Shadow Pavilion

by Liz Williams

  Mhara thought: Enough. There was a problem there, he knew. No one would believe that the Empress of Heaven could sour like a too-old wine, but then again, no one had believed that the Emperor of Heaven could be mad. Old gods, it seemed to him, do not wear well. Look at Senditreya, deranged bovine goddess of dowsing, whose rampage through the city of Singapore Three had caused so much destruction.

  Who needs Hell, when you have a Heaven like this one? Yet, gazing out across the Imperial City, it all looked so tranquil: the turrets and pavilions outlined against the gold-and-blue. Changeless, eternal, and that was the root of the problem.

  Things are going to have to change.

  Below, the Imperial Palace was crammed with beings. On the long walk up the marble hall, echoes flickering like moths, Mhara looked calmly upon dragons and spirits, goddesses and lords. Their faces had become remote, statue-still, yet imbued with supernatural presence. All were there in their primary aspects: one was not permitted to send an avatar to a coronation. Only one smiled at him: Kuan Yin, Lady of Compassion and Mercy, who sat in a column of jade robes as though conjured from the green salt sea. And only one winked: a dragon, green-gold eye twitching. Mhara repressed a smile of his own and walked on.

  At the throne, several anxious courtiers awaited him. It struck him that they might have believed that he wouldn’t show up, that he would have been found later, perhaps, down on Earth, pottering about the little temple that was all the worship he would permit, putting plants in soil. He had, briefly, considered it. But there was an ancient magic inherent in the coronation itself, the weight of words spoken, answers given. When you become Emperor of Heaven, or Hell, you write upon the universe itself, a litany that can never be erased, that seeps into the fabric of reality, effecting change. He could not, yet, afford to turn down that kind of power. But he preferred to wear it lightly.

  He repeated the conjurations after the whispered prompts of the courtier, until the old man realized that there was no need for coaching. The words came from nowhere, as if murmured by the stars, settling into his head, and he heard his own voice, calm and collected. He glanced once at the Empress and her face was marble-still, but he could see the seethe of thoughts behind it.

  A problem. Well, now was not the moment to deal with it.

  He uttered the final words of the litany and everything stopped, the world’s beating heart pausing for a limitless second. And for that second, Mhara could see everything: the clouds of spawned stars, the specks of dust on the paw of a cat, the beat of blood in his mother’s head, the depths of ocean and the grains of desert sand. Despair and beauty and silence and terror and the relentless drive of the world, the ruthlessness of life surging on, bearing everything in its wake.

  And then, it began again, and Mhara was Emperor-crowned now.

  They sang praises until the long day of Heaven faded into soft dusk and Mhara went alone to his chamber, telling the servants that assistance would not be necessary. Tomorrow, the tasks of true governance would start and he needed to speak to Robin—priestess, beloved, and ghost—about her appearance in Heaven, if she chose. He did not think his mother would like that. Tough.

  But for now, he needed peace and silence. There was something he had to think about. It was not the desolate churn of suns in the furthest reaches of space, nor the cries of species becoming extinct in the world below. It was not the manifold woes of humans or the fears of the lords of Hell.

  During that moment of coronation, of the universe’s validation of its supposedly most august son, Mhara had in that all-seeing, omniscient instant, glimpsed something really disturbing. It had been the clawed paw of a badger, disappearing into a red sack.

  7

  Chen approached the car with a considerable degree of caution. There was no sign that he was being watched, but it seemed likely. He hoped Inari would see the sense of remaining in their own vehicle­; he refused to give her a direct order, she was not a sub­ordinate, and her sense of responsibility to the badger was legitimate. In addition to this, there had been a number of occasions of late in which Inari actually had stayed home in alleged safety, and had been attacked by demons, demon-hunters, and enforcement lords from Hell. She was probably better off in the car.

  He made his way along the back wall of the car park, keeping low. There was no one in either sight or sense, but the latter could be deceptive: goddess knew he’d been wrong before. When he reached Zhu Irzh’s vehicle, he crouched down before the bumper of the car next to it, and peered out.

  There was no indication that the doors had been forced, and no magic hovered about the car. Looking upward a little, Chen could see that the car was also locked. That suggested that the demon had left the car himself, and had voluntarily gone elsewhere.

  Chen took a small phial of powder from an inside pocket. This stuff was notoriously unreliable, but Exorcist Lao had been doing some work on it at the precinct lately and had insisted that Chen give it another try. An improved formula, apparently. Chen had no issue with experimentation, but not really under this kind of circumstance. He spoke the spell anyway, and breathed out. The tiny pinch of powder flew outward, spiraling into the night air like motes of jade dust. Soon, a faint sparkle betrayed the presence of footprints, and to Chen’s hopeful eye, at least, they looked like Zhu Irzh’s elegant pointed boots. Still keeping against the wall, he followed the footprints around to the edge of the parking lot and out into Men Ling Street.

  He must remember to congratulate Lao on the improved formula. The footprints glowed a clear, bright green, which Lao had assured him would have little magical footprint (pun intended) in that their glow would be invisible to anyone who had not personally used this consignment of powder. Chen hoped that this was indeed the case: otherwise he had just broadcast his presence to the entire district. He doubted that Men Ling Street was a particularly forgiving neighborhood.

  There was the house, the one to which he had dispatched the badger. There was the doorway, down a narrow side alley, and there was the hulking shadowy form, waiting behind a dumpster. Chen sidled up behind the form.

  “Hi.”

  Before the words were even out of his mouth, he was confronted with a whirling silver blade, the sudden rush of a sword as it descended to point at his throat, the rictus face beyond.

  “Ma,” said Chen, out of a dry mouth. “It’s me.”

  “Sir!” The sword disappeared. “Sorry, sir. I thought you were a hostile.”

  “If I had been,” Chen remarked, “it wouldn’t have been for very long.” Sergeant Ma had been put through basic martial arts and weapons training, like everyone else in the precinct, but this was something else. The sheer ferocity in Ma’s face was not something Chen had ever associated with his large, mild colleague.

  “I’ve been having lessons,” Ma explained in a whisper.

  “Lessons? From whom?”

  “No Ro Shi. The demon-hunter.”

  “Oh,” Chen said. He had further problems envisaging Ma as the protégé of No Ro Shi, lately of Beijing; a man of such impeccably communist credentials that he made Chairman Mao look like a liberal. And one of the most celebrated hunters of demons ever to come out of China. No Ro Shi disapproved, ideologically, of demons. He considered them subversive. “Well, he’s certainly efficient.”

  Although now that Chen came to remember it, Inari and the badger had dumped No Ro Shi in the harbor. Good job No Ro Shi had never made the connection, even though it was now somewhat moot: Singapore Three had had the supernatural thrust so unmistakably in its collective face over the last couple of years that being married to a woman from Hell seemed almost unworthy of comment.

  “Ma, what’s going on?”

  “I’ve been keeping the building under surveillance, sir, but no one’s come into or out of it. I’ve got people on all sides. Do you think we should go in?”

  Chen thought about this. On the one hand, the situation was exactly the same as it had been on the previous instances of busting­—or trying to bust�
��illegal warehouses: as he had related to Inari, they’d gone in and found nothing. Then again, he’d not had two officers missing. Badger counted as an officer in Chen’s mind, at least for the purposes of this discussion.

  “We go in,” he said.

  A ram at the door, two officers—Shao and Pa Chin—sent in with guns, a quick survey, the all-clear, and then Chen and Ma were bursting into a completely empty room with no doors. Curtains lay in piles of dusty fabric around the edges of the room.

  “Oh dear,” Ma said, with commendable restraint.

  “There’s nothing here.” Officer Pa Chin looked about her.

  “No,” Chen agreed. “But there was.”

  The magic was so strong that he could almost smell it. As an experiment, he said to Ma, “Sergeant? Can you smell anything?”

  Ma sniffed, and wrinkled his nose. “Why, yes. Something like—I’m not sure. Incense, perhaps? Or blood?”

  If the insensitive Ma could detect it, it must be pungent.

  “What is it?” Ma continued.

  “Magic,” Chen said. “But I don’t know what kind.”

  It smelled of Hell, but next moment, of something else entirely: floral and sickly sweet. Familiar, Chen thought, I’ve smelled that before, but he did not know where.

  “Sir,” Pa Chin said, “did someone get out of this room by magic?”

  “Has to be,” Chen replied. “Unless there’s a secret door.”

  His own magic could not detect that sort of thing, though it might be able to trace the thin, alien thread that still lingered in the room. Quickly, he and the rest of his team made a search of the walls. There were no secret panels or entrances that anyone could detect: the walls seemed solid through and through.

  “Okay,” Chen told them at last. “There’s no point in wasting any more time.”

  He motioned them to the sides of the room and, obediently, they complied with his instructions. He could not help reflecting on how things had changed. Less than a handful of years ago, he was a pariah in his own department; shunned by the majority of staff apart from the captain and Exorcist Lao, who was not generally that popular himself. He remembered Ma tiptoeing nervously around him as though he might suddenly burst into flames. Now, Ma barely seemed to notice Zhu Irzh, let alone Chen himself, and the other two officers—admittedly on secondment from Beijing, where supernatural incursions might be somewhat more common due to the city’s status and age—appeared to treat this as a normal assignment. Pa Chin blinked slightly as Chen pricked the palm of his hand and let a droplet of blood fall to the floor, whereas Officer Shao’s attention was fixed on the opposite wall, watching Chen’s back.

  Chen let the blood hit the floor and spoke a word. No jade fire this time, but a spiral of neon blue that twirled up in a butterfly dance and streamed out and down.

  “It’s going back under the floorboards,” Pa Chin said, clearly fascinated.

  In Chen’s own opinion, the origins of the magical trace went far deeper than this, but he’d learned to listen to the prickle of instinct.

  “Get the boards up,” he said. Shao ran out to their patrol car and returned with a jemmy. Together, he and Pa Chin wrenched the central floorboards loose and Chen peered in.

  “There’s something there.”

  An empty space, much wider than the crack revealed by the boards. They pried enough away for Ma and Chen to drop down into the room that lay below.

  “Well,” Chen said. “There’s a door here, anyway.”

  This cellar room felt ancient, much older than the house that lay above it. Singapore Three was a recent city, but it had incorporated some very old villages and estates, including a couple of palaces, and Men Ling Street had been part of the small port area of one of these hamlets, situated on a harbor which had long since become silted up. The walls of the room were made of stone, rough and mossy and emanating a choking smell of damp.

  Chen put his ear to the door. He could hear nothing beyond it, but that meant nothing: the door might be very thick. His rosary was wrapped around his wrist: Kuan Yin might no longer be his patron, but the rosary was still Chen’s primary weapon, the focus of his power. Ma’s sword was drawn. Chen still couldn’t get used to that.

  “Right,” he mouthed. “One … two … three …”

  He kicked the door, aiming at the lock, and the old wood was more fragile than it seemed, for the lock splintered and gave way. The door fell open with a crash and Chen and Ma were through.

  Looking back, he wondered that the smell had not been worse than it was. Even so, Ma gagged and Chen clapped a hasty hand over his mouth and nose, keeping the rosary hand free. Some of the bodies had been here for some time, but others looked quite fresh, recently butchered. A skinned torso twisted on a chain, boiled eyes gazing vacantly into Chen’s own. There were, perhaps, a dozen of them, in various states of dismemberment. The sound of sad spirits wailed briefly in his ears and then were gone.

  Chen brushed past the corpses to the end of the room. The floor beneath his feet was sticky with blood. It was a meat locker, nothing more. It ended in yet another blank wall, but looking up, Chen could see a hatch, half-buried in moss. Whoever, or whatever, had stashed the bodies here clearly had little interest in keeping their meat cold or fresh.

  “Better ask Shao to bring up the missing persons file on the car computer,” Chen said. “I should imagine we’ve got a number of results in here.”

  Corpses, yes. But no sign of demon or badger.

  8

  To Go’s relief, he had managed to talk Beni into some sort of agreement.

  Sending Lara back was not the best thing to do, but the only thing. Having secured Beni’s concurrence, however, Go found himself faced with two further problems: Lara’s kindred did not want her back, and Lara herself did not want to go.

  Delicate negotiations were therefore called for. And probably a large bribe. It was not an issue that Go had anticipated when they first met Lara: kidnapping, yes, okay. That could be dealt with. He’d foreseen tears, threats, maybe even some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, but not quite the degree of enthusiasm that Lara had actually displayed. The idea of a ransom, which hadn’t even been in Go’s mind in the first place, was summarily dismissed when Go had had a visit from Lara’s sister.

  *

  At first, he’d thought it was Lara herself, standing in the window of his hotel room at midnight, and his heart had leaped and stuttered in his chest.

  “Lara! I—”

  “I’m not Lara.” A long tail twitched, rustling the curtains. Yellow eyes glittered in candlelight. And he could see now that she was shorter, her long hair a slightly different shade to Lara’s jet black, a little russet.

  “Then who—”

  “I’m her sister. Askenjuri.” At least, that is what he thought she said. The name was a hiss and a sigh. She moved toward him and his knees buckled. The light of the candle illuminated her body against the transparent folds of her loose sari and that was wrong, he thought, the candle was in the wrong place, as though she had stolen the light, but he did not care. She opened her mouth and he saw the points of tiger teeth. The sari fell to the floor and she was striped, night-and-firelight-colored, all along her thighs and then that was gone and her skin was the shade of dark honey. She smiled. Her eyes were brown and gold.

  “Am I like her, then? Do you think we look alike? People always think she takes after Mother.” Now, the voice was a purr. She was right in front of him and he had not noticed that she had moved. She smelled of musk and jasmine and blood.

  “No,” he’d said in an instinctive croak. “You’re much prettier.”

  Askenjuri’s smile widened. The lie must smell, Go thought, rank as a day-old dead goat. But she didn’t seem to mind, though the smile was mocking. “Ah, ah, ah … I’m sure you’re just being kind.” Definitely mocking. But it wasn’t just mockery. There was something behind it and he did not know what it was. That made him nervous.

  “How did you get in?” Think, man.
You have to think. But the blood was beating in his head like the sea, in out, in out, and his body was heavy and hot, gravity pulling him down and down …

  The carpet was surprisingly comfortable. She was standing over him and there was the distant engine of a purr. “Why, through your little fire.” She gestured toward the candle. “Did you light it for her? Are you expecting my sister?”

  “I think she’s screwing her agent tonight,” Go managed to say out of a dry mouth, and Askenjuri threw back her head and laughed. Her throat was golden, the stripes only faint.

  “Ah, but, my sister screws everyone, you see. Has she screwed you, I wonder? She will. We were all so pleased when you took her away, my mother, our sisters, the princesses—everyone.”

  “Princesses?” He and Beni had aimed at someone—well, humble. They thought it might lead to fewer complications.

  “We’re all royal, you know.” Again, the twitch of a tiger tail. “But some of us think we’re more royal than most. Like little Lara.”

  “What are you telling me?” Go said thickly. There didn’t seem to be much love lost between them; this didn’t seem to be some kind of revenge trip. Thank God. If that was the right thing to think anymore …

  “We don’t want her back, little man. You can keep her. If she grows tired and wants to go, let her go. But don’t send her back where she came from. We’ve all had quite enough.”

  “Oh,” Go said, and that, and variations upon it, were all that he said for the next five minutes or so, because Askenjuri was flicking open the zip of his jeans and licking her lips with a tongue that really wasn’t anything like a human being’s, and then she sank down on top of him.

  In the morning, she was gone. Go woke, feeling as though he’d been beaten with hammers. There was a long lacerated bruise down his chest and stomach—it looked as if an elephant had sat on him—and his head pounded. It was like the flu, but worse.