The Iron Khan (30 page)

And all at once the ground shifted beneath the demon’s feet, as though the mere utterance of the name had been enough to cause the earth to shake. He was standing directly in the path of a horseman and threw himself to the side as the man bore down. He glimpsed a harsh, set face, the mouth twisted in a snarl, and then the horseman rode past, the iron sword slamming down.

Timur the Lame. Not the Khan he’d seen: a later version, perhaps, in the same mold — but then the demon turned and saw the Iron Khan. The man — if one could call him that — wore blood-red armor. His face looked as though it had been carved from bone, bearing little flesh. He was staring straight at Zhu Irzh and his rictus grin was worse than Timur’s snarl. He raised a hand and Zhu Irzh felt a wash of magic that was so old and powerful that his knees started to buckle. The demon rarely felt weak — as a denizen of Hell in a world full of humans, he was not often at either a physical or a psychological disadvantage. But faced once more with the Khan, he felt as though he’d been caught in some magical riptide. It rolled him over and under. When it finally washed him up, Raksha was back by his side, spitting curses.

“Zhu Irzh!”

They weren’t alone. Some two hundred people stood with them, bewildered. Almost all were the attackers: Timur’s men, though after a cursory glance, Zhu Irzh did not think that Timur himself was among them. All carried bloodied swords.

The blue domes reached up into an equally cerulean sky. Ahead, Zhu Irzh saw an arch: suns and golden tigers and striped deer cavorted across an azure background. It reminded him of the scenes in the Buddha’s cave, innocent and joyful and a realm away from the blood-soaked man who now roared in triumph, raised his sword aloft, and caused the world to change once more.

•

The steppe, and a curve of a river, somehow familiar and yet unknown. The part of Zhu Irzh’s mind that still remained intact to himself told him that this was generic recognition, not somewhere he had previously been. He smelled fresh grass, something spicy, something piercingly sweet, with the dank odor of the river running underneath it all. Then all of this was blotted out as Master rode by, turning the black pony fast along the lines of warriors, and the demon bowed his head, along with his companions, including the black-haired woman whose name he no longer knew.

You bowed your head or you lost it. By now, a day after the battle of Samarkand, Zhu Irzh had learned that much and so had the others.

“We ride on!” Master cried. His teeth were bared in a fierce grin, exulting. That little separate part of the demon’s mind, raging with frustration, told him that the Khan’s great plan was moving toward fruition. Freed in time by the imperfect actions of the Book, the demon thought, the Khan had seen his opportunity and snatched it: traveling forward from that initial point, gathering an army as he rode. Was his ultimate destination the present day, or some other time? Zhu Irzh did not know, and again he bowed his head.

He also did not know whether this was the original time of the grasslands. There was something eternal about the steppe with its unceasing cycles of winter and summer, as though the grasslands were a liminal space, untied from the temporal world. This, and the desert, were where the Khan had come from; almost as if the Khan himself had been conjured from the substance of the land, stone and bone and dust.

There would be more fighting soon, Zhu Irzh understood. Only the elite had horses, the half-ifrit cavalry whom the Khan had summoned with him from the very early days, but Zhu Irzh had been issued a bow and a quiver full of arrows. The idea was to kill those who could be killed, leaving a quota of the rest. They themselves, untied from time, could not die, and they would take the new warriors with them when they moved on.

The black-haired woman, frowning, turned to Zhu Irzh and said something, but he did not understand her. A moment later she, too, looked confused, and then her face cleared suddenly, leaving a blankness in its wake. She turned expectantly toward the Khan, waiting for orders.

They were not long in coming. Minutes later, the first wave of horsemen swept over the hill.

“It’s changed,” Roerich said.

“How so?” Chen was standing with Roerich at the summit of one of Agarta’s turrets. In the near distance, the dunes boomed and roared like the sea. Agarta’s breezes — the city’s own microclimate — were saving them from the worst of the sun, but out there in the Taklamakan, it looked as if you could fry an egg on the sands.

Roerich pointed. “That lake. It’s usually full of water. But now look at it.”

Chen raised a pair of borrowed binoculars to his eyes and surveyed a muddy, crescent-shaped puddle. “I see what you mean. Doesn’t look healthy.”

“And those trees are normally in full bloom despite the heat. The temple protects them, you see, just as this city protects us. Now they’re no more than desiccated twigs.”

“Maybe something’s wrong with the Book,” Chen suggested. Roerich shot him a quick, appraising glance.

“That would seem to be the most likely hypothesis. Are you up for taking a look?”

“It’s what I was hired for.” Even though Chen’s Imperial employer still wasn’t within hailing distance, apparently. Roerich thought that might have something to do with the nature of the city itself; when discussing the subject with Robin, Roerich had mentioned Agarta’s proclaimed neutrality, that it must remain separate from all the various Heavens and Hells, being dedicated to human affairs and run by humans, however ascended.

“Does it work?” Robin had said, her spectral face skeptical.

“Not very well,” Roerich admitted. “But they like to claim it does.”

Chen could understand why: the whole point of being an Ascended Master (or Mistress) was that you had attained another plane of existence without the inconvenience of dying first, thus bypassing the Night Harbor, limbo, purgatory, or whatever system one’s religion had set in place.

A sort of esoteric version of Switzerland, with similar degrees of prettiness and organization. But then, Chen didn’t think Switzerland had all that much clout in real terms, either.

Now he said to Roerich, “Well, then. Let’s go.”

•

Close to, the temple was even more dilapidated than it had appeared from the city. Roerich and Chen approached with some caution across the shifting dunes. Rather than entering the front of the temple, past the stagnant lake, they deemed it best to go around the back, and see if there might be another way in.

“The trouble is,” Roerich murmured, “I don’t know what defenses the Book might have erected.”

“Nor I,” Chen said. Back in the city, Robin was still arguing with Nandini about contacting Mhara; Chen hoped she’d be successful. He thought that the Emperor had a better chance of making the Book see reason than either himself or Roerich.

The back wall of the temple was a blank: a high palisade of weathered stone, scoured by the wind and the sand. There was no obvious way of getting inside. As they approached even closer, however, a black gap opened in the wall and something shot out of it, a shrieking bolt. Immediately Chen cast a spell and Roerich, too, raised a hand. Intermingled magic sparked red and glowing green, then fell uselessly to the ground. Chen and Roerich ducked as the thing sped toward them, hurtling through Chen’s outstretched arm and vanishing.

“Illusion,” Roerich said grimly. “But the next one might not be.”

“What was it?” Some kind of demon, Chen had thought: leathery and winged, with gleaming red eyes.

“It was an ifrit. I’d be surprised if the Book was recruiting them. They’re the creatures of the Khan.”

That raised unpleasant speculations. “Perhaps they’re preventing people from going in.”

Roerich gave a curt nod. “Be on your guard.”

In the absence of any access, they made their way to the front of the building. Roerich was attempting magic, Chen could tell; some kind of concealment spell. But it wasn’t working and eventually Roerich gave a snort of annoyance and gave up. The temple lay before them, its lacquer peeling in the sunlight.

“Very well,” Roerich said, tight-lipped. He raised a hand. “Book! Can you hear me?”

Silence, so resounding as to be a noise in itself.

“Book!”

At last, a whisper on the desert air, a thin, frail sound. “I hear.”

“Where are you?”

“Where I have always been.”

That was not true, but perhaps the Book knew no differently.

“Can we enter?”

“Yes. But there are presences.” And now the Book sounded fearful. With a glance at Chen, Roerich stepped forward.

Even if he had been so blind as not to notice the state of the place, Chen would have been able to tell that something was badly wrong. The aura of rank magic, as stagnant as the sad little lake, hung heavily in the air, making it suddenly difficult to breathe. Above him, the sky dulled, a sultry, thunderous shade, and the heat was stifling.

“This has changed,” Roerich said, unnecessarily.

“I can tell.” Chen glanced around. There was no overt sign of the ifrits, but when he looked over his shoulder, he could see a flickering in the air beyond the temple, the beat of wings visible from the corners of the eyes. Something was waiting and he did not understand why they had not attacked again. Perhaps Roerich had been correct and these things were no more than illusions, but even so….

Roerich’s head went up, like a lean hunting dog. “It’s up there.”

Chen followed him up the rickety stairs of the temple, trying not to put a foot through the rotten wood, and onto a narrow parapet. The stink of magic was strongest around the door to a middle chamber. Together, Roerich and Chen looked inside.

There was the Book, setting on its plinth. Flies and wasps buzzed and hummed around it and the smell of ageing meat was overpowering. Chen clapped a hand to his face.

“I’d have said it was well past its sell-by date, Nicholas.”

“Book,” Roerich said, into the fetid gloom, “what has happened to you?”

“I wanted to restore things,” the voice said, faintly. “To what they should have been.”

“You are a creator.” Roerich’s tone was gentle. “Not a sustainer. You don’t have to hold constant what you make. That’s other people’s job.”

“I thought I did. But it was imperfect, incomplete.” The Book sounded desolate.

“Things go as they were fated to go,” Nicholas said.

“But what am I to do now?”

“Your place is in Heaven,” Chen said. “You would be welcomed home. Interwoven, once more, with Heaven’s fabric.”

In fact, he had no idea whether this was the case or not. He prayed that Mhara would understand. Whatever the case, Chen’s conscience gave an uneasy twinge and he told it to be silent. Roerich was listening intently.

“I do not know,” the Book said, and indeed, it sounded unsure.

“Come,” Roerich said firmly. “You know where your rightful place should be. Look around you. Does this seem right, this rotting room, these odors and this decay? Let your temple be restored, if you can restore nothing else. Go with Wei Chen.”

“I must consider it,” the Book said, and despite the wan sunlight beyond the window, the chamber in which they stood grew cold and dark. In unspoken agreement, Roerich and Chen backed out of the door and waited on the balcony.

“I’ll be honest with you, Nicholas,” Chen said. “I don’t know the best way to handle this thing. It’s obviously unstable.”

“We’ll just have to hope that it has enough self-preservation to allow itself to be returned to Heaven,” Roerich told him.

“It’s always hard to tell how things experience the world,” Chen mused. “From a human perspective, it can’t have been much of a life for the Book — stuck up there in what amounted to a sealed chamber.”

“The trouble is, we don’t understand how these things view time. What might be aeons to us could have seemed no more than a few seconds to an entity of this longevity. It’s very difficult to see things from their perspective.”

Chen was about to reply, but his attention was caught by a sudden disturbance in the sky above him. “What’s that?” For a moment, he thought it was one of the ifrits, broken through the protective barrier of the temple, but then he realized that it was a single curl of paper, white as a dead leaf against the sky. It sailed down, joined by further sheets of parchment, until they were falling as a single scroll. Chen held out his hands just in time for the Book to fall into them.

“I have decided on this form,” the Book said. “It may make it easier for you to transport me.”

•

Back at Agarta, Chen and Roerich stood looking down at the temple. The ifrits were still visible, but shadowy: flickering in and out of human sight.

“I don’t understand why they didn’t attack,” Chen said.

“Perhaps they are no more than illusion after all.”

Chen once more checked the leather tube in which they had placed the Book. He had a feeling it was going to be a movement that would become familiar, if not obsessive. The tube now hung from its strap across his chest, easily defensible. The Book itself was silent, maybe out of contemplation, or perhaps because its consciousness had passed into whatever realm it normally inhabited. Inari had greeted Chen with relief when they returned from their mission, but Jhai and Robin were nowhere to be seen.