The Iron Khan (Detective Inspector Chen Series)

by Liz Williams

  “I’ll need something in writing,” the Roc said.

  “I don’t have a pen.”

  “Blood will do.”

  They had no weapon, and neither wanted the potential bondage of a touch from the Roc’s razor claws, but the bird dived in a clatter of wings and plucked a thorn from one of the bushes in the ravine below. Inari and Miss Qi drew a drop of blood from each wrist, then watched as the liquid hissed into a word upon the air and faded. Inari had seen enough to know that although it had left no trace, it was as binding a promise as any inscribed upon a piece of parchment.

  “Now,” the Roc said. It stretched its wings, a twenty-foot span or more. “Let’s ride.”

  Scrambling out of the narrow window and bundling the badger through the gap, Inari was sure that the shark-demons would not be far behind them, but the building lay in silence as the Roc rose up, spiraling on the warm wind. The hut soon fell away beneath them, revealing a courtyard that they had not seen on the way in: pillars, and half-rotted statues of misshapen forms.

  “It’s a temple!” Inari said.

  “To sea demons,” the Roc told her over its shoulder. “Things come here when their worship on Earth is long forgotten.”

  Well forgotten, Inari thought, glancing back. She did not like the look of those gaping piscine mouths, too reminiscent of the shark-demons. Perhaps they worshipped themselves.

  “And you?” Miss Qi asked. “Who worshipped you?”

  The Roc’s beak yawned, in what might have been a laugh. “I was not worshipped, though maybe I wanted to be. I do not remember. I was a political adviser to a well-remembered dictator. A world of car bombs and hand grenades, not swords and bows. I am not long dead. I was sent here, in the form of a rapacious, predatory bird. No doubt I deserved it.”

  Inari was silent. No doubt he did.

  “I should like the same kind of power, without the risk,” the Roc went on. “My colleagues — I cannot call them friends — would agree.”

  “In this form?” Miss Qi asked, and Inari knew that she was wondering what kind of creature they might be unleashing upon some unsuspecting realm. “This one, or another?”

  “Let’s see when the time comes,” the Roc said smoothly, and winked a glowing eye.

  •

  Over the ocean, and beyond. No one came after them. Inari, who did not like heights, forced herself to look down on a couple of occasions as they flew, and saw boats as tiny as matchstick vessels, sailing upon that endless sea. But there was no land other than islands: this Hell was, in its way, almost as featureless as the Sea of Night. At last, though there was no visible curve to the world before them, a dusky twilight began to fall.

  “Heaven’s too far,” the Roc said. “Earth will have to do. It will be interesting to see Earth again. I doubt it’s changed much.”

  Inari doubted that, too. “If you can just fly to Earth,” she asked, “why haven’t you done so before now?”

  “Because I couldn’t. The key is your blood. Someone had to freely pay, in blood, to liberate me. People weren’t exactly queuing up.”

  “Glad we could help,” Inari said, looking down again. The sea had darkened, until it truly resembled the Sea of Night. Then she realized that it actually was the Sea of Night: somewhere back there, they had left Banquo’s Hell behind and were heading into the realms between the worlds.

  “Ah!” said the Roc, in a gasping cry. “Earth is waiting!” And there was a gap in the clouds ahead, with light pouring through it.

  THIRTY-TWO

  In Agarta, Omi replayed the memories over and over again. He knew he should not have left his companions, but the call of the city had been too strong. Omi barely realized when he rose quietly from his watch-place by the fire and headed out into the desert. The stars ahead spun in their courses, moving too fast and too far, and the air slammed into his lungs as he stumbled up and down the dunes. It was like being drugged, or losing one’s mind. Occasionally, memories of Roerich, of the demon, of the spell that he still carried inside his coat rose to ambush him with guilt, but Omi thrust it aside and carried on.

  Halfway up the next dune, he saw his grandfather standing at the summit. The old spirit was insubstantial: Omi could see the stars through his body.

  “Omi, what are you doing?” Grandfather said in distress. “This is not where you should be. What about your friends, your mission?”

  Omi’s mouth opened, but no words came out even though he tried to speak. He gaped like a fish, gasping for air, struggled on up the sand. He pushed his way through Grandfather’s form and the old man’s body dissipated in rags and tatters onto the desert wind. Only then did Omi cry out. He knew that Grandfather was a ghost, but what if he had hurt the old man so greatly that he would not want to return? Omi fell to his knees at the top of the dune and put his face in his hands. When he next looked up, there was an oasis below him.

  It was like, yet unlike, the oasis of the crescent moon lake. There was a pavilion — a much smaller one — and a low pool of water, but the place smelled stagnant and dead, and there was no sign of movement around it. The scroll that contained the spell leaped inside Omni’s pocket, and for a moment he forgot the city. His vision sharpened and cleared. Somewhere, he thought he heard his grandfather’s voice, but when he looked round, no one was there. The scroll was speaking, however, strongly and without words, a liquid fountain-fall of sound, and it impelled him into movement. He sprang up and ran down the dune toward the oasis.

  When he reached it, Omi became even more aware that something was obviously wrong. The trees that surrounded the pavilion were stunted, their leaves withered, and the pool was almost dry. The pavilion itself was scoured and bleached by the sand, until the wood of which it was made looked ancient and rotted. There was a skitter of dust down its steps, sparkling in the moonlight.

  The spell leaped again, whispering. Omi took it from his pocket and without stopping to think, opened the scroll. Immediately images poured out upon the air, flickering like flame and causing the world to stop. The dust paused in its tracks, the little breeze that had rattled the dry leaves stilled and died. Omi watched as the lines that had made up the map on the scroll sank into the dry earth and disappeared. There was an electric second of waiting. The dust on the steps began, so slowly, to move again. Life spread outward from the place where the spell had sunk in. Under the moon, the dry leaves lifted and grew green again. Water rose within the pool, ebbing up from deep beneath the surface of the sand, and the pavilion gleamed as if freshly painted. Omi felt a spring of hope: he had acted rightly, after all, and the memory of Agarta hung before him in the air. But then the dust on the pavilion steps swirled upward. Omi watched as it started to spin, whirling and whistling around the oasis and drawing more sand up with it until the oasis was surrounded by a twisting wall of sand. More spread outward until Omi could no longer see the stars, could no longer see the desert beyond, could see nothing except the pavilion itself. And then the sand turned inward and Omi flung himself up the pavilion steps and hammered on the unyielding door until he was unable to see or breathe and the world went dark.

  When he woke, the city had come. It lay all around him, and once he had risen to his feet and breathed in its perfumed air, it was, Omi discovered with a cold pang of pain, no longer what he wanted.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “So you just — what? Activated it?” the demon asked. They were out of the Council chamber now, to Zhu Irzh’s relief, and standing on a circular landing. Nandini was not with them, but Zhu Irzh had not seen her go.

  “Yes.” Omi looked down at the flagstones. “I can’t tell you how ashamed I am, Zhu Irzh. I will be honest. You are a demon, out of Hell, and I am a sacred warrior. And I am the one who — ” He paused.

  “Fucked up?”

  “Yes. I can’t make excuses for myself.”

  “Actually, I think he can,” Roerich said. “The pull of Agarta is legendary. I explained to you, Zhu Irzh, that it has driven men mad before now. And I’m no
t convinced that Agarta didn’t somehow persuade him into releasing the spell. Or the spell into releasing itself. Whatever the Council says, it doesn’t always know the mind of the city.”

  “I’m not blaming him,” the demon said. “I know how you can get sucked into things. It’s unfortunate. But we’ll just have to deal with it.”

  “The question is how.”

  “Do you have any ideas?”

  “No,” said Roerich bleakly, “I do not.”

  •

  They could stay for a day, Nandini told them. After that, the city would expect them to move on. The demon greeted this instruction with a mixture of trepidation and relief. He didn’t relish the prospect of getting back out into the desert, given the possibility of radical change, but neither did he want to stay: Agarta had started to give him the creeps. City of the Enlightened Masters it might be, but he didn’t like the feeling of continually being watched, even though no one was in sight.

  With Roerich and a silent, withdrawn Omi, he dined in the little pavilion on an exquisite vegetarian dinner. They were shown chambers in a nearby tower, by Nandini. Zhu Irzh, more fatigued than he’d realized, fell asleep immediately.

  He didn’t know what woke him, but once roused, he was instantly and fully awake, senses jangling. He got off the bed and crossed to the window. Beyond the glass, the sky was filled with stars. Agarta was on the move: the city was flying. He was looking out across a galaxy. The demon gaped open-mouthed for a moment, then ran to rouse Roerich.

  But Roerich wasn’t there. The bed in which he had been resting was empty, with no sign that anyone had ever slept in it. With growing apprehension, Zhu Irzh went in search of Omi and discovered that the young warrior’s bed was also vacant.

  Zhu Irzh stepped out onto the landing. “Nandini?” he called, aloud. Somehow he knew that she’d hear him, but no answer came. He ran back down the stairs and threw open the double doors at the base of the hall, to stand teetering on the threshold.

  The street wasn’t there, either. Instead, the door opened onto star-filled darkness, even though Zhu Irzh had seen the city below only minutes before. It reminded him of the Sea of Night, but this galaxy-whirl was alive, just as the city had been. The demon slammed the door shut and stepped back against the wall, his thoughts swirling as fast as the stars. A voice said out of nowhere, calm, verging on amused, “It’s only you I’m taking.”

  “You’re the city, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back.”

  “What do you mean: ‘back’?” Zhu Irzh asked.

  “Ah,” the city said. “You’ve been there before.”

  The demon knew where it meant. “To the Tokarians?”

  “That’s when things started to fracture,” Agarta said. “The Book has rewritten things now. But the Book no longer has that authority.”

  “Somehow,” Zhu Irzh told it, “I got the impression that you were working with the Book.”

  “We had a deal,” said the city. “I was to help you, to set the spell. But the Book, it seems, had other ideas.”

  “It stabbed you in the back?”

  “That is too Hellish a way of putting it. It has changed matters.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing?”

  “I am here for humans,” Agarta said. “The Book isn’t.”

  “Ah.” There was a pause. “Whose agenda is it running, then? Its own?”

  “The Book made Heaven. Perhaps more than one Heaven — it’s far older than I. My age was after the Ice Age; the Book dates from long before that, from the lands beyond the Northern stars.”

  “The Book wants Heaven to withdraw from the human world,” Zhu Irzh said.

  “And so it has rewritten the world to make sure that this happens.” Involuntarily, Zhu Irzh glanced toward the tall, arched windows along the hallway. All he could see was the calm, marble street outside, but he knew that if he opened the window, he would once more be looking upon a starfield. And beyond, on Earth, just what the hell had the Book done? It was beginning to hit home that the Book had done something genuinely huge. “Has it changed the whole world? Or only a bit of it? Only China?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it’s done, it’s removed me from Earth.”

  This hadn’t occurred to the demon. “You can’t get back?”

  “I can return, but only to the point when the world changed. That’s when I’m taking you.”

  “Why me? Why not Roerich?” were Zhu Irzh’s next questions. “Surely he’d be a better candidate?” He’d have suggested Omi, but the warrior was clearly susceptible to unfortunate influences and maybe it was better that he was out of it.

  “Roerich is not entirely of the world, being dead. You are.”

  “I’m not really used to saving the world,” the demon said. “That’s my partner’s job.”

  If a city can be said to smile, then this was what Agarta did. “You had better accustom yourself to the notion, then.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Li-Ju’s Celestial warship rode at anchor, close to a half-moon bay. The Empress’ vessel had disappeared, heading swiftly and unhesitatingly up a narrow creek. Li-Ju was reluctant to follow her, fearing a trap, and Chen was compelled to agree with him.

  “It’s too narrow,” he said, looking at the mouth of the creek. A thin tongue of mud unfurled into the clear water of the bay and the sides of the creek were gnarled with roots. “If we go down there and something comes up behind us, we’ll be stuck.”

  “It’s bad enough in the bay,” Li-Ju said. He cast an uneasy glance behind him.

  “So what do we do? I’d suggest going in on foot.” Chen turned to the Celestial captain. “I’m prepared to go in alone. I can’t ask anyone to risk themselves. And if I’m not back by an agreed upon time, then go on without me.”

  “The Emperor sent us to help you,” Li-Ju said. “And that’s what we’ll do. You and I will go.”

  “Very well,” Chen said, slightly ashamed of how relieved he felt.

  Li-Ju ordered a small boat to be slung over the side, then they climbed down into it and rowed in silence toward the mouth of the creek. Chen, armed with one of Li-Ju’s bows and a sword, kept a close eye on the water beneath, just in case. But though the water of the bay remained clear, once they traveled into the creek itself the water was too murky to get a proper view. They proceeded cautiously, until they had moved so far along the creek that the bay and the warship were no longer visible. The creek narrowed, the branches almost meeting overhead, until they rowed down what seemed like a long, fetid green tunnel. There was no sign of the Empress’ ship, until they rounded a bend and saw it ahead, startlingly close.

  At once Li-Ju took the little boat into the side of the creek, under the root growth. Like being in a cave, Chen thought: the great roots arched and curved overhead. He didn’t like the idea of what might be living in amongst those roots, either. The underside of the boat scraped mud, but the creek itself must form a deep channel, for the Empress’ boat was able to travel down it.

  “Do you think we’ve been seen?”

  Li-Ju peered out between the roots. “There’s no sign of anyone.”

  A voice spoke out of midair, making Chen start. “Captain! There’s a ship approaching.”

  Celestials do not usually curse, but Li-Ju looked as though he might be on the verge of doing so. He spoke into a small mirror, carried in one of his long sleeves. “Can you take evasive action?”

  Over the captain’s shoulder, Chen glimpsed the agitated face of the crewman in the mirror. “Doing so now, sir!”

  The mirror blurred and went dark. “They’re changing position,” Li-Ju said. Mentally, Chen wished them luck.

  “Look,” he said. “We’re close enough to go in on foot.”

  “I agree.”

  Together, Chen and Li-Ju clambered out of the boat and up through the tree roots onto the bank. It was dense jungle at this point, and not easy going, but they scr
ambled through the undergrowth until they came level with the Empress’ vessel, then they climbed up one of the broad tree trunks and onto a thick branch. Disregarding the insects that crawled in and out of its bark, Chen began to inch forward along the branch, hoping that the ship wouldn’t suddenly surge forward. They were close to the side of the ship now. The voice spoke again from Li-Ju’s mirror.

  “The boat’s coming down the creek, Captain.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “We don’t think so. We’re behind the headland.”

  Chen glanced up at the birds that still circled the peak. Spies? The prospect that they had been watched all along, but not from the sea, was a dismaying one, but it obviously could not be ruled out. He continued his slow progress along the tree branch, trying to avoid the sharp spines that periodically protruded from the bark. He was over the water now, close to the deck of the boat and at an angle to be able to see into one of the cabins. There was not, as far as he could tell, anyone there, nor could he glimpse anyone in the wheel-house.