The Iron Khan (35 page)

“What about you?” Chen asked Mhara.

“I’m going to try to get onto Agarta. But at the moment — it’s shutting me out. Roerich has some ideas which we’re going to try.”

“I’ll stay with you,” Chen said. Inari’s safety was paramount, but after that, he needed to look after his city and the best chance of that was by helping Mhara. He started as his phone rang and an unknown number appeared on the screen.

“Yes?”

“Chen! It’s me!”

“Zhu Irzh! Where are you?”

“Here, in the city,” the demon said, speaking hurriedly. “So is the Khan. So is an army.”

“What kind of army?”

“All sorts — warriors from the steppe, horsemen, and he’s brought the terracotta army with him.”

For a moment, Chen didn’t think he’d heard properly. “The what?”

“That army that mad warlord had made,” Zhu Irzh said. “The one in Xi’an, to accompany him into the afterlife. The Khan’s animated them.”

“I see.” Though he didn’t, exactly. “All we’ve got to deal with is a rogue flying city, the demented former Empress of Heaven, and some possessed Celestials.”

“Yes, I saw Agarta,” Zhu Irzh said. “What’s it doing here?”

As briefly as possible, Chen brought him up-to-date. “We’re in Paugeng. Jhai’s here, too.” The demon hadn’t actually asked after his fiancée, Chen noted: perhaps he’d automatically assumed that Jhai was fine. One tended to, somehow.

“Then we’re heading over,” Zhu Irzh said.

“Be careful,” Chen told him. “There’s been one battle in the hallway already.”

•

He had not, the demon said later, encountered too many problems.

“Met a Celestial but she seemed stoned rather than aggressive. Other than that, the Khan’s army is congregating around the Opera House.”

“I know,” Chen said. “I spoke to the precinct. The army’s been drafted in.”

“I don’t know how much to worry about it,” Zhu Irzh said. “On the one hand you’ve got horsemen and clay zombies. Against the Chinese infantry, even in the middle of a city, you’d think it would be no contest. But then again, the Khan’s behind them.” He looked suddenly somber, an unfamiliar expression on the normally upbeat demon’s features.

“He’s really got to you, hasn’t he?” Chen said. Both Roerich and Jhai had spoken to him of the Khan, but this was the first time that Chen had been able to see for himself how greatly the warlord had affected the demon.

“Yeah. I don’t know why. Nicholas said he’d marked me but I don’t know why. He had me under a possession spell for a while but Omi managed to break it, otherwise I’d be standing outside the Opera House now waiting for orders.”

“Well,” Chen said firmly, “you’re free and that’s all that matters.”

“What’s happening with Agarta?”

“See for yourself.”

They were now in Jhai’s private apartments, high up in Paugeng. From here, they could see a huge swathe of the city. Agarta hung like a lantern directly above the Opera House itself: the gilded dome of the Opera seemed to be trying to reach up and touch Agarta’s base, as though the two were mirror images of one another.

“What’s the Empress up to?”

“I don’t know,” Chen said. “But I’d be very surprised if it turned out to have nothing to do with the Khan.”

•

Inari luxuriated in the wide bed, appreciating Jhai’s Egyptian cotton sheets and the dim, soothing lights. It was somehow more comfortable than even beautiful Agarta: perhaps because this was a demon’s home, after all, and not the province of the more morally elevated. And in a wider sense, the city was her home as well: an imperfect one, to be sure, with many dangers, but still more her place of sanctuary than anywhere else. Now that she finally had some peace and quiet, she could tune into the child within her. It turned slowly, not kicking, just moving in its watery casing like a small seal.

“Who are you?” Inari whispered aloud, and the child replied with calm certainty, utterly serene, completely secure, I am the bridge.

“What do you mean?” Inari asked, but the child said, with perhaps a touch more urgency, Someone is coming.

Inari sat up. A figure was forming out of a cloud of mist in the far corner of the room, shadowy and vague. Black and red tendrils snaked out from it, but Inari did not need to see these to know who it was.

“Empress!”

“You,” said the Empress with an absolute malevolence at odds with her usually saccharine voice, “are coming with me.”

The Empress drew a gateway in the air, but Inari retorted, “I don’t think so.”

She threw a warding hand outward, drawing on what she thought at first was the power in Paugeng, but then realized it came from a different source entirely: the child in her womb. There was a sudden surge and the Empress reeled backward, but the gateway remained. Inari braced herself for another bolt, but the door flew open and Chen was there, with others behind him.

The Empress, taken by surprise, faltered for a moment but the gateway was already starting to glow.

Enough, the child said inside, with sudden impatience. Inari remained rooted to the bed as the Empress, and Chen and his companions, were pulled through, leaving Inari clutching the sheet to her throat and staring at empty air.

•

Chen staggered against the wall. He’d been here only a short while before, fleeing while the city rocked around him, but this was greatly changed from the Agarta he’d known then. Dark threads covered its walls like a spiderweb, pulsing with faint crimson magic. In an impressively short space of time the Empress had converted the city into her own personal lair. Chen did a quick count: Roerich and Zhu Irzh, those who had come with him when he’d felt Inari’s distress and the cry of his child. Unnerving, to be suddenly summoned by one’s own unborn offspring, but Chen found it encouraging that the Empress could be distracted enough to screw up: it suggested that her power was not, after all, omnipotent.

“Where now?” Zhu Irzh asked.

Roerich pointed to the threads. “Those are growing more thickly further up the passage. I suggest we follow them.”

They did so, but it was not easy. Chen was reminded of a recent — and unwelcome — sojourn in the Ministry of Lust, in Hell, a place that was also alive, but in a more unpleasantly organic and fleshy way. This had something of the same feel to it, a sign of how far the Empress had fallen. They moved through air that had become stagnant and fetid, over floors that were covered in a soft powdery dust, like moldering fungus.

“So great a change in so little time,” Roerich said unhappily. “I’m appalled that she’s achieved so much.”

“She was an Empress,” Chen said. “Her husband was even more destructive, believe me.”

Agarta’s windows were also filmed, with a faint black slime, making it difficult to see where the city was currently located. Eventually Chen managed to make out the long reach of Shaopeng: it seemed that the city was still where they had last seen it. But he was distracted from the view when something rushed at them out of thin air, a swift and hideous shape. Roerich, with an exclamation, struck it aside and it swept screeching into a corner in a tangle of leathery wings. At once, Roerich was upon it, blasting it into an ashy outline with the force of a spell.

“What was that?” Chen asked. “Ifrit?”

“Ifrit.” Roerich’s dark eyes were narrowed. “And that means the Khan.”

“Wonder who’s the paymaster?” Zhu Irzh said.

“We might soon find out.”

The threads led them upward, winding around one of Agarta’s spiral stairs until they came out onto the summit of a landing. Here, the grime was so thick that Chen could see nothing from the little pointed window. Roerich turned to him. She’s here, his expression said, more eloquently than words.

The door before them was locked and the threads seemed to have welded it to the lintel. Roerich tugged, but soon stepped back. Chen was about to suggest alternatives, when the Empress evidently decided to take matters into her own hands. The door melted away before their eyes, leaving Chen unsure as to whether it had been an illusion in the first place.

Within, the Empress sat in state, enthroned on a black mass that reached up over her head. Like the threads, it, too, seemed almost alive: a series of arcs and spines that moved faintly in crustacean motion. From the top, a point coming down over the Empress’ head, a thick twisting rope of darkness sank into the middle of the Empress’ skull. She was smiling. Chen had no idea what this thing might be — something from the depths of the Sea of Night itself? — but he could hear it whispering. Beside him, Roerich gave a murmur of revulsion.

The Empress reached out a hand and the black mass convulsed. A bolt of energy shot along the Empress’ arm, pulsing with blue light, and Chen threw Roerich back against the wall as it shot past, leaving a scorched patch on the stones opposite. Beneath his feet, Chen felt Agarta writhe in agony.

“I need you to help me,” Roerich said urgently as they cowered behind the lintel. “I think I can help the city to eject her, but I need to ground the power in someone who is actually mortal.”

“Best if I do it,” Zhu Irzh said. “No offense, Chen, but demons are tougher.”

“I’m afraid by ‘mortal,’ I meant ‘human,’ ” Roerich said. He looked at Chen. “Are you willing?”

“I don’t feel that I have a choice.” Now that they were finally facing their foe, Chen once again felt that curious feeling of calm, a Zen-like bow to inevitability that he had experienced before at moments like this. Perhaps to someone of a different culture, the attitude toward choice would be different; to Chen, it seemed that it had to be a question of fate. Roerich appeared to recognize this in him, for he nodded.

“Very well.” He touched Chen lightly on the shoulder and together they stepped into the shimmering doorway.

“What’s wrong with him?” Huddled in a borrowed robe of Jhai’s, Inari stared down at the prone form of the Emperor. Mhara, floating in midair, looked as serene as a person asleep, his arms resting by his sides and his blue eyes closed. The light that surrounded him was very faint, yet it had pushed Inari away when she tried to touch Mhara, a gentle, but irresistible force.

“I don’t know.” Robin’s spectral face was creased with concern. “I’ve never seen him like this before.”

“It doesn’t look bad,” Inari ventured.

“Whatever the case,” Jhai said flatly, “he’s not going to be battling his mother anytime soon.”

“What if this is just his body and his soul is elsewhere?”

Robin sighed. “It’s not that simple. When he became Emperor, he essentially fused into a single entity — he doesn’t really have a soul, he is a soul. So what you see here is Mhara himself; there isn’t anything else.”

“So we now have the question of whether he’s done this to himself,” Jhai said, “or whether someone has done this to him.”

“I am certain of this,” Robin told her. “Mhara wouldn’t save himself and leave us at risk. That suggests that this is enforced from outside.”

“The Empress is the most likely suspect,” Jhai said. She crossed to the window and raised one of the blinds. Over her shoulder, Inari saw the cone shape of Agarta, still hanging over Shaopeng. But something had changed.

“It’s spinning,” she said.

The cone was beginning to revolve like a gigantic top. Dark threads spun out from it, as though the city was weaving. Within Inari, something twinged.

I have taken measures, the child said.

“What are you talking about?” Inari asked it aloud.

Jhai gave her an odd look. “I didn’t say anything.”

“I’m not talking to you.” She didn’t want to sound rude, but since the child had once more started to communicate…

The Emperor cannot be risked, the child said.

“I don’t understand.”

There was a feeling like a sigh: exasperation, perhaps. Oh Mother. As if talking to an idiot, the child said, He cannot be risked. I have placed him under my protection. This more than anything else scared Inari. The fact that her baby was able to affect the existence of the Emperor of Heaven was alarming in the extreme.

“The baby’s done it,” she said.

Jhai and Robin stared at her as though she’d gone mad. Maybe she had, Inari thought. It would explain a great deal. “It’s just told me,” she said.

“Well,” Robin remarked after a moment, “someone’s certainly done something.”

•

Agarta was revolving. Chen still could not see out of the windows, but he could feel the motion of the city underneath his feet, and within himself, too, via his magical senses. The Empress’ teeth were bared in a feral grin. She cast bolt after bolt of energy, which jolted through Roerich and down through Chen’s boots. Roerich himself was doing nothing, either protective or offensive, and Chen had decided to respect his decision. If everyone started going off on their own track, things tended to get messy.