Shadow Pavilion

by Liz Williams

  Sniffing, badger made his methodical way around the edges of the room, snuffling beneath the edges of the drapes. The presence, however, was in the center of the room, hanging dankly above the dusty floor. It was a moment before badger remembered that he was supposed to be seeking this bug, not the remnants of something’s visit, and he knew a fleeting shame. Husband would not have allowed himself to become so easily distracted. But perhaps the two might be connected …

  He nosed aside a drape to see what lay behind: nothing, only a paneled wall, with no carving upon the black wood. As far as he could tell, the other walls were the same. There were no doors apart from the main one onto the street and this struck the badger as very odd; admittedly, he had ways of entering places which were not human ways—tunnels, for instance, struck him as wholly acceptable and yet Husband seemed to dislike them, for some reason—but this was a house in a human city, and it was curious to have no means of access into the rest of the building. Curious, and also unlikely. The badger began to hunt for other means of ingress.

  He turned from the drapes, intending to investigate the floor, when he realized that the lingering presence within the room was no longer a memory, but had become animate. Whoever or whatever had left it had returned. Something rushed through the room like a wind off a winter sea: harsh, sudden, and chilling. The badger took a step back, but the thing had gone. He had only an impression of something very sharp, with spines, and transparent.

  The badger found this stimulating. He bustled after the thing, which had vanished through the drapes on the opposite wall. Perhaps that was the answer: whoever lived in this building was incorporeal, and thus had no need of doors. The badger pulled the drapes aside all the same, expecting to find the same paneled wall that he had studied a short while ago.

  There was no wall there. Beyond the curtain lay an immense vista of industry: engines, smoking stacks, and sudden flickers of queasy flame. Hell! thought the badger, with a jolt, but he had no time to consider this hypothesis. Instead, something reached out a spiny hand, picked him up by the scruff of the neck, and bundled him into a sack. The badger, squirming around, sank his teeth into an inhuman hand and was rewarded with a yell, but next moment, his jaws closed on empty air. The sack closed around him, he was slung over and up, and the world went muffled and black.

  4

  Go was both relieved and dismayed to find Lara waiting for him on set the next morning. This was perhaps only the second occasion that she had turned up on time, let alone early, and Go had a profound distrust of changes in actresses’ behavior, particularly if they were this actress.

  “Paulie,” Lara cooed. She undulated upward and wound her hands around Go’s neck. “How sweet of you to speak to Beni. You’re both darling.”

  “Lara, my dear, you’re worth it,” Go said, with a heroic effort at sincerity. “We both know that. I think sometimes we don’t really appreciate you.” He tried to look contrite. It wasn’t a great performance, but Lara was clearly in the mood to be receptive. She dimpled (How did she do that? It was really quite weird.) and gave a small, shy smile. The old cliché about giving one’s best performance off set came to Go’s mind.

  “I’ve been reading the script,” Lara said. “I thought we could revise quite a lot of it, actually.”

  “Did you?” There’s a surprise.

  “There’s much more room for Ranee, you know. I thought she could appear in the scene with the terrorists.”

  “But Lara—that takes place in Laos, and your character is supposed to be in Delhi in the nick at that point.”

  There was the faintest suggestion of thunder in Lara’s eyes, the hint of stormclouds gathering. “It could be a flashback. Or a dream.”

  “Perhaps a hallucination?” Go said quickly. “These guys are supposed to be drug dealers, after all.”

  Just give her what she wanted, he thought, as Lara’s smothering jasmine perfume once again enveloped him. It was easiest in the long run, no matter how much it took out of you at the time.

  Filming proceeded fairly swiftly once the revised script—hashed together over a long and liquid lunch by Beni, Go, and one of the freelance writers—had been submitted.

  “There’s one good thing about having worked in porn,” Beni said to Go. “It gives you a good background in quick filmmaking. Quick and dirty.” He tried not to look smug at the joke.

  “There’s lots of good things about porn,” Go replied, gloomily. “Apart from the obvious. Have you noticed how much nicer everyone is? No airs and graces, no tantrums.”

  Beni shrugged. “They know they’re whores.”

  Go snorted. “Yeah. But do we?”

  “We do. Unfortunately, Lara doesn’t.”

  Go cast a nervous glance over his shoulder.

  “She can’t hear us, man,” Beni said. “She’s back at the studio.”

  “Lara seems to know all kinds of shit,” Go said. “Don’t underestimate her. Sometimes I think she bugs my clothes.”

  Beni looked at him. “Don’t get paranoid. She’s not a superhero.”

  “She thinks she is. Look …” Beni might be right but Go found himself lowering his voice all the same. “You and I were young when we found her, right? We were assholes.”

  “It was only four years ago,” Beni objected.

  Go refrained from saying that he felt as though he’d aged several decades since then. “We were young,” he repeated. “We thought we knew what we were doing.”

  Beni was silent and Go knew he’d struck home. “We’ve got to consider the future,” he added. At Beni’s anguished expression, Go knew that he’d been understood.

  “She’s a goldmine, man,” Beni said.

  “Yeah. But the mine’s flooding up fast. We have to make money, and get out.”

  “What are you saying? We should send her back where she came from?” Once again, Beni spoke too loudly for Go’s liking and Go hushed him.

  “Let’s talk about it another time, Beni. Not right now. We’ll go out for a drink, how about that?” Preferably in a lead-lined room. On a different continent.

  5

  Inari did not want to interrupt her husband. His head was bent over a mountain of paperwork that he’d brought home from the station and she knew, from the gentle perfume that rose from one of the piles of parchment, that some of the documentation had come from Heaven. The precinct was supposed to be working toward a paperless office, but they did not seem to be achieving their goal: perhaps it was this new development regarding the Celestials. Chen had not said very much about that, except to convey Mhara’s good wishes and to deliver an exquisite flower from the new Emperor. But Inari knew he was busy, and that was why she hesitated to interrupt him. She had to know, however.

  “Chen Wei?” she said, standing in the doorway of the little cubbyhole that served as Chen’s office. “Badger hasn’t come back yet.”

  At once, Chen gave her his undivided attention. He swiveled around in his chair and she could see concern in his face. “Hasn’t he? What about Zhu Irzh? Has he called? He was supposed to be picking badger up after a couple of hours.”

  “I’ve heard nothing,” Inari said. “Anyway, I think he’d have rung your cellphone.”

  “Well, just in case,” Chen remarked. He fished amongst the papers and checked the phone. “No, nothing.” He dialed a number, presumably the demon’s.

  “Zhu Irzh?” There was silence for a moment, then Chen said, “It’s me, Chen. When you get this, can you call me back? I’m at home.”

  Then he rung off. “Odd,” he said, frowning. “The answering service is on.”

  “Maybe something’s happened,” Inari said.

  “I don’t want to run around after either of them like a nursemaid,” Chen said. “They’re both reasonably competent. Well, mostly. But I also don’t think we can afford to be complacent.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Chen stood and picked up his jacket. “I’m going to talk to the precinct and then go down the
re. I’ll tell them to standby for back-up if I think I need it, but I don’t want to start a panic. What’s that Western expression? Cry wolf?”

  “Chen Wei,” Inari said, impulsively, “take me with you.”

  Chen opened his mouth and shut it again. She knew that his immediate reaction had been to refuse, and she appreciated the fact that he had, at least, considered it.

  “I know it might be dangerous,” she said. “But I have a responsibility to badger. He’s my family familiar, after all. If it wasn’t for me, he would not have gone to look for the bug.”

  “This is damn frustrating,” Chen said. “I wanted to treat him as part of the team, not send him into trouble. And I don’t want this to turn into one of those farces where Zhu Irzh goes to look for badger, and we go to look for Zhu Irzh, and everyone ends up missing.” He paused.

  “What exactly is this bug?” Inari asked.

  “I’ll tell you on the way,” Chen replied.

  “Sweatshops,” Chen said, once they were in the car and turning left into the maze of streets behind Shaopeng. He had already put through a number of calls to the precinct and this had reassured Inari, somewhat. But Zhu Irzh’s phone remained unanswered. “There are plenty of them in Singapore Three, as I’m sure you’re aware—some of them are legal and some of them aren’t. Over the years, we’ve seen waves of immigrants come into the city looking for work—from the mainland of China, from Laos, from other places in Asia. But never before from Hell.”

  Inari stared at him. “Hellkind have come here?”

  “Quite a number of them. Zhu Irzh and I busted a sweatshop ring last year which was run on similar principles, but the other way round—impoverished humans seeking work in the sweatshops of Hell. Actually, they were effectively being held prisoner, and that’s what seems to be happening now, but in reverse.”

  “Why are demons coming here?”

  “It’s the same old story, Inari. Work. Since the war, a lot of Hell’s industries just can’t afford to support a workforce—even though Hell technically won, the conflict with Heaven drained their resources to such an extent that a lot of demons lost their jobs. Also the industries in the lower levels were badly affected—Hell lost its main nuclear plant, for instance. I haven’t been back since, but Zhu Irzh has and he says things aren’t good—there are power cuts in the main cities every day now, and it’s seriously affecting Hell’s infrastructure.”

  Inari shivered. “I don’t know that that’s a bad thing.”

  “Perhaps not, from your point of view—a human point of view.” Chen smiled at the irony. “But it does displace people.”

  “How are the demons getting through?” Inari asked. “It’s not that easy to just go to and fro.”

  “That’s the problem. They’re being smuggled into the city and we don’t know how. Zhu Irzh has done some recon work, but it’s been pretty inconclusive. We don’t know who’s behind the demon-trafficking, whether they’re human or Hellkind. We suspect both—there must be some liaison between the two for it to work as smoothly as it has. But it’s been very difficult to find informers—even the usual suspects just seem too scared. Every time we follow up on a lead, we find an empty building and just enough evidence to show that Hellkind was there, but nothing we can really hang onto. Certainly not enough to build a case on, and without names, we can’t even begin to think about prosecuting.”

  He slowed to let an elderly couple cross the road, and fell silent. It was even more ironic, Inari thought. From what Chen had told her about his recent visit to the Heavenly Realm, part of Mhara’s goal was to bring the three worlds more closely together. And here they were, with workers from Hell coming into Singapore Three. She doubted whether it was quite what Mhara had in mind.

  She watched as the city slid by, endless streets, at first brightly lit as they passed along Shaopeng and through the downtown part of the city, but then increasingly dark and silent, with some streets looking almost deserted. Inari did not know this part of the city at all, although it featured fairly regularly in newspaper reports as the scene of various crimes, generally violent ones. She had never had reason to come here before, and even though she and badger both hailed from Hell, she could not help feeling vaguely guilty about sending it into such a place. She had not known … but then, she could have asked; regardless, the badger was hardly helpless.

  There had still been no news from Zhu Irzh. Inari knew, without asking, that this worried Chen. It wasn’t so much that something might have happened to Zhu Irzh—although that was an increasing possibility now that Zhu Irzh’s own mother was married to the new Emperor of Hell—but rather that Zhu Irzh might have done something. Got into trouble, and switched off the cellphone to cover it up. It had happened before. Inari did not want to voice these thoughts, however, as she was pretty sure that Chen shared them.

  Looking through the windscreen of the car, she saw that they had come to a bleak district of what appeared to be warehouses. Inari blinked at a sudden bite of déjà vu: surely she had been here before, that tall building, black as a heart, had once borne the blood-colored awning of a remedy store … Again, a blink, for this was not Hell. But the feeling remained with her, a small, sharp memory like a pin in the fold of a dress, that cannot be found and which pricks you when you least suspect it.

  Shortly after they turned a corner into a long row of go-downs, Chen stopped the car and called the precinct.

  “Who’s that? Ma? Excellent.” He listened for a moment. “Thank you, Sergeant.” Turning to Inari, he said, “They’ve found the car that Zhu Irzh was using, but there’s no sign of the demon or the badger.”

  “Now we’re here, I’ll see if I can contact badger,” Inari said. It was a long time since she had used this particular piece of magic, a long time since she’d had to. She pulled a long, stiff whisker out of an inner pocket and breathed on it. The whisker burst into a small, cold flame and Inari closed her eyes. “Be careful,” she thought she heard Chen say, but in the next moment she knew that she had heard his mind, not his voice.

  Dark streets. A locked room, strangely hushed and still. Curtains hanging like heavy strips of flesh, in some odd manner, almost alive. The scent of badger, coming through the flame of the burning whisker, old and earthy and animal, perhaps unpleasant to anyone who was not used to it.

  “Badger?” Inari whispered. There was the faintest breath of a reply, a muffled anger, murderous inhuman rage that blazed as slow and icy as magic. Earth magic, the sorcery of tunnels and below-the-ground. Badger magic—and then it was gone, cut off as neatly and completely as though a door had slammed shut. The flicker of the flame touched her fingers, cold-burning through to the bone, and in a breath of smoke Inari’s eyes opened and the whisker was gone.

  “He’s not on Earth,” Inari said, dismayed.

  “Then where?” Chen said, aloud, but he did not have to speculate. “Hell. He’s been taken to Hell. If you are right.”

  “I think I am. It felt—familiar.”

  “Then where is Zhu Irzh?” said Chen through his teeth. He opened the door of the car. “Inari, forgive me, but please—will you stay here?”

  “If badger comes back—”

  “Then still, stay in the car. Badger can look after himself.”

  “So can I,” Inari said, but she spoke softly and the slam of the car door took the words away.

  6

  The Emperor of Heaven opened the doors of the wardrobe and stared glumly at the contents. The wardrobe was huge: as large as many apartments back on Earth, and filled with thousands of floor-length robes. Crimson, jade, and gold. Dragons and phoenixes, twisting in perpetual embroidered flight. Pearls and garnets and emeralds, fire-flashing in the cascading light of Heaven’s noon.

  Mhara thought: T-shirt and jeans. It would not do, and he knew it. He walked into the wardrobe and rummaged through the stiff folds until he found something at the very back of the room. It was silk, and the color of a very pale twilight. It had no ornamentation. He pulled
it on and turned to the mirror. His reflection, something in which he had little interest, came as a surprise. An ethereal monk, barely present against the mirrored walls, despite being reflected to baffling infinity.

  She was not impressed. He had not expected her to be.

  “Mha—Emperor! Where is the Robe of Ten Thousand Years?”

  “I’ve no idea, Mother. Somewhere in the closet, I expect.”

  “But what is it doing there? Why aren’t you wearing it? Your father, when he was crowned—”

  “I,” said Mhara, very quietly, “am not my father.”

  “This is a ridiculous piece of posturing! Such pretence of humility is all very well in front of humankind, but it is hardly appropriate in the Imperial Court.”

  Mhara turned to face her. The Dowager Empress, until so recently the Empress of Heaven, sat at a small table near a high, arched window. Clouds rolled golden beyond, illuminating the brocade folds of her gown. Her face was as he had always known it: serene, calm, lovely, the dark hair intricately braided down her back. Like a mask, he thought. The bitterness of her speech could almost be seen: coiling out into the air and curdling its sweetness. But none of this showed on her face and that, he thought, was no good thing.

  “You have not understood me,” Mhara said, and at his tone, the Dowager Empress at last fell silent. “I am not my father. You will not, madam, have need of instructing me. I am neither senile nor insane.” Nor am I weak, although he did not think he needed to say that.

  The Dowager Empress said, “I—”

  “It is time for you to take your place, Mother,” Mhara said. He glanced at a small silver bell and it rang, just once. Immediately the maids were there, fluttering around the Dowager Empress like butterflies. There was a flash in his mother’s eyes that might have been fury, or even hate, and that was honest at least, but the next moment it was gone. And so was she, borne away amid a rustling crowd of maidens.