Shadow Pavilion (12 page)

27

“
Murdering the Celestial Emperor?” Chen said. “That's ambitious.”

Inari, still very pale, sat twisting her hands together on the couch in the main cabin of the houseboat. There was no question that Chen did not believe her, but he wondered whether this shaman-between-worlds had simply been lying. It seemed an odd, elaborate deception, however. He did not like, at all, the thought that his wife could be spirited so easily away; that this individual had some kind of hold on her. He intended to give No Ro Shi a call very soon: the demon-hunter seemed to have a grip on this sort of thing.

“Have you ever heard of this person? Lord Lady Seijin?”

Chen shook his head. “No, but that doesn't mean anything. The depths of my personal ignorance are as yet unplumbed—there's so much out there, Inari. I'm hoping No Ro Shi might be able to shed some light on the subject.”

“Are you going to speak to him?” Inari said. Evidently their thoughts had been running along similar lines. Chen looked at the clock. It was now just after 2:00 A.M.

“I'll call him now, leave a message on his answerphone.”

But he was in luck. The demon-hunter was up.

“Citizen Chen?”

“We've got a further problem,” Chen said. “I'm reluctant to discuss it on the phone. I don't want to disturb you, but—”

“I work best at night,” No Ro Shi told him. “Give me twenty minutes.”

“I have heard of this person,” the demon-hunter said, a little later. He folded his long body into an armchair, looking as though he entertained ideological objections to personal comfort. “A very old individual, almost legendary. Born in the time of Genghis, and rode with the hordes. A murderer, a barbarian, who changed with the times and yet remained the same.”

“This ‘Lord Lady' business
…
” Chen began.

“A walker between worlds. Seijin is both male and female, born of a demon father and a Celestial mother, or perhaps the other way around. But, whichever the case, born on Earth and thus able to move between all worlds at will.”

“And now resides in a place called
between.”

“I don't know a great deal about
between,”
No Ro Shi said. “I have always thought that it was itself a myth. It is supposed to be the birthplace of possibilities, falling as it does between the cracks in the worlds.”

“If the shaman was telling the truth,” Inari said, timidly, “I've been there. And it didn't feel like anywhere else I've ever been.”

No Ro Shi regarded her with something approaching kindness. “It must have been alarming.”

“What are we going to do?” Inari said. “Warn Mhara?”

“As soon as possible,” Chen said. “In fact, if you have a vehicle with you, No Ro Shi, I suggest we go to the temple as soon as we can. It's the best way to get in touch. I don't have any other method at the moment, although that was due to change.” He had the sense that things were once more moving too quickly, time sweeping him along in its tide. Not a comfortable sensation.

They all went. Chen wanted Mhara to hear Inari's story in her own words, and he was highly reluctant to leave her on her own after what had been happening. He had the suspicion that this was somehow all connected: Zhu Irzh's disappearance and that of the badger, this tale of assassinating Mhara. But there was no instinct accompanying it: no gut feeling. He was not sure how much store to place in that.

Though it might be close to dawn, the streets were still filled with people along the central area of the city, spilling out of the clubs and demon lounges and bars. Many of the lounges had been newly legalized, under revised trade agreements with Hell; how things had changed, Chen mused, as No Ro Shi's four-by-four spun past the glaring neon signs. Next thing he knew, there would be blood emporiums opening up alongside the delicatessens. Hard to ignore Hell these days; difficult to maintain a rationalist agnosticism, but there were still plenty of folk who managed it, unable to see the visitants from other realms. Chen was not sure whether this would be a comfort or otherwise. On the one hand, you'd miss a great many disturbing things; on the other, it must appear as though the rest of the world had taken leave of its senses. But then, the Chinese were used to that.

Chen's reverie was disrupted as No Ro Shi swore and the vehicle veered sharply to the left.

“What the—”

“Hostile on the far side of the road,” the demon-hunter snapped. Chen turned in his seat and saw a cloudy presence. At first, he thought it was a swirl of mist, but it was solidifying. Then, abruptly, it was gone. No Ro Shi slammed on the brakes, pitching Chen forward in his seat.

“Sorry!”

Something was standing in front of the car, a swathe of fog. As the vehicle skidded, then stopped, Chen looked into the heart of the mist and saw a tall, slender figure. It held a blood-red sword in both hands, not ready to swing, but balanced across them as if presenting the sword to a student. Dark hair fell back from a high brow. Its eyes were golden, like a demon's, and it was smiling. Impossible to tell whether the tranquil face belonged to a man or a woman. It raised the sword, a clear salute, and smiled. Then the mist was torn away, as though a sea wind had blown across the street and dispelled it, taking the figure with it.

“I think,” Chen said to the gaping No Ro Shi, “that we might have met Lord Lady Seijin.”

It was almost dawn when they reached the little temple of the Emperor of Heaven, a white glow to the east signaling the rise of the sun. Chen felt he would be glad when the night was over; gods knew that enough things had befallen him in broad daylight, but it was easier to think, somehow. Nighttime was the ghost time, the time of the spirit world, not meant for those who walked in the light. Or who tried to, anyway. A relief to step out under the lightening sky, a greater one to walk up to the temple door and have it swing open to welcome you into a calm, lamplit space.

“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

P
auleng 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, anyway. 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.