The Iron Khan (25 page)

The conversation ended and Jhai snapped her phone shut. She did not look happy. She said, “That was — a friend. At least, I think he’s a friend. Says he’s in a floating moveable city in the middle of Tibet and my fiancé’s gone back in time to try and sort things out. We’re in trouble.”

Inari did not know whether Jhai was speaking generally, or in direct connection with Zhu Irzh’s apparent involvement. “Did he say anything about Wei Chen?” she asked.

“No, and I’m sorry, Inari.” Jhai put a hand on her arm. She might even have meant the apology. “I didn’t ask.”

“But where is everyone? Are they dead?”

“No,” Jhai said slowly. “It’s apparently more accurate to say that they were never born.”

“What’s that?” Miss Qi asked. They looked in the direction of her pointing finger. On a slight rise, some distance from the shore, stood a white-domed building. It was so small that it was almost invisible against the gray-green-brown of the hills, but Inari recognized it at once. How could she not? It was the place where she’d died.

“Mhara’s temple!”

It made sense, Inari thought. If anyone survived this changed, denuded world it ought to be the Emperor of Heaven.

“Do you have a number for Roerich?” she asked.

Jhai examined her phone. “No. And somehow, I’m not sure he was using an actual phone.”

“I don’t know this man,” Inari said uneasily. “I’d rather go where it might be safe.” An odd term to use for a place where you’d been decapitated, and yet somehow she knew it to be the right choice.

Jhai shrugged. “Fair enough. If Roerich wants to track us down, I have a feeling he will anyway.”

She spoke at length to the crew and pilot, who elected to stay with the jet. They could survive for some time on aeroplane food, they said. But Inari felt that the presence of Mhara’s temple was an indication of some kind of life, unless this world had changed so radically that the temple was inhabited by something else entirely. One never knew, but one had to take the risk anyway.

She set off, with Miss Qi and Jhai. The Celestial warrior was nervous and kept glancing around her, but apart from the plane crew, there was no one else in sight. Inari, however, respected Miss Qi’s instincts.

“Can you sense anything?”

“Many things,” Miss Qi said with a shiver. “Ghosts of the might-have-been, perhaps.”

“What caused this?” Inari asked. So Jhai explained, and the story took them more than halfway to Mhara’s temple. Inari was relieved to see it so close at hand. She kept trying to trace the lines of non-existent streets, seeing from the corners of her eyes the shapes of buildings that were no longer there, and in this reality, had never been. The sun was going down now in a calm burn of gold beyond the shore and even if this was a worldly paradise, as Jhai had suggested, darkness was still dark and things still lived in it.

The temple was still, its roof turned to gold by the sunset light. The doors were closed: they walked up the front steps and knocked. Inari expected the door to remain bolted, but it did not: Robin stood in the entrance, gaping at them.

“Inari! Miss Qi! You’ve come back!”

Inari was so relieved by this apparent lack of change that she went weak at the knees. Robin hastened them inside.

“Things,” said Robin, “have changed.”

“You said they came back,” Jhai said sharply. “Did you know they’d been away? Or were you referring to something more general?”

“No,” Robin said. “These two went missing in the typhoon. Chen’s been here, Inari, looking for you, and he’s gone after you. I don’t know where Zhu Irzh is. But Kuan Yin came here and told us what had happened.” Her slightly spectral face was creased with worry. “Then I got up in the morning and — this had happened. The whole city’s gone. The worst thing of all is that I can’t seem to contact Mhara.”

“Do you think the spell — edited him out?” Inari faltered. She did not like to think of that level of power.

But Robin shook her head. “Why would it do that, and leave me here — I’m his priestess as well as his girlfriend, after all. Why not just write me out of the equation? No, I think it disrupted communication somehow, or stranded him in Heaven.”

“If the aim of the spell was to set Heaven and Earth in their rightful place,” Jhai said, “then maybe there’s no need for direct communication between the two.”

“But what is Earth’s ‘rightful place’?” Robin asked. “Looks like it’s a world with no one in it.”

“Maybe that’s the idea,” Inari said. “And what about Hell?”

“If we could find a spot that connects to Hell, maybe we could find out,” Jhai said. She sat down on a low bench, brow furrowed. “Of the three worlds, that’s the least likely to have been affected by the spell, one would have thought. I spoke to the pilot — there’s not enough fuel to get us back across China. But if we can travel through Hell, and meet up with Roerich…”

“There’s the Night Harbor,” Inari said. “That’s still there.”

“Wait until morning,” Robin advised. “We don’t know what’s out there.”

Halfway through the night, Inari woke with a start. She’d been dreaming — of Seijin coming through the door with a sword in hand, of that moment of sudden stunning silence when Inari’s head fell to the floor. But the room was empty and the silence within it was simply that of the depths of night. Yet something had woken her, all the same. Inari got to her feet and, clutching Robin’s borrowed night robe around her, went into the temple.

Robin knelt before the altar. Her head was bowed and, for a moment, Inari thought that the ghost was weeping. Then Robin raised her sleek dark head and Inari saw that the expression on her face was one of intense concentration.

“Can you hear me?” Robin asked, and Inari bit back a reply. Robin was not talking to her; the ghost’s face remained fixed on the altar. There might have been the faintest whisper across the air, or perhaps it was only the draft. Robin waited, but there was nothing more.

Inari meant to go back to her room but Robin turned.

“Inari! Sorry, I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, it’s okay. I often wake in the night. I heard something, that was all.”

“I was trying to contact Mhara,” Robin said, rising from her knees. “Still nothing.”

Inari sighed. “If you cannot get in touch with him here, then you are unlikely to be successful anywhere else.”

Robin grimaced. “Someone in Heaven once told me that this was how it was long ago. The three worlds separate, with spirits passing behind a veil that none could penetrate. Perhaps that’s how it’s supposed to be.”

“And yet the Night Harbor is still here,” Inari said. She did not like the idea of traveling back through Hell: most journeys took one across the Sea of Night, and Inari did not care if she never set eyes on that Sea again.

•

Jhai drove a hard bargain. Inari had known this, but she had never had reason to be so thankful for it. The clerk at the Night Harbor was not someone Inari had seen before: a small, wizened individual of indeterminate sex.

“We don’t get many folk through here,” the clerk was saying, as though Jhai and the rest of her party had proved a gross imposition. “Especially not headed for Hell.”

“I don’t care whether we pass through Heaven or Hell,” Jhai snapped. “We just need transport.”

The clerk peered more closely. “One of you is a ghost. Two of you are demons, and one — a Celestial.”

Miss Qi stepped forward. “We are obliged to travel to another point in this world. To do so, we must pass through another realm, or start walking. I will act as a personal guarantor for these women, if you let us travel through Heaven’s domain.”

“I cannot do that,” the clerk said. The wizened face grew grim. “Each must pass through her own realm.”

“Look,” Jhai said. She leaned forward. “I’m sure some arrangement can be made.”

“What kind of arrangement?”

“Perhaps a token of our appreciation for your help?”

“My help will be considerable,” the clerk warned.

“So will our appreciation.”

Zhu Irzh came round to find that his hands were bound behind him. He sensed warmth, and wriggling his fingers received an answering response. Blinking, he saw that the flickering light in front of him were the flames of a fire.

“Raksha?”

The owner of the other hands replied, “Yes. I was beginning to think you’d never wake up.”

“Where are we?”

“At the world’s wound.” He could not see her, but Raksha’s voice was grim. They were bound on opposite sides to a stake — in a valley, a basin between low hills. Not far away, voices hissed in exultation.

“Who is he?”

“He is the Khan.” Zhu Irzh thought he knew what had happened. The spell had indeed revised the world to its current paradisiacal state, but it had been incomplete. Perhaps it was easier to create from fresh cloth rather than to revise: Zhu Irzh knew little about building worlds. But it was both encouraging and problematic to know that gaps remained in the fabric. Given that the Khan had ridden through one of them.

He tested the bonds. Strong, and yet Zhu Irzh thought he could work his way through. Cautioning Raksha to silence, he started to rasp at the rope with a sharp nail; at least the bonds were not made of metal, in this bucolic age. A whoop from the Khan’s encampment signaled some kind of action and Zhu Irzh rasped faster.

At last, to his intense relief, the rope started to fray. There was movement, somewhere over to the left. Zhu Irzh couldn’t see what it was from this angle, so he concentrated on the rope and it snapped and sagged. He felt Raksha clutch it, to preserve the illusion of bondage. She might be the product of a paradise, but she had a good grasp of the essentials, he thought.

“Wait,” he murmured.

“I think the Khan is coming.”

A moment later, this hypothesis proved correct. A striding, helmeted figure came into view.

“So!” the Khan cried. “We have visitors!”

He thrust the point of a short sword into the earth and the soil split and fractured like glass.

“Not for long,” Zhu Irzh muttered. “Raksha, get ready to run.”

“Where is the brushwood?” the Khan snarled. A man ran forward with an armful of broken wood, the scrublike saxaul of the steppe, and threw it in front of the stake.

“Supper!” The Khan was gleeful.

Oh great. The Khan’s habits clearly hadn’t been modified much over the intervening centuries. More brushwood was brought, and Zhu Irzh pretended to sag in his bonds, his head drooping. The Khan continued to stride around the growing pyre, and once the wood had been assembled to his satisfaction, he called for a torch.

“Now!” the demon cried, as the Khan set the flame to the pyre and the sparks leaped up from the dry branches. Zhu Irzh leaped over the pyre and struck the Khan a blow to the jaw. The man’s head snapped around, then back again. Zhu Irzh could have sworn that he’d felt the Khan’s jaw shatter, but the terrible, leathery countenance was as masklike as before. The Khan swung his sword and Zhu Irzh jumped back. More warriors were running forward: he could not take them all. Raksha cried out and there was a whistle of wings as her crane swooped down from the sky. Zhu Irzh found himself seized unceremoniously by the waist and dragged upward.

The Khan gave a shout of fury, but Zhu Irzh and Raksha were already ascending, spiraling quickly into the evening sky. Stars spun, dizzyingly close, and the demon was reminded of Agarta and the constellation field. He felt a moment of relief, then Raksha swore.

Zhu Irzh looked down. There was still enough residual daylight to see the Khan’s warriors swarming like ants beneath them. But from this height, he had a far better view of the sylvan hills of the steppe. From that gash in the earth, from which the Khan and his men had sprung like some unnatural seed, a sequence of spiderweb cracks were radiating out across the land. More evidence that the spell had worked, but incompletely.

And from the center of the cracks spread a thin, towering black column. It took the demon a moment to realize what he was seeing.

“Ifrits!”

“What are they?” Raksha asked over her shoulder.

“Devils.” I should be the one to talk, the demon thought. The crane had seen them, too, and its heavy wingbeats quickened. It swooped low over a grove of trees, leaving the Khan’s troops far behind. Glancing back, Zhu Irzh saw the ifrits coming onward, gaining ground.

“Head for the Buddha!” he urged Raksha, but the crane was already veering to the east. Zhu Irzh clutched the shaman as the bird turned, and he felt the power starting to grow inside her. Instinct told him to leave her to it: it was her world, after all, her magic. Instinct was right, as the thunderbolt which shot past his ear consequently proved. Behind, he saw the ifrits scatter. A smoldering body plummeted into the trees. Ahead, the cliffs of the Buddha rose up. The crane headed straight for them, wind whistling past its wings, and Zhu Irzh felt a palpable impact as they hurtled through the invisible barrier that protected the cliff.