by Liz Williams
“I heard the car,” Robin said.
Mhara was not there: from necessity, he was resident in Heaven for most of the time these days. If Robin was lonely, she did not say so, and Chen would never cause her to lose face by asking such a personal question. “I don’t sleep much,” she said. “Being dead seems to have cured me of being tired, anyway.” She looked at No Ro Shi and smiled. “I’ve seen your picture in the papers.”
No Ro Shi bowed. “You know my convictions. I honor you nonetheless.”
“Thanks,” Robin said. “I don’t imagine it’s easy, being a communist in the face of everything that’s been going on. Doesn’t really make it easy for the State, does it? Having the supernatural continually interfering.”
The demon-hunter returned her smile with a thin grimace of his own. “I manage. At least you are on the side of goodness.”
“Well, I try.”
Inari had gone to kneel in front of the little shrine, reaching out to light one of the small candles.
“You don’t have to do that, Inari,” Robin told her. “Mhara’s a friend.”
Inari said, “That’s why I’m lighting the candle.”
“Been rather a rough night,” Chen said, and explained why.
“Ah,” Robin said, after his concise account had ended. “That would explain that.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Someone tried to kill Mhara this afternoon.” She raised a hand and the walls of the room glowed with a faint blue light, a mesh extending from floor to ceiling. “Just checking. After today, I made sure we were as secure as possible.”
“Then we were too late,” Inari said in a small voice. She looked stricken. She felt, Chen knew, responsible, no matter how irrational this might be.
“I said ‘tried,’ not ‘succeeded,’” Robin said. “Besides, I’m not even sure if he can be killed. Maybe the attempt was of something else entirely—some kind of binding, for instance.”
Chen frowned. “I don’t know what the parameters are here. If he’s killed, wouldn’t he just end up back in Heaven?”
“His father was disenspirited,” Robin reminded him. “Thrown off the Wheel of Life and Death. It is possible.”
“What happened?” Chen asked.
“He was at the lake and a woman threw a hairpin at him.”
Chen’s eyebrows rose. “That doesn’t sound all that serious an attempt, to be honest.”
“I know,” Robin replied. “She didn’t succeed in hitting him, either. I don’t know what would have happened if she had.”
“He’s sure it was a woman, is he?”
“I don’t know,” Robin said. “From what you’ve just told me, this Seijin can pass as either. It seems to fit.”
“And you haven’t noticed anything strange here?”
“No. The only person who’s come to the temple in the last day or so was a supplicant, just a street person, to pray.”
“There was nothing strange about her?”
“Not that I could tell. She prayed, lit a candle, then she went away.” Robin’s head snapped toward the door. “Hang on.”
“What is it?”
Robin smiled. “It’s Mhara.” A moment later the Celestial Emperor, wearing linen trousers and a loose jacket, stepped through the door into the main hall. He carried something small wrapped in silk.
“Hello,” he said to Chen and the others. He did not seem surprised; Chen did not yet know the extent of Mhara’s abilities. Was the Emperor omniscient? No time like the present; he asked as much.
“It’s selective omniscience,” Mhara said. “I can—if I choose—know more or less everything that happens in Heaven and a lot of what occurs on Earth, although that’s more opaque. Events in Hell come in snatches—otherwise my father might have succeeded in his attempt to conquer it.”
“And between?” Inari asked. Mhara’s face became somber.
“I can’t see between at all.”
“Hmm,” Chen said. “It seems that between can see you. Inari?”
And once again she told her story.
“It could easily have been Seijin,” Mhara said, when she had finished. “I thought it was a woman, but I didn’t get a very close look at her.” He held out his hand and the silk fell away, revealing a long, slender pin. “This was the weapon.”
Chen leaned forward and studied the object. It was an ordinary old-fashioned hairpin, made out of silver, the kind that women used to skewer an elaborate hair-do. Without even touching it, however, he could tell that the point had been sharpened to a razor-fine point; the silk had a tiny slit in it, where the point had gone through the wrapping.
But despite its conventional appearance, the hairpin reeked of magic: a nebulous grayness surrounded it, blurring its edges against the silk whenever Chen looked at it from the corners of his eyes.
“Yes,” Mhara said, softly. “It’s enchanted, and I don’t recognize the spell. It’s very old. That’s all I can say.”
“If the Emperor of Heaven does not know it,” Chen said, “then a humble police inspector doesn’t have much of a chance.”
But Inari said, “Bonerattle might know.”
28
Pauleng Go slept for a long time, well past the break of day. When he finally struggled awake, from uneasy dreams in which teeth and fire figured large, and reached for the clock, he found that it was close to noon. Rubbing his eyes, Go hauled himself out of bed and went to find the shower.
When he had finished showering, there was a knock on the door. Go opened it, to find one of Jhai’s flunkies on the other side: a young man with impeccable manners who informed him, with just the right amount of regret, that Jhai had been obliged to go to Shanghai on business, but would be back later that night. Meanwhile, he was to make himself at home and if he wanted anything, to let the staff know.
Go ordered coffee and went outside to sit on the balcony, a long curve of metal that overlooked the bay, and tried to concentrate on a script. But it was impossible for him to believe that his normal life would ever be resumed: How could he go back to the ordinary round of writing and networking, knowing that out there lurked a beast bent on vengeance? Something would have to be done about Lara and he was hoping that Jhai might have some ideas. Besides which, he needed another agent.
Abandoning the script, he went inside to the room’s PC and logged onto the net, where he spent the next hour or so obsessively hunting down reports of the incident. All he could find was an account in the local paper of the fire, and mention that a body had been discovered in the ruins. But things like this happened in Singapore Three every day: the report was embedded in a column that mentioned two other fatal fires. There was nothing to be gained by studying the past. He’d be better off looking for a decent exorcist.
Having effectively confined himself to the guest apartment made Go restless. He certainly had no plans to go into the city, but he found himself curious about Paugeng. Jhai’s corporate headquarters was the last word in modern architecture, a curving structure that he’d seen featured in numerous newspaper and magazine articles before he’d even set eyes on it in person. He knew a little of its history; the original building had been destroyed in one of the series of earthquakes that had shaken the city some years before, and Jhai had seized the opportunity to completely rebuild, though Go thought he remembered hearing somewhere that the laboratories which lay beneath the site had remained intact and were still unchanged.
Go did not expect to be allowed the run of the whole building and he did not want to piss Jhai off. He summoned the young man and asked if there were any areas of the building that were off limits.
“They will be immediately obvious,” the young man said, smiling. “We have very good security systems.”
“It’s nice to know.”
“We do have a gym and bar area. Would you like me to take you down there?”
Go, not usually fanatical about exercise, surprised himself with the enthusiasm with which he agreed. “Bar” sounded good, an
yway. He followed the young man to a set of elevators and was taken to the seventh floor, where a pleasant atrium led onto the bar area, commanding a slightly different view from the one he had seen from the guest apartment; the curve allowed him to see right out across the harbor to the hump of islands. The gym itself was well equipped, including a sauna and a pool, and beyond it, glass doors led out onto an enclosed garden, enfolded by the curve of the building. The young man disappeared unobtrusively, leaving Go to enjoy the facilities.
Having no money was embarrassing, but it appeared that, as a guest, Go was not expected to pay. He ordered a beer and sipped it on the terrace, wondering whether to go into the pool or explore the gardens. This was the kind of choice one didn’t mind having. In the end he did both, borrowing shorts and a towel from the desk, then wandering out into the gardens as he dried himself off. It was late afternoon now, and still hot. Go felt himself steaming gently and he sat down on a nearby bench to resume the beer.
How pleasant. It must be nice to be filthy rich, Go thought, not for the first time. He’d been doing all right—Beni had made sure of that—from the movies’ income, but unless you really scored as a scriptwriter, the money wasn’t that great. You were still at the bottom of the feeding heap. If he kept it up, he might not do too badly.
If he lived.
Amid the ornamental shrubs that encircled a kind of Zen garden of bark chips, something rustled. Go turned, frowning. Something flickered past his vision, too fast to see properly. A bird? It had seemed to shoot up the curved wall, vanishing at the summit. Go’s skin grew cold, he felt as though he were the subject of a thousand eyes.
The building was very secure, Jhai had said. Go put the beer down on the bench, repeating Jhai’s words under his breath like a mantra, and stood. The garden was empty—but just as he told himself this, the bushes rustled again in an invisible wind and this time there came the unmistakable flash of stripes past Go’s appalled vision. Then nothing. It was like watching a wildlife documentary: And here we glimpse the rarely seen tiger demon. Go did not wait. He sprinted across the garden and slammed the glass doors shut—much good that would do, but it gave the illusion of safety, if only for a moment. The bar, get to the bar and tell the barman that there was a problem; he could summon security. But the barman was not there. Go heard someone whispering, “Oh shit, oh shit,” as he searched the bar for any sign of a telephone. Nothing.
“Hey! Anyone there?”
Outside on the terrace—a growl. Go stumbled against the bar and knocked a glass off its perch. The growl had come from the front of the building but the garden was on the other side—his head whipped from one to the other but the sound did not come again. Go relaxed, but only for a second: out on the terrace, a shadow passed across the glass, something large and sinuous.
Go nearly shouted, then thought it might draw attention to himself. Run, fight, or hide: these were his options. His breath had started to catch, like an engine stuttering before running down. Get to the elevators, he thought frantically—but he took the wrong door, into the gym. Behind him, glass shattered as something leaped easily through.
Go had never thought of himself as a warrior, except in odd fantasy moments watching fight scenes on television. He did not expect to fight now, but desperation and fright gave him a kind of out-of-body experience, in which he saw himself bending, reaching, wrenching a set of weights off the press and turning to face whatever the hell had just banged through the door behind him. Just beyond the bench press, a tiger prowled.
“Oh god.” Go, suddenly, was shouting and running forward, swinging the weight in a lunatic explosion of anger and fear. If he had been sufficiently conscious to think about it, he would have expected the casual swat of a giant clawed paw, the rending heat and fire of his own flesh as Lara tore him apart. Instead, the tiger stood up on its hind legs. The tail shrank, the muzzle collapsed in upon itself. Claws and teeth retracted, the tiger’s ruff became a smooth cascade of hair, and in a billow of red and scarlet the beast changed down to a woman, who grabbed Go’s weight-bearing arm in a grip like an iron vice and forced it away. Go stared into yellow eyes as she shoved him onto his knees, unable to look anywhere else, locked by the gaze of the tiger demon.
A tiger demon, yes. But not Lara.
29
Seijin was unaccustomed to nursing wounds and found the sensation was not uninvigorating. Female self was resigned to the situation, but male self had been giving Seijin no small degree of grief.
“This is shameful! The loss of face has been—” Male self stammered for an appropriate adjective. “Insupportable!”
“Face has been lost before,” female self reminded him gently. Seijin was once more in the upper story of the Shadow Pavilion, looking out across the shifting, gray landscape of between. The crowds that had heralded the arrival were now dispelling on the upper slopes, but the light was low, sending golden streaks across the gray plain below. Seijin watched as a small herd of ghostly deer emerged from behind the rocks and made their way out onto the plain; then something must have startled them, for their white tails went up and they skittered away, finally fragmenting into mist.
“Face has not been lost for many years!” male self protested. “This is a great dishonor.”
“My defeat was by the Celestial Emperor,” Seijin reminded himself. “There is little dishonor in that.”
“All the same—”
“And now we have a notion of his mettle,” Seijin went on. In fact, the Emperor’s abilities had come as a surprise. It just went to show that one should not underestimate an opponent, no matter how much inside information one thought one had possessed.
“His time on Earth has weakened him,” the Dowager Empress had informed Seijin. “His liaison with this—this human ghost—has shown a deplorable degree of self-indulgence. He will not submit to duty, he shows no reverence for the past.”
From the words of the Emperor’s mother, Seijin had formed certain opinions of Mhara: someone young, in Celestial terms, probably willful and petulant. There would be power there, yes, but little guile. Yet the Emperor had not only seen Seijin coming, but had gained enough knowledge of the assassin’s movements to outsmart Seijin and seize a weapon.
That, if Seijin had been the anxious sort, was the really worrying thing. Female self, herself shadowy against the shifting tapestries on the Pavilion’s wall, sank onto a seat and wrapped her hands together. “He has taken a pin! He can follow us here, if he chooses.”
“I am not so concerned about his pursuit,” Seijin said, reflecting. “After all, his powers will be greatly diminished here in between. But what it does afford him is the opportunity to spy.”
“What if he sends someone else?” female self asked.
“Who? A necromancer? You forget who we are.”
“I remember what we were,” female self faltered. And of course, Seijin remembered, too.
A river, at twilight, the water flowing oily and slow between the high banks, crashing with the blocks of ice that snowmelt had brought down from the heights. Seijin stood in a cold wind, looking out across the steppe. From the slight rise beyond the river, the plains stretched gray and endless, the grass shifting and whispering in this last wind of winter, spring on the way. Its taste came fresh on the air and Seijin reached out hands, welcoming this change of season when power came most easily. These liminal points, the change of the season, the hour. Power ran strong under the land, beneath the black, still-frozen earth, arcing in webs from the mountain summits, all the way across the plains to the distant birch-haunted tundra.
Seijin had been up in the mountains for the past week, hunting the spirits of a wolf pack that had threatened a tribe’s meager herds. Sometimes, things did not know they had died, living so close to the otherworld that their recognition of their own death was no more than the sense of a cold wind blowing. Running the wolf pack down among the icy rocks, the black glitter of a ghost’s eye in the darkness, drawing on the power of the waning moon to
rip the beast apart, send it screaming down to Hell. Now, years later, Seijin wondered how many of those ghosts had ended up in between, racing the shadow plains. All the wolves had gone, the last cub spirit shrieking out into the winter air, disappearing. Then Seijin had come down from the heights, bearing spirit-scalps on a long thread, casting it down before the tribe’s shaman as the warriors had stared in awe and horror. It had amused Seijin to allow female self the dominance, seeing the desire in their eyes as she shyly smiled, need chased by fear as they saw the scalps wither into a bloody smoke and blow away.
One of them had come after her. One of them had died.
Pleasant memories. Seijin, standing, curled hands against the windowsill, feeling the muscles ache. Not a familiar feeling. Memory brought the river back, standing on that rise and watching the ghost lords ride the steppes, the Golden Horde on their fast, sleek ponies, sweeping from the east as they had once done, to sack and plunder the rich cities. But that was over a hundred years gone, Samarcand rebuilt into a glory of blue tile and golden dome, a city of sun and sky. If the horde reached it now, Seijin knew, watching the warriors ride by, they would sweep through the walls unseen. Perhaps they might make a child cry, give a seeress bad dreams. Nothing more than that. And as if he had heard, the man who rode in their midst turned his head and looked toward Seijin. Under the domed helm, his face was contorted into a familiar snarl, the eyes flat, black, mad.
“Hey, cousin!” Seijin cried to the Khan. “Guess what? I’m still here. Who’d have thought that, eh?” Then turned to the river and spat. In an instant, the ghost horde was gone, the grass hissing in the night wind. Seijin looked up and saw the Hunter of the Greeks striding across the late winter sky with the blue star at his heels.
“Enough,” Seijin said aloud, raised a hand and slit the air.
And now, back at Shadow Pavilion, the only home Seijin had for a handful of hundred years. Returning again, as so often. The servants were staying out of the way, although there was no real need. Seijin had grown tired of torture, some while back. But then again, that had been during the tedium of invincibility, and that, it seemed, was no longer an issue.