Shadow Pavilion

by Liz Williams

  “I think,” Chen said, “that perhaps it’s time we did.”

  51

  Inari crouched in the corner of the room, watching Seijin. Her world had narrowed down to this single focus; at the back of her mind, she understood that this was what it was to be a haunt—to become an obsession. Something within her still cried out for Chen and her home, she knew she had to return to Earth, but revenge had become a greater compulsion now. And both she and Seijin knew it. The assassin, sitting at a small table, turned and looked at her out of that single undamaged eye and Inari grinned back, curling her fingers into claws.

  “What are you, that you can haunt me like this?” Seijin whispered, and Inari whispered back, “I am your madness.” She uncurled herself from the corner and went to stand by the assassin’s shoulder. She was pleased to see that Seijin flinched.

  “What?” Inari asked, all mocking. “Afraid of me? Oh, surely that cannot be. You are the great assassin Lord Lady Seijin, are you not? The slayer of gods and men? Killer of little demons who get in your way? Surely I can’t be disconcerting you?”

  “Be quiet,” Seijin said, but it was a whisper. The empty socket glared, but something moved within it and Inari, baring her teeth, moved closer. There should have been no reflection inside the socket and yet—there it was, a procession of little figures, as if seen in a tiny mirror.

  “Why,” Inari murmured. “What can that be?” She had never been so spiteful before, the little voice reminded her, but then again, she’d never before had to live alongside her murderer. “I believe—yes! Aren’t those all the people you’ve killed?” Now that the eye was missing, she realized, Seijin could paradoxically see what previously had been hidden. “If I poked out your other eye, I wonder what you’d see with that? Your own death, maybe? Do you think so?”

  “Enough!” Seijin cried, and lashed out. The assassin’s arm passed straight through Inari and she laughed. Seijin, muttering wild curses, leaped up and ran from the room. “What’s the matter, Lord Lady?” Inari shouted. “Afraid of what you can see, like a child in the dark?” But where the assassin went she, too, was forced to go. She hastened after Seijin, up the stairs, all the way to the topmost chamber. And there, Seijin had paused in the entrance to stand, staring.

  Inari peered over the assassin’s shoulder. Someone was already in the room. It was a woman, or at least, part of one. Like Inari, she was spectral, wearing robes of immense richness and complexity. But her long skirts seemed sodden, drenched with some dark substance like ink, or perhaps blood. No—Inari looked more closely, it was not blood after all, but certainly something wet. Her face was beautiful, yet it did not look real: she was as white as a doll and her eyes were wells of blackness. Moreover, she was patchy: Inari could see glimpses of the opposite wall through the wet robes.

  At first she thought this was another haunt, someone else whom Seijin had slain, come back to exact the penalty, and she felt herself start to smile, but then the woman said, “I am not truly here.”

  “Madam,” the assassin said, and Seijin’s voice was shaken. “I can tell that.”

  “He has imprisoned me.”

  “What?” Seijin sounded genuinely surprised. “Where are you now?”

  “In a boat. On the Sea of Night. Forever.” The woman’s mouth twisted and it was through this gesture, which broke through the mask of her face, that Inari finally recognized her. She had seen this visage before, but then it had been male and belonging to someone else. The woman looked like Mhara, but whereas the new Emperor’s face was filled with a genuine tranquility, this woman looked as if she had been feigning it for decades. And it seemed she had.

  “You have one last chance,” the woman said. “Without payment, now. He knows.”

  At this Seijin laughed, a sound of genuine merriment. “Look around you. This is my kingdom, the only home I have or need, the only one I will ever be permitted. I could have had any fortune I wanted. I’ll kill your son whether you can pay me or not.”

  Inari heard herself say, “You’ll have to reach him first. You haven’t done so well up till now, have you?”

  The Lord Lady swung around. Inari saw Seijin’s mouth work, but the assassin said nothing.

  “Who is that?” Mhara’s mother said, very sharply.

  “A spirit, nothing more.”

  “A friend of your son,” Inari said, coming forward. She brushed through Seijin and the assassin felt unpleasantly hot, burning up with furnace fire. Was Seijin ill? Let’s hope so. “I was there when your hired help failed, Lady. He killed me instead.”

  “I don’t know who you are,” the Emperor’s mother said, eyeing her askance. “I wished no one else any harm.” But then her gaze narrowed and she said, “You are a demon. I knew he consorted with such. Are you one of his women, then?”

  Inari spat and a glowing coal shot out of her mouth and singed the floorboards. “I have a husband. Your son is my friend, nothing more, and you insult both of us.”

  “She makes a bold ghost,” the Dowager Empress said, sneering. “Will she be so bold when she is dispersed, or confined?”

  “I cannot disperse her,” Seijin said sourly. “I have tried.”

  News to Inari, but then the Dowager Empress said, “Then fetch a jar. Bottle her up. I know a spell, if you do not.”

  The Lord Lady crossed to a cupboard on the wall and took down a small brass jar. “Let’s see,” Seijin said. “I’d welcome some peace.”

  Inari expected to feel the stirrings of apprehension, but did not. She waited, quite calmly, as Seijin opened the jar and began an incantation. The words hissed and echoed through the upper chamber, whistling around the eaves like bats, but Inari stayed where she was. It was an old spell, she could tell: recited in the ancient demon-speech before the languages of Hell had changed to mirror the tongues of men, but it had no more effect than a handful of dust.

  “And you are supposed to be a magician,” the Dowager Empress said, with scorn.

  “Madam, perhaps you should try.” Seijin was still polite, but Inari could hear the thin thread of rebellion beneath the assassin’s words: with the Dowager Empress confined, would Seijin still feel the need to carry out what was obviously a contract? Inari thought that Seijin would, as a matter of professional pride.

  “I will,” the Dowager Empress said. She, too, began to speak and now Inari felt a pressure growing upon her, as though she was an inflating balloon. But it was nothing more than that and after a moment, it diminished. The Dowager Empress cursed.

  “As you said,” Inari remarked, “you’re not really here.”

  The Dowager Empress’ mouth opened and she shrieked, but the scream was only a thin thread of sound. It was a long way to the Sea of Night, Inari thought. The Empress was fading, too, her robes pulling her down into the floor like a drowning woman. Inari watched, impassively. The attempted spell must have exhausted the energies she’d used to project herself here. Seijin’s face was unreadable. With a final faint breath, the Dowager Empress cried, “My son is in Heaven now!”

  Then she was gone, melting through the floorboards like spilled ink.

  “Well,” Seijin said softly. “So back to Heaven we must go.”

  For a moment, Inari thought that the assassin was talking to her. Then she saw that one of Seijin’s other selves, the male, had drifted out and was circling the Lord Lady, a captured star. Easy to see Seijin’s warrior origins in this one: the trailing moustache and pointed helmet adorned with a horsehair tail, the heavily ornamented leather armor. He looked at Inari with congealing hate.

  “I must make preparations,” the assassin said. Male self was absorbed back into Seijin’s form and the Lord Lady strode from the room, followed by Inari. Seijin summoned the old Gatekeeper with a single clap of the hands; the Gatekeeper studiously did not look at Inari and it occurred to Inari that perhaps the master of Shadow Pavilion had access to his thoughts, that the Gatekeeper did not want to give anything away.

  “Prepare for my departure,” Se
ijin said. Inari watched as the Gatekeeper, moving with the confidence of long practice, cast powder in a circle: a rusty substance, like dried blood. Seijin stepped within. “I will be back soon,” the assassin said, speaking directly to Inari.

  “I wish you success,” the Gatekeeper murmured.

  “Oh, this time it will be.” Seijin snapped a hand through the air and a sword was whistling down. It touched the edge of the circle and ignited. Seijin’s form grew very small, rushing away at unimaginable speed, but Inari was pulled with it, crossing the circle with a blast of heat that made her shout out, feeling as though it had withered her, a leaf in a flame. Bound to Seijin, the assassin had pulled her along. She saw Seijin’s figure up ahead, spinning on its own axis: the Lord Lady did not look real, but like a doll dropped down a well. Worlds spun by and they were crossing the Sea of Night, with Heaven’s bright shore rising up. Then over the peach blossom lands, the lakes and pools, calm under the Celestial sky that was so light and yet spangled with stars. Inari saw Seijin’s figure hurtling toward the spires of the Imperial City and she wanted to cry out, to warn Mhara, but speed tore her voice away.

  A blink, and she was somewhere dark and perfumed. She had caught up with Seijin: she could hear the assassin moving about, muttering.

  “I am here, Seijin!” she called, and was rewarded with the assassin’s curse. Inari felt elated: With her tagging along, warning everyone she saw, how could the Lord Lady ever hope to achieve their objective? But Seijin laughed.

  “Who will believe you? The ghost of a demon? The Celestials have jurisdiction here. As soon as they set eyes on you they will snap you into a bottle.”

  “Mhara will not,” Inari said. “And how do you know that he hasn’t told everyone what has happened?”

  Seijin was silent at that, and once again, Inari felt triumphant. Despite the position in which she had been placed, she had—in this limited sphere—more power than when she had been alive. A curious circumstance and one which she intended to make the most of.

  The Lord Lady, moving with caution, opened a door and light flooded in. They stepped out into a lavishly decorated room: the lacquered walls hung with pale blue and rose silk, a thick carpet covering the floor, antique furniture dating from one of the more elegant historical periods. Paintings hung in gilt frames, their colors glowing. But somehow, Inari thought, it was all a bit much: too perfect, too refined, the pastel shades reminiscent of a sickly American cartoon. She followed the Lord Lady through several rooms, all decorated in the same style, until they came to a door that hummed and sang with magic. Seijin put out a hand and the wards snapped electric-blue. So someone had decided to seal these overwrought rooms away. An interior decorator? But Inari’s sardonic thought was soon superseded by understanding: these must have been the rooms of the Dowager Empress, and now that she had been removed to her exile, Mhara had closed them off. Perhaps, as her hireling Seijin appeared to do, the Dowager Empress might otherwise enjoy special access to the Palace through what had been her own chambers.

  Thoughtfully, Seijin walked to the window and looked out. Inari noticed that the assassin’s male self seemed to be becoming more apparent: the ghost of a helmet now framed Seijin’s features, and the assassin’s figure was encased in that tribal armor. Inari wondered if this change could be used in some way: Seijin’s power stemmed from the Lord Lady’s liminal being, after all, and if that was negated by the increasing absence of the female self … It was worth considering, though she did not yet know how it might be taken advantage of.

  Seijin was unlucky. The windows were also warded, with the same blue fire. But the assassin did not seem unduly perturbed, and that worried Inari. She tried to move through the wall herself, but an unpleasant shock ran through her incorporeal being, like being snapped by an electric fence. Seijin turned to her with a feral grin.

  “See? Heaven’s magic doesn’t like you, either.”

  Inari said nothing. She’d choose her moments of engagement, she thought. She watched as Seijin took out a long cord, of what looked like twisted black horsehair. The assassin murmured a spell, a whispering incantation that fell from Seijin’s lips in a thin stream and sank into the cord itself. The cord started to glow and Inari had the uncanny sensation that there was someone else in the room, someone familiar. A moment later she recognized it as the presence of the Dowager Empress: not horsehair at all, but the Empress’ own tresses, bound into this talisman. The whispering spell went on and the hair began to change, turning to a silkier texture, a lighter shade of black. Like Mhara’s, Inari thought, and understood what Seijin was doing: old magic, transformation through the mother-line, and as such, underpinned by genetic science. She was helpless and could only watch as Seijin took the altered tresses and attached them to the horsehair plume on the warrior’s helmet. Then Seijin’s eyes closed and the troubled face began to melt away in the pale light of magic streaming down from the coil of hair. Bones shifted, muscles glided into place beneath the changing clothes, and within a few minutes it was not the Lord Lady Seijin who stood in the Dowager Empress’ apartments, but Mhara himself.

  Seijin turned to Inari and smiled.

  “Now, let’s test, shall we?” Teeth bared, all arrogance now, which sat oddly on Mhara’s serene face; distressing to Inari, like a violation.

  “I will speak out,” she warned, and Seijin hissed, “Yes, but who will believe you, little dead demon, when the Celestial Emperor himself gives the lie to your words?”

  Inari did not reply, because Seijin would have heard the weakness in it and she did not want to give the assassin the satisfaction. Seijin turned back to the door. The assassin raised a hand and the wards sizzled out into shadow, fading and then gone. Seijin stalked through, with Inari close behind. If Seijin had been hoping that she would be trapped in the chamber, the assassin would be disappointed: resembling Mhara perhaps, but Inari was still tugged along by the magnet.

  52

  As if he had taken root like waterweed, Go stared, mesmerized, at his captor as she rose from the river. From the neck down, she was a woman, and naked: sleek fawn skin, striped with jet. But her head was the round-eared, sun-eyed head of a tigress and she opened her mouth and roared.

  The knife of sound snapped Go into movement. He sprang out of the water, scrabbling and scrambling for the bank, gripping the slimy roots of the mangroves to pull himself upright. He hauled himself clear of the river, expecting at any moment to feel the hot close of jaws on his ankle. The tigress roared again, a pleased, lazy noise. Go could not run, for the undergrowth was too dense, and there was no point in climbing: tigers can climb, too. His chest felt like a furnace, burning up in the pain of almost drowning, he tottered along like an old man, falling over the exposed roots and trailing creepers. He looked behind once, inadvertently. The tigress stood there in the water, unmoving. Waiting for her sisters, Go thought. He didn’t even know whether he was still alive. If this was dead, it didn’t feel much different. Unfortunately.

  Night fell swiftly after that, a dense velvet shawl descending over the forest. Go had no idea where he was, or where he was going. Oddly, neither hunger nor thirst appeared to be entering into the equation, in spite of the sultry, stifling heat. The humidity was intense, even at night, reminding Go of his childhood. He breathed in experimentally: at least he seemed to be able to inhale and exhale still. But that he wasn’t even sweating would seem to lend weight to the possibility that he was in fact dead. Go had, however, almost ceased to care.

  At least, before the thing dropped on him out of a tree. There was no warning at all and Go had thought he’d been paying attention, paranoid as he was about the tigers. But suddenly he was facedown in the soft spicy earth, the breath knocked out of him and a vast darkness filling his vision. Go struggled and kicked, but it was hopeless. Then, as abruptly, he was released. He raised himself up on his elbows, gasping, and was seized under the arms and hauled up at terrible speed into a tree.

  “What the fuck?” Go cried. “Let me go!”
It wasn’t a tigress: he had a confused impression of long black limbs, much too spidery to be human, and a whipping tail. Something cackled into his ear and its breath was foul, like rotting vegetation. The cackling went on: he thought the creature might be speaking, because the sound had an odd kind of cadence, but it was no language that he knew.

  Then it dropped him. Go yelled, seeing the dim forest floor swing up. The thing caught him by the ankles with a jarring jolt and threw him across a branch. The impact winded him again; he croaked for breath. When he finally regained consciousness, he found that his wrists and ankles had been trussed, so that he was strung out between two of the manifold trunks of a large tree, with the initial branch under his ribs. He squinted round and saw the creature looking at him. It was black, with short fur. It had a head shaped like a coconut, with little coal-like eyes. Its jaw dropped down when it saw him watching, revealing a huge expanse fringed with long teeth, reminding Go unpleasantly of an angler fish. It had four arms, ending in a mass of arachnid fingers, and long, jointed legs, folded beneath it.

  “Who are you?” Go demanded. The thing chattered away, but whatever it was saying remained incomprehensible. It spoke with some animation and enthusiasm, however. “I’m sure this is fascinating,” Go said. “Please let me go.” It was the teeth that had done it. Had it not been for that glimpse of jaw, Go might have felt safer with this thing, whatever it was, than down on the ground with tigers prowling.

  The animal spat at him, a glutinous skein of saliva that struck the back of his head and trickled down. It smelled of shit. If he really was dead, Go thought, gritting his teeth, all this would just go on and on. Was it possible to die more than once, to keep on doing so until one was just a faded shadow? In which case, everyone might finally leave you alone. Go shut his eyes, and waited for further demise.

  The creature continued to spit, until Go was firmly welded to the tree. He endured this, closing his eyes to avoid the spittle and trying to breathe through his mouth. At some point, he told himself, an end would come. He told himself this so often that it turned into a mantra and Go passed into a sort of yogic state of which, later, he was rather proud. When he came round again, the sky had softened to a haze that was neither day nor night, and there was no sign of the animal, for which Go—who had remained a resolute agnostic almost as an act of defiance—was nonetheless devoutly grateful. He was still stuck to the tree, however. He tugged, cautiously, as it was a long way to the ground and there was not a great deal between Go and it. But the bonds remained. He was sure that he’d seen something that behaved like this (nothing Go had ever seen looked like it) on a nature channel, during one of those animal documentaries that you watch when you’re stoned. It hadn’t made a lot of sense then, either, and he couldn’t even remember what kind of thing it had been. Nor could he remember how the prey had extricated itself from its predicament. He had a nasty feeling that it simply hadn’t.