The Demon and the City

The Demon and the City
© 2006 by Liz Williams
This edition of The Demon and the City © 2008 by Night Shade Books
 
Cover art by Jon Foster
Cover design by Michael Fusco
Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen
 
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-59780-111-9
Night Shade Books
Please visit us on the web at
http://www.nightshadebooks.com

Acknowledgements:

With thanks
 . . .

 . . .to everyone at Night Shade Books for being such a pleasure to deal with.

 . . .to Marty Halpern for his help and (considerable) patience.

 . . .as ever, to Shawna McCarthy for all her hard work, encouragement and help.

 . . .to everyone in the Montpellier Writing Group.

 . . .to David Pringle, for accepting the first Chen story for
Interzone
.

 . . .to everyone at Milford, who kept asking when the Chinese detective story was going to be published. (And now it is!)

 . . .to everyone in the Cantonese group for their help and support, particularly Chris Priest and Leigh Kennedy, and also to Tanith Lee for her unfailing kindness.

 . . .to my parents.

 . . .and last but not least, to Trevor Jones, witchcraft shop owner, historian and best friend.

"In the first rank of visionary science fiction writers."
—Charles Stross, author of
Halting State

"In
The Demon and the City
, Liz Williams does one better than giving you more of the same: she gives you more of what you didn't even know you wanted.
Demon. ..
has a flavor all its own. .. I'm looking forward to seeing the third book."
—C. E. Murpy, author of
Urban Shaman

"If Liz Williams were a casserole chef, she'd have a heavy hand with the garlic, onions, chili, ginger and some exotic spices you can only get in a stall tucked away in an obscure corner of an even more obscure market. But you'd certainly come back for seconds . . . ."
—
SFX magazine

"Williams's second novel featuring Chen and his otherworldly sidekick delivers another dose of fantastic adventure, blending Chinese mythology, elements of an old-fashioned murder mystery, and a generous dollop of acerbic humor."
—
Library Journal

"
The Demon and the City
offers readers an entertaining adventure steeped, not tinged, with the supernatural, played out against a labyrinthine industrial murder mystery. You'll get your pulse-pounding pages turned, but you'll also find yourself immersed in Williams' complex cosmology."
—Rick Kleffel,
The Agony Column

Detective Inspector Chen:
Snake Agent
The Demon and the City
Precious Dragon
The Shadow Pavilion (Forthcoming)
Banner of Souls
Bloodmind
Darkland
Empire of Bones
The Ghost Sister
Nine Layers of Sky
The Poison Master
The Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories

The Chinese inhabitants of Singapore Three say that August is an unlucky month. They say that it is called the month of the dead, for it is always during the endless burning days that the dead return, looking for the living, drawn by blood and breath. They tell their children:
You do not know how it was when we lived in the suburbs of Beijing and Guangzhou, or the willow villages of Szechuan, in the ancient cities where people understand how to keep the dead at bay. But in this great new city of Singapore Three, where the entrances to the Hell are closer and the veils between them are fractured, we no longer live in a place when a story is only a story, told to frighten a child in the darkness. Nor do you remember when the demons and the hungry ghosts were only dreaming shadows in an ordinary life, until we left the old cities and came to the new, and found that during certain months and certain times, when the eternal Wheel of Life and Death grates on its spokes, the world changes.

At such times, one can only prepare for the possibility of death as best one can.

Deveth Sardai, stepping from a downtown tram, was not thinking of death. She was, instead, wondering how to extricate herself from the latest disastrous relationship. The policy of ignoring the girl was clearly not working: Sardai had not phoned her since the previous Monday, but a litany of messages, of increasing desperation, had been left on her answerphone.

Sardai smiled thinly as she walked down to the retailers' market, to wander, anonymous, beneath the girdered roofs of the warehouse shelter. The market was crowded with people on their way home from the production lines of Haitan. In fruitsellers' quarter Sardai nearly tripped on the vegetables that spilled out over the floor, squashed into mush across the dank concrete. She kicked aside a burst cucumber, turned the corner and found herself out of the fruitsellers' street and into the meat market. The
butcherei,
mostly women, glanced at her incuriously as she passed. The mild-eyed heads of the black cattle, swinging on their racks, held more expression. Sardai stepped queasily between the remnants which littered the floor; the concrete was washed with a faint pink gloss. Nothing was wasted, Sardai knew. The cattle were reared in the derelict lots between the apartment buildings of Bharulay and Saro Town; genes acquired on the black market and manipulated to produce Indian cows, of a sort. The
butcherei
slaughtered them illegally, bleeding them dry in hidden locations among the back streets in a literal moveable feast. The traders brought the bodies here before sunrise. The horns and hooves would be the first to go, sold off to the herbalists to be ground into powder and marketed as fraudulent aphrodisiacs.

At the end of butchers' street, a shrunken, cheerful woman was washing out a cloth in a bloodstained bucket. She beamed up at Sardai, who had paused.

"What you want?"

"I'm looking for the remedy market," Sardai said. It seemed to have moved since her last visit; they rearranged the market frequently, to baffle the inspectors. No one was fooled, except the hapless customers.

"Oh, sure." The woman wrung out the cloth a last time and heaved herself to her feet. "I'll show you."

She walked with Sardai to the end of the meat market. Beyond, in front of the pilings that raised the market from the water, the butchered cattle lay in heaps of unidentifiable flesh. From the corner of her eye, Sardai saw a lean, dark shape slink behind the piles.

"There!" the woman said, pointing. At the end of the meat racks, a helpful yellow line led along the warehouse floor. Obediently, Sardai followed it and came round to the familiar red-canopied corridor, the scarlet awnings incongruous beneath the rusted ironwork roof of the remedy market. The stalls were fringed with amulets: the almond-eyed shepherd god; My Lady simpering in a violet mantle with a sheaf of corn in her tiny arms; the little fox-faced demon of the mines. They shimmered before Sardai's gaze. Maybe she should buy her girlfriend a present, make it clear that it was a parting gift. She didn't dislike the girl, after all, it was just that once the first rush of intoxicated desire had passed, Sardai had started to feel suffocated. It was the same old story; it had happened before, it would happen again. Sardai gave a mental shrug. That was just the way she was. She did not intend to give way to guilt. She did not believe in it, and it solved nothing. Almost involuntarily, however, her hand reached out and unhooked the icon of a girl, an inch long, with the crescent moon on her brow. It was the sort of thing you hung in the kitchen window, or saw swinging on the dashboard of taxis. Sardai asked, "How much is this one? Can I have her?"

A swift hand, its owner unseen, wrapped the icon in red tissue paper to keep her safe on her journey, and Sardai dropped the little package into her bag. Our Lady of Storms, the woman from the sea, reposed amidst Sardai's pens, card wallet, keys and the rest of the junk in her bag. Her girlfriend would like the little icon since she lit candles to the goddess at festival time. Sardai herself followed a different path. Thinking of this, she smiled again. All magic is art, she thought, and she considered herself to be an artist in the truest sense of the word: one who is not afraid, one who dares to gamble for great stakes. She walked on to the herbalist's. Dried carcasses of snakes rustled in their pannier with the semblance of life. Someone was having a little joke, but Sardai wasn't going to gratify them by being startled. She leaned over the dry, writhing bodies and purchased a pinch of bitter mint and then a tiny bag of lobelia, imported from the West. The herbs were horribly expensive, but Sardai didn't care. They were useful, if one practiced a particular kind of art.

Her purchases completed, Sardai wandered to the end of remedy street and came out opposite the yawning exit. Beyond, the slick waters of the harbor were apricot in the falling light. It was time to go home. Sardai walked along the slippery platform that led from the market entrance and out into the southern end of Siling Street, a meandering labyrinth of iron shelters and cookhouses. The smell of frying meat and peppers filled the evening air. Chickens were rotating on a spit in the nominal gutter, where a shadowy man was blowing a fire into life. Sardai walked quickly; it was growing dark. She slipped into her usual routine, imagining herself ten feet tall and looking down on the people she passed, with her square shoulders back and her hand on the mace canister. Guns were banned; they were common enough on the black market but the penalty for shooting your assailant was death, anyway, so why bother? Sardai was always careful; there were very few nice parts of town.

At the end of the street a humpbacked bridge led over a narrow arm of the main canal, a winding stretch of water called the Taitai: the little wrist. Sardai crossed into a wilderness of apartment blocks separated by vacant lots where sparrow vine covered the fallen masonry. Something was always being built up or torn down. The exception was the Waste, the stretch of land which crossed Jhenrai southeast to northwest, a ragged scar created when an old mine had caved in and taken the apartment homes with it. The fires still burned, fueled by some persistent gas seepage beneath the soil. People lived on the Waste: the rootless, the insane. Sardai avoided it in daylight and at night took detours out of its way, but she was well past the Waste by now and nearly home to the row of old rickety houses in the eastern part of the quarter.

Turning back, she saw a last strip of pale green sky over the harbor. The tower of the Paugeng Corporation snaked up in absurd modernist spirals above the docks; the red bird logo catching the dead sun and glowing against the rearing wall. That was a weird setup, Sardai thought, with grim amusement. She had known the Paugeng heiress, mad Jhai Tserai, from their debutante days. And now, they had an even stronger connection. Smiling, she turned back and continued walking.

Something came fast out of the shelter of the darkness. Sardai had a brief glimpse of a lean shape moving too quickly to see, and then it was gone. She'd seen something in the retail market, her bewildered mind told her, sneaking among the bones, but that had been a dog, a little thing. This was a person. She swung the mace canister out of her pocket, looked about her warily. She could see nothing. She backed off, starting to run down Mherei Street, but it was right behind her, alongside her. She could see it out of the corner of her eye, pacing beside her, silent. She stopped, nearly stumbling, and turned but there was nothing there. Her breath whimpered in her throat. There was a great wave of soundless motion behind her, the smell of the sea, hot salt washed over her, roaring in her ears, bearing her down into the well of the apricot sky. She saw the crescent moon swing round, and then she was out into the gentle shallows, leaving it all behind.

Neatly, quickly, she was dragged into the silence behind the dark streets. No one had seen, animal-sense said, no one was watching.

"Do we know who she is?" Seneschal Zhu Irzh asked, idly flicking the ash from his opium cigarette. The body sprawled at his feet, outlined by a faint nimbus glow. The girl had not long been dead, though there was no trace of her dismayed spirit in the immediate neighborhood and surprisingly little blood, given the state she was in.

Sergeant Ma eyed him askance and said, "No, not yet. Forensics is trying to get a positive ID on her now. And you shouldn't be smoking those. They're bad for your health."

"My dear sergeant, in case it had escaped your attention, I
am
already dead. In a manner of speaking, of course, seeing that I am a demon." Ma merely grunted. Zhu Irzh smiled to himself. Ma's attitude toward him was a combination of the disapproving and the protective, which was a long way from the sergeant's earlier attitude of insensate fear. Zhu Irzh had only been attached to the Singapore Three police department for a few months, but had already managed to provoke strong reactions in his colleagues, both positive and negative, yin and yang. Zhu Irzh liked to think that it was the hallmark of a masterful personality, but Detective Inspector Chen, his immediate superior, witheringly attributed the phenomenon to Zhu Irzh's otherworldly origins. Zhu Irzh reflected on this as he stood over the mutilated remains of what had, after some initial investigation, proved to be a young woman.