Zhu Irzh thought that Robin was about to say something, but she closed her mouth and looked unhappy instead.
"All right," Chen said, adding with a smile, "I'm not going to argue with the future Jade Emperor."
"We have the ingredients for a spell," Mhara said. "Something simple, and protective, and old. You five represent the elements—the demon here is fire, because he is from Hell. Robin is water, because she's a woman. Paravang the dowser is earth, and you, Detective Chen—because you are a blade of the state—are metal. And Jhai is wood, the uncertain element."
Chen nodded, and the demon thought he understood. "Together, we are the world," Chen said.
"And even a goddess will find it a little hard to challenge the world," Mhara remarked. "But her powers are waning. She's going back to being the human she used to be, although she won't be there yet. To fight her, I need to draw on powers that are latent in me, and I'll need your strength to do that. Form a circle around me."
Zhu Irzh unwound himself from Jhai and took one of her hands. Since the dowser and Robin were clearly balking, Chen stepped forward and took her other hand. Jhai growled at him, and tried to tug away, but her hand remained firmly clasped within Chen's own.
"Jhai, be a good girl," Zhu Irzh said, feeling ineffectual.
"Grrrr!"
Jhai said, showing teeth, but she let herself be pulled into the circle all the same. Paravang Roche eyed the demon with loathing and came to stand next to Chen. Mhara stood in the middle, eyes closed, and to Zhu Irzh's demonic sight he seemed suddenly insubstantial, shimmering against the frozen waste beyond. The ground rumbled and the great gate rang like a bell.
"She's coming," Mhara said. By now, the ground was shuddering so much that Zhu Irzh had difficulty keeping hold of the hands of Jhai and Robin. He was not sure whether the suddenly uncertain terrain was responsible for Mhara's increasingly diffuse appearance, or whether the prince of Heaven was doing that all on his own.
The gate clanged, sending the circle staggering. Then it opened, to reveal the goddess' chariot. The cattle had changed. They were black and bloated, their sides mottled with bloody crimson bruises, and they stank of rotting meat. Their horns were all fire now, and sulphurous smoke streamed from their gaping mouths. Senditreya had changed, too. She was monstrous, but where the cattle were swollen, Senditreya was gaunt, her comfortable cowlike flesh gone. She was stripped down to a thin layer of skin over bone and her eyes bulged in their sockets. Her dress hung on her in heavy folds; her skeletal hands gripped the reins. She looked like an ancient, desiccated woman which, the demon realized, was exactly what she was. When she saw who was standing before her, she shrieked. Zhu Irzh saw Paravang Roche cower and quail, and could not blame him.
"Don't break the circle!" he heard Chen cry. But the goddess charged. At the very edge of the circle, no more than a few feet from Chen and Jhai, the cattle stopped and tossed their heads. Mhara, by now, was no more than a glowing being of light, radiating outward. The snow beneath Zhu Irzh's boots hissed and melted, he felt warmth on his skin. The goddess reached into the depths of the chariot and produced a whip of fire, which she launched into the circle. Zhu Irzh felt a bolt of heat travel down his arm: he gasped, but kept tight hold of Jhai's hand. Mhara seized the whip by its flaming end and jerked it out of the goddess' hands: it fell sizzling into the snow. The cattle stamped and roared. Mhara sent a thunderbolt out of the circle: Zhu Irzh glimpsed a bloody, glowing hand from the center of the light. It struck Senditreya in the abdomen, and raced down the sides of the chariot. The goddess staggered, but did not succumb. She raised her hand, spoke a word, and a whirling tornado of snow rose up around the circle, seeping into it like a thousand icy needles. The demon heard Robin cry out as the snow lashed her face; her grip on his hand tightened into pain. And then the petals of thousand-flower were falling all around them and Mhara's form glowed more brightly.
The goddess closed her eyes and seemed to shrink within herself. For a fleeting instant, Zhu Irzh thought this signaled her defeat, but he soon realized that Senditreya was only mustering her forces. She reached out a hand and flicked the left-hand cow on its hindquarters. The beast bellowed as if stung by a gadfly and stamped its foot. Immediately, the earth cracked and split. Above Zhu Irzh, the sky itself shuddered: he thought then that it was no more than illusion, and it was the ceiling of Shai itself that was shaking. The cow stamped again, and then a third time, and the ground rippled up like a tsunami. The circle broke. Zhu Irzh was flung sideways, sprawling against Robin. Mhara was hurled to the ground and lay still. The light that had surrounded him faded and was gone. A gaping crack, several feet across, reached from the cow's hoof to just beyond his body.
Senditreya leaped down from the chariot and strode past Zhu Irzh. She picked up the handle of the whip from where it had fallen into the snow and, once more, fire lashed forth. She brought the whip down on Mhara's unconscious form, leaving a long, bloody groove in his side.
"No!" Robin cried. She was on her feet before Zhu Irzh could stop her. She grasped the goddess by a bony arm, but Senditreya flicked her contemptuously away as though Robin were nothing more than a bothersome insect. Robin flew into a snowbank and did not rise again. With a sinking dismay, Zhu Irzh noted that her head lay at an odd angle. There was no sign of Jhai. Chen was again standing, beginning to chant a spell, but his voice was in rags; he had been winded by the fall. The goddess lashed down with the whip once more.
Zhu Irzh knew that he had little chance against a vengeful deity, and when it came to it, whose side was he on, anyway? But then again, Senditreya presumably wasn't very popular with Hell right now, and perhaps some capital could be gained if he were the one to bring her down—but as he was debating the rights and wrongs of the issue, there was a howl of pure fury from behind.
"You fucking cow!" Paravang Roche ran over the snowbank with remarkable speed and launched himself at his goddess. She was too startled to react as he hit her. The dowser's momentum carried them both into the crack, which closed behind them with a reverberating shockwave. Zhu Irzh blinked. Senditreya was gone. The chariot still stood, with two mild-eyed white cattle in its traces. Above them, reached the high vault of Shai. As Zhu Irzh watched, it began to collapse.
Shai seemed to have retreated, and it was so cold, as cold as the void between the stars. It struck through to the demon's bones and beyond, freezing blood and sinew, welding his tongue to the roof of his mouth, his eyes transfixed, the damp warm air in his lungs turned to ice. Then he felt a single note, very sweet and clear, ring through the whole world. Ice that he was, it seemed to shatter him, break him soundlessly apart so that he spun into pieces, fragments of muscle and glassy bone flying in all directions, followed by an unwinding spool of blood. From a distant place, he watched his blood unravel, a dull silver thread bursting into droplets, and he followed it, all the way across the world, higher and higher and then falling like rain. As each drop fell, it impacted on the iron ground and it was as though all the weight of the world descended. Then he was through, seeping beneath the surface of the earth, the presence of pain, dispersal and then the familiar stretched, dreadful sense of the world itself, spinning ponderously on its axis, one face toward the hearth of the sun, the other touched by the dark and the cold, and the city on the edge of the world just coming into day. Instinctively, he gathered his fragmented senses and pulled toward the bright line of the sun, to where the Great Meridian ran in a fluttering path of fire beneath the city, and his tigress was waiting.
Jhai finally managed to get a hold of herself as the ceiling fell in. She had blurred, uncertain memories of a snowy plain, other people, a mad goddess, but none of it was clear. There was the taste of blood in her mouth and her spine ached at the base. Coughing, she dodged falling masonry, struggling to find the demon and get clear. There was a searing crunch from the doorway as the lintel began to give way. The front of Shai was subsiding, sinking slowly and gracefully in upon itself. She still had no idea how she had come to be here in the first place. Then the floor heaved and Jhai was knocked to her hands and knees. The lintel cracked with a shotgun report, bringing a shower of dust and plaster down upon her head. Jhai could not see; the chalky dust saturated her nose and throat. She coughed and gagged, knowing that she ought to get up and run. She could feel her
devic
nature surging back in defense. It occurred to her to wonder where she would end up when she died. She thought she knew.
As the doorframe fell inward, however, she felt herself seized, wrenched free and thrust out onto the steps. Frantically, she rolled clear. Behind her, the front of Shai fell in. Jhai lay on the shaking steps, gasping in long breaths of the dust-smothered air. Then, as swiftly as it had come, the tremor stopped. She remained there for a minute and then, retching, got to her feet and rubbed the dust from her eyes.
The morning sun was a pale coin above Wuan Chih, rising up through the mist, and somewhere a bird was singing, a nightingale in the uprooted trees along Shaopeng. Jhai took a step toward the ruin. All four walls of Shai had come down, along with the dome. The ground still shuddered with the aftershock. Detective Inspector Chen was standing by her side, his round face pasty with dust, like a pie, as he gaped up at the wreckage.
"Well," Zhu Irzh remarked from her other side. "Happy Day of the Dead, eh?"
The Great Meridian had settled uneasily back into its appointed track, but it would be a while before the tremors ceased entirely. Shaopeng Street had been split straight down the center, and the tram rails had been swallowed by the gaping crack. Most of the shops and chophouses were damaged, either reduced to piles of mortar or leaning unsteadily against one another.
Along Step Street, the shacks had collapsed like a row of dominoes and at least one demon lounge was now buried beneath the mass of buildings that had slid down the hill. The wall of Ghenret harbor had been breached and the water level had risen over the sea sluices and flooded back into the Jhenrai canal and over its banks, placing the go-downs and warehouses in several feet of brackish tide.
Shai was a true ruin now.
The outlying suburbs of Orichay and Bharulay had suffered considerably, slipping down the muddy hills on which they had been built. Much of Bharulay—compartment blocks, warehouses and the tram station—had ended up on top of the mining works, sealing the entrance to the hills of Wuan Chih. The rest of the shattered Eregeng Trade House had fallen into the streets beneath, squashing the Second National Bank underneath it.
The roof of the Pellucid Island Opera House had fallen in, and back in Ghenret the foundations of Paugeng had slipped, causing the tower to list. From a distance, it appeared as if the home of the Tserais had put its ear to the ground to listen. Robin's lab was crushed beneath it.
A later estimate put the death toll at nine thousand, and the city was generally considered to have got off lightly. Three thousand or more were missing, among them a well-known and reclusive poet, gone without trace.
When they finally reached Paugeng through the wrecked streets, they found that its great plexiglass wall had been shattered by the quake, letting in the night and the dusty wind. The tower was listing even further, and from the looks of things, it would not be long before it followed so many of the city's taller buildings, and collapsed. No one had got around to putting any warning tape on it: there was just too much destruction. Zhu Irzh thought of the boys in the port, with their icon of Jhai. If they could see their goddess now, he thought . . . He hoped they were still alive. Soon, the looting would begin, though from what he'd witnessed along Shaopeng, it already had.
"Surprised to find yourself back here?" the demon asked.
"Since you ask, yes." Jhai rose up from where she had been sitting on a block of fallen concrete, trying to reach her mother on the cellphone. She winced. "I feel as though I've run a marathon."
"You have, more or less. And what now, Jhai?"
The heiress paused, then said with an effort,
"I
don't know." Her voice was tart, but she was staring fiercely into the empty air, and then she passed a hand across her watering eyes.
"Jhai?"
"It's only the wind." She swallowed. "I'm all right. My mother is all right. She and Ei got to the airport, she told me." Then she said, "I thought I knew what I was doing, Zhu Irzh. I reached too far."
"Hubris," the demon said cheerfully. "Gets them all in the end. But you're one of the lucky ones. You've got a second chance. A while ago I checked up on extradition treaties between different realms. As a Keralan, you should be exempt from anything the Celestial Realms might level at you. My own Hell is a slightly different matter, and I'm sure the Jade Emperor will try to make sure that you pay some sort of penalty, but these things take a lot of time. For the moment, I think you might even be safe."
But will I?
he thought. Jhai's virus might still be in his system, judging from the episode in the demon lounge. What if he had another attack? It might be a good idea to start talking about a cure.
Jhai was looking at him warily. "You're sure of that, are you?"
"I'm never sure of anything." He reached out and took her hand. "Except one thing. You'll never really belong with humankind. And you'd be a foreigner in Hell. So now you're an exile, like me." His fingers closed around hers.
Jhai scowled. "Zhu Irzh? Are you
proposing?"
"What, marriage?" the demon said, affronted. "Certainly not. But I think we could get to know one another a bit. Is your bedroom still intact?"
Jhai looked at him for several moments. He could not read her expression. At last she said, "I doubt it. I suppose we could find a hotel."