean but battered leather case reinforced with polished wooden struts.
    Holmforth opened the letter.
     
Dear Sir,
Further to your enquiry of the 18th December, we regret to inform you...
     
    As he read on, his fingers tensed on the discarded envelope, crushing it.
    No.
    “Massa wanchee tea?” the houseboy said.
    “No. Leave that. Get out. Out, I said!”
    The man bowed, and scurried away.
    Holmforth flung the crumpled envelope into a corner, and scanned the letter again with eyes that felt hot and dry.
    Lathrop was dead. Dead! And just as he might have been useful!
    He would not be thwarted. But who else could he find to operate the thing? Wu Jisheng was no possibility – he was fanatically loyal to his hopeless, crumbling mess of an Empire. That, presumably, was why he had risked the wrath of the influential Iron Hats, with their loathing of Occidental technology and innovation and everything else. Holmforth could have brought them down on Wu Jisheng’s head easily enough, but