by Liz Williams
He had just returned from one of his exercise sessions in the local park when the doorphone rang. Paravang got stiffly to his feet to answer.
“Who is it?”
“Jhai Tserai,” purred the phone. He was so startled that he pressed the button to admit her.
“Mr Roche,” she said, once inside, and her voice held that low note of concern which Paravang so much distrusted. “I’m so terribly sorry.”
She sat down in his armchair and proceeded to explain a number of things. Everyone knew how much stress he was under, what with the temporary removal of his license, and it was completely understandable that he had reacted negatively to what he perceived as provocation. She’d done that herself on occasion, she confessed, it was very natural. The demon detective, too, was under a great deal of pressure, a long way from home and so on, and although his attack on Paravang was unpardonable, she hoped that Roche would manage to rise above it. A complaint had been made to the police department. Paravang was still a part of Paugeng—they didn’t forget old employees, even under currently embarrassing circumstances—and Tserai wanted to recompense Paravang for his dreadful ordeal and offered him: three days’ worth of trauma counseling, which he could select as he chose, a bonus for his sterling work over the past six months and, of course, the sickness pay he would normally be charged would be waived.
Paravang Roche, his voice trembling, told her how grateful he was to have worked for such a caring company. He accepted her generous offer and remarked that his training in various spiritual disciplines had given him the inner serenity to discount what the world would regard as a painful episode. His former employer patted his hand.
When she had left, Paravang fell back against the couch and sent a fervent prayer to Senditreya that Jhai Tserai would suffer a prolonged, painful and eventually fatal accident before the year was out, accompanied in her death throes by Seneschal Zhu Irzh. He had expected the attempt to buy him off, and had enough native cunning to anticipate what might happen if he made a fuss. The last site manager for Paugeng had been a man with little or no sense of personal danger, some sort of genetic mutation, Paravang supposed, and had not only taken Tserai to task over medical related staff problems once, but several times. The man had an extensive opportunity to explore such difficulties, now, having come down with an unusual kidney disease after a visit to Tevereya. There had been considerable speculation as to its cause, never satisfactorily resolved. Fortunately, Paugeng looked after its own, and had provided medical treatment at a discount rate.
So Paravang determined to take what was offered and make other arrangements to regain inner serenity. He made more tea, and after he had drunk this he took the downtown to Air Street and headed for Senditreya’s temple, where he demanded to see the priest-broker and spent an hour pouring out his woes. The broker opened his eyes wide at the sight of the ragged scratches that were healing slowly underneath the synth skin and was suitably and gratifyingly horrified. Paravang could not resist milking this unfamiliar sympathy.
“Unprovoked!” he told the broker. “First, the foul creature revokes my feng shui license. Then he forces me to work for him, without pay, and in the course of my duties—during which he never stopped arguing—he attacked me. Why? It must be some kind of curse. An enemy has conjured him from Hell to persecute me.”
The broker nodded, sagely. “I know the being,” he had told Roche. “I have made enquiries. He is attached to the police department—an unorthodox but legitimate arrangement. Putting an end to his persecution of you will undoubtedly attract attention.”
“What are you saying? I thought you wanted to help me?”
“That is correct. My sympathy for your plight is as bottomless as the pits of Hell itself. I am not suggesting that there is nothing that can be done. Merely that it will not be cheap. Legal fees can eat money like candy.”
Paravang shot the broker an incredulous glance. “Who said anything about legal fees?”
The broker favored Paravang Roche in turn with a lengthy and considering look.
“Then there is a man …” he began.
The broker had set it all up for Roche, deducting a token payment from the practitioner. The bulk would be paid once the exorcist had carried out his work. Then they had gone together into the temple and Paravang had gazed with bitterness at his fickle, beaming goddess. Senditreya’s bovine face betrayed nothing. Useless to rely on such an apathetic deity. He was glad that he’d had the wit to turn to human help.
“Will it not be too soon? Look obvious?” he had asked the broker.
“Not if it is carefully done. Leave it to me.”
Paravang caught the tram back to his neighborhood: the row of crumbling tenements that lined the suburban hills. He was tired and angry, and he was not pleased to find a neighbor, an elderly, vituperative woman, waiting outside his apartment. Not wishing to lose face, however, Paravang forced himself to be polite.
“Good evening,” he said with a small, stiff bow.
“Citizen Roche! You have to do something about it!” the old lady said without preamble.
“What?” asked Paravang, bewildered.
“The Third Commercial Bank! What else?” his neighbor said. Paravang listened as patiently as he could while she explained at length and volume the wickedness of the new Third Commercial Bank for pointing their sharp and nasty roof right at her kitchen window.
“Spoils my dinner!” she shrilled. “Brings bad luck!”
This was the problem with being a dowser, Paravang reflected. Everyone expected you to be able to solve their problems for them, especially when some organization decided to get the drop on their neighbors by manipulating the energies that lay beneath the city and altering the surrounding feng shui. The neighbor was quite right. Throughout Kuen, Rama and Wuan Chih, a ch’i war had snaked across the city. The whole thing had started in Shaopeng, where the Eregeng Trade House had erected its monstrous new headquarters: capped by a devilish pagoda roof flaring out in all directions, but directed principally at the northeast. Everyone directly beneath its baleful influence had called in the builders—at night, so as not to lose business—and had their premises tweaked and tucked to accommodate the energy flow of beneficent ch’i and malignant sha. The battle lines had shot from Shaopeng and radiated east, all the way to Paravang’s neighbor’s kitchen ten miles distant.
In the days—so sadly recent—when he had still possessed a dowsing license, Paravang would simply have recommended some lesser practitioner. Fixing his neighbor’s feng shui would not have been worth his while, but now, he was forced to take what little he could get. He accepted the meager dollars that the neighbor shoved grudgingly into his hand, and, grinding his teeth, fixed her culinary trauma with a set of judiciously positioned bagua mirrors to halt and deflect the unlucky energy.
Now, he stood in his little kitchen, angling more octagonal mirrors to deflect the malevolent sha lines that were still running off from the Eregeng Trade House. He had hung red tassels around the windows and over the door and the entrance to the disposal chute, and set up a complex array of bagua mirrors. Gradually the sense of oppression had begun to lift, but he could still feel it, hanging heavy and ominous, like a storm cloud just beyond the horizon.
Eventually the mirrors were arranged to his satisfaction, and Paravang turned his attention to his dinner. He shredded ginger and spring onion, pounded it with the garlic that he grew in pots on the windowsill, and chopped Chinese leaf, bean sprouts and shrimps. He doused the mixture in soy, rice vinegar and sesame oil and set to making neat little packages with the won ton wrappers made by his neighbor. Arranging the won ton in the bottom of the steamer, he put the water on to boil. The lights were beginning to come on across the district, and Paravang’s neighbors were starting to straggle home. Paravang looked out the window, filled with sudden doubt. Seedy though it undoubtedly was, he liked living here. In the evening he could go down to the small, dark bar at the end of the street, the one that always had washing h
anging outside, and sit with his cronies. They were not practitioners. Feng shui men tended to keep aloof from one another, fearing rivalry. These were local businesspeople who respected him. Once a week he took the tram out to Bharulay to see his elderly father, and they went for long, silent walks along the canal. His mother, the shrill, quarrelsome Mrs Roche, had long since passed into one of the more pleasant neighborhoods of Hell, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms. She sometimes telephoned, a tinny, distant voice in her son’s ear, demanding to know why he was still unwed. Since he was now fifty, he thought that she’d have given up hope long before now, but not so. She had always been a most determined woman. Apart from this maternal irritant, his life had been good enough until the arrival of the demonic intruder and the revoking of his license. But now … had he really done the right thing in hiring an—an exorcist? He thought of the demon’s blank, menacing visage, and the terrible ripping claws. What if the exorcist—Paravang shied away from the term “assassin”—messed things up? What if Zhu Irzh came after him again? He needed a fallback plan, Paravang decided, staring sightlessly out over the lights of the city. He needed serious help.
18
The world had become a dream to Robin, a circus of wonders, and nothing could touch her. She had followed the beast along the turning alleys of Shaopeng and Ghenret until they had come out into a place that she recognized. They stood in a wide square, but the towering compartments made it seem as though Robin and the animal stood at the bottom of a well. At one side an oblong of night sky was visible, above the much lower roof of the Battery Road teahouse, and Robin had gasped. She had never seen such stars, such brightness. They fell in a great burning coil over the teahouse roof and she recognized none of them.
At the center of the square stood a stretch of trees, as though a wood grew in the middle of the buildings. Robin knew, however, that this patch of acacia and thousand-flower concealed the Shaopeng cemetery. The cemetery boundaries seemed to be much more extensive than she remembered, and this made perfect sense to Robin. It was night, after all, and she had only ever visited in the day. All at once she understood what was happening, here so close to the eve of the Day of the Dead. The world was dreaming, the city re-creating itself in sleep, and changing itself to its other form, the form of its counterpart in Hell.
“Isn’t that right?” she said aloud to her companion.
And it replied, “What do you think, Robin? Tell me what you see.”
“I can see the temple roof,” Robin said obediently, “and the trees, and look, they’re coming into flower.” She could see the starry white blossoms of the thousand-flower swell out from their buds and burst outward the petals curling like a ghost’s soft hand, expanding to propel pollen in a dusty shower into the night air. A great breath of sweetness came from them, engulfing Robin and the animal in its perfume. The petals fell in a pale shower to the earth and the process began again, petals budding, shaking out and falling, until the ground beneath the trees was covered in a snowdrift of flowers.
“Perhaps we should go in,” the animal told Robin, murmuring, and when she looked at it, it was no longer a beast, somehow, but something else, a form of darkness, strangely vivid yet undefined. Robin nodded, and stepped through the ornamental gate of the cemetery. The petals were still falling, but more slowly now, and the air was filled with sweetness. The cemetery was full of light, lamps and votive candles set upon the tombs, beckoning through the scented dark. Robin could see the little temple at the center of the cemetery, and its curving roof seemed to hold the stars. Something shot over the temple roof in a burst of light and buried itself alarmingly close to Robin’s feet. A firecracker? Robin’s companion bent and plucked it from the ground, digging with animal swiftness in the damp earth. Steam rose from its indistinct fingers. Robin felt something placed in her hand. She looked down. It was a small piece of metal, glossy as though wet, and still warm. She felt her companion smile. Teeth glittered in the half-light.
“Heaven’s falling, Robin,” it said, and the voice was now thin and old. Robin put the meteorite in her pocket.
“Are we going to the temple?”
“It’s not a temple. It’s an exchange.” And Robin thought, How stupid of me. It was indeed a money-changing kiosk, with the little metal slot in its side through which a slip of paper was expelled after the completion of the transaction. Together, they walked to the exchange. Someone knocked on the door, from within; a ritual three times.
“Yes?” Robin’s companion said.
“May I come out?” a very small voice asked. The animal looked at Robin, and smiled.
“Up to you, Robin.”
Robin opened her mouth to call it forth, but she surprised herself. She heard her own voice from somewhere, high and frightened.
“No,” she said, “No, you may not!” and her companion’s smile vanished.
“Ask him to come out, Robin,” it said. It sounded sweet, as sweet as the petals of the thousand-flower that now blew around them, a white whirling cloud to settle in Robin’s hair. Robin felt a hand caress her spine, running lightly down the vertebrae, leaving a trail of warmth behind it.
“Ask, Robin, ask,” and it was the experiment’s voice murmuring in her ear, gentle, whispering. Do this for me, Robin …
“No, no!” Robin shouted, and broke away, running blindly through the graveyard. She caught her foot and fell, landing across a granite barrier. She felt a hot burst of pain shoot through her knee and something fiery licked her cheek. She thought that she had fallen against one of the votive lights, but then she felt it again and knew it for the animal’s tongue, sliding affectionately across her face. It stung and she cried out.
“Get up, Robin,” the creature said. Robin clambered to her feet and stumbled against the tilted stone, half-falling. She had broken her knee, she thought. The sensation seared through her, a pulsing lump of pain. Someone put their arm around her waist, and it was longer than a human arm, and stronger. She looked up fearfully. Her companion’s voice rasped in her ear like a tongue.
“Ask, Robin,” and then suddenly it dropped her and sprang away through the snowy petals, a heavy, bolting form, four-legged. In the little exchange, someone started to weep, softly at first, and then louder, until it was a voice that boomed out across the graveyard, filling the sky and bringing down a hail of stars, hissing from the heavens into the damp soil of the cemetery. Robin cowered by the grave marker, her arms bent ineffectually over her head, pain throbbing in her knee. She felt hands beneath her and then someone lifted her up.
“No more,” she cried, and struck out. A hand caught her wrist and held it.
“No more,” someone agreed, and she relaxed. She was hurried from the cemetery, half-lifted to help her limping gait. Behind them, the green shoots of thousand-flower began to lift through the soil, in each place where a star had fallen.
19
After a long and difficult conversation with Captain Sung, Zhu Irzh had been given a couple of days off work. Long and difficult conversations with the captain were becoming a habit, he thought resentfully. Next morning, therefore, he locked up the houseboat and walked across to Haitan market. He needed provisions, after his time away from home, and he also wanted to consider Jhai Tserai. He had to admit that she was highly entertaining, whatever demonic bargains she might have been engaged in. He grinned to himself, causing the few fellow shoppers who could see him to shuffle nervously or find something unexpectedly fascinating on the fish counter at the opposite end of the row. Zhu Irzh didn’t notice; he was too busy thinking about Jhai. His longing for her was, he reluctantly conceded, more than desire; it was opportunity.
Even if people could see him, they tended to find him sinister; including the not very alluring women who hung around the Ghenret go-downs and the slightly more attractive boys in Shaopeng tram station. If he allowed himself to become closer to Jhai, there might be an opportunity to find out more about whatever she had been doing. This, he decided, was a reasonable plan. Sun
g might have sidelined him in the course of the investigation, but that altered nothing. He was hot on the trail, he told himself. He was dedicated to upholding the right of the law. He forced away the knowledge that it was nothing more than an excuse.
The market was crowded today. Zhu Irzh was obliged to queue for everything, and submitted to being elbowed in the ribs by fierce elderly ladies. At last he came to his final purchases. He had bought enough for two or three days, a diet that emphasized meat, as befitted someone with Zhu Irzh’s carnivorous teeth. The meat here always tasted slightly strange, not horrible, but a bit flat. He had seen cattle in the city, roaming through the vacant lots like huge, tethered shadows, and had been wary of them until Ma reminded him that they were herbivores. In Hell, nothing was a herbivore.
Zhu Irzh reached the boat and fumbled the round key out of his pocket. Inside, the boat was dim and stuffy. The badger-teakettle sat on its shelf, in its inanimate form. Zhu Irzh watched it warily for a moment, trying to work out whether it had moved since the morning. It seemed to have given up being a badger, at least while he was around. He opened all the windows, arranged the food in the small refrigerator, then swung himself up onto the windowsill to watch the regular Tevereya ferry sailing past, silently across the sunlit bay. The coins of the I Ching rattled in his pocket; fishing them out in a sudden whim, he shook, and threw, and threw again. The sunlight flashed up from the water, dazzling him, and for a moment he could not tell whether the light had come from the sea or from the coins that now lay so innocently beneath his hand. It was the configuration of Hsiao Kuo. The Small Get By.
Encouraged by this, Zhu Irzh went to the cupboard and found a bottle of Hell’s finest brandy, which he had been saving for medicinal purposes. He was feeling a little off-color still, not quite himself. This, he thought, was as medicinal as it got. The liquor seared an icy trail down his throat, bringing a semblance of clarity in its wake.
