Iron Khan Read online

  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.

  9

  “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.”

  “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, t
he 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.”

  10

  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.

  11

  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.