Shadow Pavilion (28 page)

59

H
eaven was tearing down all around, shreds and tatters of beauty streaming away in the winds between the worlds, and Seijin could sense it now, the chilly nearness of home. A golden banner whipped by, followed by a young woman. She was dressed in white, her feet tightly bound, and she was smiling beneath her glossily lacquered helmet of hair. Her palms were together, as if praying. She smiled, bowed, and was whirled up into the rising storm.

Seijin now stood on a little bridge, looking down into chaos. The Emperor was behind this: Mhara's presence—calm, implacable,
working
—was very clear: Seijin could taste his spells on the wind and they were strong and sweet. They burst into ashes in the assassin's mouth, like the taste of failure. Once more Seijin howled, any semblance of control gone, as the Emperor dismantled Heaven all around and sent Seijin spinning down.

Chen and the badger were following Inari as quickly as they could, running down their own stretched lifelines back to
between
. The Shadow Pavilion called Inari like the tolling of a great bell: she could hear it ringing across the worlds and pursuing it was easy, she simply let it reel her in. She could not feel Seijin at all and that frightened her, that the assassin had already met an end and it only needed to catch up with her.

“Inari, wait!” Chen shouted once, racing through the ravaged chambers of the Dowager Empress toward the portal.

“I can't!” she cried back, anguished, a fish on the taut and snapping line of
between
. Something old and cold and heavy caught at her flying feet and weighed her down, but only a little; after a moment, she recognized its nature and its source: an earth spell, cast by the badger. It touched her to the core. It also allowed Chen and her familiar to catch up, so that they tumbled through the portal together and left Heaven.

Abyss. The Sea of Night, gleaming dark below. Back across the Three Realms, Heaven on the right, the bright and distant shore, Hell's smoky cliffs looming far away to the left and beneath it all, the endless stars. Inari glimpsed Earth, cried out once more for her home, her body, the smell of salt and tea in the morning, a spray of jasmine, everything she might never know again.
Hold on,
she told herself.
Hold on. Chen and the badger are depending on you.
That thought steadied her, as she had known it would. She turned her face from Earth and flew, hurtling over the Sea of Night and the boat containing the woman who still sat and rocked and schemed and would never, Inari somehow understood, come to terms with changed circumstance. The boat was a single drop of bitterness, in all that bitter ocean, teaching Inari how not to be. And then
between,
glimpsed swiftly under its green and twilight sky, with the impossible edifice of the Shadow Pavilion roaring up to meet her. She shot through into a circle, red heat discharging around them, diving through flame, with Chen and the badger hitting the floor, rather harder, on her spectral heels.

Chen cried out as the flame touched him and the sound tore at Inari, literally dispersing her to the four corners of the dusty ceiling. This frightened her beyond anything that Seijin had done, but again, that touch of chilly earth magic brought her back together again, badger weaving old deep spells, knitting fragments of ghost.

They were not alone in the room. The Gatekeeper was there, wringing ethereal hands.

“The Lord Lady is coming! You must go!”

“No,” Chen and Inari said, together. “We're staying.”

Between
was breaking down. Seijin could tell this easily, flying in. To someone unused to the bleak expanse, it might have appeared unchanged, but Seijin knew the location of each rock, each crag, and it was plain that the landscape was thinning, becoming more diffuse.

Surprising, the extent to which male and female self had held things together, the glue of a personality, and a land. But Seijin was beyond mourning. Matters had been allowed to progress too far; it was time to regroup, redress a balance. But looking down, Seijin noticed a transparency in one hand, the rocks glimpsed through it.
Not too late,
Seijin whispered
.
Not too late.

The Shadow Pavilion was looming ahead, with the red circle of Seijin's own magic burning in the upper chamber. Seijin soared in through gathering twilight, noting the emptiness of the landscape beneath: normally, at this hour, the creeping predators of the shadows would have been prowling around the pagoda. But now, the doors stood firmly shut and the Pavilion appeared closed in upon itself, a shuttered eye.

The circle was waiting, welcoming, drawing in, and Seijin fell, rather than stepped, through it.

And was not alone.

Chen had begun the incantation some minutes before, with Inari hovering in the corner of the ceiling and the badger at his heels. He hoped, Inari knew, to blast Seijin out of the circle, sending the assassin to the limbo between all worlds, including that of the lands of the Shadow Pavilion itself. Seijin would not live, would not die, would hold those who depended so reluctantly upon the Lord Lady in balance. It was tenuous and Inari did not like it, as no more did Chen, but they had little choice.

The incantation tore at Inari, caused the room to rock. She could hear the badger's dark voice beneath Chen's murmured words, weaving earth spells into the conjuring. Power rose, ripping upward through the Shadow Pavilion, drawn by some undreamed-of well in the foundations of
between
. With her ghost's sight, she could see its outline all around Chen, a bright blackness, flecked with gold, growing until Chen had almost disappeared. Soon, all that Inari could see of her husband was a silhouette against a background of power, one hand upraised.

But Seijin was on home ground. The Lord Lady came through the circle and slammed Chen against the wall. The Pavilion shuddered, earthquake on the way. The power that Chen had raised spilled out across the floor, a palpable tide as though a sea wall had been breached and let in the flood. Inari, huddling against the ceiling, saw Seijin give a great raw grin, as primal as an ape. But breaking Chen's power took its own toll. The Shadow Pavilion creaked like a tree in a storm, then groaned with the sound of rending timber, then split in half.

Inari once more found herself outside the Pavilion. The green sky was racing with gathering cloud, and far away on the horizon she saw a lightning bolt bridge cloud and earth. The mists that had so characterized
between
had been blown away: everything was sharp, clear, translucent, breaking. Looking back, the struggling Inari saw that the Pavilion had split in half from summit to foundation. A chasm of some ten feet separated Seijin and Chen.

Chen threw a spell across the gap, but the Lord Lady took a dancing step out of the way and the spell splattered against the wall. He could not win, Inari thought in despair. Seijin, the killer of thousands, had experienced several hundred years of additional practice. The Pavilion creaked again, alarmingly, and the gap widened. Inari was staring straight down the chasm and saw now that it went far beyond the foundations of the actual pagoda. She could see Earth—no, she could see her own body, lying calm and peaceful in Mhara's temple in Singapore Three.

Her lips, blue in a pale face, moved. Her body said to her:
Restore the land
.

“What?” Inari said. It was as though she was at the same moment very close to her body, and very distant from it. Close to it, she could see two faint red threads: the lifelines of Chen and the badger.

“Restore the land!” her body said again, impatient, and when Inari continued to stare blankly at it, her lips moved again with a single name. She could see the words now, a crimson slash of characters. They floated up through the rift between the worlds until the name was hanging in front of her in the storm-driven air.

Inari read it out loud:
Sei Lan
.

At the moment she spoke the name aloud, everything changed. The Shadow Pavilion, the shifting landscape of
between,
Chen and the badger, everything was gone. Inari stood on a slight rise of ground near a river. It was early evening, summer, a light breeze rippling the endless grasslands like a sea. The air smelled sweet, perfumed by a thousand flowers, and a very faint odor of woodsmoke. Looking to her left, Inari saw a distant congregation of round white tents, springing mushroom-like from the surface of the steppe. Tall poles with horsehair banners stood around the yurts, somehow alive and filled with presence. Horses grazed and she heard a voice raised in song.

Then this, too, disappeared, and there was only the grass, and the sky, and Inari.

And Seijin.

The Lord Lady was as Inari had first known the being. Seijin stood in the long grass, wearing a gray robe. The black hair was tied, so that it resembled one of the horsetails.

“Sei Lan” Inari said.

The assassin bowed. “Not yet.”

A woman stepped out of Seijin's form to stand beside him: female self, no more than a whisper on the air. Male self soon followed.

“Sei Lan?”

“I am Sei Lan,” the child said. Unlike male or female self, the child was quite distinct, solid. Impossible to say whether it was a girl or a boy; it had Seijin's grave face and graver gaze. The child said, “This will not do, O my father/mother.”

“Where were you?” Seijin asked, in a whisper, and the child said, “Swallowed in the blood you shed.”

“I shed that blood to protect you!” Seijin cried.

“Perhaps at first. But then? I am weighed down beneath the stones of their souls; you must set us free. You must set us all free.”

“No,” Seijin protested.

Inari felt a curious snap, as though something in the world had broken or, conversely, had been locked together. She looked down at herself. She was no longer a ghost. She had flesh, and it was demon-cool, pulsing with life. But something had joined her, something very basic, that had no voice—a spirit?
I am possessed,
Inari thought in alarm, but the thing did not feel like an alien entity either.

The child—Seijin's oldest self, Sei Lan—turned to her.

“Will you?” the child asked, strangely timid, and all at once Inari knew what it was talking about. She hesitated, remembering the story of the Lord Lady's origins.

Born of a demon father and a human mother.

Born on Earth, the exile of both.

Born to become a killer of gods and demons and men.

Can one really change the destiny of a soul? Make something good, from base clay? Well,
Inari thought,
I can try.

“Yes—” and immediately the child was gone. Across the grassland, the assassin was beginning to collapse, flesh withering, skin sagging.

“Save me!” Seijin whispered, and reached out a hand.

“But I just did,” Inari told it, and watched as the Lord Lady sank down into the grass, watched until there was nothing more than a bloody stain on the black soil of the steppe, watched until that, too, was gone.

60

I
nside the shrubbery, it was quiet, but the eerie scarlet-and-white light still played all around Go and the deva, emanating from the myriad blossoms. There was a pungent smell, close to narcotic, and for a moment the panicking Go entertained the possibility of just giving into it, lying down and going to sleep. At least you wouldn't see the jaws closing down. But a heavy body was crashing through the undergrowth behind them and the deva seemed to have forgotten about her injury, or perhaps she was swift to heal. She was sprinting ahead, dodging around the arches of the ornamental plants with a speed presumably born of a life in the forest. Go dropped the chain, which was becoming infeasibly weighty, swore, gathered it up again before the deva yanked him off his feet, and followed her.

He hoped she knew where she was going—her velocity suggested that she did—but then the deva took a wrong turn. They sped out into a long avenue of rhododendron, densely planted, the glossy, illuminated leaves forming a screen in front of a thickly twisting maze of branches. At both ends rose a high wall of shrubbery, quite impenetrable. The deva and Go looked frantically from right to left, mirroring one another's movements. Behind them, Go once more heard the sound of Agni's guests, cheering, and a very familiar roar. In desperation, they ran up the avenue toward the wall and flung themselves against it. The rhododendrons did not give way. Go beat at them with the chain, whipping it against the branches, but to no avail. The deva cried out. Go turned. A tigress had come out of the gap in the hedge, lazily switching her tail from side to side. She looked pointedly in the wrong direction, as if in mockery, and then saw them. She began to lope rapidly up the avenue.

“Get behind me,” Go urged, though he knew he was only delaying the deva's own bloody reckoning.

“No,” the deva quavered. She took hold of the other end of the chain and with one accord, they began to swing it. There might be a chance—but the tigress was running now, a streak of black and gold, leaving fire smoldering in her wake. As she leaped, Go and the deva swung the chain, but the tigress saw it and swerved. She snatched at the chain with a massive paw and it caught in the razor claws, dragging Go and the deva off their feet. They hit the short grass like bowling pins, tangled up in the chain and ripe for the catching. The tigress swatted Go with her paw, a cat's playful pounce. The blow hit him in the ribs and it felt as though something snapped. The tigress then lifted him off the ground, hauling the entangled deva with him. Go had once heard that being attacked by a wild animal produced a euphoric sensation of calm, that Zen moment before a bloody, rending death. There was no such sensation here. Go's body let go: he tried to piss himself, but it was as though his system had shut down. He hit the rhododendron hedge full on and slid back to the floor. The tigress was pacing, a gleam of interest in her yellow eyes. Go wondered, frantically, where the others were and then he realized: they hadn't bothered. It wouldn't take more than a minute to finish either himself or the deva off. Agni's harem had sent a single cat, for the fun of the chase and the death for the prince's guests. The tigress leaped. Go threw an arm in front of his face: he didn't want to see what was coming.

Then the tigress disappeared.

“Got her?” Zhu Irzh panted, from the other side of the rhododendron hedge.

“I think so.” No Ro Shi was frowning. A short distance away, the tiger revolved, snarling soundlessly, in midair. No Ro Shi's outflung hand betrayed the passage of a recent spell. The demon watched with interest.

“How long do you think you'll be able to hold her?”

“I don't intend to hold her for long.” No Ro Shi's voice demonstrated effort. He drew his hand back, bringing the captured tiger with it, and snapped his fingers shut. The tigress dropped to the ground and bounded up with a roar.

No Ro Shi spoke quick cold words. He flung out a spell that brushed Zhu Irzh's face as it passed and left a film of ice across the demon's skin. Zhu Irzh was too intrigued to protest. He watched as a swift ripple of magic passed over the tiger's leaping form. A moment later, all the black and gold was gone and in their place was the statue of a springing tiger. It looked to Zhu Irzh as though it had been there for years; encrusted with lichen and moss, the stone eroded by rain.

“Artistic,” he commented. No Ro Shi appeared pleased.

“This realm would seem to be particularly amenable to statue magic.”

“Makes sense,” Zhu Irzh agreed, thinking of what had befallen the deva. “Let's see how much more trouble we can cause.”

“Help!”

“That's Go,” the demon said. He took out a section of shrubbery with a sweep of his sword. No Ro Shi hacked through as well and a few minutes later, Go and the deva were stumbling through the gap.

“Hang on,” Zhu Irzh told them, and brought the sword down onto the chain that connected them. The deva looked as though she was about to burst into tears and threw herself into Zhu Irzh's arms.

Go, very pale, said, “I thought we'd had it.”

“Get moving,” No Ro Shi told him, and they ran for the forest, Zhu Irzh disentangling himself from the deva en route.

“Where's Jhai?”
he hissed at Go.

Go looked nonplussed. “I don't know. I haven't seen her. I've only just—well, arrived here, you might say.”

“And will soon be leaving,” the demon-hunter told him.

“Hell, suits me. She's coming too.”

Zhu Irzh caught No Ro Shi's sleeve. “Get them back home. I'm going after Jhai.”

No Ro Shi looked positively disappointed at being denied a further chance to slay things, or enspell them. “Are you sure? Won't you need back-up?”

“Believe me,” Zhu Irzh said. “Jhai
is
back-up, all on her own.”

Back at the edge of the lawns, the Hunting Lodge was in an uproar. Zhu Irzh crept rapidly back the way he had come, sneaking along the rhododendron hedge until he came to the place where the statue had been created. Then he ducked down behind the undergrowth.

Agni's guests, and the rest of the tiger clan, had streamed down from the terraces and made their way along the lawn to where the new statue stood. Zhu Irzh recognized quite a few faces from his last visit, but was not inclined to stroll forth and be sociable. He could not see Jhai anywhere and this gave him a moment of hope: if they'd left her up on the terrace
…
Zhu Irzh began to sidle along the hedge, away from the crowd. Agni was there, yes, in his fire-colored clothes. Zhu Irzh caught a glimpse of the tiger prince's eyes and wished he hadn't: Agni's gaze was a feral gold shot with red, like blood over the sun, both angry and mad.
Well,
Zhu Irzh thought to himself,
if I have to take you on, I'll do it. I just hope I don't have to.
It wasn't that he was a coward, just—careful.

But if Jhai was not there, then neither was Lara, and that made Zhu Irzh's skin prickle. He tried to do a rapid inventory of exactly who had come down to see the statue, but it was impossible: there were just too many people milling about. He crept along the hedge until he thought he was reasonably clear, then sprinted up a second long avenue of azalea toward the Hunting Lodge.

There was no sign of Jhai on the terrace, which Zhu Irzh skirted with a great deal of caution. He was beginning to think he'd imagined her, yet he knew she had to be here. Then something caught his eye: a long red and gold thread, snagged on a rough piece of masonry. Zhu Irzh was pleased; it seemed this detective business had something to it after all. He left the thread where it lay and moved along the terrace, keeping to the shadows. Occasionally, he checked the lawn. They were still down there; he could hear the growls of the tiger girls and Agni's voice, raised to a pitch that Zhu Irzh had not previously encountered in the prince, but which betokened an incipient psychotic meltdown. He thought that Agni was probably in the process of discovering that No Ro Shi's spell was irreversible: the demon-hunter tended, necessarily, to be very thorough about these matters.

At the end of the terrace, one of the French doors that lay along the ground floor of the palace was open. Zhu Irzh, with a final glance at the congregation down on the lawns, slipped through. Inside, he found himself in a dining hall. Silver glittered in candlelight, though the candles burned with a steady red flame that was somehow cold to look at. An array of plates and cutlery suggested that whatever meal that was about to be served was not going to take the form of a light snack. Silver platters rested along the table at intervals, their domes rising from spiky flower arrangements like some miniature city. Checking that he was unobserved, Zhu Irzh lifted one of the platters and stared down at a human head. It was white, and male. Its blue boiled eyes bugged out, lending it an expression of puff-cheeked outrage. Half a mango had been stuffed into its mouth. As Zhu Irzh stared, intrigued, the eyes rolled up to meet his own.

“Mgmph!” the head said.

“Sorry,” Zhu Irzh told him. “Can't help you right now, old chap. Maybe later.” Hastily, he replaced the cover. He didn't want to be grassed up by someone's entrée, but it was too late now, assuming that the head had Agni's best interests at heart, which Zhu Irzh doubted. Cursing under his breath, he left the magnificent banquet table behind and ran through the columns that separated the dining room from a hallway.

Something glinted in the shadows. Zhu Irzh stooped and picked it up: Jhai was unraveling. The thread led him along the hallway and up a flight of stairs. Halfway up, Zhu Irzh heard footsteps coming down and dived behind a tapestry. He peered out, once the footsteps had passed, to see a turbaned servant disappearing down the staircase, carrying a tea service on a tray. Zhu Irzh followed the thread further and found that it ran under a door. He took a chance, and knocked.

“Yeah?”

Jhai, found!

“Agni, you twat, is that you?” Jhai's voice dripped contempt.

“No,” Zhu Irzh hissed, “it's me.”

“Zhu Irzh!” At least she sounded pleased to see him. “Get me the fuck out of here. Agni's warded the door.”

“All right, stand back. I'll see what I can do.”

He'd used opening spells before, in a variety of circumstances, but there was still the issue of how magic worked in this realm. The demon agreed with No Ro Shi: sometimes you just have to take a chance. Zhu Irzh was reluctant to use blood magic—too close to the sorceries of fire, in Agni's lands—so he deployed an incantation instead, one that had been devised for blasting through rock. Not subtle, but he had to work quickly.

The spell worked quite well. Three minutes later, Zhu Irzh was sitting in the middle of the shattered dining table, picking plaster out of his hair. Jhai lay spread-eagled across a dining chair, swearing. The severed heads, freed of their imprisoning platters and domes, bounded around the room like pinballs. Above, a gaping hole in the ceiling gave testimony to the success of Zhu Irzh's conjuration.

“Bloody hell,” Jhai said. “Agni won't be pleased.”

“I think we'd better go,” Zhu Irzh told her, clambering to his feet and brushing forks from his coat. The fallen candles had set fire to the white linen tablecloth and it blazed up in a sudden sheet of flame. Jhai took the demon's hand and they ran out of the French doors. As they did so, the long lace curtains that concealed the diners from view also caught fire, billowing out behind them. As they came out onto the terrace, a shout went up.

“There!”

The assembled crowd was running back up the lawn toward the Hunting Lodge, Agni at their head. Beside the demon, Jhai picked up the trailing skirts of her wedding dress and sprinted for the forest. Zhu Irzh caught a glimpse of Agni's raised hand and then a fireball shot across the lawn and sizzled into the mango trees.

“Shit!” Jhai reeled back against the demon.

“Just run. He's not trying to hit
you.”

Unfortunately, it seemed that Agni was. The next fireball knocked Zhu Irzh off his feet and sent him sprawling into a flower bed. He glanced toward the forest, saw that they were not going to make it, looked back at the Hunting Lodge and also saw—with some satisfaction—that it was well and truly on fire. Then Jhai cried out. Things were swarming out of the trees, blackened shapes that looked as though they had already been consumed in the flames, their eyes as bright as red-hot coals. Some were small, but most of them were the size of a man. They had long, delicate hands and sharp, black teeth. Two of them had seized Jhai by the arms and lifted her off her feet; Jhai was not a heavy girl, but she still had a demon's strength, as Zhu Irzh knew, and these creatures lifted her easily and held her despite her struggles.

“You,” said Agni, strolling up behind in dangerous silence, “have set my house on fire.”

“An accident.” It was ironic, the demon reflected bitterly, that the occasions when he actually spoke the literal truth were those in which he was the least likely to be believed.

“How does a life in the fire sound to you?” Agni still spoke mildly, but only a few minutes ago Zhu Irzh had heard him shrieking down on the lawn.

“A bit Catholic, actually.”

Agni smiled. “A lot of them come here. We have a Goanese population on Earth, after all.”

“Agni, listen.” That was Jhai, speaking quickly. “If you keep me here, this won't be an end to it. You think I'll just knuckle under? Yes, you can control my cousins. They've never known anything else, apart from Lara, and look what a mess she's made of her independence. But I've never known anything
but
. That's why you went after me, isn't it? But can you handle it?”

Zhu Irzh looked from Jhai to Agni, both in their red and gold. Agni's clothes were as impeccable as ever, but Jhai's glossy hair-do had come undone and streamed across her shoulders. The magnificent gown was torn at the hem, fraying into ruffles. She had lost her shoes, or kicked them off, and now stood barefoot on the scorched grass. Her face was flecked with soot.