by Liz Williams
“So the answer’s no, then?”
Tso could only nod, once, and feebly. The personage spat at his feet, a gesture somewhat at odds with the magnificence of his garments and bearing. The globule of spittle frothed and writhed, boiling away to produce something that resembled a sticky black seedpod. Tso stared. The seedpod cracked in two, and a long thing like a two-tailed scorpion scuttled out and ran up Tso’s leg. Tso yelled and struggled, but it was no use. The guards held his arms in a firm grip, and he was forced to stand helpless as the scorpion-thing snaked inside his collar and coiled itself tightly around his throat. He could feel the delicate prick of its double stings, just below his jugular.
“You really don’t have any idea why you’ve been brought here to the Ministry of Epidemics, do you?” the personage asked with contempt. Painfully aware of the sting at his throat, Tso burst into a voluble and impassioned plea.
“With the utmost respect, Lord, I do not. Have I not provided vital aid and succor to the Ministry of Epidemics? Has it not been my company who has supplied your august institution with the required amount of fresh, top-quality human blood, the very fluid of life of several hundred young girls—at very short notice, I should point out, and at maximum expense and difficulty, given that they were alive at the time? Have I not placed into your hands my own accursed brother-in-law, the protégé of Kuan Yin herself, thus thwarting an attempt by the human authorities to bring ruin upon the Ministry’s most worthy and intricate plans? Haven’t I—”
“All this,” said the personage in a voice like a plangent bell, “has been for nothing more than your perceived personal advantage, and is regarded as nothing more than barely sufficient recompense, after the grave affront your family has delivered to the Imperial Court. Did not your own sister, doubtless with your connivance, seek to deceive a good and worthy public servant, who wished only to make her his bride and cherish her for eternity?”
“I had nothing to do with it!” Tso cried. “She—”
But the personage intoned relentlessly on. “And did not that sister, also with your complicit approval, run off to marry a human when your sad scheme was discovered—that self-same protégé of the goddess? Are you aware of the policies of the Imperial Court regarding miscegenation and consorting with Immortals of the heavenly persuasion? If you had kept better guard over your womenfolk, Master Tso, you would not find yourself in the sorry position that you do now. Did you seriously expect to find yourself rewarded for turning your brother-in-law, the contemptible Chen Wei, over to us—a task in which, I might add, you significantly failed to do, given that he’s still at large.”
But Tso had nothing to say. The personage grinned a dreadful, vulpine grin, and added, “However, it may be that even such a worthless person as yourself is not wholly useless. After all, you share some defiling degree of human blood with your shameful sister, and that makes you a possible candidate for certain of the Ministry’s experimental purposes. We shall see if you might be of use after all.” He picked up a small, delicate bell from the desktop and rang it. At the far end of the room, a door was flung open, as though someone had been waiting eagerly for their summons. And when Tso saw what stepped through that door, it was as though the blood in his veins, both human and demon, was nothing more than icy water.
50
Zhu Irzh and Chen shrank back against the sides of the lift, but there was only another empty hallway. This one, however, was considerably more lavishly appointed than the one below. Thick, sulfur-colored drapes masked the walls, and a plush carpet reminiscent of moss covered the floor. Abandoning the lift, Chen and the demon stepped carefully into the hallway.
“Where now?” the demon asked.
“No idea. Let’s try that way.” Chen indicated one of the long corridors that led from the hallway. The demon padded alongside, occasionally stopping to peer at the closed doors that led off from the hallway. The air smelled musty, with a curiously antiseptic undertone, and beneath that, the unmistakable odor of sickness. It reminded Chen of an old-fashioned and gloomy hotel, crossed with a hospital and a mortuary. Shortly, they came out into a reception area, paved with peeling lacquered tiles. A clerk sat at the desk, writing moodily in a ledger and occasionally coaxing a single strand of hair back across a mottled bald scalp. Zhu Irzh and Chen sidled back behind the curtains.
“What now?” Chen murmured. “Should we go back?”
The demon gnawed thoughtfully on his lip with a gilded incisor. “Might be more people elsewhere. I’ll deal with him.”
Chen reached out a warning hand but Zhu Irzh was already strolling across the tiles to the desk. The clerk looked up indifferently. Chen held his breath, but the clerk’s expression did not change.
“Good morning,” the demon remarked politely. “I wonder if you could possibly tell me the location of a Dr Jhang—he’s, ah, treating a lady friend of mine for a rather intimate complaint and I need to have a word with him.”
“How did you get in?” the clerk asked suspiciously. “I thought they’d closed the main doors today. Have you been waiting all night?”
Zhu Irzh gave his most engagingly predatory smile and murmured, “Connections.” A wad of Hell money appeared in his hand as if conjured out of thin air. The clerk’s red rheumy eyes widened momentarily. “Would you mind just stepping round here a moment?” Zhu Irzh murmured. With his gaze fixed on the hypnotic wedge of money in Zhu Irzh’s hand, the clerk did so.
“Is it real?” he mumbled cautiously. Chen once more inappropriately invoked the blessings of Heaven upon a realm where casual workers were so poorly paid, if at all.
“Real?” purred Zhu Irzh. “Straight from the hands of a priest himself—you can smell the incense on it.” He dangled the wad of cash temptingly beneath the clerk’s pug nose, and as the clerk obligingly bent his head, Zhu Irzh’s free hand chopped him smartly below the ear. He fell without a sound. Chen emerged from the curtains.
“Neat,” he murmured. Zhu Irzh beamed smugly and put the money back in his pocket. Then he dragged the unconscious clerk behind the curtains and bound him with the length of tasseled rope that secured them to the wall.
“Now,” he remarked whimsically, looking towards the row of double doors that led from the reception area. “Which to choose?”
“At least we can see,” Chen said. He went swiftly to the nearest door and peered through the dusty glass pane. He felt himself grow very still, and cold.
“What is it?” Zhu Irzh asked impatiently.
“See for yourself.” Chen could feel the pulse of nausea beginning in the pit of his stomach. He turned away from the door, leaving the demon with an unrestricted view. It was hardly likely that Zhu Irzh would be so affected, and indeed, the demon merely remarked with interest, “Looks like some kind of laboratory. People being tested. Shall we take a look inside?”
“Do there seem to be any medical personnel around?” The words came close to sticking in Chen’s throat, like the glue of grief.
“Can’t see anyone,” Zhu Irzh remarked. “Might as well, eh?” He gave the door a gentle push and it swung open.
Inside, the air was stuffy and rank, clotted with the smell of suffering. Light filtered in through grubby, slitted windows at the far end of the room, or emanated from a flickering neon tube high above Chen’s head. The walls were painted that biliously institutional green common to both Earth and Hell, stained with an ominous rust. The test subjects, if such they were, lay on stacked racks arranged in two long aisles down each side of the room. Chen made a hasty estimate of some nine people to every rack: most of them were women, and very young. But as he stepped reluctantly closer, he saw that they were barely alive; indeed, they seemed hardly present at all. Their small forms were shadowy and indistinct: their pale faces peered up through a miasma of vague air. Tentatively, Chen placed his hand on the shoulder of one of the girls and it passed straight through, although there was a curious sensation of presence, as though the air itself was warm and wet like a humid day. Zhu I
rzh’s puzzled expression suggested that the demon had noticed the same thing.
“The ghosts of the innocent,” he murmured. “A plague to garner innocent souls, and human blood: that’s what the Ministry needs to make their drug.”
“These ghosts are between,” Zhu Irzh said, wonderingly. Chen frowned.
“Between Earth and Hell? That’s not possible.”
The demon shook his sleek head.
“I fear that you’re wrong, Detective Inspector. It is not impossible, only extremely rare.”
“That’s what gods do,” Chen whispered. The demon smiled.
“These young ladies are hardly deities. They are humans, that is all, and most unfortunate. Deep magic can summon the flesh halfway, while the mind and the soul wander freely but impotently across the void. It isn’t a magic to which anyone I know has access, but then, I’m not an Imperial institution.”
“Not all governmental bodies in Hell have this kind of power, though,” Chen said. “Just as well, otherwise we’d see all manner of chaos.”
“Quite so. They don’t. That’s why the more inventive among us are forced to seek out the demon lounges: movement between the worlds seems to fascinate us all. As I say, it’s deep magic, and as such, you need a high level of authorization and competence in order to apply it. It seems that the Ministry of Epidemics has been so fortunate as to garner such august dispensation,” Zhu Irzh replied dryly.
“The capacity to deploy deep magic; Imperial troops moving against the Ministry of Wealth; rumors of a plague aimed at all mankind … This is even worse than I thought. This whole situation is a glove that the hand of the Emperor would seem to fit well.”
Zhu Irzh nodded, uneasily. “So it would seem. The Ministry must be very sure of themselves this time. The Imperial Court doesn’t usually involve itself so deeply in departmental affairs—upsets the balance, as you know. The Celestial powers demand redress and that can tie up even the Imperial Court in the knots of an eternity of paperwork. Let’s see what’s through the doors at the end of this room.”
The doorway led to a further chamber, in which the racks lay empty. Zhu Irzh picked up a syringe, which dangled from a greasy plastic pipe that led into a mesh of webbing high in the recesses of the wall.
“Looks like they’re preparing for more inmates,” he said. Chen nodded grimly.
“Doesn’t seem to be much of interest at the moment, but this is obviously a part of the new operation.” His eyes narrowed; he was thinking aloud. “This lab, the new plague, the Blood Emporium … they’re all connected. A drug, to be made from human blood. But what would such a drug do?” His gaze met Zhu Irzh’s hot golden eyes.
The demon said, “The First Lord told me that it was a drug that would take people to Paradise. Whatever that means.”
Voices were coming from the first lab. Zhu Irzh and Chen dived behind one of the racks, and listened for a tense moment before the doors swung open and a group of people stepped through. Between the bars of the rack, Chen could see a heavily built person, dressed in the most ornate clothes: a blond-collared cloak of flesh that fell in heaving ripples to the floor. Chen could only see part of his face, but it was puffy and mottled with disease. An ulcerated laceration marred one distended cheek. He was accompanied by a smaller demon wearing a grubby white lab coat, and a rotting demon with a cold, patrician face whom Chen recognized with a sudden lurch of the heart as Inari’s erstwhile fiancé, the repugnant Dao Yi. These three, however, were also accompanied by someone else, and at the sight of this third person, Chen felt himself grow still. Beside him, even Zhu Irzh swallowed a sharp, indrawn breath.
The fourth member of the party was tall, some seven feet in height, and gaunt. The talons of one hand had been permitted to grow into intricate coils, signifying his elevated status. His skin was a bright, raw red, the musculature clearly visible, as though he had been flayed. His lipless mouth was set in a permanent grin, and Chen got the alarming impression that this was no mere trick of ravaged feature, but that the demon was genuinely and perpetually amused. His eyes were slanted and black and dead, and his face was crowned with an upsweep of something that more closely resembled tentacles than hair, gathered together in a loose, writhing braid. He wore the crimson, gray and black robes of an Imperial Alchemist, and a ceremonial machete hung from his sash. Zhu Irzh nudged Chen sharply in the ribs, and mouthed, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Chen nodded in silent, but fervent, agreement. He glanced around, but the only possible exit remained the door by which they had entered. There were no windows, and both floor and ceiling were a seamless expanse of tiling. Dao Yi, Inari’s former fiancé, made a small, fastidious gesture and said, “Gentlemen! I have great pleasure in welcoming you to this, our third gherao ward, which is in the process of being made ready for the next intake of spirits. I’m happy to say that it’s been completed on schedule, and on budget.”
“Gratifying,” the personage in the flesh cloak murmured, in a thick voice like syrup. The small demon in the lab coat nodded anxiously, as if eager to provide reassurance. The alchemist simply gazed around him with mad, black eyes. “And you’re quite sure that the program is proceeding according to plan?”
“Quite sure, Minister, yes,” Dao Yi said, nervously. Chen took more careful note of the demon in the cloak of flesh: this, then, was the Minister of Epidemics himself, dimly recognizable from the figure seen in the First Lord of Banking’s ravaged garden. “We’ve been most fortunate to procure the services of Tso’s Blood Emporium, one of the most reliable old firms in the city, to process the human blood.” This remark was clearly made for the benefit of the alchemist, who took no notice whatsoever, but continued to stare around him with his lipless grin. Evidently disconcerted, Dao Yi’s mouth compressed into a thin line.
The Minister said acidly, “Reliable? I was under the distinct impression that Master Tso—who in any case no longer runs the Emporium—had been detained. I understood there to be bad feeling between his family and yourself.”
“This is indeed the case,” Dao Yi said hastily. “However, Tso has been of minimal value in providing us with some important information regarding the human protégé of one of the Celestials, and will moreover go to serve His Excellency the Alchemist in some potentially useful capacity.”
“Pleased to hear it,” the Minister grumbled. “And how is the blood being collected from source?”
“Our people have been targeting the dormitories of the so-called bioweb, a new form of technology sold to humankind by Hell. Our technicians have had some hand in the research and development. The bioweb provides an ideal context from which to obtain both blood and innocent souls: the components of the web are female and generally young. They are also confined within tanks, and therefore quite passive and unable to put up a struggle. Our agents go in, siphon the blood to a collection point—usually one of the free rooms in the establishment—open a portal and transfer the blood to Hell. It’s pumped straight to Tso’s, where they have the equipment to treat it. The souls of the girls are then harvested and placed in the liminal state you see here so as not to attract the attention of Heaven.”
“A convenient piece of technology, this bioweb,” the Minister said to the alchemist, who was paying no attention whatsoever.
“We were, you see, able to make some very favorable deals with the human in charge of the corporation, and he was happy to assist us with the necessary details; security personnel and medical staff are removed shortly before the harvesting, without a fuss, and—”
The alchemist’s head came up like a hunting dog’s. Chen could see the ravaged nose sniff savagely at the air, as though the alchemist had scented a truffle. The alchemist said in a sibilant voice, “Why, there is a human here!”
Dao Yi’s mouth fell open in shock, and even the Minister looked startled. The alchemist took a great bounding stride behind the racks and came face to face with Chen.
“Run!” Chen shouted, shoving Zhu Irzh aside.
; “No! You can’t fight—”
“Just go!” Chen roared. For once, the demon did as he was told, thrusting both Dao Yi and the Minister out of the way and bolting back through the doors, which slammed behind him. Chen was left to face the alchemist. He fell into a fighting stance, realizing as he did so that it was probably doomed, and struck at the alchemist’s fire-colored face. The alchemist twisted aside with reptilian speed and gripped Chen by the throat in one taloned hand. He hauled Chen easily off his feet; choking, Chen stared down into the nightmare visage.
“Well, well, well,” the alchemist said in evident delight. “Did I not tell you over tea this morning, Minister? The balance of the universe is changing. The very path of the Tao itself is being cajoled aside to favor Hell. Our time is coming, wouldn’t you say?” The hideous mouth opened in a soundless zero of exultation; the taloned hand tightened, and for Chen, the world was abruptly no more.
51
The worst thing about the lower levels was not the thin, high voice that sang incessantly through the streets like the whine of a vast mosquito, nor the jets of acrid flame that shot at random from between the stones, but the dust-laden wind which blew in from the distant barrens. Dust stained Inari’s skin and seeped beneath her clothes, matting her hair and blocking her nose. She couldn’t stop sneezing: it was worse than the hay fever to which she’d been prone on Earth. Neither the wind nor the dust seemed to greatly affect Fan, whose red and gray robes appeared as fresh as though she’d recently retrieved them from the laundry. She cast Inari an occasional sympathetic glance, but when Inari begged to sit down for a moment and wipe the dust from her eyes, Fan said no.
“We have to keep moving. For all we know, the wu’ei might be close behind.”
“I thought you said their power was limited in the lower levels?” Inari protested, and Fan gave a small, grim smile.
