Snake Agent: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel (21 page)

"There we are," he said, placing a black lacquered bowl, filled with tea of the same hue, on the table. "This'll make you feel better." And then, before Inari had time to react, he bent to swiftly and expertly kiss her. Somewhere beyond the sudden ringing in her head—an uneasy mixture of outrage, guilt, horror and desire—came the cynical thought that he'd obviously had plenty of practice. She pulled back, stumbling to her feet and upsetting the chair, and clapped her hand to her mouth like a schoolgirl. Zhu Irzh caught his lower lip between his teeth; he looked utterly charmed.

"I
can't
," she stuttered. Stepping across the fallen chair, Zhu Irzh took her firmly by the shoulders and looked down into her stricken face.

"Of course not," he said smoothly. "You've had some nasty experiences today; enough to unsettle the sternest soul. I don't know
what
I was thinking of." Bending his head, he kissed her chastely on the brow. "Now. Drink your tea and go to bed. I'll sleep on the couch—or down the hall, if you prefer. I'm sure I can borrow my neighbor's couch."

"The hall," Inari managed to say. "If you don't mind—I mean, thank you, but—"

"It's quite all right," Zhu Irzh said soothingly. He gathered up a bundle of clothes and opened the door. "Sleep well, Leilei." It took her a moment to realize that this was her pretended name, and a moment more to realize that as he stepped through the door, Zhu Irzh's smile was once more wide.

"I've read about this," Lao murmured. "Never actually seen it done, though. How many times have you been through this now?"

"This will be the ninth," Chen said absently. He was crouching on the tiles of the temple floor, carefully arranging the sticks of red incense.

"That's more than I'd realized," Lao said with renewed respect.

"Yes, well, I've been at this game a long time," Chen told him. Silently, he added,
But never without Kuan Yin's blessing.
He decided not to share this thought with the police exorcist; Lao was more nervous than Chen had ever seen him. The long ends of his moustache seemed to twitch with unstable energy, and Chen could almost sense Lao's flickering
ch'i
. "Try to get centered," Chen said mildly, looking up. "You're throwing me off balance."

"Sorry." Lao sank back into a more relaxed stance and took a deep, steadying breath.

"That's better." It wasn't, but Chen didn't want Lao to become more distracted than he was already. In the normal field of operations, the exorcist was usually a fairly sanguine character, if irritable, but what they were doing now was a long way from normal. Briefly, Chen debated with himself whether to send Lao outside, but he needed the exorcist for the role that was usually occupied by the goddess. Chen was trying not to think too hard about the implications of this; he had enough to worry about.

"All right," he said, standing up and surveying the results of his preparations. "I think we're ready to roll." Lao gave a small, tense nod.

"You're sure?" Their eyes met briefly.

"No choice," Chen said.

"Chen—look after yourself, all right? Don't do anything too bloody stupid." The words
Unlike last time
hung unspoken in the air between them. "And bring her back safely, yes? Her
and
yourself."

Chen could not resist a wary glance at the statue of Kuan Yin, but the goddess was tranquil and unmoving. If there was a faint halo of disapproval around the serenity of her jade countenance, it was indiscernible from the products of his own guilty imagination.

"I'll be all right," Chen said, trying to sound sincere. "Don't worry. And keep an eye on No Ro Shi, whatever you do."

"Oh, don't you worry about that," Lao said, with something of a return to form. "I'm not letting that mad bastard out of my sight until doomsday. Or until you come back. Whichever's first. By the way—" he paused.

"What?"

"If that demon shows up—the vice cop."

"What about him?"

"What shall I tell him?"

Chen paused for thought.

"Tell him the truth. Tell him where I've gone. But don't tell him the whole reason why. Just let him know I'm going after whoever snatched Tang."

"And if he doesn't believe me?"

"Don't give him the luxury of choice. You'll just have to be especially convincing."

He reached out and gripped Lao's hand. "Lao—thanks."

"Let's get on with it," Lao said grimly, returning the grip for an instant. He stepped backwards, leaving Chen standing in the middle of the circle. "You're certain this will work?" he asked, picking up the laptop and settling it onto his bony knees.

"Yes, I'm certain. Pretty sure, anyway," Chen said, making a quick epistemological adjustment. "All you have to do is run the program."

"And you've done this before?"

"Well, no. Not exactly. Usually, the goddess herself recites the litany, but it's some nineteen pages of ancient Mandarin and, frankly, I haven't had the time to actually learn it myself, so it didn't seem right to ask you to do so. That's why I digitized it instead."

"Is that likely to make a difference?" Lao asked, alarmed.

"Well, it's true that there is a bit of a difference between the intonations of an actual deity from the Celestial Shores and a Sony-Hyundai voice synthesizer, but I'm hoping the effect will be the same," Chen said, more flippantly than he felt. "Right," he added, leaning down to touch a lighter to the incense sticks and stepping back as each one flared into fragrant smoke. "Off we go."

Through the incense haze he saw Lao's long fingers hovering over the keyboard of the laptop, and heard the first words of the litany that would send him down to the Night Harbor and on to Hell. He did not need to glance behind him to see that he had the goddess' full attention. He could feel her lambent eyes boring into the back of his head like a drill, and the full weight of her disapproval felt as though someone had thrown a bucket of icy water over him.

"Chen Wei!" The voice was a familiar one, and it echoed inside his head as if nothing lay between the twin walls of his skull. Chen concentrated on the uneven, artificial voice of the litany. "Chen, do you think I don't know what you are doing?" Uncanny, thought Chen, how the goddess' voice could sound so like that of his own mother in one of her more imperious moods, yet he could not find it surprising. He did not reply.

"If you are following her, Chen, the little demon whom you took to your bed, then all that you can ever be is one man. One man, without my protection, against the armies and legions of Hell. I am compassionate beyond measure, but even my compassion has limits."

In the matter of prejudice,
Chen thought,
we are all the same. Goddess and demon, human and monster: none of us understand difference, but at least some of us make the effort to try.

"Do you have the temerity to compare yourself to me?" the goddess asked incredulously, and this time Chen flinched. All Heaven's icy command was behind those words.
Yes, she is the compassionate and the merciful, but she is also a goddess, and woe betide anyone who forgets that.
But the litany was winding to its end. He could feel the heat rising, spiraling in the smoky air that filled the temple, burning through the soles of his shoes and snatching at the back of his throat. His head was beginning to ring like a bell, and a band akin to the iron grasp of a migraine seized his skull with crushing force.

"Chen Wei!" someone cried, but through the pain Chen could not tell whether it was the goddess or Lao, or some other, crying out his name from the depths of the abyss. Words echoed in his head:
if you gaze into the abyss, sooner or later you will find it looking back at you.
And then the temple was stripped away and he was standing in the great hallway that was the entrance to the Night Harbor, its iron doors at his back.

Even the air was different in this antechamber between the worlds. It crackled with anticipation, like the wind before a storm. Shadows chased across the hall, darting up into the metal lattice of the immense and distant ceiling. This portal of the Night Harbor reminded Chen of a Victorian railway station that he had once visited in London: there was something echoing and gloomy about it, with the edge of anticipation that one found in places where journeys were about to be made. From the corner of his eye Chen glimpsed a vast, milling crowd of people: both old and young, but all of them pale and weary. When he turned to gaze at them directly, however, he was unsurprised to see that there was no one there. The dark, indistinct form of a warrant officer was bringing a new ghost through the doors. At the far end of the hallway, seated behind an ornate desk, sat a receptionist filing her talons. Chen frowned, though he knew that administrative tasks were shared equally between the worlds and it was often true that demons were rather easier to deal with than the frequently hide-bound personnel from the Celestial Realms. Ignoring the insubstantial queue, Chen walked up to the desk. It was hard to get his balance: he found himself lurching as though he'd just stepped ashore, which to Chen raised interesting questions about the exact nature of gravity. When he reached the desk, he presented his credentials. The girl looked up. She was chewing something, Chen noted with distaste. Her gaze flickered incuriously across Chen, who said, "Police Department, Liaison Division. I'll be going to Hell."

He was expecting an argument over his authorization, but the girl merely shifted whatever it was she was chewing to the other side of her cheek and flicked up some records on a computer that looked as though it had been carved out of ebony. Her talons clicked across bone keys. She mumbled, "All right, then. Through there."

"It's all right if I go straight through?" Chen asked sharply, checking. The girl shrugged. She took a glutinous red lump out of her mouth, studied it for a moment, then replaced it. Taking this for assent, Chen went swiftly to the indicated door and pressed his scarred palm against its carved iron surface. There was a sudden warmth beneath his hand. He could feel a hundred pairs of envious eyes on his back as the door opened and he stepped cautiously through.

The Night Harbor was the greatest nexus between the worlds. It resembled such sites as Kuan Yin's temple and the Pellucid Island Opera House, but unlike these places, which remained firmly rooted in their own particular worlds, the Night Harbor constantly shifted and changed. It seemed to Chen to contain all possibilities at once, all destinations. Blossoms drifted by, fragile as snow, from the peach trees of Heaven's shores; turning to flakes of ice as Hell's configurations took precedence. Faces drifted by Chen: a young man whose mouth formed a gaping zero of horror; a girl in a Western wedding dress as white as the peach blossoms and ashes through which she was floating. Her dress was on fire, yet unconsumed. Pagodas reconstructed themselves against a sky that altered from moment to moment, and for a disorienting minute Chen found himself gazing up through water. His hand groped in his breast pocket and located the rosary, which anchored him a little. Chen knew that the embarkation queues were to be found in what passed for the south of the port area, as far as one could go from the entry doors before reaching the shores of the Sea of Night, but given the alchemical landscape in which he currently stood, finding a particular direction was not easy. Mountains streamed by; firecrackers thrown by a group of spectral children, their mouths open in silent, frozen laughter, snapped at his feet. Before his eyes they turned to dog spirits, the hounds of Hell, and he recognized the tottering buildings of Dog Village. There was an ululating howl as something smelled live meat. Teeth snapped at Chen's arm and he turned, whipping the rosary across a long, dark muzzle. The spirit wailed, and fell back to flee on two spindly legs. Chen hunched his head into his shoulders, gripped his rosary and fled past the rickety houses with a snarl echoing in his ears.

Then the Dog Village was gone: the ground on which he walked was suddenly the whole of China and his head was in the clouds.
Concentrate,
thought Chen.
Concentrate.
He thought of Comrade No Ro Shi, the demon-hunter, attempting to make sense of these anarchic surroundings and smiled. Definitely not the party line; No Ro Shi would disapprove, deny, refuse to see. Perhaps No Ro Shi's way was the best after all; perhaps Chen should have taken a firmer stance in the matter of his own ideological convictions, but Chen could not resist the subtle appeal of shades of gray, which maybe made him the best person to navigate these shadowy shores after all. Maybe.

He could see something in the distance: a thin dark line like a crack in the world. It was not the first sight Chen had had of the Sea of Night, and he had crossed it in his travels between the worlds, in this life and in others, but it never failed to chill him. It was the great gulf, the line between Life and Death, and he could not help but be afraid. He came to the bridge across the abyss, and here Chen halted. He hated heights, and the bridge was no more than a few inches wide, as thin as a razor. Chen, panicking, thought:
I can't do it. I can't; I'll have to go back. You've done it before,
his rational self reminded him. But he could not imagine how. Inari's face swam before his mind's eye and then something striped and dark stepped in front of him. It was the badger. Dimly, Chen remembered a shape streaking into the circle at the moment of his departure from the temple. Black eyes gazed up at him.

"Follow me," the badger said without compassion. It placed a clawed foot on the bridge and stepped forwards. Fixing his gaze on the back of the badger's striped head, pointing like an arrow to safety and the other side, Chen took a deep breath and followed.

After what seemed like an eternity, they stepped safely onto the dock on the other side. The badger glanced back indifferently, as though it mattered little whether Chen had fallen silently into the abyss, but Chen could read much into that glance.

"Thank you," he sighed. He had rarely been more pleased to be on solid ground. He felt shaky and weak, as though death had come to claim him after all. The badger inclined its head in what might have been a bow.