Iron Khan Read online

  “When? Twenty-first century.”

  The man’s black eyebrows rose. “Indeed? I died in the 1920s, myself. How interesting.”

  It was the demon’s turn to be surprised. “You’re a ghost?” There was little sense of it.

  “Not … exactly. Perhaps a ghost in the same way that this village is a ghost. You know what Taklamakan means?”

  Thanks to the guide book, Zhu Irzh did.

  “Sometimes those that go into it, really don’t come out. Ever. I’m luckier than most, due to—well, never mind that now.”

  “In my day,” Zhu Irzh said, taking a chance, “someone’s just brought some of these people back to life.”

  “Reanimation?” The man looked thoughtful. “The Tokarians have been gone for many centuries. It would have to be someone well-versed in desert magic to restore them.” He glanced over his shoulder. “You and I had best return to our respective points of origin, I think.”

  “Why?”

  “The sand.” The dark man pointed. Far on the horizon, but approaching quickly, was a boiling red wall.

  “Shit!”

  “Stand clear of the gate,” the man instructed. Zhu Irzh did so and the man raised a hand, inscribing a long sparkling arabesque in the dry air. It looked like Arabic and the whisper of magic was suddenly all around. Zhu Irzh could sense things changing.

  “Wait!” he said, as the sand boiled closer and the wind whipped grains of it about his boots. “What’s your name?”

  The stranger’s lips moved, but only half a name came to the demon on the rising wind. “Nicholas—” And then he, and the village, and the sand were gone, leaving Zhu Irzh in the clear calm light of a late desert afternoon.

  5

  “He didn’t look at all familiar?” Jhai said, biting her lip as the car bumped across the desert back to Urumchi.

  “No. But he was a magician, and a powerful one.” Zhu Irzh had seen, and done, enough magic to be accustomed to the ease with which an accomplished magician can act, and this man had drawn a gap in time and the world as easily as Zhu Irzh himself might open a door.

  “If you’re going to be snatched back to the Tokarian era, maybe we shouldn’t bring you out to the desert again,” was Jhai’s next comment.

  “Fine with me. I’ll stay in Urumchi next time.” Next time, there might not be an obliging magical stranger to help him get back: the memory of that deadly wall of on-rushing sand was a chilling one. Then his cellphone hummed.

  “Zhu Irzh?” Turgun’s voice was strained. “We’ve found her.”

  *

  High on the roof of the apartment block, Turgun and the demon watched as the dead woman stood, balancing, on the very edge of the building. The street lay below her, some thirty stories down. Jhai had ordered the driver to speed up as soon as Turgun’s call had come through, and it was not yet quite dark when they reached Urumchi. A vivid green strip of sky showed in the west, over the mountains, and the mummy was outlined against it. She wore a long blue dress, the skirts snapping out behind her as the wind snatched at them. Here in the heart of the city, the wind smelled of the desert. Zhu Irzh tasted salt on his tongue.

  “What’s she doing?” Turgun whispered. The forensic team had, so he’d informed the demon, failed to pick up any trace of the missing mummy. They’d finally tracked her down as a result of another phone call, a panicky one made by someone working late in the office block on which they now stood. This time, the mummy hadn’t injured anyone, or sought to do so.

  “She can’t surely be trying to kill herself,” Turgun said. “She’s already dead.”

  “Hard to say what’s going on in her mind,” Zhu Irzh replied. The mummy raised her arms, so that the draperies of her dress left them bare. Tattoos snaked up them and, in the floodlights of the roof, the tattoos looked alive, and crawling. The flesh on which they moved appeared young. The woman’s dark hair whipped out behind her and Zhu Irzh felt the prickle of magic. This, he believed, was someone in full possession of their faculties, for all she may have been dead for thousands of years and in a glass case for decades. And now she was speaking in a language as dead as she, in words that the demon had never heard but recognized as ancient: the root words of his own tongue of Hell, the spell-speech which could create and then uncreate again. In the empty air above the evening streets of the city, something started to form.

  “We’ve got to stop this,” Turgun murmured.

  “I’m not sure we can.” The spell felt completely different to the one by which Nicholas had sent him back to his own time, and yet had that same sense of assurance, of ease. Death hadn’t altered this woman’s abilities. With caution, Zhu Irzh left the doorway and walked out onto the roof. Something was coalescing, swirling in currents through the air. The woman brought her hands abruptly down, spoke a word. Zhu Irzh stared. A bird hovered before her, enormous, its feathers glittering in jewel-colors of sapphire and emerald. It had a long curving beak. The woman stepped lithely off the roof, onto its waiting back. Bare feet braced, her arms slightly outstretched for balance, she looked Zhu Irzh directly in the face. She was remarkably beautiful, but it wasn’t an Eastern face: angular, with a delicate, arched nose. In the floodlights, her eyes were as blue as the sky. She smiled when she saw Zhu Irzh, whispered something that could have been a promise. Then the bird soared outward, flying down through the canyons of the city with the shaman on its back.

  “Well,” the demon remarked to an open-mouthed Turgun. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”

  “Short of scrambling the air force,” Turgun remarked a short while later, back in the hotel bar, “there’s not a lot I can do. And I don’t think the government would take kindly to a phone call telling them to send out aircraft to look for a lady on a giant chicken.”

  “Actually, it was more like a crane,” Zhu Irzh said, choosing to be pedantic. “But I agree with you. There’s a limit to what you can expect people to believe.” He was having a hard enough time evaluating recent events himself; ironic, given what he’d been through. “I suppose you’ll just have to wait and see if she shows up again.” But privately, he was wondering if that conjured crane wasn’t taking the shaman out to the salt flats of the Taklamakan, taking her back to that hot, bright world, taking her home.

  That night, Zhu Irzh had a dream. This was unusual enough—demons rarely dream—but the content was enough to make him wake and sit upright, sweating and yet cold.

  He was standing in a street, by a high stone wall with a fretworked pattern running along the top. Zhu Irzh did not know what lay behind the wall, but it filled him with fear all the same, a clammy sense of anticipation and dread. There was nothing to explain this: all he could see over the summit of the wall was the fronds of trees. The road on which he stood was dusty, a fine, soft dust, unlike the sandy grit of the desert city. There was an orange glow to the sky which suggested streetlighting, and the wall looked like something from the nineteenth century.

  Zhu Irzh walked around the wall and found a gateway. Like the gate to the Tokarian village, this was half-open. The demon looked inside, into a courtyard with a fountain. A faint splash of water greeted him, and with it, a wave of horror.

  What the fuck? I’m from Hell. I don’t do horror.

  Whatever it was, it was not connected to him, the demon understood, but was some property of the place itself. An ornamental building, constructed in the shape of an “E” without the central bar, lay within: an odd mix of architectural styles. It looked Chinese, but with painted shutters and an intricately carved roof.

  He didn’t want to go inside, but curiosity won. The demon stepped through the gate and into the courtyard. The fountain seemed to be blocked and when he examined it more closely, Zhu Irzh saw that it was running not with water, but with blood. He straightened up, aware that someone was watching him from the shuttered windows of the villa. As soon as he looked at them, they withdrew.

  “Who’s there?” the demon asked. No reply. Zhu Irzh bounded up the step
s to the door and went in, determined not to be outmastered by some spirit. But as he entered a plastered hallway, something came through the door behind him, with a scimitar upraised, and a weight of bursting psychic pressure descended upon Zhu Irzh’s head.

  He staggered. Next moment, there was a blast of fresh cold air and the presence was dispelled. Zhu Irzh found himself standing outside, gripping the rim of the fountain. The magician he knew as Nicholas was there, holding out a hand.

  “What the—where are we?” Zhu Irzh asked.

  “This is where you must come. This is where he originates.” Nicholas’ saturnine mouth turned down in distaste. “This is where he kept me prisoner. This is Kashgar.”

  “Who is ‘he’?”

  “The one they call the Iron Khan. A magus who has lived through centuries, dining off lives.”

  “A vampire?”

  “More than that. A ruler born, who will not die. Help me, Zhu Irzh. Come to Kashgar, and help me.”

  “I—” Zhu Irzh began, but the dream was fading, Nicholas’ face diminishing to a spark of light … and then he was awake and shiver­ing, with the word echoing around the walls of the hotel room.

  Kashgar …

  6

  Patiently, Omi drew a sigil in the ashes of the fire and waited for it to take form. Here in the heights, the air was cold and crisp, heralding snow. The scent of fir was refreshing after the endless blasting heat of the desert; Omi felt that he could breathe again. This was enough like Fuji to feel like home … Omi took a breath, remembering early morning at the monastery, walking out into the formal garden, its artfully placed rocks changed to a miniature mountain range of their own by the rime of frost. The distant ring of a bell through the clear air, the smell of pine …

  Very familiar. Omi was conscious of a weight lifting from him. He shifted the sword on his shoulder and stood. The sigil formed slowly out of the ashes of the fire: the bright burn of the sign that meant Hell. Omi gave a grim smile; it was no more than he’d expected. He looked south, over the vast expanse of the desert, to where forces were gathering.

  Not easy, being here, aware of ancient wrongs. Omi was pledged to give his life for his country, his Path. That didn’t mean he had to like it, or even to agree. The Chinese hated his people and he couldn’t blame them. There was honor, and then there was the mask of it. Important to know which one was which. And now he’d been sent here, to a place that was barely even China, to combat an ancient enemy and a wrong yet older than that.

  Where are you? Omi whispered to the night wind. Where are you, this time? Enduring through the ages, always at the heart of battle and, lately in a more sophisticated age, intrigue.

  “You won’t know him when you meet him,” the sensei had said, handing back Omi’s newly blessed sword. “He is always different.”

  Omi had bowed his head, thinking: You are wrong. Grand­father would tell him, he knew, and with that memory he murmured it aloud: “Grandfather?”

  “I am here.” The old man spoke out of the trunk of a nearby pine, the bark twisting into shadowy mist to form the familiar face. “What is it, my son’s son?”

  “He is here, not Hell. Yet the sigil says Hell. What does it mean?”

  “The sigil is your helper,” Grandfather said. “And therefore, so is Hell itself.”

  Omi frowned. “How can that be?”

  “Look for one from Hell. Don’t judge. Don’t assume. Be careful!”

  Well-trained as he was, it took a moment for Omi to realize that the last remark was not part of the same advice, but was directed at his present condition. Reacting instinctively, he swung the katana over and up, gripping it in both hands as the ascending mass sped overhead, aiming low, then coming around for another attack. Omi recognized it: one of the lesser ifrits, but directed to kill and potentially deadly. He struck out as the ifrit swept back, leathery wings outspread and exhaling poisonous heat. He could see its eyes: small and interested and blood-red. He’d missed, that first time, the ifrit moving with unnatural speed, but the second sword-strike hit home. The ifrit’s head parted from its long neck in a shower of fiery blood, and the ifrit exploded with a thunderclap.

  He hadn’t killed it. There was only one way to do that, and Omi was not magician enough, though Grandfather had been. It would have re-manifested in the wide deserts and domed cities of its own Hell, but for the moment, it was gone, and Omi could be well enough satisfied with that.

  He crouched on his heels with his back to the tree from which Grandfather had appeared, and closed his eyes. The proximity of his grandfather’s spirit steadied him, as had the dispatch of the ifrit. He had wondered, so many times, whether he was really cut out for all this, but the sensei had been adamant: It is your bloodline they’re after, and it is you who must do what has to be done. His father had tried, and failed, had met a grisly end in the Taklamakan at the claws of one of the Khan’s succubi. And Grandfather himself had died in the Khan’s dungeons.

  How long, Omi had ventured to ask the sensei, has this been going on?

  Long enough, was the answer to that. The Khan was ancient, Omi knew, using the blood and spirits of his enemies to rejuvenate himself in the manner of a magic so old it had become a cliché. And Omi’s family were themselves of the Royal House of Japan, a minor branch these days, but still moving secretly through the bloodlines of the aristocracy, a proud heritage. There was nothing to be done except duty, and Omi would honor that; despite his doubts of himself, he was determined to see an end to it. He wanted to marry, when the time came, and he wanted a child. That was it, really; he had no great desire for wealth or status, only for a family of his own and for that son or daughter—it did not matter which—not to have to face the same battles.

  If that meant consorting with Hell, Omi thought, straightening up and setting about his makeshift camp, then fine. That’s what he’d do.

  7

  “It’s looking very dark over there,” Inari remarked, shading her eyes with her hand and staring out to sea. Beside her, Miss Qi frowned. She had been persuaded to stay overnight after the dinner. Chen had departed to work.

  “Is Earth often like this? I’ve never seen such a sky in Heaven.”

  That didn’t surprise Inari. Miss Qi had not been on Earth for very long, and Inari understood from her heavenly friend that Mhara’s delegation to the human world was forbidden from interfering with the weather. Out along the horizon, a mass of cloud was gathering, inky and shot with bronze where the sun made its last feeble attempts to push through.

  “Everyone was startled at the weather-working ban,” Miss Qi said, echoing Inari’s own thoughts. “No one could understand it. Hurricanes and earthquakes and typhoons—why would anyone want to put up with that?”

  “Don’t you have any weather in Heaven?” Inari said, rather timidly. She did not want her friend to think that she was criticizing her, or cause her to lose face.

  “Sometimes there are breezes. And the occasional shower of rain in the spring, just for contrast. But it’s extremely gentle.” Miss Qi gave a very human shiver.

  “I’m afraid you’re not likely to find this weather ‘extremely gentle,’” Inari said grimly. The ominous bank of clouds reminded her of Hell. “If Wei Chen were here, I’d—” but her thought was cut off by a high-pitched wail from the shore.

  Miss Qi jumped and her hand flew to the hilt of her sword. “What is that?”

  It sounded like a cat being tortured, but Inari had heard the noise before. “It’s the typhoon warning siren! We need to move the boat.”

  Miss Qi gaped at her. “Can this boat be moved?” Of course, Inari reflected, Miss Qi had only ever seen the houseboat in its current position and, like a lot of people, must have assumed it to be stationary.

  “Yes. This has happened twice before, but Wei Chen was here each time. We’ll have to do it ourselves.” She found that her hand had crept to her stomach, unconsciously protecting the growing child. She did not relish the prospect of steering the boat all the wa
y around the point to the typhoon shelter, but it would have to be done: the harbor was too exposed and all around them people were scrambling with mooring ropes and starting their engines.

  “We’ll have to bring the anchor up,” Inari said.

  “I’ll have to bring it up,” Miss Qi retorted. “You’re pregnant.”

  “Demons are more robust than humans,” Inari said.

  “But it’s half a human baby!” Miss Qi said over her shoulder, running along the deck to where the anchor rope strained over the side. Inari cast an anxious look toward the horizon, where the cloud was beginning to boil. As she did so, a mammoth crack of thunder rolled across the sea, followed by a bolt of lightning as bright and sharp as a razor. Inari frowned. That wasn’t the right way round … The wind was starting to rise, too, stirring her hair and the hem of her skirt with a salty, electric breath. She looked back along the deck. It seemed that Heaven’s warriors were more robust than humans as well, for the seemingly delicate Miss Qi had already got the anchor up to the railing and was heaving it over the side. As quickly as she could, Inari ran up the stairs to the little wheel-house. This was an old-fashioned boat, which Chen had modernized over the years so that the controls were relatively slick. Inari knew how to steer, but the sea was growing increasingly choppy; and besides, there were all the other boats around her, some of them quite a lot longer, all making for the typhoon shelter. Well, she had no choice.

  “Ready?” she shouted down to Miss Qi.

  “Nearly!” Miss Qi replied. “Get going!” Inari started the engine and after a few sputters, the old houseboat roared into life.

  “Mistress!” Inari looked down to see the badger. “I can offer little assistance,” the badger said, reluctantly.

  “Perhaps you could help Miss Qi with the mooring ropes,” Inari said, forbearing to add, “And please don’t fall in.”

  By now, the sea was churning inward, driven before the oncoming storm. Inari looked out the window of the wheel-house and her courage almost failed her. The clouds were coming at a tremendous pace, whipped on by a dimly glimpsed, whirling mass at their heart: the typhoon itself. A sudden gust threw rain across the window of the wheel-house; Inari felt as though the storm had spat at her. This didn’t feel like a normal storm: the way the clouds moved, the way the wind was rising. Inari swallowed panic as Miss Qi called up, “We’re no longer moored!”