Shadow Pavilion (5 page)

11

G
o and Beni stood at the center of the room, their hands linked by a long red sash. Around them burned candles, crimson and gold, sending tongues of tiger-colored flame up into the smoky air. Beni had thrown a handful of incense on the brazier and it smoldered, filling the room with a pungent, gingery scent.

“We're only going to get one shot at this,” Go warned his colleague. “We've got to get it right.”

Beni looked uneasy. “I still think she should actually
be
here.”

“Yeah, right. That's entirely realistic. Lara, darling, just come and participate in this ritual for us, would you? It'll send you back to Hell and your unloving family and seal you there forever.”

“I understand the reasons for it,” Beni remarked. “I just think it would stand a much better chance of working. Couldn't you have slipped her something?”

“Like what? I tried that once, when she was being particularly difficult—put enough valium in her tea to knock out an elephant and what happened? She stayed wide awake and chattering on. She's not human.”

“Couldn't you have asked a remedy man or something? An expert?”

“And tell him what? ‘My friend and I, we conjured up this tiger spirit from Hell in India, and now she's a famous movie star, but she's gone bonkers and we want to get rid of her.'”

“You don't have to tell them the truth,” Beni said, exasperated. “Make something up. It's what you do for a living, after all.”

“I don't want any openings for blackmail. You know what these people are like. Look, we don't have infinite amounts of time. Are you going to help me or not?”

Beni gave a sullen nod. “Yeah. I suppose.”

At the other end of the room, lit by a hundred candles, stood a shrine to Lara. Go had raided the archives for stills and these now adorned a wooden frame: Lara in black and white, posing like Ava Gardner; Lara in Bollywood Technicolor, a fuchsia sari whipping around her; several shots from a
Vogue
shoot and images from her latest movie. The only pictures that Go had failed to come up with had been images of her tiger-self. Lara was cagy about that, too aware of possible consequences, and although Go had surreptitiously tried, he'd never succeeded in capturing a picture of Lara in her true, or at least, non-human form.

“Okay,” Go said. “Here we go.”

Letting go of the sash for a moment, he cast a handful of banishing incense onto the brazier. It hissed ominously, smoke billowing out in an acrid cloud across the room and making Go's eyes water and sting.

“God, that stuff's strong,” Beni said, coughing. “What did you put in it?”

Go did not reply. He was trying to read the scroll that stood before him on a music stand. It was familiar: the same spell that they'd used to bring Lara here, but—a classic touch—in reverse. Nervously, he intoned it.

“Nothing's happening,” Beni said.

Go did not reply to this, either. He was not sure that Beni was right: perhaps more sensitive than the agent, or more paranoid, it seemed to him that they had suddenly attracted all sorts of attention to what was going on in the room. He had the sensation of a thousand eyes fixated upon him, a thousand ears listening, and he had no idea who they might have belonged to. He continued with the litany, which had to be recited three times, as the atmosphere in the chamber curdled and congealed like old milk.

“Oh my God,” Beni said suddenly.

Go had come to the end of the third recitation and he looked up. There was a mass of movement around the base of the shrine, spreading outward. At first, he thought they were dustballs, but then little red eyes opened and through the incense smoke he glimpsed the skittering ghosts of rats and mice, a thin, transparent snake winding its way through the floorboards. A shape—much larger—stepped out of the air, seemingly made of smoke. It was a child, hair streaming down her back, mouth open in horror, a blood-red necklace around her throat that gaped and spilled.

Go and Beni cried out, but she was gone, taking the vermin-spirits with her.

“What the hell—?” Go whispered.

Beni glanced feverishly about him. “It's the house, man. This is such an old place—must have been full of psychic crap. You just sent it onward.”

“No bloody Lara, though.” The realization of failure ran cold down his spine, despite the choking warmth of the room.

“Oh
yes,
bloody Lara,” a voice said. Go nearly dropped the sash. The child had not been the only thing emerging from the candlelit mouth of the shrine. At first, there was only an outline in the air: tall, slender, tail twitching.

“Shit,” he heard Beni's panicked murmur.

At the top of the outline appeared two furious yellow eyes. And then the teeth. A moment later, Lara herself was almost fully visible: naked, with the black slashes of her tiger-striped marking all the way down her body. Her face, however, had changed and instead of the beautiful human mask it was elongated, snarling, the jaw dropping impossibly far to show the razor teeth.

“What are you
doing?”
Lara said, in a voice that was more of a growl.

“Lara—look, babe. Things change.”

Beni, Go thought, don't make the mistake of trying to
reason
with her. She's way beyond that point. She's never been
at
that point. Even at her sweetest, logic had never been Lara's strongest feature.

“You know what I'm saying?”

“Beni—” Go said, in warning.
You're not firing a bloody grip or something.
But the warning went unheeded. The agent was too accustomed to talking his way out of a problem. “Things haven't been great for any of us lately—I know you're not
happy,
babe, and there was the whole pay dispute thing, which I fully concede was unfortunate, could have handled it a lot better, and—”

“So you're sending me back to Hell?” Lara said, in that voice that still was not human, at all, and filled with fire. “You brought me here, and now you can't handle it, you can't deal with me because I won't be your simpering demon bimbo, and you're trying to send me
back,
you pathetic little
shit.”

“Lara—” Go and Beni said together, but it was at Beni that she sprang. Go had a single, appalled image of Lara: her long legs bending backward at the knee, claws ripping on the polished wooden floor, her striped body arcing through the smoking air as she fell upon her agent and tore out his throat.

That was almost all he saw, because Go was off and running, knocking over the guttering candles in his flight for the door. He kicked the door open and fell out into the hallway. The clear, warm air came as a shock, as if he'd been punched. For a despairing moment, he thought Lara had struck him in the back.

Almost, but not quite all. Staggering against the opposite wall, he took one look back and saw, behind the curtain of sudden fire, Lara's head raised and fresh red blood running down her chin into the flames. The gold of the fire was trapped in her eyes and then she leaped upward. He heard the crash and shatter of broken glass as she sprang through the window and then Go himself was stumbling backward, bare feet slipping on the boards of the hallway, and he threw himself out of the front door and into the still and midnight garden as the house caught light and flared up like a firecracker.

12

I
t was a relief to reach the temple. Mhara stepped out of the oppressive air of Heaven into a calm, white-plastered room: the little annex that he and Robin used as a portal. Robin—priestess, ghost, but still scientist—had come up with a spell that keyed the annex to her own soul, and Mhara's: nothing that could be stolen or used, but enough to deter anyone following either of them through, either to Heaven, or from it. It was sad, Mhara thought, to have to be so untrusting, but it was the way of things and he supported Robin's installation of the spell. He could see it now, taking the form of a thin gilt lattice, suspended in the air before him. He reached out a hand and the lattice was gone.

“Robin?” There was a lamp burning somewhere in the temple; he could feel its tranquil small presence and that of another, far more complex, being. He followed the sense of those two presences until he came to the main room of the temple, the shrine that lay at the end of the simple living quarters, just inside the main door.

This, too, was plastered white, and the shrine itself bore no image, only a lamp and a niche for a candle. Robin knelt in front of it with her back to him, solid enough in this soft light, although sometimes her form flickered a little, as if seen through clear water.

“Hello,” Robin said, without looking round. “How did it go?”

Mhara sighed. “Tedious. I wish you could have been there.”

“Well, I could have,” she agreed. She had decided against attending the coronation.
I'm not one for big state occasions, and anyway, I don't want to cramp your style
. She'd felt it might be embarrassing for the new Emperor, having his dead human girlfriend showing up on the big day. “I'm sure your mother thought I'd have made a scene. Would you like some tea?” She motioned to a battered iron kettle that set on a table near the door. “I just made some oolong.”

Mhara laughed, but he did not feel able to contradict her. “Thanks, I will.” He went to the table and poured steaming green liquid into a bowl. “And Mother made a bit of a scene herself. Wanted me to wear the big state robes, and I thought—not my style. She's going to have to get used to that and she's going to have to get used to you, Robin. I've already explained to her that you're here to stay.”

“I thought,” Robin said, without turning her head, “that you might be up for some sort of political marriage.”

“Robin—this isn't the Heaven of thousands of years ago, not anymore.”

“Does Heaven know that?”

Mhara sipped tea. “I don't know. It will have to take it on board at some point. I'm up against a tradition like a juggernaut and I'm not going to be the one that gives in.”

“No,” Robin agreed. “I don't suppose you will.” For the first time, she turned her head and looked at him. Robin thought, Mhara knew, that she had a very ordinary face: typical of the region, rather thin, with straight black brows, a long mouth. Mhara did not agree; it was not that he considered her beautiful, as that he did not really care. In Heaven, one was surrounded by the exquisite, a continual parade of glorious beauty that, after a while, became rather boring. He found Robin's neither-plain-nor-pretty features restful, after all that extraordinariness. Moreover death, and a more settled situation, had smoothed out the habitual lines and frowns of worry that she had worn when Mhara first encountered her, down in the laboratories of Jhai Tserai's corporation, and had lent a serenity to her face that made it more restful yet. Mhara enjoyed looking at her and did so now.

“The question of a political marriage will come up,” Mhara said. “My mother will make sure of it—I'm certain she has half a dozen candidates in mind from various other Heavens. Angelic powers, devas, houris. It doesn't matter, Robin. Things have changed. Heaven is as subject to the march of time as anywhere else, we're a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century now, and I'm not subject to my mother's rule. This is a terrible thing to say but I don't even have much respect for her—she saw what my father was becoming and she didn't do anything to stop it.”

“Well, we'll just have to wait and see what happens,” Robin said. “It won't do much good for me to talk to your mother, but I suppose I can try if I have to.”

“There is,” Mhara remarked, “absolutely no point in winding her up.”

Robin patted him on the shoulder. “Sometimes, going out with you is really surprisingly normal. You don't even look very Emperor-esque, if that's any comfort.”

“Unfortunately, I am starting to feel some of its burdens.” Mhara put the tea bowl down. Talk of his coronation had just reminded him of something. “Have you heard from Chen or Inari lately?”

“I saw them at the weekend. They brought those—” Robin pointed toward a spray of elegant white orchids in a vase “—I forgot to tell you. Coronation present.”

“Was Inari's badger with them?”

Robin frowned, remembering. “I think so. Yes, it was. It went for a root in the flowerbed while we were having tea. I know it's sentient but I can't help thinking of it as a sort of dog. Or a teakettle, obviously.”

“But you haven't seen or spoken to them since then?”

“No. Why?”

“I think,” said Mhara, opening the door, “I'd better have a quick word with the detective inspector.”

It was, he discovered, a beautiful evening. For once, the air above the sprawl of Singapore Three was clear, fading down into an intensity of sunset green. There was a brief flash of gold from the horizon, along the line of the sea, and Mhara felt the benediction of the sun as it slipped out of sight. He had a sudden, dizzying vision of it as a distant star, the little zip and flicker of the world as it orbited. Then it was gone and the lights of the city lay before him, peaceful in this liminal time of twilight in spite of the faint roar of traffic.

The temple, until so recently no more than a ruined shell, stood on a slight rise in an outlying suburb, backed by the wall of hills that rose in the north of the city. The view was pleasant from here; there were trees, and occasionally a rainy breath of mountain air. This, more than Heaven, had become home. Mhara was pleased to be back.

There were several ways of contacting Chen, but when on Earth, the new Emperor preferred to work with traditional methods. He clicked open the shell of his cellphone and dialed Chen's number. No reply. Mhara tried the houseboat and got an answerphone message. Well, it was a pleasant evening, not late, and if he recalled correctly, it was a Friday. Maybe Chen and Inari had gone out, and he would not blame them if they had. He left messages on both phones, just in case. The image of a badger's paw, disappearing, was still fresh in his mind, and more than any of the multitudinous horrors of the world glimpsed during his coronation, it filled him with an unaccountable unease.