by Liz Williams
“Then please try,” Chen said. The man sounded exhausted and Go could hardly blame him. “I have tried to put a call through, but I can’t reach her.”
“I’ll try,” Jhai said. “If you’re sure there’s nothing Mhara can do. Who did this, anyway?”
“An assassin. Listen, Jhai—” and here Chen drew Jhai away into an annex, leaving Go alone with the demon’s corpse. Evidently there was something that Go was not meant to hear. Fair enough.
He tore his gaze away from the body and wandered around the room, looking at the sparse furnishings. A serene place, despite what had so recently happened here. Go had never been a religious man, but something in him responded to this Zen simplicity. As he was standing there, someone came out of a side annex, a young woman. She looked tired, but there was also something else about her, something not quite right—it reminded Go of the spirits his father used to raise, as though the girl was already dead. How odd. Not unattractive, though.
“I’m just waiting for Jhai,” Go explained.
“I know,” the young woman said. “She’s still with Chen. My name’s Robin; I’m a priestess.” She gave him a rather direct look. “I suppose you know your tiger lady’s in the news?”
“Lara?” Go’s heart felt as though it had dropped through his ribs and hit the floor.
“Yes. I’ve just been listening to the radio, trying to take my mind off things. Inari—” she gestured toward the corpse “—was a friend, you know? Still is, wherever she’s gone.” She sighed and Go felt a breath of icy air run across his skin. “I caught the news. Lara went through the early morning market like a dose of salts. One man dead, several people injured.”
“This is all my fault,” Go said. Things had gone from bad to worse, and all because he wanted to be a Svengali to the movie actress from Hell.
“Well, yes,” Robin said. She did not sound accusing. “It is. But these things—I’ve not led a perfect life myself.”
“But you’re a nun,” Go said, before he could stop himself.
Robin laughed. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly. I need to let Jhai know about Lara as soon as she comes out.”
“Is the news still on?” Go asked. Some stations were devoted to nothing but the news, recycling it endlessly. He might as well hear this for himself, depressing though it might be.
“I think so. Do you want to listen? I can probably find a station.”
“You’re being very kind,” Go said.
Robin gave a sad shrug. “All I can do at the moment.”
Go said hesitantly, “Your—deity. Jhai explained a couple of things to me in the car. Is he here?” Can he help me? But Go did not want to ask that. Odd: a few months ago, he’d have been entirely happy to make what use he could of the situation. Now, he felt a definite reluctance to ask for such aid; he was beginning to feel that this would have to be worked through, no matter the consequences. And he had an awful feeling he knew what those consequences might be.
But the news surprised him. Lara had indeed been on the rampage through the port market, but there were other sightings filtering through now, along Shaopeng and in Bharulay. Robin frowned as she listened to the reports.
“Lara’s moved fast, hasn’t she?” Go said in a whisper.
“I don’t think these can all be Lara,” Robin said. “These places are miles apart and you heard what they just said: these sightings are within the last few minutes.”
“Is she using magic?” Go wondered aloud.
“Or there’s more than one tiger,” Robin said.
43
Zhu Irzh and the badger stared up into the branches of the pillar. A vast column ascended into the cerulean skies, branching out toward its summit, stone changing to tree.
“I didn’t even know this existed,” the demon said, awed.
“It sometimes does not,” the god replied. Krishna raised the flute to his lips and played a single, fragile phrase. Behind them, the women of the blue god’s court whispered and murmured, and the deer gave a whistling cry. All these sounds floated up into the branches of the tree: glistening ebony black, as if containing captive stars, rustling with huge green leaves like curls of jade. High among these leaves, these sounds crystallized, forming a transparent lotus flower, which changed into a bird and flew down.
“This is your guide,” Krishna said. The badger looked hard at the bird, which remained transparent and expressionless, a thing of light.
“Fair enough,” Zhu Irzh replied. “What do you want us to do? Climb after it? I’m game, but I’m not sure about my friend here.”
“I will manage!” the badger snapped.
“You need climb only a little way,” Krishna told him. “Then, as you will see, things will become quite different.”
The badger’s head whipped around. Something on the wind, something rank and distinctly uncelestial.
“Are you all right?” Zhu Irzh asked, but the little deer said, “I can smell it, too.”
“What is it?” Krishna’s voice was as soft and musical as ever, but something about it made the badger’s hackles start to rise in sympathy.
“It smells like one of Agni’s hounds,” the badger growled.
Krishna turned to the demon. “You should start climbing.”
“Hey, I’m all for getting ahead,” Zhu Irzh protested. “But I’m not going to leave you to face that thing; you’ve been so kind, and—”
“Zhu Irzh.” Still soft, but with force. “Go.”
It had the impact of divine command, a wateriness of the joints with which the badger was entirely unfamiliar. The demon, however, bowed his head in fleeting acquiescence and put a hand on the pillar. His expression changed.
“This is weird!”
As he spoke, a racing, snarling shape burst out of the bushes. Agni’s hound indeed: this must be one of the largest dogs, scaled like a dragon, flickers of fire emerging from its nostrils.
“Do the teakettle thing!” the demon commanded, and with great reluctance, the badger did as he was told. Zhu Irzh slung the iron pot over his shoulder and placed a foot on the pillar, the sole flat. From his limited perspective, the badger could see that they were suddenly on a long, snaking road. He looked back, and there was Krishna with the women, each throwing out a long silk scarf. With the final scarf caught in the deer’s antlers, they began to spin, faster and faster until there was a whirling coil of color a little way behind.
“Go!” Krishna cried again, and Zhu Irzh started running. The badger heard growls and howls, saw the scarves whirl faster, a dark shape sucked within. Then the landscape changed and he and Zhu Irzh were picked up by the path on which they stood and taken upward.
Then the world was blue, the sky filled with sapphire light, and he walked on indigo earth. Women walked by, chattering and laughing, balancing jars upon their heads, their saris made out of water and crystal and speckled with diamond light. The demon had stopped walking and stared in open admiration.
“This can’t be Hell,” he said. And the badger looked up and saw a huge face bending down from the heavens, made out of sky, the dark eyes filled with a vast amusement. The horned moon rested upon his brow; in one hand, he held a trident that was mountain high. He said, in a voice of soft thunder, “You are in the wrong place.”
“I won’t argue with that,” stammered Zhu Irzh. It was one of the few times that the badger had seen him discomposed.
“Then let me send you to the right place,” the vast blue being said. His hand came down. Moments later, they were standing on the palm, fingers rising like blue columns, being raised up through streaming clouds.
“Go,” the blue god said, and gently blew. The realm darkened into stormlight. Zhu Irzh and the badger floated downward, as lightly as leaves, into the humid air of Singapore Three.
44
Inari put a faltering hand to her head. Still there, and that was strange enough in itself: she remembered the shock of the assassin’s sword as it struck her, remembered her body, fountaining blood, t
oppling sideways like a felled tree. There had been no pain, and surprisingly little sensation. The memory that was most clear was, curiously, a moment of anxiety over the broken cup of tea, flying through the air and shattering as it hit the floor. Her eyes had watched, for a few seconds, the streams of tea and blood, mingling like little rivers on the stone floor. Then everything had gone dark, in more traditional fashion, and now she was here, lying facedown on ashy earth with the cloudy hillside rising above her.
Inari’s initial sensation, once shock and dismay had made their presence felt, was one of relief. She did not know where she was, but she suspected that she was back in between, where at least she had a kind of ally. Bonerattle might help her, or he might not, now that she was of no further use to him, but even a doubtful ally was better than an uncaring family. She was not home in Hell and that was a great blessing, even under the circumstances. And, she could be assured that Chen would do everything in his power to get her back, reanimate her, and Inari had great faith in her husband’s abilities. Chen, a modest man, never claimed to be a particularly inspired thinker, but he was persistent, calm, and above all, constant. She could trust him, and so she would.
Also, being decapitated was oddly liberating. Inari had never been slain before, although she knew plenty of people to whom it had happened, and who better than a denizen of Hell to know that this was no kind of end at all, just an interruption in the continuity of being. Seijin, that smiling serenity of a killer, had done his or her utmost, and this was the result.
Could be worse, Inari thought. Could be a lot worse. Aloud, she said, “Is that the best you can do, O assassin?” And laughed, because it made her feel better.
But that was all very well and good. She couldn’t just lie here, eating ash. The presence of the light, fluffy grayness that covered the ground made her wonder if she was near the place where the forge had been: Had it really disappeared for good, or did it move from place to place? While Chen was working out how to rescue her, Inari knew she must take steps to rescue herself. With this in mind, she clambered to her feet—she might be a spirit now, but she had a very real sore throat, all the same—and started walking, hampered by her long skirts. When she had died, she had been wearing a bed-robe and a nightdress; somehow, these had metamorphosed into a full set of funeral robes, the red of a dying sun, embroidered with black. Long sleeves trailed down past her wrists, and her midriff was supported by a stiff, folded sash. She had the feeling that, if she’d had a mirror in which to look, she would find that her face was fully painted: she put a tentative finger to her lips and rubbed. The fingertip came away reddened, so yes, this was indeed the case, and her hair had also been piled up and pinned. She must look like a geisha doll. Was this what she now looked like on Earth? Had her funeral already taken place? No use wondering about that.
After some time, the landscape had changed very little, although it was true that Inari was making slow progress. The rocks that protruded through the ashy surface were sharp, and she did not want to slow herself down any further by injuring a foot or an ankle. There was no sign of the forge, or of Bonerattle—although when she reached a patch of more open ground, where the mist was less oppressive, she risked calling out. She did not use his name, hoping that he might recognize her voice. But nothing emerged from the cloud and so Inari walked on, reminding herself that she had been in worse places than this: the lower levels of Hell, for example, in which one’s very form might change, become more bestial. She did not seem to be changing now. And there was no sign of the brooding pagoda that Bonerattle had called the Shadow Pavilion. Inari was just thinking that, if forced to enter this strange limbo, she had at least ended up in a relatively innocuous bit of it, when she stepped around a rock and before her rose the pagoda.
It seemed even larger than she had remembered from that last turbulent visit, towering on its rock, so high that it almost appeared to lean out across the valley. At least she knew where to avoid … And then found she could not.
The Shadow Pavilion was like a magnet. Inari’s suddenly faltering footsteps dragged her down the valley: she tried to resist, to pull away, but was unable to do so. The Pavilion had her now and it wasn’t just the tug it exerted on her feet, but a compulsion that made her incapable of looking anywhere else. Inari, a sudden puppet, was dragged toward the pagoda.
The compulsion lasted until she had climbed the steps. She stood looking up at the ancient wooden doors, carved with symbols so old that they had long since lost any meaning, at least any that was known to Inari. Now that she had reached the pagoda, the protective calm that had enfolded her on the slopes had dissipated as completely as mist; she was afraid, of Seijin, of further vengeance. Sometimes even a spirit could be killed—such a fate had befallen Mhara’s own father, the late and corrupt Celestial Emperor. The assassin struck her as someone who would not flinch at full measures.
Then someone said, “Ah. You must be the person we are expecting.”
Inari stumbled against the doorframe. The person who had addressed her was slight and ghostly, the same gray as the wood of the doors.
“I am the Gatekeeper. I’m afraid we weren’t given your name … ?”
Inari had no intention of telling him this, for names had power and she did not know what authority the laws of between might give him over her. But then the words were dragged out of her mouth as efficiently as she herself had been hauled to the doors of the pagoda. The Gatekeeper fished in a sleeve and consulted a list.
“Ah, yes. I see I was correct. And you came here on your own two feet? Impressive.”
“I didn’t have much choice!”
The Gatekeeper said, “Usually, Seijin brings them here in a bag.”
“I think I am too small a fry for the assassin,” Inari said.
“How charmingly modest. And yet, the Lord Lady slew you. That is a very great honor, normally reserved for elite warriors.”
“I suppose I should be grateful,” Inari said, not without sarcasm.
“Well,” the Gatekeeper remarked, unhappily, “you are still dead. Let me open the doors for you, so that you may see your new home.”
“New home?”
“Why yes,” the Gatekeeper explained. “Once you are here, you won’t be leaving us again.”
But Inari, as she stepped through the old wooden doorway into the Shadow Pavilion, thought, We’ll see about that.
As she wandered through the Pavilion’s labyrinth of chambers, Inari unaccountably felt her spirits rise. Seijin was not here, and who, in truth, might say whether the Lord Lady would even return at all? The assassin had gone after Mhara once before, and been defeated. Inari hoped against hope that the Celestial Emperor would once more be successful. Perhaps Seijin would even be slain!
And end up back here again, two raging ghosts, confined in this echoing prison.
The more she saw of the Pavilion, the greater her awareness of other presences grew. She could not see these beings directly, but if she stood in the corner of a room, or by a windowsill, and glanced out of the corners of her eyes, figures appeared: a woman with streaming hair, ringing her hands in the stiff folds of her old-fashioned robes. A tall, armored man, snarling in fury, clasping a shattered sword. A child, weeping, but when it turned, Inari saw that it had gaping holes where its eyes had once been, and a mouth full of teeth like pins.
None of them tried to speak to her and she wondered whether she seemed the same to them, a half-glimpsed ghost lost in her own pain.
But I don’t feel dead, particularly. And whereas the other spirits mourned or raged, Inari planned to push her own woes aside, and find out more.
This was not a simple matter. When she tried to count the number of stories possessed by the Pavilion, running lightly up and down the many stairs and taking note of landings, Inari found that she could not get a grip on it. At first she counted four, and then nine, and then only three. At each ascent and descent, the Pavilion looked the same: the musty, paneled walls; the moth-eaten hangin
gs, decked with spiders’ webs; the thick, hand-stitched carpets. A luxurious place, once, a palace. Had the Pavilion ever been somewhere real, the home of some Chinese emperor, the summerhouse of a spoiled princess? Inari had known of buildings being stolen before, and the Shadow Pavilion held resonances. At some time, someone had been happy here; she could feel it, a summer current running through the dust. But those sensations were very faint, long overlain by rage and pain.
Inari had no way of knowing when she had arrived, and she began to lose track of time. She did not think that between followed the same time zone as Singapore Three; there was no reason to expect it to do so. But when she next looked through a window, out across the long lands, she saw that the light was fading and a blue twilight was falling. Shapes moved with purpose through the dusk and Inari, however foolishly, felt glad that she was inside.
She turned to find the Gatekeeper standing at her elbow.
“I thought you would want to know,” the old spirit said. “The Lord Lady is coming home.”
45
Zhu Irzh and the badger fell out of the air, from some height, and hit a grimy stretch of ground in a parking lot. Winded, it took some time for the badger to say, “Are we back?” He smelled the air. “Yes, I see that we are.”
Zhu Irzh clambered to his feet, dusting off his coat. “That was quite a drop. I should have asked if we could have been put down gently. Are you all right? Nothing broken?”
“I am intact,” the badger admitted. He was surprised at how relieved he was to be home: all his animal senses had come alive again at this reversion to his own territory. He had not realized just how firmly he had become attached to this bit of the human realm, but that was the element of earth for you: it claimed and clung. “And you?”
“Also fine, I think. Badger, before we’re sucked into yet another maelstrom, I just wanted to say that it has been—well, okay, not a pleasure, but I have valued your presence recently. You are a resourceful creature.”
