The Iron Khan (Detective Inspector Chen Series)

by Liz Williams

  Damn, thought the demon. There was an old Chinese curse he’d once heard: May you come to the attention of those in authority. It looked as though that curse might be coming true and that wasn’t reassuring.

  Forty minutes later, they touched down in Kashgar. The other passengers stood back, to let Zhu Irzh off the plane first. He tried to tell himself it was a measure of their appreciation, but couldn’t quite manage it. Jhai, in an unusually subdued frame of mind, accompanied him out to the taxi rank and thence to their hotel.

  •

  That afternoon, they walked out into Kashgar. It felt even hotter than the desert itself: a frontier town, China to the east, Central Asia to the west. Zhu Irzh had learned from one of the hotel’s leaflets that Kashgar was essentially a way station, an oasis. Not too far away, the Torogurt Pass led up into the mountains and over to the far east of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and from there, down into the Ferghana Valley, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism provoked by the repressive Uzbek regime. The pass was therefore rigorously controlled, but it was still open and some of the other guests in the hotel had come down through it that morning, so the hotel clerk informed Jhai. Not a tourist destination, then, Kashgar, but an ancient outpost of the Silk Road, a crossroad of East and West.

  “It’s a very interesting town, even if it isn’t very big,” the clerk said. “There’s the mausoleum of Abakh Hoja, who to us is a prophet, and we also have the biggest mosque in China, and the biggest statue of Chairman Mao, also.”

  Jhai, with the demon lingering in earshot, expressed polite interest but said that what she really wanted to see was the market. A map was duly procured and they set off. It was by now late afternoon and the sun was sliding down over the western mountains, casting long shadows into the merging shade of trees. The old oasis city was very much in evidence: thick walls of clay hiding courtyards and secret entrances, a winding labyrinth of ancient stone in the heart of the modern network of roads and traffic. The faces that they passed were Uighur, not Chinese, the difference far more marked than in Urumchi, and as they made their way further into the old part of the city, the flowered dresses and jeans of the local girls gave way to coffee-colored shrouds, so thickly woven that it would have been impossible to tell which way a stationary woman was facing. Jhai grimaced, but said only, “It’s a personal choice. I wear saris, after all.”

  Zhu Irzh looked about him. No one had reacted to his presence, and he wondered if they could even see him: many of the Chinese could not and these folk were presumably devoutly Islamic, with a Hell and a Paradise of their own. Little room there for a Chinese demon… He watched a young man sitting back on his heels and beating a huge copper dish into shape. Other copper wares hung from hooks all along the store front. The scene reminded him of Hell; here on Earth, it must be like going back in time. Then there was the unmistakable sound of a Nokia ringtone and the young man took his cellphone out of his pocket without missing a beat of the hammer, and answered it. Well, almost like going back in time.

  Zhu Irzh and Jhai wandered past shops that sold caged birds, past butchers and grocers and ironmongers. At the end of a street lay a tea garden with a shaded balcony, but they decided to return to the hotel and harder liquor instead.

  “No sign of your mysterious stranger?” Jhai asked with a smile.

  “No, though I’ve been looking out for him.” Zhu Irzh had, indeed, half-expected to see Nicholas stepping out of one of those shadowy doorways. He could feel the man’s presence, like a ghost at the shoulder: a curious sensation, given that he’d only met the man twice, and one of those meetings had been in a dream. “Frankly — and I never thought I’d say this — I’ve had quite enough excitement for one day.”

  “Hell, yeah,” was all that Jhai had to say about the matter.

  At the end of the road, the old city stopped abruptly. A gateway led through a wall of packed yellow bricks, onto a more modern street.

  More modern, but still not contemporary. Zhu Irzh looked with interest at the handsome villas, partly obscured by fronds of greenery.

  “So when do these date from, do you think?”

  “Nineteenth century, I would think. They’re more Central Asian than Chinese — I went over the border once to a trade fair in Almaty, in Kazakhstan, and there were some houses there like these. Pretty. I like that ornamental woodwork.”

  Zhu Irzh agreed. They were pleasant. At least the ones that didn’t have a seeping sense of horror permeating through their walls. He tried to tell himself that it had just been a dream, but somehow, his internal protestations were not convincing. Very probably, the villa in the dream did not even exist.

  And then they turned a corner and there it was — much bigger than the other properties, and surprisingly, more exposed. The trees that fringed the path that led up to it looked as though they were dead, or dying. Fawn leaves littered the path like beetles’ wings and the blue panels of the house were stained with a creeping rust.

  Zhu Irzh stopped dead. Jhai gave him a questioning look. “Don’t tell me. That’s it.”

  “That’s the place.”

  In the late afternoon sunlight, the villa held no apparent menace, and yet there was something wrong. The villa was dilapidated, as though it had been long abandoned, whereas the places on either side — at quite some distance — were obviously inhabited.

  “Do you want to take a closer look?” Jhai asked.

  He was inclined to say no. But he was a demon, the stepson now of the Emperor of Hell itself. A house and some ghosts couldn’t hold any real terrors, in the middle of the sunlit day.

  “I’m going in,” Zhu Irzh replied.

  NINE

  “It was kept in here,” Mhara said, as they came to the huge double doors of an inner chamber. Somehow, Chen thought, the doors did not look in keeping with the rest of the Imperial Palace of Heaven: whereas the Palace was filled with rich shades of gold and red, or pastels, the doors were made of a silvery-gold substance that could have been either stone or wood. Carvings shifted and flowed across their surface; meaningless symbols to Chen, yet in some way alive. The doors looked wrong too, as though they had been appropriated from some other building entirely. He said as much, hoping that he was not giving offense. He thought he knew the mild-mannered Mhara well enough by now not to cause him to lose face by witless remarks, but one could always be wrong.

  But indeed, Mhara took no offense. “You’re quite right, of course. And how astute of you. The doors come from another Heaven — I’m not sure which one, perhaps one of the Western paradises. They’re ancient — even more ancient than this palace.”

  “How could they be Western, in that case? China is far older than that, so the Palace must have come first.”

  “They cannot be Christian,” Mhara agreed. “But there were peoples in the western lands before that, and they had a belief in an afterlife. I believe these doors were an exchange — I don’t know what we gave for them, however.”

  “Fascinating,” Chen said, wondering who those ancient peoples could have been. This was sophisticated work and now that he looked more closely, he could see the faces of animals peering out at him from the door frame: cats and hares and foxes. And a badger. Well, well. He’d have to tell Inari’s familiar about that, when he got home. “But why keep the Book of Chinese Heaven behind someone else’s doors?”

  “It’s written into the guarding spell,” Mhara said. “Technically, because these doors are foreign, they are not subject to the same magic as the rest of Heaven, and because the magic to which they belonged has been lost — apart from the guarding spell itself — our own magic cannot be used to open them. It was an extra safeguard, against attempts to steal the Book.”

  “Which may now have stolen itself.”

  “Apparently so.”

  Chen stood back a pace and looked at the doors. Foreign magic, running clear and cold like a mountain river, with nothing that was redolent of evil. “And behind them?” he asked.

  “I’ll show you.” Mha
ra extended a hand and a stream of light reached out from it, blue and bright, flooding the doors with its brilliance. Slowly, the doors began to open, with the creatures that roamed their surfaces creeping back into the foliage of the door frame. Then the doors stood fully open and the light began to die.

  At first, Chen thought that the chamber was empty. He had the impression of somewhere immensely high and cavernous, resembling a cave rather than a room. The chamber was circular and bones of stone held up its ceiling, arching up like branches.

  “Like being in a forest,” he murmured.

  “I think that was the idea,” Mhara replied. “Best let me go first. I need to introduce you to it.”

  An odd turn of phrase, Chen thought, but as soon as Mhara motioned for him to enter the room and he crossed the threshold, he understood what the Emperor had meant. The chamber was not merely beautiful and strange; it was alive. He’d mentioned a forest and this was exactly like stepping into a wood: filled with whispers, a distant echo of something that could have been birdsong, or running water, or music. Things flitted out of sight, glimpsed only from the corners of the eye.

  Welcome, the room said to him, inside his head. You are welcome here. Mhara smiled as though he’d overheard, which perhaps he had. “It was designed to recognize evil. It won’t let it enter.”

  “What would happen to an evildoer, if one did come here?”

  “They would not be destroyed. Simply removed, to a remote area on Earth. It has only happened once in the Palace’s history — a thousand years ago now, with a very clever thief. He found himself down in the desert and the shock was so great that he gave up his ways and became a holy monk.”

  “A nice story,” Chen said.

  “Sometimes things do work out.”

  The nature of the place gave fuel to the speculation that the Book of the landscape of Heaven had abducted itself, but this was still not sufficient evidence for the theory to be proved, Chen reflected. “If someone who was not wicked, whose intentions were entirely pure, came here to steal the book, could they succeed? Presumably so.”

  “That’s my concern,” Mhara said. “Now that the Emperor my father is dead, and with him the dictate that all Heaven must think exactly as the Emperor does, agreeing with all his proclamations, it is feasible that someone with ideas other than myself, with the best of intentions, might have gained access to this room and taken the Book. For what purpose, I do not know. But if this was the case, then one must consider that it was probable that the Book agreed to its abduction. It has its own protections, after all, just as the room does.”

  “So in such a case, would book and thief be in the right?” Chen asked.

  “That’s what worries me,” Mhara replied. He beckoned to Chen. “Look at this.”

  Chen obeyed the instruction and found himself standing before a lectern, made of so clear a crystal that it was almost invisible, had it not been for a glitter of light on its polished surface. “This was where the Book was placed?” he asked.

  “Yes. You can see how easy it would be to leave a fingerprint, if one were careless.”

  A print would show up on this surface like a blot of soot. But this thief had been wary, if indeed, a thief there had been. The surface of the lectern was pristine.

  “Are there any recording devices, magical or otherwise, in here?”

  Mhara pointed up to an owlish face looking out of carved greenery. The face winked, making Chen jump.

  “It sees everything and projects it onto a crystal screen in an adjoining chamber.”

  “Remarkably modern,” Chen said.

  “Yes, even Heaven occasionally adopts ideas from the human world,” Mhara said wryly. “As you might have noticed… Anyway, the screen shows nothing. One moment the book is there, the next it is not.”

  “If there’s this magical transportation system, then that lends some weight to the hypothesis that the Book simply removed itself — took itself down to the mountains, perhaps.”

  “I’d considered that,” Mhara said. “But what would it do then? It has no legs of its own and its ability to transport itself on Earth would be very limited.”

  “So the Book might have an accomplice, then?”

  “Possibly. Maybe it approached someone in a dream. Such things have been known.”

  “This job doesn’t always lend itself to the likeliest explanation,” Chen said. “Is there any way the recording device could have been tampered with? You can alter the footage on CCTV cameras, after all.”

  “No!” came an irritated protest from high on the wall. “Nothing changes me! I am a guardian of the Book.”

  Chen did not want the device to lose face and therefore did not say that it had not proved a very effective guardian, given what had happened. But he thought he might point something out, all the same. “Could the Book itself have changed you?”

  A long silence, then, very grudgingly, “It’s a possibility.”

  “I don’t mean to criticize,” Chen was quick to add. “But if we know it’s a possibility, then it gives weight to our hypothesis.”

  The device lapsed into ruminative quiet as Mhara and Chen explored the rest of the chamber. There was, the Emperor declared, nothing amiss, and Chen had to accept this, given the Emperor’s familiarity with the room. They left soon after that — an empty chamber, guarding nothing — but Mhara was careful to seal the doors behind him. After the room, the rest of the Palace seemed lifeless and stale.

  “At least we have a working hypothesis,” Chen said. “The next thing, I’d suggest, is to go to the place where that thief-turned-monk was sent, and see if the Book is there.”

  Mhara sighed. “I was afraid you’d suggest that. The problem is that the location is rather extensive.”

  “What’s it called? The region where he found himself?”

  “The Gobi Desert.”

  TEN

  Omi spent most of that night in meditation, emerging to find a pale rosy dawn firing the sky beyond the pines. He was being watched. He could feel it at the back of his neck, as palpable as a touch upon his skin. Yet it did not feel like an enemy — it was more akin to being watched by an animal, a wolf or bear.

  There were both in these mountains of northwestern China, and Omi was immediately wary. The skills in which he’d been trained were effective against ifrit or human, but he doubted whether they’d prove as efficient if he were confronted with a bear. His hand stole to the shaft of the bow and closed around it. Slowly, he rose to his feet and turned.

  Both she and the bird looked as though they were made from mist. The blue tattoos that ringed her arms coiled and snaked with a life of their own and the feathers of the crane’s wing fell across her shoulder, merging and shifting as the mist itself curled up the mountainside. She was watching him with an unblinking gaze, also blue, and the hair that trailed down her back was shot with indigo.

  Omi’s skin prickled all over again. “Who are you?”

  “I am called No-one,” the woman said. She was human, not ifrit or, he thought, demon.

  “What kind of name is that?” Omi asked.

  The woman smiled. “I traded my name for power,” she said.

  “That’s an old magic,” Omi commented.

  “I’m an old magician. You may call me Raksha, if you wish. That means the same thing in my language.”

  “You don’t look that old,” Omi said gallantly, but he knew at once that she was telling the truth: there was the sense of a great presence to her, as if she carried far more than the obvious weight of her years.

  “I came to find you,” Raksha said. “Your name is Omi, is that not right? And you are a warrior, from Japan, trying to avenge the murder of your father at the hands of a man who should by rights be dead.”

  Omi grew very still. “How do you know all this?” The details of his father’s murder were known, so he’d believed, to only three people: Grandfather, his sensei, and Omi himself. Now here was this supernatural stranger commenting as casually upon
the core of his life as if remarking upon the weather.

  “Do not worry,” the woman said. “I didn’t learn this from anyone living.”

  “How did you learn it, then?”

  “I can’t tell you. I made a promise.”

  “Are you a demon?” Omi said. He didn’t think so, but after the vision of the sigil he had had earlier, it was worth checking.

  “No. Well, not really. I’ve been — out of circulation for rather a long time. I’ve been sent to help you.”

  “By whom? Another ‘no one’?”

  A curious expression crossed the woman’s face, half-amused, half-dismayed. “I can’t tell you. I made a promise. Do you think you can trust me? My people had vows of honor, once. They’re dead, but the vows remain, written on the world.”