All the Gates of Hell (24 page)

"She's dead," Jin said. "No one's faulting your...enthusiasm. Though one might ask why you bothered to bury her."

"I don't like bones lying about," the demon said. "It's untidy."

Jin just stared. "In the depths of hell, and you talk about 'untidy'? Are you insane?"

"I've often wondered that myself," the demon said. "Excuse me, I have work to do."

The demon trudged past the tree while Jin just watched him. No point in hanging around there, really. If it was true she'd missed her chance this time around, then the time would come again.

"I'm sorry," Jin said aloud, and to no one in particular since she didn't even know the little girl's name. Jin left the path and started up the slope to go back the way she had come.

She felt a tug.

Jin just stared at her wrist for several long seconds. The tug had been fierce this time, and there was no mistaking it. But... that couldn't be! The girl was dead! It was too late.

The tug wasn't coming from the grave. Jin opened her third eye just a bit, and ignored the infinite nothingness it showed her long enough to see what was in front of her there, what was real. The golden thread was real, it was there, and it led to someone. Not the girl.

I'm here...for the demon
?

Jin couldn't believe her eyes -- any of them -- but there was no mistake. The thread connected to Jin's wrist played out through the smoke and ash of hell to connect to the demon's wrist. The one who had killed the child even as she watched like a useless lump was the one she had come to this hell to free.

"I don't believe this," she said aloud. "This makes no sense!"

"Were you talking to me?" the demon asked over his shoulder.

"I-I don't know."

Now the demon stopped, and turned back to look at her again. "You seem confused," it said, "Come with me and let's talk about it."

(())

Chapter 19

While Jin had been watching the demon and his victim several lava bomb fragments had landed within the boundaries of the garden. First the demon scooped up the erring rocks and flung them out of the valley entirely with its powerful arms. Then the demon fetched a crude rake from a cleft in the mountain and began to make the sand right again. Jin sat on a stone further up the slope and watched him work.

"This is your garden," Jin said. "I didn't know."

"Even a demon can get bored," it said. "And there will be a delay until Azuki-chan can return from the Tenth Hell."

"And then you torture her to death again. I guess it's a good thing that she won't remember you," Jin said.

The demon shrugged. "That doesn't matter. I have my role to play. She has hers."

"Such a good way to avoid responsibility for what you do."

The demon grunted as it raked up and discarded another stone. "No one avoids responsibility for what they do, though it pleases many to think otherwise. The only uncertainty is when payment will be demanded and in what form."

"Azuki-chan? That was her name?" The demon just went on raking, but Jin didn't really need his answer. She was beginning to wonder what answers she did need. "Why her?"

The demon paused in its raking. "What do you mean?"

"I mean most demons here work in packs, torturing people who also suffer in packs. Yet here we have one demon, one tortured denizen of hell. You've devoted all your time to one person, this 'Azuki-chan.' Why?"

The demon shrugged. "Have there been complaints?"

"Please answer my question."

The demon shrugged again. "Why should I? The fact that I am a demon and I am here means I am serving my function. There isn't much leeway for our kind."

"Did you enjoy torturing Azuki-chan?"

"The question is meaningless. I did what I had to do, as did she."

"Yes. Quietly, with dignity on both sides. No screaming. No fear. No anger. What would you have done had she screamed at you? Begged? Cried? Think of this, then tell me it's a meaningless question."

The demon raked harder. "I would have done my duty. That is all there is, and all I am. As a servant of hell, what I want doesn't matter."

"What if you were wrong?"

The demon stopped raking. It looked at her for a moment, then shrugged and went back to raking. "I see. You've come to torment me. That's a little unfair," he said. "Those graves attest to how attentive I am to my duties."

"It was a simple question."

"Simple?" the demon bared its tusks. "If I tortured Azuki-chan and there was any other option then it was for nothing. How shall I dance around the thought that what I did was wrong, that I picked up her broken body from under that same tree so many times for no reason? That I did what I did --" He stopped. "Please go away," he said.

"Why her?"

"It doesn't matter. I told you that."

"If it doesn't matter, then you can answer my question as well as not. Tell me what I want to know, and I'll go away."

"Demons lie. I know."

"That doesn't mean I'm lying now and that doesn't mean you'll lie to me."

The demon stood on the edge of its garden and leaned on its rake, examining its handiwork. "Because she asked me to," he said. Jin didn't say anything and after a little while it went on. "Frankly I expected you to challenge me on that, but it's true. I don't understand it, myself. When she came here she wasn't like the others. They are all angry, almost as fierce as demons themselves. Not Azuki-chan. You saw. It was no different
then
than from her first time. I remember. I had just struck her particularly hard and she looked at me. She just said. 'I want you to be my teacher.'"

"Teacher? Did you know what that meant?"

"No, and I still do not. I don't even know why I agreed, but from then on I was the one who drove her up this killing tree in our own corner of hell. I had to. And to answer your previous question truthfully: Yes. I-I enjoyed it."

Jin shrugged. "You didn't look like you were enjoying it today. Oh, I admit you were unflinching, but that's not the same thing."

"At the time," the demon said, "all I could think was that I had my very own poor fool to torment. I didn't have to share her with any of the other demons. I practiced with my whip until I could strike her body any place I wanted. Sometimes I killed her quickly, using the whip as much as the tree. Sometimes I killed her slowly, let the tree do its work. Sometimes both equally. I was a master at torturing Azuki-chan."

"What did she do through all this?"

"The same as now. Bore it all and came back to me for more. Never afraid, never angry. In pain, yes. Sometimes she would cry out. Then she would apologize." The demon shook its head. "Can you imagine? Apologizing to a demon?"

Jin took a long slow breath. "When did it change for you?"

"I don't understand."

"Yes you do. When did you get tired of being angry and cruel?"

"I never -- "

"When did you become tired of being a demon?"

"One cannot tire of one's fundamental nature! It's ridiculous!"

"Unlike, say, a demon tending a garden in hell?"

Jin wasn't entirely sure where her words were coming from, but she'd learned to follow her instincts in these matters. She knew what she said was true, but she also knew that, so far, it was not enough. What was she missing? After a moment that understanding came to her, too.

The demon shrugged. "This is a diversion, nothing more, as I await Azuki-chan's return. I'll destroy it if you like."

"You'll just rebuild it again. You are a demon in hell and yet you insist that this one little patch of sand be something more than hell. How many times have you tried to destroy it before today, only to make it anew?"

The demon was so startled it nearly dropped its rake. "How...how did you know that? Who are you?"

"Let me borrow your rake for a moment, and I'll tell you."

The demon frowned, but held the rake out to Jin, who rose from her stone seat and walked down the slope to grasp it. She wasn't looking forward to what she was about to do, but so far she had not learned what she needed to learn, and there was only one way she knew to do it. Jin reached out for the rake, and deliberately brushed the demon's hand.

The knowledge was there, and it was even worse than Jin expected. For that moment she was the demon, a true demon, and carried a thousand years of memories of
being
a demon. The things it had done, and what it had felt as it did them. Watching the sufferers die and now and then dying and being reborn itself once more as a demon in this one hell.

"I'm called Palun Gong," Jin said. She made a show of studying the crude rake, but she did not give it back.

The demon frowned. "I have heard this name, I know, but I can't think where. Why did you want to see my rake?"

"I didn't. I wanted to see
you
a little more closely," Jin said, and she shuddered to think just how very close she had, in fact, been to the demon. But she had learned what she needed to know, including the demon's name.

"Are you done with your questions then, Palun Gong? If so, please return my rake. Azuki-chan will be returning soon and I have work to do."

"I only have one more: when did Azuki-chan start torturing
you
?"

"Nonsense! You saw what I did to her! That's -- "

"The truth, Gnasher. You hate what you do to her. You hate what you are. No matter what you do to that poor child she does a thousand times worse to you every time you lift that whip."

"Please go away, Palun Gong. Leave me..."

"To suffer in peace? Was that what you were going to say? See how well Azuki-chan taught you."

"I am a demon! What else is there for me?"

"The same as for anyone else, Gnasher -- Everything."

Jin lifted the rake in her demon's hands and she shattered it. Gnasher screamed in anguish. "My garden...!"

"Doesn't belong here," Jin said firmly. "And neither do you."

There is a certain stubbornness in the mind of a demon that resists reordering, so it took a moment or two for understanding to dawn, but when it did it arrived like a clap of thunder. Gnasher stopped being a demon. He wasn't exactly human, either, but he had changed. Jin dropped the remnants of the rake down the slope onto Gnasher's garden.

"I think I know you now, no matter what you call yourself. Yet what about Azuki-chan?" Gnasher asked. "Who will perform the duties of hell for her now?"

"She'll be fine, I promise. You have a long journey ahead of you, but say hello to Madame Meng for me, will you?"

Another few moments and Gnasher was gone. Jin went back to her rock to wait. She noted with mild interest when a shadow detached itself from the rake from and flowed across the sand, barely visible as a darker patch of blackness as it slipped into the crevices of the mountain.

Shiro
.

Jin was not particularly surprised at his appearance there; there had been something familiar about the touch of the rake. Not intense, not vivid nor full of images as her contact with Gnasher had been, or even as much as her first contact with Shiro, but very familiar for all that. Faint, by comparison, and easy to overlook in the rush of
knowledge
she had gained from Gnasher, but Jin did not overlook it. She knew Shiro had given both Frank and Ling the slip, nor in turn was she surprised that he didn't hang around; Jin had already established that her demon form gave him the screaming willies, and after her conversations with Frank and Ling, Jin even had a pretty good idea as to why that was.

Still, it occurred to Jin that perhaps she had been wrong about what she had seen back on that very first day. Was Shiro helping to trap Rebecca in that corridor, or was he just there because he knew that, sooner or later, Jin would be too? After all, Gnasher hadn't needed any help from Shiro or anyone else to trap himself in hell -- he was a demon and by definition that's where he belonged. The difficult bit was for Gnasher to learn that he didn't have to be trapped, or belong. Shiro hadn't changed any of that, nor really interfered so far as Jin could tell; he was just there....

Oh
.

It occurred to Jin that maybe, just maybe, she knew what that meant. The differences in this rescue pointed to something about Shiro that perhaps she had misunderstood before now. She wasn't sure this knowledge changed anything, but it was something she needed to think about later. For now, she had other fish to gut.

Jin didn't have to wait very long. The reborn Azuki-chan soon came wandering out of the plains of hell. When she saw Jin sitting there in her demon form she stopped, looking confused. "Who are you? Where is Gnasher?"

"Gone. Promoted, moved on, not-quite-but-more-so-enlightened, whatever you want to call it. You can drop the act now."

Azuki-chan started to glow. She never changed into anything else, but her clothes changed from rags to flowing white robes. "Well. Took you long enough," the girl said.

With her face no longer smeared with blood and ashes, Jin finally got her first good look at Azuki-chan. Jin nearly fell off her stone.

"You're me!" she said. "Well, at least you look like I did, when I was about ten years old. Why do you look like that?"

Azuki-chan hid a smile. "You knew what I was and you don't know that? Maybe you're not as wise as people say."

Jin just stared for another few moments, trying to reconcile what she saw with what she understood, and after all the possibilities where considered and discarded, she was left with only one.

"You don't look like me. You
are
me."

"In a sense. I'm another incarnation of Guan Yin. Brought here ages ago for the purpose of Gnasher's salvation."

"What do you mean, 'another incarnation'? How many times has Guan Yin reincarnated? How bloody many of us are out here?"

Azuki-chan frowned. "I didn't say 'reincarnation.' I said 'incarnation.' Guan Yin wasn't physically reborn as me. I'm simply an aspect of her, given physical form for a purpose, as you are."

"'Aspect'?" Jin dropped her demon form, just for an instant, then resumed it. "Guess again," she said.