by Liz Williams
“What’s that?” Li-Ju asked. Drawn by the motion of the Empress’ magical engine, the boat was speeding up, no longer turning like a twig caught on an eddy, but arrowing straight for the gap.
“I don’t know.” Yet Chen thought he did. The boundaries between the worlds were breaking down, allowing magic to bleed between systems, allowing rifts and ruptures. The pirates had taken advantage of one such, and now their captive was turning the tables on Banquo and his crew.
But where was she heading? Surely not back to the limbo of the Sea of Night? And Heaven would hardly welcome her. That left, to Chen’s mind, a handful of unappealing alternatives.
It wasn’t long before they found out. The boat sailed straight for the crack and as it approached, there was a roll of thunder. Lightning shot out from the crack, forming a web in the heavens and merging with the threads of energy generated by the Empress. She was drawing her power from somewhere, Chen realized: this was more than she could possess herself. Besides, it felt different—more like the magic of Hell, but with an added foreign quality that he was unable to place. All he and Li-Ju could do was hang on while the boat hurtled through the lightning storm. Beside them, Banquo was cursing.
The gap now filled the air ahead. Through the little window, Chen kept getting glimpses of its darkness, shot with lights: scarlet and jade and a fiery white. Then the world beyond the window was blotted out as they soared into the gap.
Immediately, all the sound and fury ceased. A vast quietness fell upon the boat. The Empress, now a wadded mass of magical threads, continued to spin like some silent generator. Li-Ju turned to Chen and spoke, but no sound emerged from his mouth. Chen felt as though his ears had been packed with cotton wool. Inside his chest, his heartbeat slowed to a painful, thudding pace. His breath seemed to be congealing in his lungs.
“What?” But he couldn’t even hear his own voice.
Gradually, the circle of darkness that was the window began to lighten. Chen saw a drift of cloud, then a strip of sky in between the swirling mist. A moment later, the Empress’ gyrating figure began to slow down. Her eyes reappeared within the mass, two malevolent black sparks. Far beneath the boat, a green curve appeared.
It was Earth, and yet it was wrong. As soon as they were through the gap, Chen knew that he was back home, but there were subtle differences. Nothing obvious in the air through which the boat was descending, no clue in the land below them—but the magic was wrong. Or was that—right? Chen felt a surge of unfamiliar power through his fingertips, as if a bolt of lightning had arced up from the earth itself. He felt connected; he could almost have described the land that was now speeding by under their feet even if he was still unable to see it.
Across the room, the Empress’ eyes widened. The spell came to Chen’s lips almost before he had time to think about it. He threw out a hand, a gesture which was normally accompanied by slicing a spell into his palm. But now the magic shot through him effortlessly. He had a sudden, disconcerting vision of himself from the outside, a figure of light, one hand outflung, and then the magic was coursing out of him and striking the Empress full on.
It sent her into a spin and the boat spun with her. Chen reached down into the land, found the threads that made the link, pulled, tugged, twisted …
Li-Ju and Banquo were staring at him wide-eyed.
“What the hell are you doing?” the pirate demanded.
“Taking us in,” Chen said, humming with magic. He spread his fingers wide, pointing away from his adversary now and taking the boat into a long glide. They were now perhaps twenty feet above the ground. A grove of trees rushed past. Chen took the boat lower until the grass brushed its sides, and then he stopped it. The boat sank to a gentle, lurching halt.
Immediately the Empress rose in a rustle of skirts and magic and rushed at the door.
“Oh no you don’t!” Banquo said. He reached for her but Chen was quicker. He picked up the trailing threads of the Empress’ magic and bound them around her. The Empress toppled like a cut sapling, hobbled by her skirts and the remnants of her power. Banquo hauled her upright and bound her hands behind her with a fragment of rope. The Empress cursed and spat, but suddenly she grew limp and sagging in the pirate’s grasp.
“Where are we?” Li-Ju threw the door wide and started down the corridor. Chen followed him, ignoring the pirate.
The grasslands stretched as far as the eye could see, a soft rolling land starred with flowers in all shades of yellow and mauve, blurring the landscape into an impressionistic watercolor. A few groves of low trees broke up the steppe. In the distance a herd of what might have been deer grazed peacefully.
Li-Ju was staring, with a frown. “This is Earth. But it feels like Heaven.”
“Earth’s changed,” Chen agreed. He was still aware of the aftermath of unaccustomed power; aware, too, of the force of it coursing underneath his feet, as swift and smooth as uninterrupted water, there for the taking. Quickly, he brought Li-Ju up to speed.
“And you don’t normally have that kind of power?” the captain asked.
“No. All my magic has been hard won,” said Chen. He saw no need to be macho about it, not at this stage of his life. He gripped the rail of the grounded boat, looking out across the sea of grass. “I had to study hard. It didn’t come naturally. The only time I’ve ever had that sort of magic available so readily was when I was still under Kuan Yin’s protection and that was just borrowed. It wasn’t like this.”
More out of wonderment than need, Chen reached down into the ground with his senses and pulled up a handful of power. It sparked and sparkled through the air, changing into a swallow and shooting off across the grassland. They watched it go.
“So,” Li-Ju said, after a weighty moment. “Earth, but not Earth.”
“Yes. We need to find out what’s happened. And we need to do something with the Empress. I don’t trust the pirate not to cut some kind of deal.”
But then Chen was staring in amazement out over the grass.
“What’s that?”
42
It was not like watching a plane descend, or a spaceship—the nearest thing, Inari decided, to what it actually was. Rather, the flying city of Agarta arrived by degrees, like a palimpsest: first a shadow on the morning air, then a firmer image which blurred the mountain wall, and finally its full self, hanging against the bulk of the rocks. Inari had never seen anything like it. Even Jhai was silent.
“Thus it comes,” Nicholas Roerich said, with quiet satisfaction. A bridge was spinning itself weblike across the air, joining the gap between Agarta and the wall of the temple. It looked too delicate to bear any human weight, a gossamer confection of silvery threads. Above it, Agarta’s turrets towered.
“You spoke of the Masters,” Jhai said. “Where are they?”
“Within.” Roerich took a step onto the bridge. “Follow me. You’ll be quite safe.”
“I’ll go first,” Robin said. “I’m already dead, after all.”
“I’ve died once before,” Inari murmured, but she let the ghost go ahead of her. Stepping out onto the bridge gave her a moment of extreme disorientation, but mindful of Jhai and Miss Qi close behind, she tried not to hesitate. And indeed, once she was actually on the bridge, she discovered that it felt quite solid and safe, as though she could not fall off, despite its fragility and the depths of the gaping air beneath her. A minute’s confident walking later, and she was stepping off the bridge again into Agarta.
It did not feel as though it welcomed her, nor repelled her. Instead she had the distinct sensation that she was being watched and evaluated. Beside her, Jhai gave an uneasy start. “I’m not sure this place likes me.”
Miss Qi and Robin, predictably, seemed to have no such qualms. “What a lovely place,” the Celestial warrior said, striding forward to examine a lily. Inari, looking back, saw that the temple was fading away behind them. The bridge had disappeared, separating them from the land, and within moments the temple had become no more than a shadow
. The mountains, too, seemed different: more solid, lit by shades of green as far as their pale summits.
“Where are we?” But she quickly answered her own question. “We’re back on Earth, aren’t we?”
Roerich nodded. “Earth-the-Changed.”
The mountains were folding around them, shifting as Agarta moved.
“We’re flying!” Inari said.
Jhai turned to Roerich. “Where to now?”
“Your fiancé’s gone back in time,” Roerich said.
“To do what?”
“He’s looking for the Khan.”
“I thought,” said Jhai, “that the Khan was looking for him.”
Inari wandered around the narrow streets of the city. She had been left to her own devices and she felt safe here, although she still did not feel that she had been wholly accepted. The city was judging her, seeing whether she was worthy of acceptance. It made Inari nervous, but she was damned if she was going to beg for its approval. She had Chen’s approval, after all, and that was all that mattered. She had been given a chamber, a room high in a tower from which she could view the changing, rushing world, but Inari, strangely restless, preferred to walk.
Roerich had explained what had happened, that his young acolyte, Omi, had accidentally released a spell from the remaking Book of Heaven. And this new Earth was what the Book had created, but it was incomplete, somehow fractured. Inari could have told him that already, for Hell had appeared unchanged. Perhaps the sad old world was too much now for even the Book to unmake and it had simply displaced it, papered over the cracks, created an illusion.
The mountains underwent one last fold and were left behind. Now Agarta skimmed over seemingly endless plains, and the sweet smell of empty grassland filled the air. Once Inari looked up to see a white horse running toward her, its mane flying behind it. Then, with a flare of its nostrils, it was gone. She wondered what it had seen. But Agarta was slowing down now, the grass below visible as more than a pale wheat-green blur. Inari went to a low wall and looked over, parting a curtain of cascading roses.
There was a curious thing: a boat, marooned on a hillside, miles from any waterway that Inari could see. And standing on the deck was someone who was not at all unfamiliar.
Inari rarely raised her voice, but her shout echoed across the steppe. “Wei Chen!”
Several reunions later, Chen, Inari, and her companions sat in a round chamber high above the city, with Roerich and the Enlightened woman named Nandini. Inari had the impression that there were others in the chamber, too, but when she tried to look at them directly, no one was there.
“The world is breaking apart.” Nandini spoke calmly, but Inari could see the tension in her face.
“Do we know what’s happened to the cities of Earth? To the people?”
“We believe they have been shifted to the place known as Between,” Nandini said. Inari had visited Between, while dead. She had not thought all those people would fit. Perhaps it was bigger than it looked.
“So they have not been—unmade?” Chen asked.
“No. Whichever way you look at it, altering the timeline would effectively have resulted in wholesale murder. So the Book seems merely to have moved them at the times at which it decided to change things. Don’t ask me how this affects folk who are already dead: presumably their spirits reside in Heaven or Hell or in their reincarnations.”
“And Zhu Irzh?” said Chen.
“Somewhere. Somewhen.”
Agarta might be home of the Enlightened Masters, Inari reflected, but it seemed that not even the Enlightened knew everything.
“What happened to the Empress?” she heard herself say. Years ago, Inari might have been too timid to raise her voice in such august company, in case she caused them to lose face, but those days were long gone, eroded by experience and time and the child growing within her. The Empress had struck out at Inari once, and the baby, and Miss Qi, and badger. Enough was enough; Inari would not tolerate it again.
Chen turned to her reassuringly. “She’s incarcerated here in the city. As soon as things are set right, she’ll be returned to the Sea of Night.”
“Speaking of which,” Robin said, “has anyone heard anything from my fiancé?”
“We have sent dispensation to the Night Harbor,” Nandini said, rather stiffly, “petitioning to enter Heaven.”
Jhai snorted. “Might I suggest a large bribe?”
“Agarta does not encourage corruption,” Nandini replied, now icy.
“Whether you encourage it or not,” Jhai said, “even in this remade world, it would seem that the Night Harbor remains reassuringly the same.”
Nandini was too serene to glare, but she came close to it.
Inari was still thinking about the Empress. She’d broken out of the Sea of Night, and then Banquo’s capture. Inari did not think that these calm rose-growers were likely to hold the Empress hostage for long, whatever Chen may think. Then, ashamed of her own disloyalty, she told herself that Chen was no fool and had defeated the Empress once already.
“Agarta is at its limits,” Nandini said now, as if reluctant to admit such limitation. “We can travel no further. The Book has circumscribed our world.”
“But the Book has been unsuccessful,” Chen argued.
“I agree,” Jhai said. “You said yourself—the world is breaking down. Why not test those limits? You’re the only one who believes in them.”
Nandini was silent.
Inari saw that Roerich was staring at Nandini, his dark gaze unblinking, and it was as if she had read his mind. The Masters want others to act for them, now. Agarta’s time is passing. Then, with a sigh, Roerich spoke.
“You have to try,” he said.
43
The swarm of ifrits still circled at the boundaries of the cliff. How did the spirit that was the Buddha see them? Zhu Irzh wondered. As gnats, or fleas? Or, in his limitless compassion, simply as themselves?
But the demon didn’t really care what the Buddha thought of them. They were vermin and enemies, and he wanted them gone. Frustrated, he watched them circle against the velvet sky. Raksha had spoken of another way out of here, and he was waiting for her to return. The shaman had taken to adversity with surprising effectiveness for someone raised in an earthly paradise: perhaps she retained memories of her alternative Tokarian self, the one in his own timeline. Mulling it over, Zhu Irzh decided that he preferred Earth as it had been; it kept you on your toes, somehow. Heaven seemed to make you either soft or mad.
Raksha materialized at his shoulder, coming cat-footed out of the dark.
“Any luck?”
The shaman assented. “There’s a tunnel which runs through the cliff—looks like a natural cave.” She looked out at the ifrits, eyes narrowing. “Do you know much about those things? How good is their sense of smell?”
“I’ve no idea. I wouldn’t put much past them, though. They’re predators. Where does this tunnel come out?”
“Into the grassland somewhere.”
“The wound in the world,” Zhu Irzh said. “I think that must be where the spell was activated.”
“It’s a place where something is badly wrong,” Raksha agreed. Zhu Irzh sighed.
“A good starting point, then.” Even with the Khan and his troops milling around. Now that Zhu Irzh thought back, out of the mists of panic, there had been something odd about those warriors: not men, he thought, but if not, then what? Had the Khan been recruiting in Hell? “We have to find out what the Khan is planning to do.”
And hopefully, reverse a paradisiacal spell.
The tunnel was bone dry and dusty underfoot, running in a series of twists and turns beneath the hill. Even down here, Zhu Irzh could sense the presence of the Buddha: a great calm pervading the place like the hush and rush of the sea. Not quite calm enough, however, to stop him from worrying about what might be waiting for them at the other end.
Raksha was silent. The demon had no idea what was going through her head, but he was
grateful for her presence. Not to mention her abilities. He wondered about the others—where Roerich might be, or Omi. And then there was Chen—had he been edited out of this revised future? Zhu Irzh was aware of a substantial indignation. He was tired of people playing God. Even if they were gods.
The tunnel was widening. Raksha carried a small torch, a flaring thing of pitch, but unless it was his imagination, the light was growing. Next moment, Raksha caught him by the arm.
“We’re coming to the end of the tunnel. Be careful.”
The demon did not need telling twice. He flattened himself against the wall at the end of the tunnel as a draft of cool, grass-scented air blew inward. There was no sound from outside. Zhu Irzh checked his instincts: they were telling him it was safe. Cautiously, he peered around the side of the tunnel.
Outside, the land sloped gently down to the gleam of water. A stream snaked between low, grass-fringed banks. Above the hills, the moon hung huge and golden. No sign of the Khan or his men, yet the demon’s senses told him that the land was not as empty as it looked. Next moment he darted back as something sprung out of a thicket of scrub.
Raksha, however, didn’t hesitate leaving the tunnel.
“So, it is you!” she said.
“It is I,” the hare said. It sat back on long, folded legs and gazed up at her with eyes like the moon. “There are strange things out in the grass.”
Looking at the hare, Zhu Irzh caught the fleeting shadow of a girl, golden-eyed, with long fawn hair. Human and animal had not been so distinct once in the world’s history.