The Iron Khan (7 page)

“So in such a case, would book and thief be in the right?” Chen asked.

“That’s what worries me,” Mhara replied. He beckoned to Chen. “Look at this.”

Chen obeyed the instruction and found himself standing before a lectern, made of so clear a crystal that it was almost invisible, had it not been for a glitter of light on its polished surface. “This was where the Book was placed?” he asked.

“Yes. You can see how easy it would be to leave a fingerprint, if one were careless.”

A print would show up on this surface like a blot of soot. But this thief had been wary, if indeed, a thief there had been. The surface of the lectern was pristine.

“Are there any recording devices, magical or otherwise, in here?”

Mhara pointed up to an owlish face looking out of carved greenery. The face winked, making Chen jump.

“It sees everything and projects it onto a crystal screen in an adjoining chamber.”

“Remarkably modern,” Chen said.

“Yes, even Heaven occasionally adopts ideas from the human world,” Mhara said wryly. “As you might have noticed… Anyway, the screen shows nothing. One moment the book is there, the next it is not.”

“If there’s this magical transportation system, then that lends some weight to the hypothesis that the Book simply removed itself — took itself down to the mountains, perhaps.”

“I’d considered that,” Mhara said. “But what would it do then? It has no legs of its own and its ability to transport itself on Earth would be very limited.”

“So the Book might have an accomplice, then?”

“Possibly. Maybe it approached someone in a dream. Such things have been known.”

“This job doesn’t always lend itself to the likeliest explanation,” Chen said. “Is there any way the recording device could have been tampered with? You can alter the footage on CCTV cameras, after all.”

“No!” came an irritated protest from high on the wall. “Nothing changes me! I am a guardian of the Book.”

Chen did not want the device to lose face and therefore did not say that it had not proved a very effective guardian, given what had happened. But he thought he might point something out, all the same. “Could the Book itself have changed you?”

A long silence, then, very grudgingly, “It’s a possibility.”

“I don’t mean to criticize,” Chen was quick to add. “But if we know it’s a possibility, then it gives weight to our hypothesis.”

The device lapsed into ruminative quiet as Mhara and Chen explored the rest of the chamber. There was, the Emperor declared, nothing amiss, and Chen had to accept this, given the Emperor’s familiarity with the room. They left soon after that — an empty chamber, guarding nothing — but Mhara was careful to seal the doors behind him. After the room, the rest of the Palace seemed lifeless and stale.

“At least we have a working hypothesis,” Chen said. “The next thing, I’d suggest, is to go to the place where that thief-turned-monk was sent, and see if the Book is there.”

Mhara sighed. “I was afraid you’d suggest that. The problem is that the location is rather extensive.”

“What’s it called? The region where he found himself?”

“The Gobi Desert.”

Omi spent most of that night in meditation, emerging to find a pale rosy dawn firing the sky beyond the pines. He was being watched. He could feel it at the back of his neck, as palpable as a touch upon his skin. Yet it did not feel like an enemy — it was more akin to being watched by an animal, a wolf or bear.

There were both in these mountains of northwestern China, and Omi was immediately wary. The skills in which he’d been trained were effective against ifrit or human, but he doubted whether they’d prove as efficient if he were confronted with a bear. His hand stole to the shaft of the bow and closed around it. Slowly, he rose to his feet and turned.

Both she and the bird looked as though they were made from mist. The blue tattoos that ringed her arms coiled and snaked with a life of their own and the feathers of the crane’s wing fell across her shoulder, merging and shifting as the mist itself curled up the mountainside. She was watching him with an unblinking gaze, also blue, and the hair that trailed down her back was shot with indigo.

Omi’s skin prickled all over again. “Who are you?”

“I am called No-one,” the woman said. She was human, not ifrit or, he thought, demon.

“What kind of name is that?” Omi asked.

The woman smiled. “I traded my name for power,” she said.

“That’s an old magic,” Omi commented.

“I’m an old magician. You may call me Raksha, if you wish. That means the same thing in my language.”

“You don’t look that old,” Omi said gallantly, but he knew at once that she was telling the truth: there was the sense of a great presence to her, as if she carried far more than the obvious weight of her years.

“I came to find you,” Raksha said. “Your name is Omi, is that not right? And you are a warrior, from Japan, trying to avenge the murder of your father at the hands of a man who should by rights be dead.”

Omi grew very still. “How do you know all this?” The details of his father’s murder were known, so he’d believed, to only three people: Grandfather, his sensei, and Omi himself. Now here was this supernatural stranger commenting as casually upon the core of his life as if remarking upon the weather.

“Do not worry,” the woman said. “I didn’t learn this from anyone living.”

“How did you learn it, then?”

“I can’t tell you. I made a promise.”

“Are you a demon?” Omi said. He didn’t think so, but after the vision of the sigil he had had earlier, it was worth checking.

“No. Well, not really. I’ve been — out of circulation for rather a long time. I’ve been sent to help you.”

“By whom? Another ‘no one’?”

A curious expression crossed the woman’s face, half-amused, half-dismayed. “I can’t tell you. I made a promise. Do you think you can trust me? My people had vows of honor, once. They’re dead, but the vows remain, written on the world.”

Omi considered. It wasn’t a question of trust — how could he do that? — but he thought he could best her in a fight, even though she was a magician. After all, so was he, and so was Grandfather. It was two against one…

“What did you have in mind?” he asked.

•

An hour later, flying high over the glaciated summits, Omi was wishing he’d never asked. He’d flown in planes before now, but never on the back of a magical crane, holding tightly to the sinuous waist of an ancient magician and hoping he wouldn’t fall off. It was, he supposed, quibbling to wonder why they both didn’t freeze, although there was a rime of ice along the soles of his boots and an icicle depended from the tip of the bow like a small glass spear.

“Where are we going?” he asked, but the wind swallowed his words and Raksha did not turn her head. She had bound up her long black hair into a topknot and occasionally her sharp profile turned to the right, staring down into the mill of the clouds. When he dared follow her gaze, Omi caught glimpses of the mountains far below, but they were traveling down the range now, toward the desert: a place he had no wish to go. It seemed, however, that he’d have little say in the matter. The crane, prompted by some invisible or inaudible command of its mistress, was veering south, until the chill of the mountains ebbed and a smack of heat arose from the dry lands below. The clouds were gone, leaving a fierce blue sky. Below, Omi could see a dried-up riverbed snaking across the surface of the desert, and they were following it, still flying high, but close enough for Omi to see the patterns of the rocks and, weaving between them, the almost undetectable tracks left by the ifrits’ infrequent migrations. He thought of saying something but, not knowing where Raksha’s allegiances might lie, decided against it.

Raksha raised a thin hand and pointed. “Do you see?”

Omi squinted into the day. There was a smudge of gray-green on the horizon that could have been illusion or oasis.

“What is it?” Raksha did not reply. But the crane was flying fast and soon he could see the outline of groves of trees lying in the midst of humps of dry brown earth. The earth had split, leaving a cliff face rearing up over the river. Here there was a trickle of water and a series of regular rectangular holes in the face of the cliff, and all at once Omi knew where this must be.

“This is Dun Huang!” he said. A figure in saffron robes was crossing the river on a narrow bridge and this reassured him: this was a holy place, where monks lived. If Raksha was evil, then she wouldn’t be coming to such a place as this. Beyond the cliff, Omi could see, incongruously, a car park. A bus was trundling out onto the dirt road that ran parallel with the river. The crane glided overhead but none of the passengers looked up, and although they passed close enough to the monk that the beat of the crane’s wings would have been clearly audible, the monk continued on his serene way, smiling gently to himself.

The crane glided to a landing at the edge of a grove of trees and Omi stepped gratefully down into sudden silence. It was warm, but a breeze stirred the leaves of acacia and oak. A cuckoo called, precise and close at hand.

“It’s a long time since I’ve been here,” Raksha said. She murmured to the crane and it took off once more and sailed up into the branches, folding itself up like an origami bird.

“I’ve never been,” Omi said, staring up at the cliff face. “I’ve seen photos. It’s a tourist attraction now.”

Raksha looked at him, puzzled. “ ‘Tourist’?”

“Travelers.”

“Ah. Pilgrims.”

“More or less.”

Raksha strode down to the bank of the stream and ran a hand through the clear water. Omi got the impression that she had, in some manner, learned something from it, for her expression when she straightened up was thoughtful. “Interesting,” she said. “They’re still here. I thought they were. I could feel them.”

“Who?” Omi asked.

“The old,” she said. “There’s a new religion here now.”

“This is a Buddhist center,” Omi said. “There are some very famous statues up in those caves.”

Raksha smiled. “I’ve heard of ‘Buddhist.’ When I was in Hell once, someone told me about the new faith.”

“It’s not all that new,” Omi said, thinking, Then how old are you?

“The akashi were here first,” Raksha said. “My cousins.”

“Akashi?”

“Oasis spirits. You’ll meet them, maybe. If we’re lucky. Or unlucky.”

“Tell me,” Omi said, struck by sudden suspicion, “are these akashi the same as ifrits?”

Raksha laughed. “Oh no. They’re old enemies of the ifrits.” She turned and began walking along the bank of the stream. Her feet were clad in soft leather shoes, Omi noticed, and she left no footprints. He believed her in this, at least: Dun Huang was one of the holiest places of the Buddhist faith — powerful enough, surely, to keep out the ifrits.

The cuckoo called again from the trees, a clear bell-note. The monk was nowhere to be seen, though Omi glimpsed buildings through the branches. The sun was setting now, going down in burnished bronze behind the wall of the cliff. Raksha was heading toward a narrow walkway that led up to the caves. Omi followed her, not without misgivings.

Zhu Irzh suggested that Jhai remain at the gates of the villa and watch for anyone who might come in or out. He did not tell her that she might also need to raise the alarm if he didn’t return, but Jhai flatly refused to stay behind.

“I want to see what’s in there,” she said. “Don’t treat me as though I’m in need of protection. It’s very sweet but I’m a demon, too, you know.”

“A demon who has recently been seriously injured.”

Jhai snorted. “What, by Lara? My cousin couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag.”

Zhu Irzh forbore to mention that Lara, tiger demon turned Bollywood star turned, well, tiger, had come close to disemboweling her relative. Jhai didn’t take well to tactlessness and he knew better by now than to argue with her once she’d made up her mind. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll both go.”

They made their way cautiously down the path to the villa. No alarms sounded, nothing stirred in the dense undergrowth that had once been a formal garden. Roses twined in profusion up through the tangles of bramble, winding their coils around the overhanging branches of trees, but when Zhu Irzh came close enough to smell one, there was no odor at all, only a faint and unpleasant scent of rotting meat.

Funny, that. In fact, the whole villa had an air of decay. And there must be some reason why this prime piece of Kashgarian real estate had not been snapped up by some rising entrepreneur. The number of Mercs and BMWs cruising the streets near the hotel had told Zhu Irzh that at least some of the residents weren’t poverty stricken.

When the demon reached the front steps, he paused. The veranda was sagging and the wooden boards didn’t look all that safe. He picked his way gingerly up the steps. The front door was ajar.