The Iron Khan (Detective Inspector Chen Series)

by Liz Williams

  The main lobby was occupied by a wedding. The bride, in full Western bridal gear that made her look like a gigantic cake, was nearly six feet tall. Behind her veil, the eyes that glided incuriously over Zhu Irzh were a bright green. Not at all Chinese, Zhu Irzh felt, with a pleasant frisson of being abroad. He headed into the plush red velvet opulence of the bar and ordered a local beer.

  Not bad. Looking at the range of wines featured above the bar made the demon feel provincial: he hadn’t realized quite how many vintages the Gobi and its environs produced. There had always been attempts throughout China’s long history, to encourage settlement out here. But no one wanted to leave the comforts of the east for this difficult and still dangerous land, a place where sandstorms scoured the desert and the land stretched red and black for miles. Not unlike Hell, really, but without the crowds. Reflecting on similarities, Zhu Irzh sipped his beer and watched the wedding party proceed into the dining area. Oh god. That was another thing to think about — his own wedding. Jhai had set the date for the following summer. It was to be a big affair, befitting the marriage of the stepson of the Emperor of Hell (China) and a scion of the royal family of Hell (India), not to mention Jhai’s role as a leading industrialist.

  Their mothers had been in close correspondence. That in itself was enough to strike fear into a demon’s heart. Mind you, Zhu Irzh thought, at the rate at which they had both been casting out family members, give it another few months and there wouldn’t be anyone left to invite.

  And there was his own bride-to-be now, striding in through the swing doors of the lobby. With a crimson sari billowing out behind her and her out-size designer sunglasses, Jhai looked like an exotic and venomous moth. Zhu Irzh raised a hand.

  “Hello, darling!” Jhai slid onto the barstool beside him.

  “How was your meeting?”

  “They were all imbeciles, quite frankly, but anxious to please. I think we’ve got a few things resolved. We’re supposed to be going out this afternoon to look at the site — you can come with us if you want. I’ll have to change my clothes first.”

  “Why not?” the demon mused aloud. “Might be interesting to see a bit of the actual desert now we’re here.”

  “It’ll be the middle of nowhere,” Jhai warned. “Like Lop Nur. You don’t want to put a chemical plant anywhere that matters.”

  “What’s that — Lop Nur?”

  “One of the country’s big nuclear plants. Remember the one in Hell? It’s like that. They were doing atmospheric testing until recently. So I don’t think a few chemicals are likely to make much difference.”

  One thing you couldn’t accuse Jhai of being was ecologically sensitive. Zhu Irzh once more felt that faint, strange tremor of unease that he’d learned to identify as his conscience. After seeing what had become of Hell’s main nuclear plant, he wasn’t so sure that siting a chemical factory in even such a remote place was a good idea. But for the sake of peace, he said, “Probably not. Want a drink?”

  Jhai accepted a mineral water. “What’s going on in there?” she asked, gesturing in the direction of the dining room.

  “Wedding reception.”

  “It’s very loud for a lunchtime reception, isn’t it?”

  Jhai was right. Zhu Irzh hadn’t really been paying attention and had initially taken the noise for the congratulatory shouts of happy revelers. But what he was now hearing were screams.

  He ran for the dining room, dimly aware that beside him, Jhai had gathered up the skirts of her sari and was sprinting along. The bar staff were similarly responsive, but the demon was first through the door.

  The dining room was in chaos. Overturned tables and chairs littered the floor, along with canapés and glasses. One of the ushers slipped on a pool of spilled champagne and fell flat; Zhu Irzh had to swerve to avoid falling over him. Someone, possibly the bride’s mother, was emitting a series of ear-splitting shrieks. Then somebody stumbled onto the dance floor, leaving the way clear and revealing the source of the commotion.

  At first, Zhu Irzh thought that some hippy had wandered in off the street. The figure was tall, with a streaming mane of red hair and bright blue eyes. His torso was bare and covered in a swirl of tattoos, and he wore a pair of baggy tartan trousers. At first glance, he looked like some of the Western backpackers that thronged the streets of Singapore Three in the summer, but they were, on the whole, alive.

  This man wasn’t.

  He was heading for the bride. Unlike some of the reanimated dead that Zhu Irzh had previously encountered, this one neither lurched nor hopped. He moved with a sinister fluidity, much faster than a human, if not as swift as demonkind. He carried a curious weapon, a long staff with a bulbous head, like a truncated spear. The bride stood stock-still, her mouth gaping, as if paralyzed. The man swung the staff up and over his head, twirling it like the cheerleaders Zhu Irzh had seen in American films. But before he had time to strike down the bride, the demon was striding forward, ducking under the spinning staff and slamming a hand into the center of the zombie’s bare chest. Cool and hard, more like stone than flesh. Contact had to be made for Zhu Irzh to speak the necessary spell, a basic piece of magic for one born in Hell, designed for the inconvenient human dead. He’d never tried it on Earth, and had a moment of doubt, for magic differed between the worlds and Chen had sometimes experienced reversals in his own spellcraft when visiting Hell. But luck, or locality, was with the demon. He felt, rather than saw, the zombie slacken and crumple, then watched as the unnatural spark in those blue eyes faded to a pinpoint star and was gone. But at the moment of its departure, just before the connection between them snapped, the demon saw the zombie’s last thoughts.

  Desert. High and arid, a long ridge of sandstone, red in the last light of the setting sun. Below, the village huddled around its wells, the meager foliage still green in the early summer heat. Soon the ground would bake, hot enough to fry an egg, and the wicked sand would spin up from the deep desert, whipped on by devils riding skeleton ponies.

  They’d had a message from the west, from long-lost kin: a spoken tale of somewhere gray and mist-ridden, sea crashing into thunder on the rocks. The blue-eyed man had never seen the sea, had ventured once to a lake in the mountains and thought it must be the same. Join us, the message had said. Whatever the reason for the separation, it is your ancestors’ wrong, not yours. And the blue-eyed man looked out across dryness, to where the small people were waiting and hating, and wondered if they should leave.

  •

  After that, there was nothing, only a terrified blur of wind and sand and choking death. The blue-eyed man fell at Zhu Irzh’s feet, stiff in desiccated atrophy.

  FOUR

  On the slab in the local Urumchi morgue, the man had clearly been dead for centuries. Zhu Irzh stood looking down at him in wonder.

  “We’re considering it as theft, rather than a murder attempt,” Inspector Turgun said, mildly. Tall and thick-set where Chen was short and round, Turgun nonetheless reminded the demon of his absent colleague. He was visibly Uighur rather than Han: a leathery face, with slanted, opaque eyes and a small, thin nose like a beak.

  “Theft?” Jhai echoed, frowning.

  “This gentleman is actually the property of the local museum,” Turgun said. “A very famous exhibit. I remember being taken to see him and the others when I was a child.”

  “But who is he?”

  “Well, no one knows his name, obviously. Much too long ago for that, and they didn’t keep written records.”

  “He’s not Chinese, though,” Jhai said. “Or Uighur, is he? He looks like a Westerner.”

  Turgun nodded. “Essentially, he’s a Celt. Or a proto-Celt. That’s what the history professors tell us, but maybe in a few years they’ll have changed their minds. I believe the theory is that many thousands of years ago, when the people who became the Celts migrated from northern India, some of them turned left and a handful turned right. They ended up here, in the Gobi, and set up a civilization. They were called the
Tokarians, and this is what this man was. As you can see, he bears no resemblance to any of the Chinese peoples, because he simply isn’t one of them.”

  “So if he was in the museum, he must have been — what? Dug up? I suppose the atmosphere in this area must be very dry.”

  “That’s right,” Turgun said. “He was mummified, probably in a sandstorm. The others in the museum are the same.”

  “Might be worth giving the museum a ring, if you haven’t done so already. Find out who else might be missing.”

  Turgun gave the demon an unhappy glance. “It’s already being done. I suspect the worst.”

  “If I may say so, Inspector, you’re taking this very calmly. Do you have much, uh, supernatural activity in Urumchi?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Turgun said. “Or given where you come from, perhaps not. Remember, Seneschal Irzh, this is a border country. Islam meets Chinese beliefs, with more than a dash of Buddhism thrown in. That means many Hells and many peoples: there are ifrits out in the deep desert, and demons here in the city. Sometimes they meet, and it isn’t pretty. We’ve had a lot of trouble, which we try to keep quiet. If you were both Han, I’d be much more careful what I said to you, but as it is — we have enough suspicion from the Chinese government, and trouble with terrorists, too.”

  “I’d heard about that,” Jhai said. “Of course everyone’s paranoid about Islamic terrorism these days.”

  “Especially the government in Beijing,” Turgun responded. “Of course, we have a few extremists — they’re to be found everywhere. But in the main, the Uighur people here, myself included, just want a quiet life.” He sighed, looking down at the mummified, ancient corpse. “Some chance of that.”

  Turgun was right. When they left the morgue and returned to Turgun’s office, they learned that the call had been made to the museum.

  “How badly is the custodian hurt?” Jhai asked, when she heard the news.

  “She’s shaken, but not physically damaged apart from a few bruises. It knocked her out.” Turgun replaced the receiver. “I suppose I should say ‘she,’ rather than ‘it.’ ”

  “Some of the Tokarian mummies were female, then?” Zhu Irzh asked.

  “Yes. Two women, two men — one was old, even by today’s standards. He didn’t get far. The younger man smashed his way out of his case and so did the women. One of them collapsed in the courtyard after attacking the custodian, but the youngest woman is still at large.”

  “I suppose three out of four isn’t too bad,” the demon said, optimistically.

  “It could be a lot worse. But it’s the youngest woman I’d be inclined to be worried about, to be honest. We don’t really know what she was, but she had a pouch at her belt containing amulets and I know some of the museum staff think she was a shaman. A reanimated magic-practitioner is likely to be more dangerous than even a warrior.”

  Zhu Irzh remembered the vision he’d shared with the blue-eyed mummy, that hot harsh place. Magic hadn’t helped the girl, when the sand swept in. But given a second chance, who knew what she might do? Hard, too, not to wonder about the state of their souls: the zombies he’d met in China had been simple vessels of flesh, with little of the original personality and none of the original soul. They had been dispatched to Heaven or Hell, there to await reincarnation. But here in this borderland, who knew what the Tokarians had believed, and who knew where their souls might be? Summoned back from some ancient limbo, perhaps, or crouching in their dried-out bodies, awaiting life?

  “Any idea where she might have gone?”

  “No. Back to the desert, maybe?” Turgun’s expression was hopeful.

  “The gent in the morgue didn’t,” Zhu Irzh reminded him. “So far, they’ve attacked two people. Either they’re fully animate or someone has programmed them to do it.”

  Turgun sighed. “You’re right, of course. But we’ve had no further reports and she’s been missing for two hours now. I’ll get units out and searching.”

  “I’ll help if I can,” Zhu Irzh said diffidently. He knew that other police forces sometimes objected to outsiders coming into their patch, especially, perhaps, Easterners, though Turgun seemed extremely accommodating so far.

  “Thank you,” the Uighur inspector said. “We’ve got our own forensic team on it — they might be able to pick up a trace of our missing mummy. I’ll call you if there’s any news.”

  Released into the midday flurry of Urumchi’s traffic, Zhu Irzh and Jhai returned to the hotel, which had done an admirable job of soothing shattered bridal nerves and re-hosting the disrupted reception in a non-mummy-infested part of the hotel. Zhu Irzh ordered room service while Jhai changed into more desert-friendly clothes, and after a quick lunch, they went back down to the lobby where Jhai’s car was pulling up.

  “How far is this factory site of yours?” Zhu Irzh asked.

  “About a hundred kilometers out. Local government insisted.”

  Zhu Irzh watched with interest as the shabby suburbs and industrial estates of outer Urumchi fell away as they approached the desert: first, flat fields and irrigation plants, then a huge wind farm, outlined like striding ghosts against the faint blue bulk of the mountains, and then miles of salt pans. As the city receded, the desert began to take hold in earnest. This, according to Zhu Irzh’s guide book, was not the Gobi itself, but a region known as the Taklamakan: a name that, roughly translated, meant if you go in, you don’t come out.

  Reassuring. But he could see what the guide book meant. It was like the lowest reaches of Hell: bleak and lunar-arid, more stone than sand, with ridges of exposed rock striking up through the surface as though the earth was in revolt. You could hide a dozen chemical plants out here and no one would notice. The last sign of habitation — a small military-style hut — had been passed miles before and now there was nothing. He said as much.

  “Yeah, it’s certainly empty,” Jhai remarked with satisfaction. She studied her cellphone. “You can still get a signal, though.”

  The road on which they were traveling was tarmacked, but soil and sand had blown across it, making it seem more of a track. Then they turned off the road and started bumping down a real track, toward a tumble of rocks.

  “This is it?” Zhu Irzh asked.

  “This is where it’s going to be.” Jhai pointed to an expanse of flattened earth, glistening white with salt. A collection of four-by-fours stood at its edge, accompanied by a small huddle of people.

  The car slowed to a halt and Jhai jumped out, scattering greetings. The demon followed more slowly, and was struck by a sudden weight of silence, despite the voices of Jhai and her companions. The heat burst up out of the ground like a fist, searing even lungs accustomed to the airs of Hell, and the place smelled dry, an old bone odor. If the Tokarians had managed to eke out a civilization here, they were worthy of some respect.

  Jhai was studying architectural plans. Two of the men, in hard hats and stout boots, were evidently surveyors.

  “Sorry about this, Zhu,” Jhai said. “Dragging you out to the middle of nowhere. I’ve got to go through this. It’s probably going to take an hour or so.”

  “No problem,” the demon replied loyally. “Always interesting, to see new places. I might go for a stroll.”

  “Don’t get into trouble,” Jhai said, with a sideways glance at miles of empty world.

  The demon grinned. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  Much as he wanted to support Jhai, he’d actually been telling no more than the truth. Since his arrival on Earth, he’d seen relatively little of it: his duties had largely been confined to Singapore Three, with occasional visits to various Hells, and apart from a weekend trip to Shanghai, also courtesy of Jhai, he’d experienced almost nothing of China itself. Empty though the Gobi might be, it was still different. He set off across the salt flats with some enthusiasm. The tower blocks of Urumchi were no longer visible from this distance, but the eastern end of the mountains — the demon did not know what they were called — was clear agai
nst the pale sky. With the heat shimmering the air, earth and sky merged into one another, creating a world of mirage. Jhai, the surveyors, and their vehicles were a small black patch against the rocks. But as he walked, Zhu Irzh realized that he’d been wrong about the lack of habitation. He could see something up ahead, a collection of buildings. Jhai had mentioned military activity out here in the desert, so perhaps these were not houses, but something to do with that. Initially, he wasn’t even sure that the buildings were real — a product of the shivering air — but drawing closer he saw that they were quite solid, a thick wall of baked clay, reaching up some twenty feet, with a gate set into it. The place looked like some organic fortress. He’d seen a documentary about Central Asia, where there were similar towns.