The Iron Khan (23 page)

“Where is it?” Miss Qi asked, blankly.

“Look!” Inari said, pointing. “There’s the Night Harbor!”

It had never been a place for which she had held any affection, being the gateway to both Heaven and Hell. But now the sight of its oblong black form made it feel like an old friend.

“I thought this was a city?” the Roc said.

“It was. Where have you taken us?”

“This is Earth!” the Roc said, clearly as surprised as they were. “You can feel it.”

The bird was right. If Inari reached into herself, her core — further even than the child that swam, dreaming, in her womb — she felt Earth there, the pull and weight of the human world. It was more than instinct; it was knowledge.

“But where’s the city?” echoed Miss Qi.

Clinging to the Roc’s metallic feathers, they circled the place where Singapore Three had been. It was definitely the right location; Inari could tell this from the underlying geography. But something — not just the lack of the city — was different.

“Magic,” Miss Qi whispered.

“Yes, but what kind of magic?” Looking down from the Roc’s back, she could see the air sparkling, a fine dust permeating the atmosphere, but visible from the corners of the eyes, not when studied directly. Inari knew it for the aftermath of magical work, on an immense scale. She’d seen such work before, but only in Hell.

“Yes,” Miss Qi said, when Inari pointed this out to her. “Someone must have stolen the city.”

“Or destroyed it.” Inari could still feel Singapore Three, but it was like an echo, or a fading dream.

“I don’t think it’s been destroyed,” Miss Qi said. “I can sense it, but it’s in the wrong place. That’s what made me think it must have been stolen.”

“But who would steal a city? And why?” The main problem with Miss Qi’s hypothesis, Inari thought, was who would want it.

“I grow tired,” the Roc said, and soared downward toward the little hummock of an island.

“Wait!” Inari commanded. “Land on shore. Please. We need to find out what’s happened.” This new shore might prove to have unknown dangers, but they stood more chance of discovering the truth about the changes if they weren’t marooned.

“I could just turn around and take you back to my Hell,” the Roc pointed out. “Since there appears to be little for me here.”

“You said you wanted land of your own,” said Inari. “Maybe this is your chance to take it.”

“Yes,” said Miss Qi, with a cunning that Inari had not expected in her. “There might be new prey.”

The Roc did not reply, but their comments had evidently given it food for thought, because it glided over the islands and headed for the coast. Inari looked down as they passed above the harbor: no boats now rode at anchor in the bay, nor was there any sign of the typhoon shelter.

“There’s a plane!” Miss Qi said, suddenly. Inari looked ahead. The Celestial warrior was right: a jet was streaking across the sky, leaving a vapor trail behind it. With the Roc still circling, they watched as it headed downward to a flat piece of land close to the bay. This was not, Inari knew, where the airport was situated in her own day.

“That doesn’t look like a fighter plane,” Miss Qi said, frowning.

“It isn’t.” Inari didn’t know much about aircraft, but she recognized this one from the red symbol emblazoned across its fuselage. It was one of the Paugeng jets; Jhai’s private craft. She leaned forward in excitement.

“The woman who owns that plane has a lot of power. She’s the one I was telling you about. Can you land us near it?”

“Very well,” the Roc said, in slightly more conciliatory tones now that there was a chance of getting what it had come for. It headed inland, toward the rudimentary landing strip. The plane had landed now and was slowing. The Roc took them down to a slight rise and Inari scrambled gratefully from its back. The badger shook himself. Miss Qi took Inari’s arm.

“Are you sure that Jhai’s in there?”

“I can’t be sure.” Inari looked around her at the desolate coastline. “Things have altered so much…”

But she had to take the risk. Leaving the Roc ruffling its feathers on the rise, they headed for the aircraft, which had now taxied to a halt. It was with considerable relief that Inari saw the door open and Jhai herself swing down a ladder to the ground.

•

“Inari! What the hell?” Jhai spotted her Celestial bodyguard. “Miss Qi! And what’s that bird doing there?”

“We were kidnapped. Ended up in someone’s Hell. Got rescued,” Miss Qi said. Jhai appreciated brevity, Inari knew.

“Oh. Sorry to hear that. I’ve just been working, out West, then in Beijing. Had to leave Zhu Irzh — he got involved in a case. Left Beijing airport earlier and as we were halfway here, something happened.”

“The city’s gone,” Inari said, feeling that she was stating the obvious.

“Let me tell you, it’s not the only thing that’s disappeared. The whole of China’s changed. One minute I was looking out of the window at urban sprawl, the next, it wasn’t there.”

“Is this really Earth?” Miss Qi asked. “Or some kind of parallel world?”

“That would seem to be the obvious explanation,” Jhai said. She looked up, to see a passenger jet heading over the hills. “Anyone up in the air seems not to have been affected, though. I’ve tried to get hold of Zhu Irzh but I can’t reach him.”

“And Wei Chen?” Inari faltered.

Jhai shook her head. “I’m sorry, Inari. No sign of him. But this world isn’t entirely empty. As we flew in I saw villages — even some little towns. So it isn’t completely unpopulated.”

And as if to punctuate her words, her cellphone rang.

Zhu Irzh watched the stars as they flew, galaxies whisking by. The city was speeding up, taking him into the past: he could feel the years rolling back, affecting him at the cellular level. This was not the subtle transition that he’d experienced when he’d first slipped into the Tokarian village, but was swift and brutal. It took him a moment to realize that the city had stopped moving, and then he felt windswept and breathless.

“Are we nearly there yet?”

The city did not reply. Instead, it began to fade, the stars flickering out one by one, the walls folding down into themselves. It was a calm process with an air of unstoppable authority about it: Agarta had done this before. It reminded Zhu Irzh of watching a computerized image slowly dismantle. When it was over, he stood alone in the desert, a bright sun golden above him and the scent of incense on the light breath of the wind.

The demon followed it. Whereas the southern part of the desert had featured those huge dunes, this terrain did not: it looked more like another planet. Black grit crunched beneath Zhu Irzh’s boots and a line of old red hills broke the horizon. Then he heard singing. It was so unexpected that Zhu Irzh stopped dead and listened.

It wasn’t human. He could tell that much. And it was coming from above. The demon looked up. Overheard, perhaps at a height of some thirty feet, a group of women soared in flight. Their long, trailing garments floated around them as they flew in brightly colored streamers and each one wore a conical hat, like a small beehive.

Then one of them spotted Zhu Irzh. She gave a scream and a second later, all of them were drifting down to cluster around him.

“Ladies, ladies,” the demon said, not displeased. “There’s no need to be quite so enthusiastic.”

“But what are you?” There didn’t seem to be any linguistic barrier, although Zhu Irzh could tell that he was not speaking, or hearing, his native tongue.

“I am a demon. From Hell.”

One of the flying women frowned. “I’ve never heard of such a place.”

“I can assure you it exists,” Zhu Irzh said, conscious of some unease. Perhaps it no longer did, in this timeline, or perhaps its gateways were much less clearly marked than they were in his own world. “And you — you are akashi, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” There was twittering, and a certain amount of giggling. “How did you know?”

“I’ve — met your kind before.” But he was not sure whether this was really true. None of them looked quite like the akashi he had encountered, and so maybe none of them were. Could the spell alter appearance in addition to — well, everything else?

The akashi laughed behind their hands, which were slender and clawed. “Are you going to visit the Enlightened One?”

“Who is he?” Then Zhu Irzh hastily amended, “Or should I say she?”

More laughter. “He lives in the cave. Over that ridge.”

Well, why not? It wasn’t as though he had a clue what he was doing, after all. “I’ll go there, then,” the demon said.

The akashi rose into the air in a flock, like birds, their streamers fluttering around them. Zhu Irzh watched them go with a faint regret. Maybe they’d come back later. In the meantime, he might as well see who this Enlightened One was.

Over the ridge lay a grove of acacia. Wherever he was in this timeline, he didn’t think it was where he’d been previously. He could see what were clearly caves: a long, high line of rock, interspersed with dark hollows. But the air was sparkling. A crystalline stream ran between the trees.

It felt like Heaven. And that made Zhu Irzh nervous. He kept walking toward the caves and as he did so, he became aware that there was someone within. He was being watched. At the foot of the cliff face, he paused and looked up.

“I am here,” someone said.

“Are you the Book?” Zhu Irzh asked with some trepidation. He wasn’t sure that he could give an account of himself to that particular entity.

“Which book is that? We have many books here. Come and see for yourself.”

“How?” The cliff face rose sheer before him.

“Step upon the air,” the voice said. Frowning, the demon did so and found himself hovering a foot or so above the ground.

“I’ve never done that before!” Perhaps this was how the akashi managed their flight: an invisible staircase. Experimentally, he continued to climb and found himself standing in front of a narrow ledge, some hundred feet up the cliff face. He stepped onto it and said aloud, “Where to now?”

“Here.” There was a cave entrance some few yards along the ledge. Inside, it took the demon’s eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light. Then he took a step back.

The face was huge and golden, the eyes elongated. It was smiling.

“Buddha?”

“One of My avatars.”

“Wait a minute,” Zhu Irzh said. “You were a living being, weren’t you? And as far as I remember, you weren’t contemporary with the Tokarians — they were much earlier.”

“That is so. But in fact, my spirit has always been around, staking a claim on certain places. This visage you see before you is not me as I truly am, but only the face that humans have put upon me.”

This was something that Zhu Irzh understood. He nodded.

“You, however,” the Buddha said, “truly do not belong.”

It was said courteously, but with a query. And the divinity had not known about the Book. Zhu Irzh decided to explain.

“I have never heard of such a thing,” the Buddha said, wonderingly. “And you are a demon.”

“Ah, yes. That.” His origins had embarrassed him before, Hell knew, but rarely so much as now. Then he remembered that Agarta had taken him in and he stood a little straighter. “But I am not on a demonic errand.”

“You’re speaking the truth,” the Buddha said. “I can hear it. How odd.”

“I need to find the Tokarians,” Zhu Irzh told him. “Can you help me?” He didn’t see why the Buddha should do so, but it couldn’t hurt to ask.

“One of the girls will take you there,” the Buddha said.

Zhu Irzh perked up. “Fine with me.”

He didn’t expect her to be a deer, but in retrospect, it made a certain amount of sense. The akashi, she explained, were animal spirits: deer and birds and butterflies, anything gentle and lovely. It reminded him of the Indian Hell belonging to Jhai’s cousin, from which he had recently been obliged to escape.

“And you can go where you please on the face of this world?” Zhu Irzh asked, just to make sure.

“Yes, of course. Often, we go to the mountain forests to visit our friends the tiger spirits.”

Tiger spirits. Hmm. Best not mention that other close encounter with tiger spirits, or even that he was engaged to one.

“How nice.” It was just like Heaven, Zhu Irzh thought. No matter how long ago this might be, he didn’t think Earth had ever been so pleasant. He wondered what else the Book had managed to achieve. The deer skipped ahead, darting through the long grass. It might be that this was simply her natural form for a journey, or that the Buddha had asked her to take this shape to remove temptation from visiting demons. Easy to be cynical. Easy to be right, though.

“Is it very far?” he asked.

“A little way, but the journey is so pleasant,” the deer replied, pausing to munch on some flowers. This was not like the desert he had known, either: closer to steppe, with miles of gently waving grass dotted with spring blossoms. The air smelled sweet and fresh. Zhu Irzh sighed. It was like stepping into Disneyland. Despite the charms of this place, he preferred the Earth as it had been, in all its multifarious complexity. And if the Tokarians were as pleasant as the akashi, would they actually be any help? He might have to end up frightening people to get answers out of them, and in that case, would the Book’s new rules simply write him out of existence?