The Iron Khan (2 page)

But things were changing, as the presence of the quiet, pale warrior by Chen’s side attested to. Miss Qi looked up at the rose and turquoise of the evening sky and smiled.

“It’s quite lovely sometimes, this human realm,” she said.

Chen returned the smile. “It’s not as beautiful as Heaven, I’m afraid.”

“Heaven can get a bit…cloying,” Miss Qi said, frowning as though she’d said something disloyal. “I never thought so until I lived here, and then I started looking at Heaven with a different eye. I suppose that’s what travel does.”

“There’s a Western saying I heard in a movie once,” Chen told her. “ ‘You can’t go home again.’ ”

“Well, you can go home,” Miss Qi said, “it just won’t be the same.”

Perhaps she was right, Chen thought as they crossed the makeshift bridge of other people’s sampans to one of the little rowing boats that was used whenever the houseboat was moored further out in the harbor. Miss Qi took one oar, Chen the other, and they rowed the short distance to the houseboat. But it was certainly good to be coming home this evening, seeing the old-fashioned lamp that swung from the prow of the houseboat and the lights in the kitchen. A familiar striped shape was waiting at the top of the rope ladder.

“Hello, badger,” Chen said. The badger grunted, bowing his head to Miss Qi. She’d learned not to try to pat him. Badger had been uncharacteristically patient.

“Good evening, spirit of earth,” Miss Qi said. Badger preferred formality.

“Good evening, warrior of Heaven. Mistress will be pleased that you’ve come.” The badger trundled inside.

“You must be one of the only people I’ve ever met who has a badger for a butler,” Miss Qi remarked.

Chen laughed. “He’s a little more than that.” They followed the earth spirit inside, to where Inari was bending over a steamer on the stove. Looking at her, one would never have known she was pregnant. Chen had not known what to expect of a demon gestation, and Inari had not reassured him by saying vaguely that it took all manner of forms. Much more helpful had been the explanation given by the midwife. They’d been very lucky in finding Mrs Wo: demon health professionals weren’t common in Singapore Three, even under the new and more relaxed immigration policies. Half of Heaven seemed to have decamped to the city after Mhara had insisted that his personnel take a greater role in human affairs, and all of them seemed to want to be healers. Well and good, thought Chen, but they’d all balked at treating a demon, even one who was a personal friend of the Emperor himself. It wasn’t a political issue, they’d taken pains to explain: it was simply that they lacked the relevant obstetrical knowledge.

Then, one evening, he’d come out of the police station to find a hunched figure sitting on a bench in the shadows, veiled by an enormous hat. Chen had thought there was something odd about her at the time, and moments later, when he felt a tug on his sleeve and looked down into little green eyes, like chips of jade, set in a coal-black face, he realized that beneath the hat was a demon.

“Sorry to trouble you,” the demon had said, gripping the handle of her capacious handbag, “but this might be of interest.”

She proffered a large, ornate business card, on which the words Mrs Wo, Midwife were written in gold.

“I have references,” Mrs Wo said. “I know you’ll be wary of trusting a demon. But you’ll need someone, at least, when the time comes.”

Inari, when asked, had requested a meeting and she had, rather unexpectedly, taken a liking to Mrs Wo. Chen checked out the references with all the capability of a police department that deals extensively with Hell, and they were excellent. So Mrs Wo had been hired as a midwife to the Chen’s forthcoming child and, thus far, had proved invaluable.

Now, Inari straightened up from the stove and smiled at Chen and Miss Qi.

“It’s good to see you,” she said to the Celestial warrior.

“Thank you,” Miss Qi said, gravely, and Chen watched with a quiet satisfaction as his wife served tea to their friend.

Vrumchi was not an unpleasant city, Zhu Irzh thought as he stood on the hotel balcony. There was a park, situated on a greenly wooded hill, with a pagoda rising from it. Streams of morning traffic wound around the base of the hotel, some twenty floors below: the sound of distant horns floated up through the hazy air as impatient drivers utilized what Zhu Irzh had heard referred to as the “sixth gear.” Beyond the road, a jumble of restaurants and shops led to a bridge, and beyond all that, lay the endless dusty expanse of the steppes, and Central Asia.

Zhu Irzh had never been so far west before, and somehow he’d expected it to be much more primitive than this thriving metropolis. But this part of the country had proved interesting. They had already been to an official dinner at a restaurant in the mountains, which rose up at the back of Urumchi in a massive, white-capped wall.

And Hell was a little different here, too. He could feel it. It had appeared to him in dreams — a liminal space, the gap between the Chinese and the Islamic Hells, and the hint of something much older yet. These were not Han lands: the people here were Uighur, Turkish, as well as Chinese. They looked different. Their food was different. And their beliefs were different. It made Zhu Irzh feel slightly disoriented, as though the ground was literally changing beneath his feet. He’d not had cause yet to discuss this with Jhai, but he planned to. In the meantime, she was busy, here to discuss the construction of a new chemical plant out on the barren steppe. She was in a business meeting right now, leaving Zhu Irzh to enjoy the hotel. With that in mind, the demon realized it was now eleven o’clock, almost time for the bar to open. He slipped on a pair of sunglasses, to hide his eyes, and wandered downstairs. They’d know he wasn’t local, but hopefully they wouldn’t realize quite how local he wasn’t.

The main lobby was occupied by a wedding. The bride, in full Western bridal gear that made her look like a gigantic cake, was nearly six feet tall. Behind her veil, the eyes that glided incuriously over Zhu Irzh were a bright green. Not at all Chinese, Zhu Irzh felt, with a pleasant frisson of being abroad. He headed into the plush red velvet opulence of the bar and ordered a local beer.

Not bad. Looking at the range of wines featured above the bar made the demon feel provincial: he hadn’t realized quite how many vintages the Gobi and its environs produced. There had always been attempts throughout China’s long history, to encourage settlement out here. But no one wanted to leave the comforts of the east for this difficult and still dangerous land, a place where sandstorms scoured the desert and the land stretched red and black for miles. Not unlike Hell, really, but without the crowds. Reflecting on similarities, Zhu Irzh sipped his beer and watched the wedding party proceed into the dining area. Oh god. That was another thing to think about — his own wedding. Jhai had set the date for the following summer. It was to be a big affair, befitting the marriage of the stepson of the Emperor of Hell (China) and a scion of the royal family of Hell (India), not to mention Jhai’s role as a leading industrialist.

Their mothers had been in close correspondence. That in itself was enough to strike fear into a demon’s heart. Mind you, Zhu Irzh thought, at the rate at which they had both been casting out family members, give it another few months and there wouldn’t be anyone left to invite.

And there was his own bride-to-be now, striding in through the swing doors of the lobby. With a crimson sari billowing out behind her and her out-size designer sunglasses, Jhai looked like an exotic and venomous moth. Zhu Irzh raised a hand.

“Hello, darling!” Jhai slid onto the barstool beside him.

“How was your meeting?”

“They were all imbeciles, quite frankly, but anxious to please. I think we’ve got a few things resolved. We’re supposed to be going out this afternoon to look at the site — you can come with us if you want. I’ll have to change my clothes first.”

“Why not?” the demon mused aloud. “Might be interesting to see a bit of the actual desert now we’re here.”

“It’ll be the middle of nowhere,” Jhai warned. “Like Lop Nur. You don’t want to put a chemical plant anywhere that matters.”

“What’s that — Lop Nur?”

“One of the country’s big nuclear plants. Remember the one in Hell? It’s like that. They were doing atmospheric testing until recently. So I don’t think a few chemicals are likely to make much difference.”

One thing you couldn’t accuse Jhai of being was ecologically sensitive. Zhu Irzh once more felt that faint, strange tremor of unease that he’d learned to identify as his conscience. After seeing what had become of Hell’s main nuclear plant, he wasn’t so sure that siting a chemical factory in even such a remote place was a good idea. But for the sake of peace, he said, “Probably not. Want a drink?”

Jhai accepted a mineral water. “What’s going on in there?” she asked, gesturing in the direction of the dining room.

“Wedding reception.”

“It’s very loud for a lunchtime reception, isn’t it?”

Jhai was right. Zhu Irzh hadn’t really been paying attention and had initially taken the noise for the congratulatory shouts of happy revelers. But what he was now hearing were screams.

He ran for the dining room, dimly aware that beside him, Jhai had gathered up the skirts of her sari and was sprinting along. The bar staff were similarly responsive, but the demon was first through the door.

The dining room was in chaos. Overturned tables and chairs littered the floor, along with canapés and glasses. One of the ushers slipped on a pool of spilled champagne and fell flat; Zhu Irzh had to swerve to avoid falling over him. Someone, possibly the bride’s mother, was emitting a series of ear-splitting shrieks. Then somebody stumbled onto the dance floor, leaving the way clear and revealing the source of the commotion.

At first, Zhu Irzh thought that some hippy had wandered in off the street. The figure was tall, with a streaming mane of red hair and bright blue eyes. His torso was bare and covered in a swirl of tattoos, and he wore a pair of baggy tartan trousers. At first glance, he looked like some of the Western backpackers that thronged the streets of Singapore Three in the summer, but they were, on the whole, alive.

This man wasn’t.

He was heading for the bride. Unlike some of the reanimated dead that Zhu Irzh had previously encountered, this one neither lurched nor hopped. He moved with a sinister fluidity, much faster than a human, if not as swift as demonkind. He carried a curious weapon, a long staff with a bulbous head, like a truncated spear. The bride stood stock-still, her mouth gaping, as if paralyzed. The man swung the staff up and over his head, twirling it like the cheerleaders Zhu Irzh had seen in American films. But before he had time to strike down the bride, the demon was striding forward, ducking under the spinning staff and slamming a hand into the center of the zombie’s bare chest. Cool and hard, more like stone than flesh. Contact had to be made for Zhu Irzh to speak the necessary spell, a basic piece of magic for one born in Hell, designed for the inconvenient human dead. He’d never tried it on Earth, and had a moment of doubt, for magic differed between the worlds and Chen had sometimes experienced reversals in his own spellcraft when visiting Hell. But luck, or locality, was with the demon. He felt, rather than saw, the zombie slacken and crumple, then watched as the unnatural spark in those blue eyes faded to a pinpoint star and was gone. But at the moment of its departure, just before the connection between them snapped, the demon saw the zombie’s last thoughts.

Desert. High and arid, a long ridge of sandstone, red in the last light of the setting sun. Below, the village huddled around its wells, the meager foliage still green in the early summer heat. Soon the ground would bake, hot enough to fry an egg, and the wicked sand would spin up from the deep desert, whipped on by devils riding skeleton ponies.

They’d had a message from the west, from long-lost kin: a spoken tale of somewhere gray and mist-ridden, sea crashing into thunder on the rocks. The blue-eyed man had never seen the sea, had ventured once to a lake in the mountains and thought it must be the same. Join us, the message had said. Whatever the reason for the separation, it is your ancestors’ wrong, not yours. And the blue-eyed man looked out across dryness, to where the small people were waiting and hating, and wondered if they should leave.

•

After that, there was nothing, only a terrified blur of wind and sand and choking death. The blue-eyed man fell at Zhu Irzh’s feet, stiff in desiccated atrophy.

On the slab in the local Urumchi morgue, the man had clearly been dead for centuries. Zhu Irzh stood looking down at him in wonder.

“We’re considering it as theft, rather than a murder attempt,” Inspector Turgun said, mildly. Tall and thick-set where Chen was short and round, Turgun nonetheless reminded the demon of his absent colleague. He was visibly Uighur rather than Han: a leathery face, with slanted, opaque eyes and a small, thin nose like a beak.

“Theft?” Jhai echoed, frowning.

“This gentleman is actually the property of the local museum,” Turgun said. “A very famous exhibit. I remember being taken to see him and the others when I was a child.”