The Iron Khan (27 page)

“Besides,” Miss Qi said, “we were in enough trouble of our own already.”

“You didn’t see your boyfriend when you were in Heaven, did you?” Jhai asked Robin.

The ghost shook her head. “No. It was like traveling through a channel. Everything on either side was just mist. Anyway, I have the feeling that if we’d sought Mhara out, you’d have found yourselves in the middle of Hell’s capital. I’ve never journeyed when connected like this.”

Inari repressed a shudder. At least they’d stayed together, in a manner of speaking.

“And now,” Roerich said, “I need to summon Agarta.”

Chen and Li-Ju had spent the night patiently examining every inch of the room, while the Empress continued to glower in the corner. There was no obvious way out: Banquo was, it seemed, taking no chances. Toward morning, Chen became aware of a further disturbance from the corner: the Empress was mumbling again.

“What’s she up to?” Li-Ju whispered, uneasily.

“I don’t know.” It sounded like the earlier spell, but Chen could tell that this one was of greater potency. The words sizzled through the air, striking sparks from the paneled wood. A faint smell of burning became evident.

“If she sets fire to the room — ” Li-Ju began.

Quietly, Chen started to form the beginnings of a counterspell, one against fire. His own magic was not strong enough to break out of a room, but it had some impact, all the same. Something water-summoning… Just as well they were on a river, although Chen did not like to think of what he might be bringing up alongside the spell.

But it seemed that destruction was not, after all, the Empress’ intent. The sparks fizzed out, hissing into spirals of smoke, which began to thicken.

“Madam — ” Chen warned, but the Empress was not listening. Through the thickening smoke he could see her eyes roll back into her head, making the beautiful face look even more masklike. Her mouth fell open as though her jaw had become suddenly unhinged. Beneath Chen’s feet, the boat gave a violent lurch. Thrown to one side, he grasped the windowsill. Through the tiny porthole, a treetop sailed by.

“My god! We’re flying!” Li-Ju breathed.

Rather than escaping from her prison, it seemed that the Empress had simply decided to steal it. Footsteps thundered down the corridor and the door was flung open.

“What — ?” Banquo roared. He hurled a spell at the Empress, a glistening conjuration of gold-and-blue, but it was too late. The Empress was changing, no longer a statue-still, disdainful figure, but a spinning confection of magical threads, weaving out from her form like a spider. The room reeked and stank of magic, something truly ancient, from a time of sacrifices and war. Chen coughed as rancid spellwork tore into his throat. The river was now a line of dull green far below, the trees themselves left far behind. The boat was spiraling up through the rainforest canopy, passing the distant summits with their spinning coils of birds, up into the blueness of sky. Ahead, as the boat turned, Chen could see a thin, dark crack.

“What’s that?” Li-Ju asked. Drawn by the motion of the Empress’ magical engine, the boat was speeding up, no longer turning like a twig caught on an eddy, but arrowing straight for the gap.

“I don’t know.” Yet Chen thought he did. The boundaries between the worlds were breaking down, allowing magic to bleed between systems, allowing rifts and ruptures. The pirates had taken advantage of one such, and now their captive was turning the tables on Banquo and his crew.

But where was she heading? Surely not back to the limbo of the Sea of Night? And Heaven would hardly welcome her. That left, to Chen’s mind, a handful of unappealing alternatives.

•

It wasn’t long before they found out. The boat sailed straight for the crack and as it approached, there was a roll of thunder. Lightning shot out from the crack, forming a web in the heavens and merging with the threads of energy generated by the Empress. She was drawing her power from somewhere, Chen realized: this was more than she could possess herself. Besides, it felt different — more like the magic of Hell, but with an added foreign quality that he was unable to place. All he and Li-Ju could do was hang on while the boat hurtled through the lightning storm. Beside them, Banquo was cursing.

The gap now filled the air ahead. Through the little window, Chen kept getting glimpses of its darkness, shot with lights: scarlet and jade and a fiery white. Then the world beyond the window was blotted out as they soared into the gap.

Immediately, all the sound and fury ceased. A vast quietness fell upon the boat. The Empress, now a wadded mass of magical threads, continued to spin like some silent generator. Li-Ju turned to Chen and spoke, but no sound emerged from his mouth. Chen felt as though his ears had been packed with cotton wool. Inside his chest, his heartbeat slowed to a painful, thudding pace. His breath seemed to be congealing in his lungs.

“What?” But he couldn’t even hear his own voice.

Gradually, the circle of darkness that was the window began to lighten. Chen saw a drift of cloud, then a strip of sky in between the swirling mist. A moment later, the Empress’ gyrating figure began to slow down. Her eyes reappeared within the mass, two malevolent black sparks. Far beneath the boat, a green curve appeared.

It was Earth, and yet it was wrong. As soon as they were through the gap, Chen knew that he was back home, but there were subtle differences. Nothing obvious in the air through which the boat was descending, no clue in the land below them — but the magic was wrong. Or was that — right? Chen felt a surge of unfamiliar power through his fingertips, as if a bolt of lightning had arced up from the earth itself. He felt connected; he could almost have described the land that was now speeding by under their feet even if he was still unable to see it.

Across the room, the Empress’ eyes widened. The spell came to Chen’s lips almost before he had time to think about it. He threw out a hand, a gesture which was normally accompanied by slicing a spell into his palm. But now the magic shot through him effortlessly. He had a sudden, disconcerting vision of himself from the outside, a figure of light, one hand outflung, and then the magic was coursing out of him and striking the Empress full on.

It sent her into a spin and the boat spun with her. Chen reached down into the land, found the threads that made the link, pulled, tugged, twisted….

Li-Ju and Banquo were staring at him wide-eyed.

“What the hell are you doing?” the pirate demanded.

“Taking us in,” Chen said, humming with magic. He spread his fingers wide, pointing away from his adversary now and taking the boat into a long glide. They were now perhaps twenty feet above the ground. A grove of trees rushed past. Chen took the boat lower until the grass brushed its sides, and then he stopped it. The boat sank to a gentle, lurching halt.

Immediately the Empress rose in a rustle of skirts and magic and rushed at the door.

“Oh no you don’t!” Banquo said. He reached for her but Chen was quicker. He picked up the trailing threads of the Empress’ magic and bound them around her. The Empress toppled like a cut sapling, hobbled by her skirts and the remnants of her power. Banquo hauled her upright and bound her hands behind her with a fragment of rope. The Empress cursed and spat, but suddenly she grew limp and sagging in the pirate’s grasp.

“Where are we?” Li-Ju threw the door wide and started down the corridor. Chen followed him, ignoring the pirate.

The grasslands stretched as far as the eye could see, a soft rolling land starred with flowers in all shades of yellow and mauve, blurring the landscape into an impressionistic watercolor. A few groves of low trees broke up the steppe. In the distance a herd of what might have been deer grazed peacefully.

Li-Ju was staring, with a frown. “This is Earth. But it feels like Heaven.”

“Earth’s changed,” Chen agreed. He was still aware of the aftermath of unaccustomed power; aware, too, of the force of it coursing underneath his feet, as swift and smooth as uninterrupted water, there for the taking. Quickly, he brought Li-Ju up to speed.

“And you don’t normally have that kind of power?” the captain asked.

“No. All my magic has been hard won,” said Chen. He saw no need to be macho about it, not at this stage of his life. He gripped the rail of the grounded boat, looking out across the sea of grass. “I had to study hard. It didn’t come naturally. The only time I’ve ever had that sort of magic available so readily was when I was still under Kuan Yin’s protection and that was just borrowed. It wasn’t like this.”

More out of wonderment than need, Chen reached down into the ground with his senses and pulled up a handful of power. It sparked and sparkled through the air, changing into a swallow and shooting off across the grassland. They watched it go.

“So,” Li-Ju said, after a weighty moment. “Earth, but not Earth.”

“Yes. We need to find out what’s happened. And we need to do something with the Empress. I don’t trust the pirate not to cut some kind of deal.”

But then Chen was staring in amazement out over the grass.

“What’s that?”

It was not like watching a plane descend, or a spaceship — the nearest thing, Inari decided, to what it actually was. Rather, the flying city of Agarta arrived by degrees, like a palimpsest: first a shadow on the morning air, then a firmer image which blurred the mountain wall, and finally its full self, hanging against the bulk of the rocks. Inari had never seen anything like it. Even Jhai was silent.

“Thus it comes,” Nicholas Roerich said, with quiet satisfaction. A bridge was spinning itself weblike across the air, joining the gap between Agarta and the wall of the temple. It looked too delicate to bear any human weight, a gossamer confection of silvery threads. Above it, Agarta’s turrets towered.

“You spoke of the Masters,” Jhai said. “Where are they?”

“Within.” Roerich took a step onto the bridge. “Follow me. You’ll be quite safe.”

“I’ll go first,” Robin said. “I’m already dead, after all.”

“I’ve died once before,” Inari murmured, but she let the ghost go ahead of her. Stepping out onto the bridge gave her a moment of extreme disorientation, but mindful of Jhai and Miss Qi close behind, she tried not to hesitate. And indeed, once she was actually on the bridge, she discovered that it felt quite solid and safe, as though she could not fall off, despite its fragility and the depths of the gaping air beneath her. A minute’s confident walking later, and she was stepping off the bridge again into Agarta.

It did not feel as though it welcomed her, nor repelled her. Instead she had the distinct sensation that she was being watched and evaluated. Beside her, Jhai gave an uneasy start. “I’m not sure this place likes me.”

Miss Qi and Robin, predictably, seemed to have no such qualms. “What a lovely place,” the Celestial warrior said, striding forward to examine a lily. Inari, looking back, saw that the temple was fading away behind them. The bridge had disappeared, separating them from the land, and within moments the temple had become no more than a shadow. The mountains, too, seemed different: more solid, lit by shades of green as far as their pale summits.

“Where are we?” But she quickly answered her own question. “We’re back on Earth, aren’t we?”

Roerich nodded. “Earth-the-Changed.”

The mountains were folding around them, shifting as Agarta moved.

“We’re flying!” Inari said.

Jhai turned to Roerich. “Where to now?”

“Your fiancé’s gone back in time,” Roerich said.

“To do what?”

“He’s looking for the Khan.”

“I thought,” said Jhai, “that the Khan was looking for him.”

•

Inari wandered around the narrow streets of the city. She had been left to her own devices and she felt safe here, although she still did not feel that she had been wholly accepted. The city was judging her, seeing whether she was worthy of acceptance. It made Inari nervous, but she was damned if she was going to beg for its approval. She had Chen’s approval, after all, and that was all that mattered. She had been given a chamber, a room high in a tower from which she could view the changing, rushing world, but Inari, strangely restless, preferred to walk.

Roerich had explained what had happened, that his young acolyte, Omi, had accidentally released a spell from the remaking Book of Heaven. And this new Earth was what the Book had created, but it was incomplete, somehow fractured. Inari could have told him that already, for Hell had appeared unchanged. Perhaps the sad old world was too much now for even the Book to unmake and it had simply displaced it, papered over the cracks, created an illusion.

The mountains underwent one last fold and were left behind. Now Agarta skimmed over seemingly endless plains, and the sweet smell of empty grassland filled the air. Once Inari looked up to see a white horse running toward her, its mane flying behind it. Then, with a flare of its nostrils, it was gone. She wondered what it had seen. But Agarta was slowing down now, the grass below visible as more than a pale wheat-green blur. Inari went to a low wall and looked over, parting a curtain of cascading roses.