The Iron Khan (6 page)

Then the plane gently veered to the left, heading southwest over the desert, and the cockpit door slammed shut. The co-pilot gave a frown of irritation and reached for the handle. But the door did not open. The pilot himself had not yet noticed that anything was amiss as he continued chatting with the two dignitaries. The co-pilot bent over the door mechanism, gave it a surreptitious wrench. No one else, while reading their in-flight magazines or investigating the contents of their snack boxes, seemed to have realized that things were not well. Glancing out of the window, Zhu Irzh saw that the ground was rather closer than it had been. Far away to the left — but drawing rapidly closer — were a range of mountain peaks, impossibly high: Tibet, and the northernmost heights of the Himalayas.

By now the co-pilot had given up any attempt at subterfuge and was hammering at the door mechanism with his fist. Jhai looked up sharply from her laptop. Everyone else was now watching, too, and a mutter of consternation was spreading through the aircraft.

“What the hell?”

“He’s locked himself out,” Zhu Irzh said. “How good is this autopilot thing, anyway? Can it land the plane?”

“Yes, but only if they set it up first, and I doubt whether they’ve done that yet — we’re only halfway through the flight. But this shouldn’t be happening on autopilot regardless!”

“We’ll be at the end of it in a minute if he doesn’t get the door open,” Zhu Irzh said, rising from his seat.

The pilot proved a little more decisive, or reckless, than his deputy. Opening a cupboard on the wall, he wrenched out a small axe and began beating at the door.

“God!” Jhai said. “I don’t think that’s — ”

Tibet loomed prettily to the south, close enough to glimpse glaciers snaking their way down the mountain wall. A woman screamed and that started off others in the plane. Zhu Irzh was fighting his way past Jhai and another passenger who had made his way into the aisle.

“Stand back!” the demon ordered. He had a vague idea that magic wasn’t permitted on public aircraft, any more than weaponry, but he didn’t fancy a trip down to Hell quite so soon and neither, he could be fairly certain, would the majority of the passengers. The pilot, astonished, stepped quickly away and Zhu Irzh, raising a hand and murmuring a speedy invocation, sent a bolt of energy straight down the aisle. It hit the door square on and the door shattered. The pilot, recovering quickly, fought his way through the splinters into the cockpit and a moment later the plane, which had been turning disastrously toward the nearest glacier, righted itself. Zhu Irzh sank back into his seat and watched as Tibet mercifully receded. There was a scattering of grateful, if disconcerted, applause and Zhu Irzh fought the urge to bow.

“Well done, darling” said Jhai. She picked up her laptop, rather shakily, and went back to work. The panicky noises in the cabin died away, to be replaced by whispers, but Zhu Irzh, looking up the aisle toward his handiwork, saw one of the dignitaries staring back at him with an expression of frank curiosity and speculation on his face.

Damn, thought the demon. There was an old Chinese curse he’d once heard: May you come to the attention of those in authority. It looked as though that curse might be coming true and that wasn’t reassuring.

Forty minutes later, they touched down in Kashgar. The other passengers stood back, to let Zhu Irzh off the plane first. He tried to tell himself it was a measure of their appreciation, but couldn’t quite manage it. Jhai, in an unusually subdued frame of mind, accompanied him out to the taxi rank and thence to their hotel.

•

That afternoon, they walked out into Kashgar. It felt even hotter than the desert itself: a frontier town, China to the east, Central Asia to the west. Zhu Irzh had learned from one of the hotel’s leaflets that Kashgar was essentially a way station, an oasis. Not too far away, the Torogurt Pass led up into the mountains and over to the far east of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and from there, down into the Ferghana Valley, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism provoked by the repressive Uzbek regime. The pass was therefore rigorously controlled, but it was still open and some of the other guests in the hotel had come down through it that morning, so the hotel clerk informed Jhai. Not a tourist destination, then, Kashgar, but an ancient outpost of the Silk Road, a crossroad of East and West.

“It’s a very interesting town, even if it isn’t very big,” the clerk said. “There’s the mausoleum of Abakh Hoja, who to us is a prophet, and we also have the biggest mosque in China, and the biggest statue of Chairman Mao, also.”

Jhai, with the demon lingering in earshot, expressed polite interest but said that what she really wanted to see was the market. A map was duly procured and they set off. It was by now late afternoon and the sun was sliding down over the western mountains, casting long shadows into the merging shade of trees. The old oasis city was very much in evidence: thick walls of clay hiding courtyards and secret entrances, a winding labyrinth of ancient stone in the heart of the modern network of roads and traffic. The faces that they passed were Uighur, not Chinese, the difference far more marked than in Urumchi, and as they made their way further into the old part of the city, the flowered dresses and jeans of the local girls gave way to coffee-colored shrouds, so thickly woven that it would have been impossible to tell which way a stationary woman was facing. Jhai grimaced, but said only, “It’s a personal choice. I wear saris, after all.”

Zhu Irzh looked about him. No one had reacted to his presence, and he wondered if they could even see him: many of the Chinese could not and these folk were presumably devoutly Islamic, with a Hell and a Paradise of their own. Little room there for a Chinese demon… He watched a young man sitting back on his heels and beating a huge copper dish into shape. Other copper wares hung from hooks all along the store front. The scene reminded him of Hell; here on Earth, it must be like going back in time. Then there was the unmistakable sound of a Nokia ringtone and the young man took his cellphone out of his pocket without missing a beat of the hammer, and answered it. Well, almost like going back in time.

Zhu Irzh and Jhai wandered past shops that sold caged birds, past butchers and grocers and ironmongers. At the end of a street lay a tea garden with a shaded balcony, but they decided to return to the hotel and harder liquor instead.

“No sign of your mysterious stranger?” Jhai asked with a smile.

“No, though I’ve been looking out for him.” Zhu Irzh had, indeed, half-expected to see Nicholas stepping out of one of those shadowy doorways. He could feel the man’s presence, like a ghost at the shoulder: a curious sensation, given that he’d only met the man twice, and one of those meetings had been in a dream. “Frankly — and I never thought I’d say this — I’ve had quite enough excitement for one day.”

“Hell, yeah,” was all that Jhai had to say about the matter.

At the end of the road, the old city stopped abruptly. A gateway led through a wall of packed yellow bricks, onto a more modern street.

More modern, but still not contemporary. Zhu Irzh looked with interest at the handsome villas, partly obscured by fronds of greenery.

“So when do these date from, do you think?”

“Nineteenth century, I would think. They’re more Central Asian than Chinese — I went over the border once to a trade fair in Almaty, in Kazakhstan, and there were some houses there like these. Pretty. I like that ornamental woodwork.”

Zhu Irzh agreed. They were pleasant. At least the ones that didn’t have a seeping sense of horror permeating through their walls. He tried to tell himself that it had just been a dream, but somehow, his internal protestations were not convincing. Very probably, the villa in the dream did not even exist.

And then they turned a corner and there it was — much bigger than the other properties, and surprisingly, more exposed. The trees that fringed the path that led up to it looked as though they were dead, or dying. Fawn leaves littered the path like beetles’ wings and the blue panels of the house were stained with a creeping rust.

Zhu Irzh stopped dead. Jhai gave him a questioning look. “Don’t tell me. That’s it.”

“That’s the place.”

In the late afternoon sunlight, the villa held no apparent menace, and yet there was something wrong. The villa was dilapidated, as though it had been long abandoned, whereas the places on either side — at quite some distance — were obviously inhabited.

“Do you want to take a closer look?” Jhai asked.

He was inclined to say no. But he was a demon, the stepson now of the Emperor of Hell itself. A house and some ghosts couldn’t hold any real terrors, in the middle of the sunlit day.

“I’m going in,” Zhu Irzh replied.

“It was kept in here,” Mhara said, as they came to the huge double doors of an inner chamber. Somehow, Chen thought, the doors did not look in keeping with the rest of the Imperial Palace of Heaven: whereas the Palace was filled with rich shades of gold and red, or pastels, the doors were made of a silvery-gold substance that could have been either stone or wood. Carvings shifted and flowed across their surface; meaningless symbols to Chen, yet in some way alive. The doors looked wrong too, as though they had been appropriated from some other building entirely. He said as much, hoping that he was not giving offense. He thought he knew the mild-mannered Mhara well enough by now not to cause him to lose face by witless remarks, but one could always be wrong.

But indeed, Mhara took no offense. “You’re quite right, of course. And how astute of you. The doors come from another Heaven — I’m not sure which one, perhaps one of the Western paradises. They’re ancient — even more ancient than this palace.”

“How could they be Western, in that case? China is far older than that, so the Palace must have come first.”

“They cannot be Christian,” Mhara agreed. “But there were peoples in the western lands before that, and they had a belief in an afterlife. I believe these doors were an exchange — I don’t know what we gave for them, however.”

“Fascinating,” Chen said, wondering who those ancient peoples could have been. This was sophisticated work and now that he looked more closely, he could see the faces of animals peering out at him from the door frame: cats and hares and foxes. And a badger. Well, well. He’d have to tell Inari’s familiar about that, when he got home. “But why keep the Book of Chinese Heaven behind someone else’s doors?”

“It’s written into the guarding spell,” Mhara said. “Technically, because these doors are foreign, they are not subject to the same magic as the rest of Heaven, and because the magic to which they belonged has been lost — apart from the guarding spell itself — our own magic cannot be used to open them. It was an extra safeguard, against attempts to steal the Book.”

“Which may now have stolen itself.”

“Apparently so.”

Chen stood back a pace and looked at the doors. Foreign magic, running clear and cold like a mountain river, with nothing that was redolent of evil. “And behind them?” he asked.

“I’ll show you.” Mhara extended a hand and a stream of light reached out from it, blue and bright, flooding the doors with its brilliance. Slowly, the doors began to open, with the creatures that roamed their surfaces creeping back into the foliage of the door frame. Then the doors stood fully open and the light began to die.

At first, Chen thought that the chamber was empty. He had the impression of somewhere immensely high and cavernous, resembling a cave rather than a room. The chamber was circular and bones of stone held up its ceiling, arching up like branches.

“Like being in a forest,” he murmured.

“I think that was the idea,” Mhara replied. “Best let me go first. I need to introduce you to it.”

An odd turn of phrase, Chen thought, but as soon as Mhara motioned for him to enter the room and he crossed the threshold, he understood what the Emperor had meant. The chamber was not merely beautiful and strange; it was alive. He’d mentioned a forest and this was exactly like stepping into a wood: filled with whispers, a distant echo of something that could have been birdsong, or running water, or music. Things flitted out of sight, glimpsed only from the corners of the eye.

Welcome, the room said to him, inside his head. You are welcome here. Mhara smiled as though he’d overheard, which perhaps he had. “It was designed to recognize evil. It won’t let it enter.”

“What would happen to an evildoer, if one did come here?”

“They would not be destroyed. Simply removed, to a remote area on Earth. It has only happened once in the Palace’s history — a thousand years ago now, with a very clever thief. He found himself down in the desert and the shock was so great that he gave up his ways and became a holy monk.”

“A nice story,” Chen said.

“Sometimes things do work out.”

The nature of the place gave fuel to the speculation that the Book of the landscape of Heaven had abducted itself, but this was still not sufficient evidence for the theory to be proved, Chen reflected. “If someone who was not wicked, whose intentions were entirely pure, came here to steal the book, could they succeed? Presumably so.”

“That’s my concern,” Mhara said. “Now that the Emperor my father is dead, and with him the dictate that all Heaven must think exactly as the Emperor does, agreeing with all his proclamations, it is feasible that someone with ideas other than myself, with the best of intentions, might have gained access to this room and taken the Book. For what purpose, I do not know. But if this was the case, then one must consider that it was probable that the Book agreed to its abduction. It has its own protections, after all, just as the room does.”