by Liz Williams
Jhai shrugged. Underneath the dim lighting her amber skin was pale, and her eyes huge.
“Are you all right?” Zhu Irzh said, congratulating himself on having noticed.
“Yes … yes, I’m fine. We had a few problems today, nothing you need worry about.” She gave a rather unconvincing laugh. Zhu Irzh took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the door, and when he turned he found Jhai immediately behind him. She wound her arms around his neck and he kissed her, opening her lips with his tongue and stroking the back of her neck. She was not passive now. She made him lie back on the couch and went down on him, and he lay back suffused with pleasure, feeling her take him deeper into her mouth until he realized that he was going to come. He sat up quickly and pulled her onto his lap, pushing up the silken skirts.
She had, in a prudent moment, taken her underwear off and he let her take him inside her. She rode him hard, held tightly within her, sitting back occasionally to stroke his flat belly as he stirred his hips against her, and at last he could not hold back any longer and let go, gasping with release. Before she had time to be disappointed he sat up and rolled over, pinning her underneath him and stroking her hard until she came.
And with it, changed.
Jhai, human once more and putting her underwear back on, gave him a rather shamefaced smile.
“I couldn’t wait, sorry about that.”
“Neither could I. Are you apologizing for fucking me?” He rested his head on his arm and smiled at her. Whatever tension had been released by that, it was back now. She gave him a nervy grin. A thought occurred to him.
“Jhai? Have you taken anything?”
“No more than usual.”
“Ah.”
“It’s just—I’m a bit wound up today.”
“Will you stay?” he said diffidently.
“No, I ought to get back.” She evidently didn’t want to hang around, and she dressed quickly. Zhu Irzh saw her onto the wharf, and even he, night-sighted and animal-wary, did not see the thing that watched her go.
Next day, Jhai’s car arrived early. Zhu Irzh made his way across the pontoons to find it waiting on the wharf; a black Mercedes like a block of night in the afternoon sunshine. As he ambled up the wharf, the door opened and Jhai stepped out into the sunlight. She wore a dark vest and combat pants; her hair fell in a tight braid down her back. Ready for business, thought Zhu Irzh, but what kind?
“Hi,” Jhai said. “No back-up?”
“I thought I could handle you alone.”
The look she gave him made the demon grin.
“Get in the car, Zhu Irzh.” She followed him through the door.
“So,” he said, once the chauffeur had taken them out into the lunchtime traffic. “You’ve something to show me?”
Jhai nodded. “You might not trust me enough to let me, though.”
“Oh?” She seemed nervous, he thought. Tension sang in her like a wire drawn tight. For the hundredth time, he wondered what bargains she had made, and how they impacted upon the dead. Detective Inspector Chen would have handled this very differently, the demon knew. A cautious, thorough investigation of suspects: methodical, meticulous, and conducted in the full knowledge that the investigator was on the side of justice. But am I? Zhu Irzh asked himself rhetorically. He had been posted to Earth for political reasons, and it was certainly proving entertaining now that he had left that period of ennui behind. But no one, least of all Zhu Irzh, was under any illusions. The only master the demon served was himself. Captain Sung might have kept him on a tight rein, keeping him out of major investigations until Chen’s absence, and the station’s limited manpower, made it necessary for him to be attached to a real case, but if he was offered a promising alternative, then he’d take it. And Jhai was certainly promising. As high as Heaven. A tantalizing remark, but what had she meant by it?
They had left the city behind now, and were traveling through the suburbs. Soon, even these were gone and the countryside became scattered with smallholdings: leafy gardens planted in the yellow earth of the river delta, goats and dogs and ducks.
“Your mother has a place out here?” Zhu Irzh asked curiously.
“In the hills. Another twenty minutes and we’ll be there.”
Zhu Irzh watched the gentle land roll by and then they were climbing into the barren earth of the hills. Across the hillside ran a fence, triple barred with razor wire. The car slowed. Zhu Irzh heard the hum of an electronic gate and then they were through. The car pulled up at a long, low building. The demon had been imagining a mansion, but this looked more like some kind of dormitory.
“The main complex is underground,” Jhai explained, stepping from the car.
“So what do you do up here?” Zhu Irzh asked, not expecting a real answer, but Jhai said, “Lab work. Anything experimental, that needs more space than the city.”
“For your mining contracts? Or the pharmaceutical side?”
She smiled briefly. “Both.” She touched her palm to a pad on the side of a door. Zhu Irzh saw the blue glow of a retinal scan, and they were through into a kind of airlock.
“High security?”
“It’s sometimes necessary.” This time, she did not smile.
They passed through into a second airlock, and then into a long, narrow room, clearly a laboratory of some kind.
“Now,” Jhai said, motioning toward a desk. “I have a confession to make.”
“All right,” the demon replied, carefully. “What kind of confession?”
“Not to the killings. I didn’t do those, Zhu Irzh. But I know what did.”
“What? Not who?”
“Who and what. Zhu Irzh, your aggressive lapse, the other day—I’m afraid I have to take responsibility for that as well.”
He stared at her. “You?”
“When you went to the site where the murder victim was found, you caught something from the body. A virus.”
Zhu Irzh stared at her. “What was it?”
“Okay. You know that I use a drug to repress my—my other side. It’s based on a Keralan folk remedy, oddly enough—a combination of herbs, made into a magical balm. It was once used in exorcisms. The drug I take is the synthetic equivalent. You contracted the same kind of thing, but in a viral carrier, and reversed. A few molecular tweaks here and there, a little refining, and one has a drug that can tap directly into the response centers of the brain. In your case, the drug was on a time-release, just in case anyone made the connection between your visit to Paugeng, and the attack on Paravang Roche.”
“That’s outrageous,” Zhu Irzh said hotly. “I could have killed the man.”
“Oh, come on. You’re a demon. Don’t tell me you’ve got a conscience, Zhu Irzh.”
He didn’t want to admit to that weakness, so he said, “No. The attack lacked style. But why?”
“What I have in mind for this particular pharmaceutical range is something—quite ambitious. Come on. I’ll show you.” She rose and gestured toward the door. “I’d like you to take a walk, Zhu Irzh. It’s only a short distance into the hills. Come with me.”
Curious and annoyed, the demon followed her. They went back out through the airlocks and into the day. Heat struck the demon like a wall.
“Where are we going?”
“I’ll show you.”
She led him up a dusty path, through groves of acacia. Looking back, he could see the compound far below, like a child’s building blocks. They came to a razor-wire fence, a substantial thing that was also clearly electrically charged—and spell-warded. The demon held out a considering hand and felt the snap of magic along his palm. Jhai halted.
“Is this the perimeter?” Zhu Irzh asked.
“No. This is an enclosure.”
“Enclosing what? Jhai, if this is a trap, I think I should point out that I’m wearing a trace. It’s embedded in the bone of my arm, so you’ll have to have me searched and then cut it out if you want to remove it. If anything happens to me, the trace will deactivate and a
lert my colleagues. And I have my own wards, too.” He was lying, of course, but it wouldn’t hurt to make her think a little.
Jhai smiled. “Glad to see you’ve taken precautions. But this isn’t a trap. Not for you.”
“For what, then?”
“Go and look.”
The demon regarded her doubtfully for a moment, then nodded.
“All right.” He wasn’t happy about it, but curiosity won out over unease.
“I’ll meet you later. Just follow the path up the hillside.”
“You’re not coming?”
“No,” Jhai said. “I don’t want to attract attention to myself.” She pressed her hand against the gate lock, and it opened. Cautiously, Zhu Irzh stepped through. A tingling sensation ran up his spine like a mouse. At first, he thought this was some aspect of the gate security system, and then he realized. It was natural.
“There’s a ch’i meridian running along here. I can feel it, under the ground.”
Jhai nodded. “You’ll notice more of them. This was a sacred place long ago. There’s some powerful feng shui around here.” Gently, she shut the gate behind him, and turned. “See you later.”
Wondering if there would be a later, the demon made his way up the hillside. It was very quiet. A single small bird turned in the air above him, spinning on the wind, but only a faint breeze stirred the hillside grasses. Beneath his feet, Zhu Irzh sensed the meridian, its pulsing presence humming under the arid ground. He squatted on his heels and listened. He could hear his own heartbeat, beginning to pound in time to the meridian. There was a change in the wind, beginning to turn to the south, a warm wind bearing the salt-mud smell of the delta, which was just visible in a fan of light through the hills. He could hear the wind and the voices that it carried, once startlingly loud in his ear, speaking a long, liquid language, coming from far out to sea. Waterdragons. Zhu Irzh smiled.
Rising to his feet, he walked on. There was a grove of acacia ahead of him. The meridian led directly into it. Following the path, Zhu Irzh brushed the leaves of acacia aside and halted. Within the grove stood a small temple. It was built of pale, smooth stone, and it was very old. It looked as though it had been in ruin for many years; lichen mottled the stone like a scab. But power hung around it all the same. The air glistened. The meridian seemed to shine beneath the demon’s feet. As he stood, watching, the world darkened around him; the sky changed from a bone-colored haze to fawn, then amber. Shadows raced by, attached to nothing. Zhu Irzh sank down to kneel in the dusty earth. It seemed to him that he knelt on the skin of a drum, reverberating with the beat of the world, and then the skin parted and let him slip through, dissolving him, so that he was no longer separate from the world but part of it.
To the east, the mines gaped, shattering the surface of the world with parallel scars, and he could see down beneath them in a cross-section of the world over which he was painfully spread. The rifts in the earth were indeed intersecting with the fault lines, as everyone was saying and as the governor, tied into the mining corporations, had strenuously denied. Yet there was something else about the meridians, something wrong—then it was gone, and he could no longer get a grip on it. Both the rifts and the faults ran along the meridian pathways of ch’i and sha.
Zhu Irzh—stretched, disembodied, smeared throughout the body of the planet—did not care. He was everywhere, simultaneously; unified with the blind, unthinking world. His awareness poured down waterways, felt the delta coursing around him and then was out into the open sea where the waterdragons were still calling, across and over and into the wild country of the southern mountains, uninhabited except for the tiny villages clinging to their bare sides. The stars rang around him and the hard, little moon swung up and over his shoulder like a stone flung into the sky. Beyond, there was only darkness with, very far away, an echo of somewhere known. He could see the shore of Heaven itself, as bright as dawn. It hurt his eyes and he turned within to the world’s molten heart, seeking Hell. Fire gushed as the earth’s core heaved, and then without warning he was flung back in the familiar confines of bone and blood and sinew. The bleached sky roared over him like a wave. He fell back into the grass, crying out with the shock. He was panting, and drenched in sweat. His mouth tasted of blood; experimentally he licked his lip and found nothing there. Death hung close in the air, making the hairs at the back of his neck prickle and his throat constrict. Claws flexed from the pads of his fingertips.
It was growing dark, yet surely it was no more than three o’clock. He must have been under some kind of spell … He glanced up and froze. Someone was coming out of the temple and walking toward him through the gloom. Hastily, Zhu Irzh scrambled to his feet. The figure was tall, and dressed in a saffron robe. Its hands were outstretched in welcome. Zhu Irzh’s hand crept toward the hilt of his sword. He was close enough now to see its face: serene, smiling, filled with peace. The unmistakable scent of peach blossom clung around it. It had come from Heaven and he knew it, now, for one of the spirits that attended the Celestial Court. Slowly, Zhu Irzh relaxed. He released his grip on the sword.
The Celestial being’s jaw dropped as though it had been unhinged. Zhu Irzh glimpsed a row of needle teeth, then a probing tongue shot out, aiming at his throat. Zhu Irzh flung up his arm to ward it off and it gripped him by the wrist. The tongue’s serrated edge bit into his flesh. Cursing, Zhu Irzh leaped backward and drew the sword, but the tongue as swiftly withdrew. The being threw back its head, making the dislocated jaw flap, and emitted a shrill, shrieking laugh. Then the creature leaped high into the air, displaying long, clawed feet, and bounded like a hare down the hillside. There was a second shriek as it met the fence. He saw a flash, and then the being lay still.
Zhu Irzh became gradually aware that his own mouth was hanging open. His wrist was beginning to swell with a series of painful weals, but the hurt was eclipsed by simple amazement. What, in Hell or out of it, had that been? With the sword drawn, Zhu Irzh sprinted down toward the fallen being, but when he reached the fence, there was nothing there. Snarling under his breath, the demon made a swift search of the vicinity but the being, whatever it had been, was gone. At last Zhu Irzh turned and, glancing around him warily, went back along the path to meet Jhai.
She was not there, but just as Zhu Irzh was beginning to think that the whole thing was some kind of gigantic trick, he saw her coming along the ridge of the hill. She caught up with him at the summit. Below, the arc of the world fell away under the green sunset sky, and the sea, by some curious inversion of the light, had changed to a silvery aquamarine, brighter than the heavens. Zhu Irzh stood on a rocky outcrop at the edge of the summit, impervious to the drop at his feet. If he fell, he’d survive, but he wasn’t sure about Jhai. His hair, ruffled by the brief battle, whipped in the delta wind. He sensed Jhai come up behind him and found himself smiling: It’s dark … How well can she see? … I’ll pitch her over the edge if she tries anything. She was armed, sensible girl; he could sense the way her fingers gripped the automatic, affecting her balance a little, and the way she moved. His smile widened.
“No need for that, Jhai. I’m not going to attack you, unless you make the first move.”
He was expecting protest or anger, but instead she said softly, “Look at the lights.” She pointed. Through the haze, the city spread in a blurred star along the delta. From up here, they could see each quarter: Bharulay, Ghenret, Bharcharia Anh, and toward Jhenrai and the harbor, the Paugeng tower spiking up, the highest structure along the flat warehouse district of the port. The warning beacon at its peak flared briefly and a helicopter coming in from the seaward side flipped to turn around it before wheeling at a right angle to the airport. The last crimson edge of the sun slid beneath the horizon, leaving a fiery smear in its wake.
“Look,” Jhai said, taking the demon’s arm. Deliberately, she was keeping her gaze on the city, so as not to look down and he realized suddenly that she was afraid of heights. It made him feel a little better. “You can see all the way to O
richay. As far as the airport.”
“You can see the bridge. And the harbor.”
“So you can.” Her grip on his arm tightened a little.
“It’s cold up here,” she whispered. Zhu Irzh turned to her. Her eyes were filled with light, and for a moment no one was there behind them.
“Best go back down,” he said.
She nodded. “I’ll take you back into the city.”
“Do I get an explanation?”
“Yes. But not here. I’ll tell you on the way.”
He led her down the hill, shivering a little, like an animal or a child. At the compound the driver was waiting, patiently smoking a cigarette. Jhai held the door for the demon; he climbed in, and they set off.
25
The Temple of Shai seemed to go on forever. They were in the main cistern now, floating past columns rooted in water. A face looked out at Robin, carved in stone and iron, its mouth fixed in a wide grimace. The stone itself was a dark gray, mottled and speckled like skin. Above them, the ribs of the domes arched upward, vanishing into the soft darkness. The waterways of the cistern were a maze; a pattern that made little sense. It was very quiet. There was no sign of the troop boat. Robin was oddly relaxed, traveling through this silent, melancholy place, as though they had entered some limbo where there was no longer any need to hurry and there was all the time in the world to be oneself. As they rounded one of the numerous bends she saw, without surprise or disgust, the body of an enormous seal. It was little more than a carcass now; the flesh eaten away, the ribs stretching upward and the white skull, with its broad nose and round eye sockets picked quite clean, gazing at the ceiling.
“Who do you think did that?”
Mhara’s eyes reflected nothing but the dark surface of the water. “I don’t know. The worlds are changing, Robin. You can’t feel the change, but it’s there. It’s going to happen.”
“Change how?” Her skin felt icy cold. “How do you know?”
Crouched in the stern of the boat, Mhara, too, might have been carved from stone and iron. He had fixed the tiller and now the craft took them forward, following the canal.
