The Iron Khan (Detective Inspector Chen Series)

by Liz Williams

  I cannot move.

  “Why not?” And then the demon suddenly realized who he was talking to. “It’s you!” he said inanely. “You’re the spell.”

  My name is Book.

  This was not, Zhu Irzh realized, wholly true. “Book” was the word he understood, but the word that had been spoken was different. He remembered Roerich saying that the Book was far older than printed text — could only be, in fact, since the word came from humans and Celestials, and this thing had appeared before both; it was the creator of all.

  “I’m coming down,” the demon said.

  “Be careful,” Raksha hissed, and the hare’s long ears flattened in alarm. Zhu Irzh broke cover and set off down the hill toward the wound.

  When he reached it, he saw that it pulsed faintly, as if alive. The demon frowned: it was disturbing, somehow, to witness this gentle heave of the land. He’d had too much experience of earthquakes… Memories of chunks of masonry hurtling into the streets of Singapore Three were still vivid in his memory. He might be supernatural, but even the demonic prefer not to be flattened. Or buried alive.

  A thread of magic, a thin filament, coiled out from the dark maw in the earth. Zhu Irzh willed himself to stay put and not run: this was a test, a probe, not an attack. He hoped so, anyway. The thread snaked around his head; he felt it poking into one ear. Not a pleasant sensation and the demon gritted his teeth as the thread filtered through his mind, observing with a distinct sensation of curiosity the demon’s powers and memories. Then, suddenly, it was withdrawn.

  Interesting!

  “Well?”

  I do not understand you.

  “I thought I spoke clearly.”

  I have never seen such a thing as you. Except —

  “Except?”

  Except those that have come through me.

  “Do you know what you yourself are?” the demon asked.

  I am Book. I am the beginning of things.

  “Take a look into my mind again,” Zhu Irzh said. “Look at my memories of you.”

  Again, the thread probed; again, his memories were gently raided.

  I am not as I was, the Book said.

  “No. You tried to put things back to the way you thought they should have been. But something’s gone wrong. You spoke of the things that came through you. What you’ve done is caused the world to crack. Things are bleeding through it and unless you reverse yourself, further chaos will result.”

  I cannot do that.

  “Cannot, or will not?”

  The Book was silent. Then it said, I do not know.

  “Let me take a look at you,” Zhu Irzh suggested, feeling like a doctor and speaking with an authority that he did not feel. For a moment, he thought the Book was going to refuse, then it said, Very well.

  “All right,” the demon told it, though he had no idea how he was going to proceed. “How are we going to go about this?”

  You must enter me.

  Disturbing. The demon disliked dark holes in the earth; positive things rarely emerged from them. With a sigh, he sat down on the lip of the maw and inserted his boots. He thought he heard a stifled exclamation from Raksha and flapped a hand, again motioning her to silence.

  Next moment, he was somewhere else entirely. The grassland around him and the sky above disappeared. Zhu Irzh was standing in a room, among stacked shelves of books.

  Another has been here, the Book said, its voice echoing all around him.

  “Who?”

  A human. Young.

  “Was he called Omi?”

  I think — yes, that was the name. He took the form of a great cat.

  That was news to Zhu Irzh.

  “So, which one of these are you?”

  I do not know.

  Zhu Irzh gave a sigh of pure exasperation. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  I am one and many. The Book sounded genuinely puzzled, and Zhu Irzh began to wonder whether he had inadvertently struck the heart of the problem: that in revising the world, the Book had succeeded in revising itself as well, perhaps — horrible thought — erasing vital parts of its functioning. Seeing the Book as a computer seemed to make more sense than regarding it as a textual entity, although Zhu Irzh’s understanding of information technology was patchy at best.

  “Okay,” he said aloud. Best not to share his internal speculations with the thing: it seemed confused enough already. “Why don’t I start looking?”

  Omi had told him that the spell had been found among the scrolls, rather than the books, and this made sense. He strode through the stacks, searching for anything that resembled the scroll that Omi had carried with him, before Agarta had come and caused him to act so disastrously. He rifled through shelves and ledges of scrolls, desperately seeking. He didn’t want the Book to change its mind about allowing him in here and it appeared unstable enough for anything…

  It had been a parchment, stained as if a myriad of teacups had been placed upon it. He remembered that it had been tied with a scarlet ribbon, tightly bound at each end with wax — and here was something, right at the back of the rack, where one might expect the most ancient scrolls to lurk. Holding his breath, Zhu Irzh held it aloft. “Do you know if this is the spell that you are? Do you recognize it?”

  I think it is so, the Book said doubtfully.

  Good enough for me, the demon thought. He broke the seal at one end and unscrolled the parchment. As soon as he opened it, the room grew quiet and dim and Zhu Irzh felt a twinge of magic, deep inside.

  “This is it, I’m sure of it.”

  He held the scroll open, attempting to read it the wrong way round. Symbols poured off the page to hang brightly in the air. Each one glowed like a firefly and then, one by one, they went out. The room grew even dimmer, the stacks of books lost in shadow, and the demon felt an almost imperceptible shift, as though a vast hand had reached out and moved him sideways.

  “What — ”

  The room was melting, fading as mist fades at the coming of dawn, boiling away into evaporation. Sand crunched under Zhu Irzh’s feet; he tasted grit on the wind. As his vision cleared he found himself standing in the desert, under the same swimming moon. But the endless grassland had disappeared: this was the Taklamakan as he remembered it, and the small, huddled fortress of the Tokarians was visible once more across the river, now more of a muddy stretch. A woman was walking down the slope: Raksha, still with the hare at her heels.

  “I think I did it,” Zhu Irzh said. He looked around him, finding no sign of the world’s wound.

  Raksha was frowning. “I remember — like a dream. This was a sea of grass. And you — ”

  Zhu Irzh blinked. The moon, which had ridden above him like a great round eye, was now a sliver, a crescent in the west. The shaman was quicker to understand.

  “We’ve moving.”

  “Not just us,” Zhu Irzh said. He’d already heard the hammer of hoofbeats across the steppe. “Quickly!” Grabbing Raksha by the arm, he hustled her up the slope into the comparative shelter of the rocks. The trees were gone, although he could still see the silhouette of branches above the walls of the village. A moment later, the Khan appeared, riding hard out of a dustcloud. In the trace of moonlight, his face was set. His warriors rode at his heels and underneath their helms Zhu Irzh finally glimpsed their faces — long, leathery countenances, almost beaked, with small black eyes as hard as stones. Kin to the ifrits? Zhu Irzh would have put good money on their being of the same species.

  He opened his mouth to tell Raksha to keep her head down; when the horsemen swept by, Zhu Irzh felt himself pulled in their wake like a leaf sent spinning by the passage of a speedboat. He saw Raksha beside him, her eyes wide, and then they were torn away from the world and that time, under the dizzying orb of the swiftly changing moon.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The world changed in the blink of an eye. Where the grassland had been, there was now only the desert sand, fawn and black and gold, with the distant red line of the mountains
beyond.

  “God! He did it!” Jhai said, as her cellphone rang. “Hello? Yes, this is Jhai. Who are you?” She listened for a moment, then said, clearly thinking quickly, “No, I’d intended to come back on the jet, but something came up here and we needed to send a few things back. Not good for the carbon footprint, I know, but I’ll sort something out at this end.” She snapped the clamshell shut. “That was Paugeng, asking something boring. Thank god. Didn’t seem to notice anything had changed.”

  Inari exhaled a sigh she did not know she’d been holding. “Then everything’s back to normal?”

  “Yeah,” Jhai said, looking disparagingly around Agarta. “If you can call this normal.”

  “So where’s Zhu Irzh?” Chen asked. They clustered around Jhai as she phoned.

  “Nothing. He’s not answering.”

  “Is it ringing?” Chen asked.

  “No.”

  Chen sighed. “Typical.” He turned to Roerich. “Sometimes, it’s important to focus. I was originally hired to find the Book of Heaven. When all this began, that was Mhara’s original request.”

  Roerich smiled. He and Chen were very alike, Inari thought approvingly, even though they looked so different: one Russian, one Chinese. And yet their spirits were similar; a blind person could have told that.

  “And so you have been successful,” Roerich said. “At least in part. I will speak to Nandini, ask if Agarta can take us to the temple of the Book. It isn’t so far, after all. Then you can question your suspect directly.”

  “Good enough plan,” Chen said. “I wonder whether it’s the same entity, or whether Zhu Irzh has managed to do something to it. He usually has a disastrous effect on these things.”

  •

  Later, Chen gripped the wall of the city and looked out across the desert. Agarta was still stationary, hovering a hundred feet or so above the black sands of the Gobi. What a wasteland, Chen thought. Fascinating to be so far west, although he’d generally considered traveling by more conventional means.

  The relief that had filled him on seeing Inari, safe and sound and waving to him from the improbable vista of Agarta, had been so great that Chen had been compelled to sideline it — as though there was a box in his head marked “RELIEF” into which such emotions could be placed, and examined later. Now, with Inari resting in the tower chamber, he allowed himself to experience that relief and it nearly brought him to his knees. The desert below swam into sudden darkness and he clutched the wall more tightly, bowing his head for a moment to let the blood supply resume.

  Roerich was still in consultation with Nandini, which Chen thought might take a while. He still had not worked out Agarta’s place in the scheme of things: Roerich had said something earlier that suggested the agendas of the city itself and those of its inhabitants might differ, an unnerving thought. Chen looked down at the stone beneath his hands, wondering if it was alive. Despite Agarta’s beauty and calm, he did not like the sensation of being so dependent on such a powerful enterprise: it was the same disquiet as when he was caught in Heaven’s mills. Had Robin been able to contact Mhara yet? She’d said she was going to try.

  With these thoughts running through his mind, Chen reached down and casually drew up a thread of power from the black sands. Earthier and harsher than the magic of the lost grasslands, it settled into his palm like a lump of lead. Experimentally, and with a mental apology to the city, Chen cast it outward and a crow swooped down over the sands, disappearing against the shadows of the dunes.

  Interesting.

  The world that had given him this power was gone, illusion briefly created and as swiftly dissipated, but whatever it had changed in him remained. Chen wondered whether it was some lingering effect, whether it would fade. He was not afraid of power, but there were always ramifications to these things, always a price to pay. In recent months, it felt to him as though Inari had been the one to bear the brunt of that price and at this thought, Chen’s lips thinned.

  He was intending to return to the tower room and see how Inari was, but at that point, Agarta began to move.

  FORTY-FIVE

  It was like watching a movie, ratcheted up to impossible speed. Rather than the sensation of falling, after the initial pull, Zhu Irzh felt as though he was standing still while the world whisked past him. Fragments and snatches of scenes whirled by: cities built and ransacked, armies on the move, forests growing and dwindling as the desert sands took hold. Beside him, he thought Raksha might be screaming, but he could not be sure.

  Then it all stopped. Heat was beating down on his skin, and a yelling man was swinging a sword at him. Startled, Zhu Irzh brought up a reflexive hand and cast out a spell. His assailant burst apart in a shower of fire. Alongside, other warriors paused for an astonished moment, then resumed their battle. Raksha had picked up the fallen man’s sword and was swinging it with grim determination. She might have come from a pre-Iron Age culture, but she’d got the hang of more modern weaponry with commendable speed and enthusiasm. Another warrior went down in a fountain of blood as Raksha decapitated him. Might as well leave her to it, the demon thought, and concentrated on blasting opponents apart until enough of a path was cleared for him to grab the shaman and haul her onto a nearby rise.

  From here, they found themselves looking down onto a battlefield. For some half-mile distant, warriors in pointed helms hacked and slashed at men armed with short swords and what looked like farm implements.

  “This is carnage!” Raksha spat in disgust. Zhu Irzh agreed. The Ministry of War might have approved, but the sight did not bring its reluctant scion any pleasure. From the layout of the battlefield, it was easy enough to see what was occurring: invaders from elsewhere, sweeping down onto the city, which, taken by surprise, was being inadequately defended.

  Inadequately and, Zhu Irzh could see, with futility. Lines of horsemen, in the same leather armor, riding fast, tough ponies swept around from the east of the city. Zhu Irzh could see structures rising over the city wall: huge blue domes swimming in the heat, like a mirage. He turned to a panting peasant who had joined them on the hillside, hoping whatever translating magic had been with them was still in place.

  “What’s that city?”

  “Samarkand,” the peasant said, giving the demon a curious glance. “You must be from a long way away, if you don’t know that.”

  “We’ve come very far,” Zhu Irzh agreed. “And these warriors — who are they?”

  It was clearly not the time for a social chat, but the peasant was winded. Between heaving breaths, he said, “These are the hordes of the Khan. Timur the Lame, cursed be his name.”

  And all at once the ground shifted beneath the demon’s feet, as though the mere utterance of the name had been enough to cause the earth to shake. He was standing directly in the path of a horseman and threw himself to the side as the man bore down. He glimpsed a harsh, set face, the mouth twisted in a snarl, and then the horseman rode past, the iron sword slamming down.

  Timur the Lame. Not the Khan he’d seen: a later version, perhaps, in the same mold — but then the demon turned and saw the Iron Khan. The man — if one could call him that — wore blood-red armor. His face looked as though it had been carved from bone, bearing little flesh. He was staring straight at Zhu Irzh and his rictus grin was worse than Timur’s snarl. He raised a hand and Zhu Irzh felt a wash of magic that was so old and powerful that his knees started to buckle. The demon rarely felt weak — as a denizen of Hell in a world full of humans, he was not often at either a physical or a psychological disadvantage. But faced once more with the Khan, he felt as though he’d been caught in some magical riptide. It rolled him over and under. When it finally washed him up, Raksha was back by his side, spitting curses.

  “Zhu Irzh!”

  They weren’t alone. Some two hundred people stood with them, bewildered. Almost all were the attackers: Timur’s men, though after a cursory glance, Zhu Irzh did not think that Timur himself was among them. All carried bloodied swords.

&n
bsp; The blue domes reached up into an equally cerulean sky. Ahead, Zhu Irzh saw an arch: suns and golden tigers and striped deer cavorted across an azure background. It reminded him of the scenes in the Buddha’s cave, innocent and joyful and a realm away from the blood-soaked man who now roared in triumph, raised his sword aloft, and caused the world to change once more.

  •

  The steppe, and a curve of a river, somehow familiar and yet unknown. The part of Zhu Irzh’s mind that still remained intact to himself told him that this was generic recognition, not somewhere he had previously been. He smelled fresh grass, something spicy, something piercingly sweet, with the dank odor of the river running underneath it all. Then all of this was blotted out as Master rode by, turning the black pony fast along the lines of warriors, and the demon bowed his head, along with his companions, including the black-haired woman whose name he no longer knew.