Iron Khan Page 4

  Inari spun the wheel, checking the position of the boats on either side of her, a commercial barge and a much smaller sampan crewed by an elderly couple. There was little time for maritime etiquette: the barge waved her on and Inari took the houseboat out into what was becoming a shipping channel. The boat wallowed in the swell, lurching from side to side. Miss Qi leaped nimbly up the stairs and into the wheel-house, her pale hair starred with rain.

  “It’s cold,” she said.

  “Miss Qi, I don’t think this is the usual type of typhoon. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not like the typhoons we’ve had before.” She steadied the wheel. “And we had so little warning. Normally, they know days before if the weather’s starting to change—they want everyone in the shelters well before it hits.”

  There was, she thought, little chance of that now. The houseboat was rounding the point now—she could see the ridge of pine trees at the far end of the spit—and the typhoon shelter was visible as a series of barriers bobbing in the water of the next harbor. But they were at the tail end of the queue, and given the number of boats trying to get into the bottleneck of the shelter, Inari thought they were unlikely to make it.

  She wouldn’t abandon ship. But she might not have any choice. A series of possibilities, none of them pleasant, flashed through her mind: drowning, in which case she’d return to Hell. Swimming to shore, but losing the houseboat, the only true home she’d ever known. And what would she say to Wei Chen on his return from Heaven? Sorry, dear, home sank. She had to make it to the shelter, but the houseboat, chugging along, could not be made to go any faster. It was already at its limit and the storm was lashing the coast now, blurring the lights of the city through the rain-speckled glass, and causing the boat to heave in the water. Good thing demons were not easily afflicted with seasickness, but she was not certain that the same could be said for poor Miss Qi, who was now so pale that her skin had a faint gleam of green.

  “Sit down!” Inari commanded the Celestial.

  “I’ve never thrown up in my life,” Miss Qi protested. “I don’t know how!”

  “I think you’ll find it comes quite naturally,” Inari said, with sympathy. The badger had wedged himself into a corner of the wheel-house like a cork in a bottle and showed no signs of budging. Then a blast of wind struck the houseboat broadside and caused it to lurch. The wheel was ripped out of Inari’s hands and freely spun. She grabbed it, losing skin, and managed to regain control of the craft, but only for a moment. They were yards from the entrance to the typhoon shelter—she saw the sampan glide safely through—when the storm struck full on.

  The wheel was once again torn out of Inari’s hands. The houseboat spun violently into a right-angled turn, throwing Inari and Miss Qi into a heap on the deck. The wind hit them with a sound like an express train. Inari had a sudden, confused glance of the barriers of the typhoon shelter far below them, as they were carried up on a wall of water that should have deposited them in the middle of the sheltering boats. Instead, the wave dropped, letting the boat fall and fall and fall, until Inari could see not sea, but stars.

  8

  “If you want to go,” Jhai said, not yet impatient but verging on it, “then we’ll go. The surveyors are getting on with what they have to do. You’ve still got leave. And I could use a proper break.”

  “It might not be much of a vacation,” Zhu Irzh said, thinking of that sinister villa. “And it’s not like me to be influenced by dreams.”

  Jhai shot him a curious glance. “No, it isn’t, is it? This must have been some dream.”

  “Something’s seeking me out,” Zhu Irzh said. “I’m not used to that.” It was true. Usually, he was peripheral to events, along for the ride. He might have been involved in some of the major upheavals of the last few years, but only as a participant, not as someone whom others tried to rope in. Yet there had been something about Nicholas’ dark gaze that Zhu Irzh felt oddly reluctant to ignore.

  “This man who came to you,” Jhai said, as if she had read his thoughts. Zhu Irzh blinked. For a moment, it was almost as though Nicholas was standing in the room. “What exactly did he say to you?”

  “He mentioned someone called the Iron Khan,” the demon reported. “I don’t know who or what he meant by that—I’ve never heard of such a person. But that’s not so surprising. Out here, the Hells are so close that they overlap with one another: he might be a figure from the Islamic version. I’ve never been there, don’t know much about it. Nicholas said that the Khan is like a jiang shi, a vampire.”

  “Have you met many jiang shis?”

  “No, never. I’ve met a couple of zombies, but they weren’t life-force leeches. There aren’t any in Hell, for obvious reasons—they come about because the soul fails to leave a human body properly, and Hell is, by definition, a place of souls.”

  “I’ve heard theories that they don’t really exist,” Jhai said. “That they’re demonized forms of the Manchu—that’s why they all wear those Qing Dynasty clothes. There’s another belief that they were invented by smugglers, who dressed up to scare off locals from investigating their activities.”

  “That may be so,” Zhu Irzh said, “but I wouldn’t rule them out, all the same. Especially not after what happened at that wedding downstairs.”

  Jhai laughed. “If I see any furry people with long black fingernails hopping about, I’ll let you know. Better go around holding your breath. Or we could get some sticky rice from room service. That’s a sure-fire cure for jiang shis.”

  “I think you’ve been watching too many movies,” Zhu Irzh said.

  But all the same, next morning, Jhai booked flights for Kashgar.

  “Have you heard anything more from Turgun?” Jhai asked as they waited in line at the airport. It would, doubtless, have been easier to commission Paugeng’s own jet, but the runway at Kashgar was apparently not up to the task. So here they were, standing in line with grandmothers and small children and dogs and crates of chickens, in Urumchi’s new and surprisingly glossy airport terminal.

  “I called him while you were packing,” Zhu Irzh said. “He’s heard nothing more about the female mummy. He said that the male’s been returned to the museum and has shown no further signs of life. Turgun’s got armed guards on duty, but there’s a limit to how long he’ll be able to keep them there—the authorities have been asking awkward questions, apparently.”

  “Can’t blame them,” Jhai said. “When is this line going to start moving? Ah. Here we go.”

  They shuffled through the security channels, which were tightly controlled: Turgun had not been joking about the govern­ment’s concerns regarding terrorism. Soldiers armed with machine guns swarmed around the little terminal and even Jhai’s baggage was searched, which she bore without comment. Zhu Irzh himself, resplendent in a pair of designer sunglasses to hide non-human eyes, attracted no comment.

  “Good thing we’re not going out of the country,” Jhai said in an undertone. “If they’d needed to see your passport, you’d have to take those off.”

  Zhu Irzh could not help wondering about Mhara’s Long March, whether the Celestials who had come down to Earth would really be able to have that much of an effect on human problems, on terrorism, on war. With the Ministries of Hell still doing their best to carry out their remits, Mhara’s people would have their work cut out.

  Together, he and Jhai made their way out onto the tarmac. At noon, the airport was baking in the heat, a desert in itself, and behind them the terminal shimmered in the haze until rendered almost spectral. The plane itself was a small, squat vehicle, bearing an Air China logo. Jhai and Zhu Irzh took their seats and awaited take-off.

  You certainly got a sense of China’s size, flying over it like this. The demon squinted out of the little window while Jhai concentrated on her laptop. They’d opted for first class, so the facilities were somewhat better, but not by much. Zhu Irzh watched as the landscape scrolled beneath: wave upon wave of high, bleached hill interspersed with dark stripes a
nd red washes, the stark colors of the deep Taklamakan. No trees, nothing that was green. Occasionally, there was the glitter of salt in the harsh sunlight. Given recent events, the demon would not have been surprised to see a woman on a blue crane flying alongside the plane, but none appeared. Was she now in some Hell of her own, he wondered, flying between the worlds? The woman intrigued him, as did the entire situation. The Tokarian, the shaman. She had not looked like a jiang shi, stiff and hopping. She’d looked alive.

  Movement at the front of the cabin attracted his attention and Zhu Irzh looked up from the window. The pilot, smart in his official uniform, had come out of the cockpit, accompanied by his co-pilot. Both were beaming.

  “Who’s flying the plane?” Zhu Irzh asked uneasily. He was aware that technology was not his strong point. Magic was much simpler, somehow. Jhai glanced up.

  “What? Oh, it must be on autopilot. Perfectly safe.” She returned to her spreadsheet. The demon watched with interest as two bureaucratic men at the front of the plane were greeted fulsomely by the aircrew, while a smiling stewardess looked on. Local government officials, probably. Both the men wore designer suits and were clearly of some importance.

  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 abrupt
ly. 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.