Snake Agent

by Liz Williams

  “Some help would be appreciated,” Chen said, through rattling teeth. The two halves of the creature thrashed about in front of him, but the light that ran along its side was beginning to flicker and die. Gradually, it became still and gray, like dead neon. Zhu Irzh reached across and hauled Chen to his feet.

  “There,” the demon said with mock solicitousness, dusting Chen down. “Well done. I like a man who can think quickly—and where do you think you’re going?” Striding across the chamber, he seized the little ghost by the wrist and dragged her back into the room. The ghost squeaked.

  “Careful!” Chen barked.

  “Oh, really,” the demon said, irritated. “She can’t feel anything. Not like that, anyway.”

  “Nevertheless, Zhu Irzh … Let her go.”

  The ghost ran to Chen and hid behind him. She seemed to be growing smaller. “Honestly,” the demon said. “Anyone would think I’d done something barbarous.”

  “We’d better leave,” Chen murmured, deeming it best not to reply to this remark. “Tell me, Seneschal, how did you get here?”

  “I entered your world through one of the temples. But I got into the house through the sewers.”

  Chen looked at Zhu Irzh. The demon’s long, silk coat was immaculate; his boots shone and his hair was sleek. He smelled faintly of opium and the incense of Hell, but nothing more unpleasant.

  “Vice Division, you see,” Zhu Irzh said, by way of explanation. “They do say that shit doesn’t stick.”

  Chen sighed. “Not to you, perhaps. Ah well. I suppose it’s the most unobtrusive route out.”

  “Aren’t you going after Tang?”

  “No, not now. Not yet, anyway. My principal concern is his daughter’s safety.” He lowered his voice, hoping that the ghost could not hear. “And I want to find out exactly why he killed her, dispatched her to Hell, then brought her back again. I want to know why her father wants to keep so close an eye on her.”

  The demon nodded reflectively. “I’d like to know that, too.”

  Swooping suddenly at the little ghost, he turned her face to the light. She ducked out of his grip and dodged away again, but not before Zhu Irzh had given a hiss of irritation.

  “What are you doing?” Chen demanded.

  “Looking to see if she’s still got her p’o.”

  Chen glanced down. The glow of the ghost’s soul was still faintly visible, a miasma behind the wreck of her skull.

  “You can see that she still has her soul. Why?”

  The demon’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to be debating something with himself, but after a moment he said, “I saw the ghost of another of Tang’s victims. Her p’o was missing.”

  “Odd,” Chen said. “Usually, the p’o only goes when they’ve gone the legitimate route to the otherworlds. But Tang’s victims were illegally processed.”

  “I know. Which suggests that something else removed her soul once she reached Hell.”

  “Soul trafficking,” Chen said. “That’s really serious, even more so than the ghost-trade.”

  “And indicates that our Mr Tang is involved in something very dark indeed.”

  “Any idea what that might be?”

  A shadow crossed the demon’s face. He shook his head. Chen was certain that Zhu Irzh was holding something back, but it would have to wait.

  “Talking of Tang,” he said, “we can’t stay here … But I want to get a watch on him. I want to see what he does, where he goes. I am beginning to think that he’s more useful to me if he’s walking around as a free man.”

  “Up to you,” the demon said with a shrug. “He’s your suspect, after all.”

  The emphasis he placed on the words carried the subtle implication that the ghost was the demon’s own. Chen glanced down and saw that Pearl’s fragile hand was clasped firmly around his arm; he felt nothing.

  “You’d best show us the way,” Chen said. Inside his pocket, the rosary was still wrapped around his hand. The only way that he was going to bid farewell to the little ghost would be to wave good-bye as she left on a boat for Heaven. He considered the demon’s retreating back. Zhu Irzh moved with a sinuous litheness that suggested powerful ch’i, and Chen had already noted his strength. If it came to a fight, he thought uneasily, it may very well be that Zhu Irzh would be more than a match for him. But then again, he had beaten Zhu Irzh once already, and any fight would take place on Chen’s own earthly territory, which evened the odds. Chen preferred realism to pessimism; he would see, he thought, but he was determined not to let the ghost of poor Pearl Tang go back to Hell without a struggle.

  The demon stopped, and pointed. Chen saw a round iron hatch set level with the floor. “Sewers?”

  The demon nodded.

  “Indeed. Very well, Detective Inspector. Down we go.” Bending, he hooked a clawed finger around the hatch and hauled it from its resting place. Chen took a step back at the resulting smell, and even Zhu Irzh’s aristocratic nose wrinkled. Only the ghost remained unmoved, staring numbly ahead of her.

  “All right,” Chen said. “You first.”

  The demon smiled. Teeth glittered in the darkness. “But I insist. After you.”

  They glared at each other over polite, rictus smiles. Chen was hardly obsessive over the matter of face, regarding it as at best a necessary courtesy and at worst a neurosis, but dealing with Hell was all about power games and he had decided to concede as little ground as possible to Zhu Irzh. After a moment’s standoff, however, the ghost seemed to make a decision. With a sudden touch of hauteur, she stepped onto the empty air above the hatch and descended as smoothly as someone stepping into an elevator.

  “Oh,” Zhu Irzh said, somewhat discomposed. Chen’s smile widened, in mimicry of the demon’s own. He sat down and lowered himself through the hatch. The shaft was shallow. Chen landed in a foot of unpleasant water. The smell was overwhelming. Chen clapped a hand over his mouth and gave vent to a prolonged fit of retching. The hatch clanged shut overhead.

  “Do you think you might try to be a little quieter?” the demon’s voice said, inches from his ear. Zhu Irzh’s eyes resembled an eclipse of the sun: the pupils expanding until only a thin, bright corona remained.

  “Sorry,” Chen muttered through the sleeve of his coat. After a few moments he adjusted to breathing through his mouth, but the smell was still noxious.

  “Can you see me?” Zhu Irzh said.

  “No. Not unless you turn your head and I can see your eyes.”

  In his dark clothes, Zhu Irzh was lost in the gloom. It was easier to see the ghost, a faint dim gleam. Something thin and hard wrapped itself around Chen’s wrist with a hiss like a whip; he could not restrain a cry. A moment later, he realized what it was: the demon’s tail.

  “My uncle has an excellent apothecary,” Zhu Irzh remarked, irrelevantly. “He sells remedies for all manner of ills. I can procure you something, if you like.”

  “For what?” Chen replied nasally.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, you seem to suffer a trifle from nerves … I’ve got a cousin like that; always starting at every little sound.”

  The demon stepped delicately forwards into the darkness, pulling Chen with him in a rustle of silk. Ahead, the ghost emitted a faint phosphorescence, like radiation.

  11

  “Tell me again what he looked like, this man upon the harbor wall?” the badger-teakettle said in its inhuman voice. To Inari, the badger sounded as earth would if it could talk: deep and thick and slow. The badger was sitting on the bed beside Inari, its paws folded and its long claws meshed. Its eyes appeared to be closed, but she could see a black gleam beneath the wrinkled lids.

  “Tall. Not young. I think his hair was gray, but I sometimes find it difficult to judge, in this light of Earth. A hard face, like something found on the side of a tomb, with eyebrows like a bar. A long coat, such as demons wear. A sword.”

  The badger ducked its head and said, “I do not know such a person.” The reproof was plain.

 
“I did not imagine him,” Inari snapped. “He was real and he was there, watching me.”

  “Perhaps your husband has assigned a guardian.”

  “He didn’t look like a policeman.”

  The badger’s eyes opened wide, catching the candlelight so that the dark irises contained a tiny, perfect flame.

  “Hell, then. Kindred.”

  “He did not feel like kin to me. He smelled human, even at such a distance. And why would my family use a human to spy upon me?”

  “I don’t know,” the badger admitted. There was a short, contemplative pause. “And if it is your kin, what will you do?”

  “I won’t go back.”

  “I know you will not go back, Inari. I asked you what you would do.” The badger’s eyes were like polished iron and there was no pity in them. Animals do not feel pity, and neither do spirits, thought Inari, it is a failing of humankind, and sometimes of my own.

  “Well,” she said reluctantly. “I won’t put Chen Wei in danger.”

  “He is already in danger, and was so from the day you first set eyes upon one another. If you left him, and vanished to the furthest depths of the storm-breeding ocean, or to the highest winter peak of the Zhai Fu Lo, it would make no difference. If they chose to do so, the wu’ei could still hunt him down.”

  “I know,” Inari whispered. She had always known that this day would come: the day on which she had to face the truth. She wanted to pretend that the man she had seen on the harbor wall was no one of importance, and perhaps it was true, but it still didn’t matter. The consequences of her actions were inescapable. “I could not have done otherwise,” she said. “You know what I am. Demons cannot help but use, however greatly they may love. And I could not face marriage to—to that person.”

  “Yes, Dao Yi, your betrothed,” the badger said. “We have heard nothing from him since the day you left Hell.”

  “My family paid him the dowry,” Inari said, and even to her own ears her voice sounded hollow and unconvincing. “That was what Dao Yi wanted, after all: not me.”

  “You know better than that,” the badger said.

  Inari rose and paced to the window. It was now quite dark. She could see her own image reflected in the candlelight on the glass: a pale, pointed face, and eyes like wells of blood. She turned this way and that, trying to imagine herself human, as if she wished hard enough, transformation would come. Change flickered in the reflection beyond her shoulder: the badger, a teakettle once more, in silent rejection of all that she was trying to pretend.

  12

  Chen, Zhu Irzh and the ghost surfaced in a street that Chen did not immediately recognize. He stood taking deep breaths of comparatively fresh air and glanced around him. His trouser legs were sodden, and clung unpleasantly to his shins. He did not dare look down at his shoes. The street was narrow: the usual welter of machine shops and cafés, all silent under the moon, their facades hidden behind steel shutters. Turning, Chen glimpsed a peaked roof and realized where they were. They were standing at the back of Kuan Yin’s second temple, in Xiangfan below the Garden District.

  “Well,” the demon said softly.

  “You came here? Through the temple?” Chen asked, nonplussed. The sudden sensation of betrayal rose in his throat, though he knew perfectly well that the temples were gates between the worlds. The demon gave a fluid shrug.

  “It’s as good a place as any other. Besides, it’s not far from where I live, in my world. What’s it to you?”

  “Kuan Yin is my patron.”

  “Mmm.” Zhu Irzh murmured in surprise. A flicker of unease crossed his face. Surely, Chen thought, surely the goddess will not let him steal Pearl’s soul back to Hell from her own precincts? The same thought had evidently crossed the demon’s mind, too. He adjusted the cuffs of his silk coat with some semblance of embarrassment. Thunder cracked in the distance and heavy drops of rain began to drum on the corrugated iron roofs around them. Zhu Irzh’s head snapped back.

  “Rain,” he said, dismayed. A single droplet fell from the heavens and streaked Zhu Irzh’s cheek like a tear. The demon hissed in pain and clapped a hand to his face.

  “I suggest we get out of the wet,” Chen said, silently thanking the goddess that Zhu Irzh was clearly not of the same storm-­loving lineage as Inari. He took the demon’s arm and drew him aside. “You want to talk to Pearl, don’t you? Well, so do I. And she’ll feel safer in the temple.”

  Ducking beneath an awning, Zhu Irzh said, “Detective Inspector, you know that if it were up to me, I’d be perfectly content for you to put Pearl Tang on the next Celestial boat and that would be that. But I have my orders.”

  “Who’s your superior?”

  “Supreme Seneschal Yhu.”

  “Perhaps if I spoke to him, explained the situation—”

  “No!” the demon said hastily. “That is, there are political complications.”

  “There usually are. Look. It’s going to pour in a minute. Let’s at least get out of the rain and have a chat with this unfortunate spirit.”

  Zhu Irzh bolted towards the temple with his coat held over his head. The rain was driving hard now, but at least it had the advantage of cleaning Chen’s trousers. The thought of turning up at his goddess’ temple reeking of the city sewers had not been an appealing one. As always, the doors were open, symbolizing Kuan Yin’s permanent openness to those who suffered. No one was about, save for a large and melancholy frog sitting in the middle of the courtyard. Chen led the ghost to the main temple and opened the door.

  Inside, the temple was silent. Two guardian spirits, represented in stone, stood by the entrance. Chen lit a taper and their faces flared into sudden nightmare prominence. The ghost gave a small, muffled cry. Chen found three kneeling-mats and sat down on one of them.

  “Now,” he said, as gently as he could, to the ghost. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” The ghost stared at him in silent incomprehension. “Can you understand me? Can you speak?”

  “It might be a language problem,” Zhu Irzh suggested. “Sometimes they lose the language of life after they’ve crossed over. You speak Gweilin, don’t you, Chen?”

  “It’s a possibility she might have lost her Cantonese. That’s usually a result of death caused from head injury, isn’t it? Well, we’ll try.”

  He repeated his questions in Gweilin and a spark of understanding appeared in the ghost’s white eyes.

  “Can you tell me anything at all?” Chen said.

  The demon leaned across and said in fluent, rasping Gweilin, “Listen, Pearl. You’re dead, okay? Either your dad had you murdered or did it himself. Then he arranged for you to be sent to Hell, but brought you back again. Why?”

  The ghost gaped at him. Chen snapped, “Don’t you think she’s suffered enough?”

  Zhu Irzh spread his hands. “She’ll have to face facts sooner or later.”

  In a high, wondering voice the ghost said, “He killed me because I found out about the others. He had them killed, too, because the Xi Guan told him to.”

  Chen frowned. “What’s the Xi Guan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No use looking at me,” Zhu Irzh said, in response to Chen’s questioning glance. “It’s just a title. It means ‘The Pre-Eminent.’”

  “Where did you hear the word?” Chen asked the ghost.

  “My dad.” She twisted her hands. “I knew a lot about what my dad was doing. I used to go through his stuff in the study when he was out and no one was around. I knew he signed a bargain with the Ministry of Wealth, long ago, and that’s why we were rich. But lately, over the last year or so, he started to get angry. His investments weren’t doing so well—he hadn’t put any money into bioweb technology because he thought it was a fad, but then it got really popular and he kept saying the Ministry of Wealth had cheated him, they should have told him, and he was going to look for someone else to help him. Then one night, very late, a man came to the house. I—I’d gone out, by myself, to see someone—I was c
oming back through my bedroom window when I saw the man. I couldn’t see him very clearly, he was wearing a hood, but he stank. He smelled like something that had gone rotten, and he moved in a funny way. I didn’t stick around, I went back into my bedroom. After that, things got a bit better and dad seemed to calm down. But then—then all my friends started dying, we all had problems—they said it was anorexia. And I just got depressed. And one night I got so hungry I couldn’t stand it. I went downstairs to the kitchen. Dad was in his study, on the phone. He sounded tense, like he did when he was pretending not to be angry. He said, ‘I’ve done everything the Xi Guan asked me to do. Do you realize the danger I’ve put myself in over these deaths? Seven virgin souls for your experiments—that’s what the Xi Guan wanted and that’s what you got. I’ve kept my part of the bargain. Now it’s your turn.’

  “He hung up and he was coming out of the room, so I turned to run, but I—I hadn’t eaten anything that day, and I caught my foot on the rug and fell. He grabbed me just as I was getting up. ‘What did you hear?’ he shouted. ‘What did you hear?’ I told him I hadn’t heard anything, but he knew I was lying. He pulled me up by my nightdress and took me into the study. He took something out of the desk—I don’t know what it was. It moved. It was like a lump of flesh, a big shrimp. And he forced it into my mouth—” the ghost’s voice wavered “—so that I couldn’t speak or breathe properly, and then he made me go back upstairs. He made me lie down on the bed and then he just—he just sat there, looking at me. Watching me choke. And he kept saying something—a name, I don’t remember, and something came through the wall and stood by the bed. The back of my head hurt and it got worse and then … And then the person by the bed leaned over me, and I heard my father say, ‘Why is this so important?’ and the person was saying something, and all at once I knew why my father was doing these things, but it was too late.”