Snake Agent

by Liz Williams

Ma still felt weak and shaky, but he could not disobey: the demon-hunter’s voice pulled him up like a puppeteer jerking the strings. Together, they ran across the wasteland to the dorm. The gates of the razor-wire fence that protected the property were closed and bolted, and so were the heavy double doors.

  “Most of the building’s underground,” No Ro Shi said, glancing behind him. “We have to find a way to get in.”

  “Don’t these places usually have a security team on base?” Ma asked.

  The demon-hunter nodded. “Yes, they do.”

  “So where are they?” Ma asked uneasily. No Ro Shi did not reply. Instead, he reached out and touched a gloved hand to something red and wet adhering to the razor wire. Ma looked away.

  “How are we going to get in then?” Ma asked, suddenly hating the way his voice sounded so high and nervous. Perhaps that wasn’t the plan. Perhaps they could just call for reinforcements and he could watch from behind the police car while a SWAT team kicked in the doors. Ma, while lamenting his own cowardice, did not feel that he was in a position to substantially address it; better just to go with the flow. Looking at No Ro Shi’s iron countenance, however, he realized that calling for reinforcements would not be an option.

  “Stand back, Sergeant,” No Ro Shi instructed him. Ma was only too happy to comply. He shuffled back a few paces, careful to keep tabs on what might be happening behind them. He watched with a sinking feeling of familiarity as No Ro Shi raised his sword, held in both hands by the blade so that a trickle of blood ran down the sleeves of his armored coat, and began to chant. He flicked the blade upwards, and Ma winced as a sharp burst of light stabbed his eyes. Then the sword was falling, skewering sunlight as it fell, and No Ro Shi caught it by the hilt and sliced through the locks of the door as though they were soft as bean curd.

  “After me!” he shouted, kicking in the door. Ma swallowed a lump of fear, drew his gun, and plunged after the demon-hunter before he had time to think better of it. Whatever he did in front of this character was going to make him look like an idiot, he thought, so he might as well obey orders. The metal doors were blasted back on their hinges as No Ro Shi charged through, pursued by the panting Ma.

  Next minute, Ma found himself in a reception area containing a desk and a number of chairs. The carpet was of good quality, and the smooth pale walls were lined with upbeat portraits of smiling workers. At the far end, an artful photograph of a nexus floating in her tank formed a dramatic introduction to the open-plan stairwell. Ma studied the nexus’ face: she had been airbrushed to perfection, and she looked as though her dreams were happy ones.

  “Downstairs,” No Ro Shi ordered, after a quick and thorough search of the reception area. “That’s where the dorms are.”

  Ma followed him down a steep staircase that terminated in a doorway. The heavy metal door was wide open, revealing its complex locking mechanism. It led into a kind of airlock, ending at a second door. This, too, was open. There was the rasp of metal against silk as the demon-hunter drew his sword, wrapped a rosary around his free hand, and motioned to Ma to be quiet. Then he stepped through the door. Ma’s own fingers were white around the grip of the gun as he steeled himself for whatever might lie inside.

  Inside, the dormitory was anticlimactically silent and still. The coils of the bioweb apparatus hung in serpentine arrays from the ceiling, filling the upper half of the room, and spiraling back towards the regeneration units at the far end of the room. Viral liquids seethed within. The bodies of the nexi bobbed in their tanks like weed caught on the tide, and everything was so peaceful that it was a moment before Ma noticed the smell: a too-pungent, antiseptic odor, concealing decay. He crossed to the nearest tank and peered in curiously. In all the infomercials he’d seen, the nexi had appeared to be sweetly asleep, hands crossed modestly on their breasts, eyes shut, smiling as they dreamed within a delicate cradle of fine filaments. He did not recall seeing the thick tubes that penetrated the nexus’ mouth and anus, nor the bruising crawl of wires beneath her skin. And the eyes of this nexus were open, gazing sightlessly into nothing. The liquid in which she was floating resembled a thick, murky soup. No Ro Shi’s hand caught him by the shoulder, jerking him backwards.

  “She’s dead,” the demon-hunter whispered. “Like the rest of them.”

  “Dead?” Ma echoed in dismay. To his horror, No Ro Shi drew his sword and severed the ridged locks that secured the tank. The side of the tank swung slowly down with a hiss of hydraulic hinges, and the fluid within drained away into the service tubes. The nexus, still connected to her tubing, lay limply on the floor of the tank, and now Ma could see that her pallor was not due to the filtered light of the tank. No Ro Shi reached out with a gloved hand and detached the tube from her mouth, leaving it distended in a gape of horror.

  “Bloodless,” he said, probing the sides of the girl’s mouth. “She’s been drained.”

  “Who by? And why?”

  No Ro Shi tapped impatient fingers against the sides of the tank.

  “By the powers of Hell. As to why, we need look no further than the Ministry of Epidemics. A plague, Chen said. A plague is coming, and I believe that this is one of the places where it starts.”

  “A plague?” Ma had sudden visions of himself being consumed by disease. “You’ve brought me into a plague zone?”

  “Don’t worry,” No Ro said, with a lipless grin. “You and I are protected, at least for the next hour or so. I have a patron deity, you see, who negotiates to keep us safe. But he won’t be able to do that forever. Now that I’ve confirmed my suspicions, we need to take samples and get out of here.” He took a slender black case from inside his coat and opened it. A number of small instruments lay within. Ma, peering nervously over the demon-hunter’s shoulder, noted that there seemed to be a preponderance of scalpels, and something that resembled an apple corer.

  “Take a look around the rest of the building,” No Ro Shi instructed, selecting a scalpel. “I’ll get started here.”

  “Hang on,” Ma said. “That thing that attacked me—the thing made of light. You said it was being controlled by someone. What if—” He glanced nervously around him.

  “It’s around,” the demon-hunter said abruptly. “I can smell it. A demon of some kind, but it’s keeping out of the way. The things that invoke sun-demons aren’t themselves strong, but they are clever. Just watch your back. And I expect you to watch mine, too.”

  “All right,” Ma said unhappily. Then he added: “If this actually is the beginning of a plague—I mean, shouldn’t we get one of the special units in?”

  No Ro Shi did not reply for a moment. He was occupied with detaching a small fragment of skin from the dead girl’s throat. Then he said, “Sergeant, this is a conundrum with which I frequently find myself dealing. Too much attention drawn to the wrong thing, and one finds oneself—blocked. Mysterious obstacles are placed in one’s path by one’s superiors, and the more critical an incident seems to be, the more quickly those obstacles appear. You’d be surprised at the number of times I get taken off a case, just as some crucial breakthrough’s about to happen.” He sounded bitter, and Ma couldn’t blame him. “Singapore Three’s different from Beijing. Your captain’s a relatively enlightened man, I think. He supports Chen instead of undermining him, but Chen tends not to deal with major incidents—no disrespect to the honorable Detective, but his work’s pretty routine. The things I deal with are different, and there are a great many people who have made it their job to ensure that I fail more often than I succeed. I’m sure you understand the nature of politics today, Sergeant. Hell’s never very far away, as I’m sure you’ve learned. Now, get on with your job. We haven’t got all day.”

  He bent his head once more to his macabre task, leaving Ma to trail reluctantly back towards the stairs. As he did so, he noticed to his dismay that there was a slimy trail along the floor: a faint iridescence as though a large snail had oozed across it. It led through the doors and into the reception area.

  No sound came fr
om the reception area itself. Ma followed the trail into a nearby corridor and discovered a series of small rooms, obviously offices. All were deserted. In the second office, two cups of half-drunk coffee stood on a table. They were still tepid. Leaving them where they stood, Ma peered into the third office. Nothing. The drawer of a filing cabinet was open, and Ma leafed through a thick stack of what appeared to be medical records, but they weren’t very revealing. A rattling noise from the corner made him jump, but it was only a batch of paper tumbling out of the shredder. Ma doubted that demons would need to use recycling technology but, like the coffee cups, it raised the question of how long this place had been abandoned. The back of his neck prickled cold. Turning, he went back out into the corridor and headed towards the final office, where the slimy trail terminated. He encountered the smell before he stepped through the door. It was overpoweringly strong: the smell of blood.

  Very cautiously, his gun drawn, Ma put an eye to the crack in the door. The office was awash. There was no attempt at subtlety—no arcane symbols daubed across the walls, no sanguinary warnings inscribed in ancient scripts—just blood. It looked as though someone had simply hurled a tank of red paint into the room. Holding his breath, the gun extended before him, Ma plunged through the doorway. There wasn’t even a body. He’d been half-expecting to find the imaginatively butchered corpse of some nurse or technician spread-eagled against the wall, but there was nothing to show where the blood originated. Ma made a cursory search, but there was so much of the stuff that he couldn’t even determine the angle it had come from. It painted the doorframe, covered the walls and had made the carpet squishy. Gagging, Ma backed out and ran stickily down the corridor, thoughts of plague running rife through his beleaguered brain.

  All No Ro Shi said was, “I expected something like that. Right. I’ve finished the sampling, we might as well go. Once we’re out of here I’ll call your captain and get the dorm sealed. Don’t mention this to anyone else. The less fuss the better.”

  PART FIVE

  47

  Hell

  Inari and Fan had now been traveling for almost three hours, and Inari was hopelessly disoriented. She had tried to keep track of the labyrinth of passageways, but the twists and turns were too intricate to keep in mind: it was as though they were moving through a vast honeycomb of bone. Indeed, Inari thought, the walls of the passages more closely resembled bone than stone. They were pale as ivory, smooth and cool. She remembered what Fan had said: you’ll be safe here, beneath the old devil’s skull. Yet whenever she tried to ask the scarred woman what she had meant, Inari’s throat constricted and her mouth grew dry as dust so that the words would not come. Fan turned. Her face was luminous in the darkness, as though she shone with her own light. She murmured, “Inari? It won’t be long now before we reach the transition point. We need to prepare ourselves.”

  “Transition point? What’s that?” Inari asked.

  “Where the worlds cross.”

  Inari blinked. “I thought we were still in Hell. Do you mean we’re going to be on Earth?”

  Fan shook her head. “No. Inari, this is a route through the levels of Hell. The geography of Hell is complex, and even I don’t understand it fully—it travels back upon itself, like intricately folded cloth. We’re going to go a stage further down; perhaps even deeper than that.”

  “Do we have to?” Inari, used as she was to Hell itself, had never visited the lower levels; indeed, her family had always considered it a rather disreputable thing to do, grubbing about beneath the layers of the world like worms. Fan gave a faint smile, as if she knew what was going through Inari’s mind.

  “I’m afraid we have no choice. We’ve attracted the attention of the wu’ei, remember? They’ll be looking for you, and there are few better ways of covering your tracks than by traveling in the worlds beneath.” She turned and began walking swiftly along the narrow, sloping path.

  “Don’t they have jurisdiction in the lower levels?” Inari asked, following. She heard Fan’s soft laugh.

  “They have some. They’d like to think they have a great deal, but the truth is, Inari, only the Imperial Emperor himself has any sway over what happens in the lower reaches. The denizens of those parts go their own way; they are perverse, inconsequential, intransigent. Elemental forms, very old, and slow to change. You’ll see.”

  Inari opened her mouth to ask another question, but they had reached a slender split in the rock, as perfect and regular as the curve of a crescent moon.

  “There,” Fan said with evident satisfaction. “Here is where we make the transition.” She glanced round. “When we pass through, you may notice a change in me. And in yourself. As in all movement, something is lost and something gained … Take my hand.” She reached behind her, and after a moment’s hesitation Inari gripped her rough fingers. Fan stepped forwards, drawing Inari with her, and now Inari could see that the arch in the rock was nothing more than an illusion: a crack in the dark air itself. Inari’s fingers curled more tightly around Fan’s, and they stepped through. But even though she had moved, Inari could not repress the sudden sensation that she had remained still, that the world itself had shifted around her, as though she were the hub of an immense wheel. Inari’s vision dimmed and swayed; she staggered, and Fan’s iron hand pulled her upright.

  “Do you see?”

  Inari blinked. For a brief, disorienting moment, it seemed that she gazed out across a vast expanse: a great plain of crimson rock, above which hung three ashen moons as fragile and wan as soap bubbles. Two immense cities jostled out across the plain, composed of spires of red rock that reached up into the heavens; she could see the smoky fires burning in the streets, and hear voices on the wind. It looked like a scene from one of those science-fiction movies that Chen was so inexplicably fond of watching; it looked nothing like the worlds she knew. As she tried to make sense of it, however, it disintegrated, and there was nothing more than a cool, gray twilight.

  “The cities of the plain,” Fan said into her ear. “Very old—so old that some philosophers say that the world is gradually con­figuring itself to meet their image, and what we see is nothing more than a glimpse of the far future. But others say that this is not so, and there are no triple moons, no plain; only a writhing chaos onto which we project our own images.” Her hand tightened around Inari’s as she shrugged. “But it doesn’t make a great deal of difference in the end, if you ask me. It still has to be dealt with.”

  “We’re going across?” Inari faltered. The glimpse she had seen was somehow terrifying, something that not even a demon should be permitted to see.

  “No,” Fan murmured. “We’re going in!”

  48

  Above Chen’s head rose the enormous iron spire of the Ministry of War: a spike some nine thousand feet high that reared towards the heavens from a tripod base, as though some mad giant had been let loose on the Eiffel Tower and told to make a few improvements. Around the foot of the Ministry extended an obsidian wall surmounted with writhing live razor wire that thrashed and squirmed in perpetual blind motion, seeking prey. From the base of the wall ran a long flight of shallow steps, leading down to the main administrative square, and a pair of gigantic metal lion-dogs on plinths. Chen, Zhu Irzh, and the badger-teakettle were crouching at the base of one of these plinths, contemplating the ziggurat bulk of the Ministry of Epidemics across the square.

  “How are we going to get in?” the demon enquired rhetorically. They were at the time of day which, in Hell, passed as dawn. A chilly, gray light suffused the buildings of the administrative district, and the wind had changed direction, though Chen noted that his shadow still streamed out behind him any which way, as if incapable of making up its mind where to fall. He had long since given up trying to work out where the light was coming from, but the inconstancy of his shadow continued to set him on edge. He stared across to the Ministry of Epidemics. Shadows seemed to wreathe it like a miasma of plague. In its distant upper stories, lights were burning red. The great
iron doors that led onto the main square were firmly closed.

  “You say it has no back entrances?” Chen murmured.

  “None whatsoever. I checked. The drainage system is also apparently complicated, since the city officials clearly don’t want the Ministry infecting the rest of the population via that particular route—believe it or not, sanitary controls here are quite strict.” Zhu Irzh caught sight of Chen’s skeptical look, and protested further. “They really are! So we can’t get in via the sewers. On that previous occasion, as I told you, I simply strolled through the doors with the rest of the patients, and strolled right out again with Leilei.” His face took on a momentarily pensive cast. “But that was before the Ministry started dispatching assassins after me. I’ve no doubt that my person carries some telltale sign that will set alarms clanging all over the place if I so much as set foot in the forecourt. And Imperial Majesty only knows how they’d react to you.”

  “No, obviously we can’t go in via orthodox means: that’s out of the question. Do you know of any means of disguise? Could we pass ourselves off as sick?”

  Zhu Irzh looked at him dubiously.

  “You’re obviously human, that’s the problem. And don’t take this the wrong way, Detective, but you smell like one, too. All that fresh blood and meat and bone—” He broke off hastily at the look in Chen’s eye. “They’d sniff you out, is what I’m saying.”

  “What about magic?”

  “All government departments tend to have detectors for magical disguises, that’s the trouble. There’s too much internecine warfare between agencies; everyone’s paranoid.”

  “Could we get in through one of the upper-level windows?” Chen mused, instantly discarding his own suggestion. “No, I don’t suppose we could.”

  “Not a chance,” the demon agreed flatly. He stared across to the sheer, gleaming side of the Ministry ziggurat. “Fifty feet of wall before you get anywhere near a window. I doubt if even a glue-footed gecko could make its way up that on a hot day.”