Demon and the City Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF LIZ WILLIAMS

  “Williams has an astonishing ability to create strange worlds and complex characters with only a few words. She finds new tangents with standard myths … and uses non-Western concepts … to great effect.” —Publishers Weekly

  Snake Agent

  “This exotic amalgam of police procedural, SF, comic fantasy, and horror is a delight from start to finish.” —Locus

  “Williams joins A. A. Attanasio and China Miéville as one of the best contemporary practitioners of a kind of imaginative literature that fuses the intellect of SF with the heart of fantasy.” —SciFi.com

  “Williams’s language is lyrical and elegant… . The dialogue has a patina of Britishness about it that adds to the feeling of other that permeates the book. The first in a series, Snake Agent set the pace for what will no doubt be an exciting and worthwhile series. I am looking forward to the next … Inspector Chen novel.” —Bookslut

  The Demon and the City

  “Like all of Williams’s work, this is a smooth, sharp read. She turns the conventions of good and evil on their ear and gives them a good sharp boot in the rear.” —Jay Lake, author of Mainspring

  The Demon and the City

  A Detective Inspector Chen Novel

  Liz Williams

  Contents

  Prologue

  Hsiao Kuo: The Small Get By

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Ming I: The Darkening of the Light

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Hsiao Chu: The Taming Power of the Small

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  Ta Ch’U: The Taming Power of the Great

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  Interlude

  53

  Interlude

  54

  55

  56

  Interlude

  57

  Interlude

  58

  59

  Interlude

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  Preview: Precious Dragon

  About the Author

  To the Witchcraft Shop Owner

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks …

  … to everyone at Night Shade Books for being such a pleasure to deal with.

  … to Marty Halpern for his help and (considerable) patience.

  … as ever, to Shawna McCarthy for all her hard work, encourage­­ment and help.

  … to everyone in the Montpellier Writing Group.

  … to David Pringle, for accepting the first Chen story for Interzone­.

  … to everyone at Milford, who kept asking when the Chinese detective story was going to be published. (And now it is!)

  … to everyone in the Cantonese group for their help and support, particularly Chris Priest and Leigh Kennedy, and also to Tanith Lee for her unfailing kindness.

  … to my parents.

  … and last but not least, to Trevor Jones, witchcraft shop ow­ner, historian and best friend.

  PROLOGUE

  The chinese inhabitants of Singapore Three say that August is an unlucky month. They say that it is called the month of the dead, for it is always during the endless burning days that the dead return, looking for the living, drawn by blood and breath. They tell their children: You do not know how it was when we lived in the suburbs of Beijing and Guangzhou, or the willow villages of Szechuan, in the ancient cities where people understand how to keep the dead at bay. But in this great new city of Singapore Three, where the entrances to the Hell are closer and the veils between them are fractured, we no longer live in a place when a story is only a story, told to frighten a child in the darkness. Nor do you remember when the demons and the hungry ghosts were only dreaming shadows in an ordinary life, until we left the old cities and came to the new, and found that during certain months and certain times, when the eternal Wheel of Life and Death grates on its spokes, the world changes.

  At such times, one can only prepare for the possibility of death as best one can.

  Deveth Sardai, stepping from a downtown tram, was not thinking of death. She was, instead, wondering how to extricate herself from the latest disastrous relationship. The policy of ignoring the girl was clearly not working: Sardai had not phoned her since the previous Monday, but a litany of messages, of increasing desperation, had been left on her answerphone.

  Sardai smiled thinly as she walked down to the retailers’ market, to wander, anonymous, beneath the girdered roofs of the warehouse shelter. The market was crowded with people on their way home from the production lines of Haitan. In fruit­sellers’ quarter Sardai nearly tripped on the vegetables that spilled out over the floor, squashed into mush across the dank concrete. She kicked aside a burst cucumber, turned the corner and found herself out of the fruitsellers’ street and into the meat market. The butcherei, mostly women, glanced at her incuriously as she passed. The mild-eyed heads of the black cattle, swinging on their racks, held more expression. Sardai stepped queasily between the remnants which littered the floor; the concrete was washed with a faint pink gloss. Nothing was wasted, Sardai knew. The cattle were reared in the derelict lots between the apartment buildings of Bharulay and Saro Town; genes acquired on the black market and manipulated to produce Indian cows, of a sort. The butcherei slaughtered them illegally, bleeding them dry in hidden locations among the back streets in a literal moveable feast. The traders brought the bodies here before sunrise. The horns and hooves would be the first to go, sold off to the herbalists to be ground into powder and marketed as fraudulent aphrodisiacs.

  At the end of butchers’ street, a shrunken, cheerful woman was washing out a cloth in a bloodstained bucket. She beamed up at Sardai, who had paused.

  “What you want?”

  “I’m looking for the remedy market,” Sardai said. It seemed to have moved since her last visit; they rearranged the market frequently, to baffle the inspectors. No one was fooled, except the hapless customers.

  “Oh, sure.” The woman wrung out the cloth a last time and heaved herself to her feet. “I’ll show you.”

  She walked with Sardai to the end of the meat market. Beyond, in front of the pilings that raised the market from the water, the butchered cattle lay in heaps of unidentifiable flesh. From the corner of her eye, Sardai saw a lean, dark shape slink behind the piles.

  “There!” the woman said, pointing. At the end of the meat racks, a helpful yellow line led along the warehouse floor. Obediently, Sardai followed it and came round to the familiar red-canopied corridor, the scarlet awnings incongruous beneath the rusted ironwork roof of the remedy market. The stalls were fringed with amulets: the almond-eyed shepherd god; My Lady simpering in a violet mantle with a sheaf of corn in her tiny arms; the little fox-faced demon of the mines. They shimmered before Sardai’s gaze. Maybe she should buy her girlfriend
a present, make it clear that it was a parting gift. She didn’t dislike the girl, after all, it was just that once the first rush of intoxicated desire had passed, Sardai had started to feel suffocated. It was the same old story; it had happened before, it would happen again. Sardai gave a mental shrug. That was just the way she was. She did not intend to give way to guilt. She did not believe in it, and it solved nothing. Almost involuntarily, however, her hand reached out and unhooked the icon of a girl, an inch long, with the crescent moon on her brow. It was the sort of thing you hung in the kitchen window, or saw swinging on the dashboard of taxis. Sardai asked, “How much is this one? Can I have her?”

  A swift hand, its owner unseen, wrapped the icon in red tissue paper to keep her safe on her journey, and Sardai dropped the little package into her bag. Our Lady of Storms, the woman from the sea, reposed amidst Sardai’s pens, card wallet, keys and the rest of the junk in her bag. Her girlfriend would like the little icon since she lit candles to the goddess at festival time. Sardai herself followed a different path. Thinking of this, she smiled again. All magic is art, she thought, and she considered herself to be an artist in the truest sense of the word: one who is not afraid, one who dares to gamble for great stakes. She walked on to the herbalist’s. Dried carcasses of snakes rustled in their pannier with the semblance of life. Someone was having a little joke, but Sardai wasn’t going to gratify them by being startled. She leaned over the dry, writhing bodies and purchased a pinch of bitter mint and then a tiny bag of lobelia, imported from the West. The herbs were horribly expensive, but Sardai didn’t care. They were useful, if one practiced a particular kind of art.

  Her purchases completed, Sardai wandered to the end of remedy street and came out opposite the yawning exit. Beyond, the slick waters of the harbor were apricot in the falling light. It was time to go home. Sardai walked along the slippery platform that led from the market entrance and out into the southern end of Siling Street, a meandering labyrinth of iron shelters and cookhouses. The smell of frying meat and peppers filled the evening air. Chickens were rotating on a spit in the nominal gutter, where a shadowy man was blowing a fire into life. Sardai walked quickly; it was growing dark. She slipped into her usual routine, imagining herself ten feet tall and looking down on the people she passed, with her square shoulders back and her hand on the mace canister. Guns were banned; they were common enough on the black market but the penalty for shooting your assailant was death, anyway, so why bother? Sardai was always careful; there were very few nice parts of town.

  At the end of the street a humpbacked bridge led over a narrow arm of the main canal, a winding stretch of water called the Taitai: the little wrist. Sardai crossed into a wilderness of apartment blocks separated by vacant lots where sparrow vine covered the fallen masonry. Something was always being built up or torn down. The exception was the Waste, the stretch of land which crossed Jhenrai southeast to northwest, a ragged scar created when an old mine had caved in and taken the apartment homes with it. The fires still burned, fueled by some persistent gas seepage beneath the soil. People lived on the Waste: the rootless, the insane. Sardai avoided it in daylight and at night took detours out of its way, but she was well past the Waste by now and nearly home to the row of old rickety houses in the eastern part of the quarter.

  Turning back, she saw a last strip of pale green sky over the harbor. The tower of the Paugeng Corporation snaked up in absurd modernist spirals above the docks; the red bird logo catching the dead sun and glowing against the rearing wall. That was a weird setup, Sardai thought, with grim amusement. She had known the Paugeng heiress, mad Jhai Tserai, from their debutante days. And now, they had an even stronger connection. Smiling, she turned back and continued walking.

  Something came fast out of the shelter of the darkness. Sardai had a brief glimpse of a lean shape moving too quickly to see, and then it was gone. She’d seen something in the retail market, her bewildered mind told her, sneaking among the bones, but that had been a dog, a little thing. This was a person. She swung the mace canister out of her pocket, looked about her warily. She could see nothing. She backed off, starting to run down Mherei Street, but it was right behind her, alongside her. She could see it out of the corner of her eye, pacing beside her, silent. She stopped, nearly stumbling, and turned but there was nothing there. Her breath whimpered in her throat. There was a great wave of soundless motion behind her, the smell of the sea, hot salt washed over her, roaring in her ears, bearing her down into the well of the apricot sky. She saw the crescent moon swing round, and then she was out into the gentle shallows, leaving it all behind.

  Neatly, quickly, she was dragged into the silence behind the dark streets. No one had seen, animal-sense said, no one was watching.

  HSIAO KUO:

  THE SMALL

  GET BY

  1

  “Do we know who she is?” Seneschal Zhu Irzh asked, idly flicking the ash from his opium cigarette. The body sprawled at his feet, outlined by a faint nimbus glow. The girl had not long been dead, though there was no trace of her dismayed spirit in the immediate neighborhood and surprisingly little blood, given the state she was in.

  Sergeant Ma eyed him askance and said, “No, not yet. Forensics is trying to get a positive ID on her now. And you shouldn’t be smoking those. They’re bad for your health.”

  “My dear sergeant, in case it had escaped your attention, I am already dead. In a manner of speaking, of course, seeing that I am a demon.” Ma merely grunted. Zhu Irzh smiled to himself. Ma’s attitude toward him was a combination of the disapproving and the protective, which was a long way from the sergeant’s earlier attitude of insensate fear. Zhu Irzh had only been attached to the Singapore Three police department for a few months, but had already managed to provoke strong reactions in his colleagues, both positive and negative, yin and yang. Zhu Irzh liked to think that it was the hallmark of a masterful personality, but Detective Inspector Chen, his immediate superior, witheringly attributed the phenomenon to Zhu Irzh’s otherworldly origins. Zhu Irzh reflected on this as he stood over the mutilated remains of what had, after some initial investigation, proved to be a young woman.

  He found himself frowning. He missed Chen, and the Detective Inspector had only been gone for a week. If anyone deserved a holiday, Zhu Irzh thought, it was Chen, but still, Singapore Three’s temporary loss was Hawaii’s impermanent gain. He hoped, not without a trace of bitterness, that Chen and his wife were having a nice time. Meanwhile, he was still stuck here in the city, dealing with humans who had been foolish enough to get themselves mangled by unknown persons.

  “If forensics doesn’t turn anything up, we could go to the Night Harbor, couldn’t we? Interview the victim directly,” Ma remarked.

  “I suppose so. Though I don’t fancy shoving my way through that throng on a Saturday night trying to work out which spirit is minus her face. Or other bits. And I’m still having problems with my visa.” Zhu Irzh gave a martyred sigh. Initially, he had been excited about his reassignment from Hell’s Vice Division; the result of a political embroilment which only now was beginning to subside. The human world was novel enough to be interesting at first, but now it slightly depressed him. The colors seemed so insipid, the air so bland. It wasn’t as bad as Heaven, which he’d visited only fleetingly, but it was getting close. The food was like the sort of thing you fed to cats: it smelled all right, but it didn’t taste of anything. Besides, he’d had little to properly occupy him since he got here: a few routine gang killings, and a long and indescribably tedious investigation into the Feng Shui Practitioners’ Guild, resulting in several boring visits to renegade dowsers. Zhu Irzh had done his best to get out of this last task, but had been thwarted by Chen. The latter seemed to be enjoying the novelty of having an underling, and had disturbingly little compunction in handing the most banal tasks over to Zhu Irzh. If one was of a flamboyant personality, the demon felt, one might as well make the most of it. He had not been allowed near the work of the Vice Division, where h
is experience lay. It was nothing but a waste. An earlier, oft repeated conversation, replayed itself in his mind.

  “Your experience,” Chen had said firmly, “has been in the promotion of vice, not its suppression. You surely can’t seriously think they’ll let you anywhere near drugs or prostitution, given that Hell’s vice squad is responsible for most of it?”

  The demon had bridled. “I’m not unremittingly evil—and me saying that just goes to show that I’m not a typical demon. I have feelings, too. I have a conscience. I helped you save the world, didn’t I?”

  Chen, though conceding that there was a measure of truth in this, had remained resolute. “I don’t think you’re unremittingly evil,” he said. “I just think you’re … slightly dodgy.” Zhu Irzh had pretended to be annoyed, but admitted to himself that Chen might have a point. Vice was pretty much a consuming interest with him, and why not? It was fun, after all. It was a vocation.

  However, human women tended to give Zhu Irzh a wide berth, thus negating another of the demon’s consuming interests. This was perhaps understandable, but also cause for some lament. Back home in Hell, he had barely been able to turn round without falling over one or another girlfriend; here, it was a different story. And it was cold: even in this summer that humans described as sweltering. Morosely, Zhu Irzh poked the limp corpse with the toe of his boot, revealing the shattered pelvis and ribcage. Ma gazed at him in reproach.

  “Don’t do that. It’s disturbing the crime scene. Forensics won’t like it.”