The Demon and the City - By Liz Williams Page 0,48

from far out to sea. Waterdragons. Zhu Irzh smiled.

Rising to his feet, he walked on. There was a grove of acacia ahead of him. The meridian led directly into it. Following the path, Zhu Irzh brushed the leaves of acacia aside and halted. Within the grove stood a small temple. It was built of pale, smooth stone, and it was very old. It looked as though it had been in ruin for many years; lichen mottled the stone like a scab. But power hung around it all the same. The air glistened. The meridian seemed to shine beneath the demon's feet. As he stood, watching, the world darkened around him; the sky changed from a bone-colored haze to fawn, then amber. Shadows raced by, attached to nothing. Zhu Irzh sank down to kneel in the dusty earth. It seemed to him that he knelt on the skin of a drum, reverberating with the beat of the world, and then the skin parted and let him slip through, dissolving him, so that he was no longer separate from the world but part of it.

To the east, the mines gaped, shattering the surface of the world with parallel scars, and he could see down beneath them in a cross-section of the world over which he was painfully spread. The rifts in the earth were indeed intersecting with the fault lines, as everyone was saying and as the governor, tied into the mining corporations, had strenuously denied. Yet there was something else about the meridians, something wrong—then it was gone, and he could no longer get a grip on it. Both the rifts and the faults ran along the meridian pathways of ch'i and sha.

Zhu Irzh—stretched, disembodied, smeared throughout the body of the planet—did not care. He was everywhere, simultaneously; unified with the blind, unthinking world. His awareness poured down waterways, felt the delta coursing around him and then was out into the open sea where the waterdragons were still calling, across and over and into the wild country of the southern mountains, uninhabited except for the tiny villages clinging to their bare sides. The stars rang around him and the hard, little moon swung up and over his shoulder like a stone flung into the sky. Beyond, there was only darkness with, very far away, an echo of somewhere known. He could see the shore of Heaven itself, as bright as dawn. It hurt his eyes and he turned within to the world's molten heart, seeking Hell. Fire gushed as the earth's core heaved, and then without warning he was flung back in the familiar confines of bone and blood and sinew. The bleached sky roared over him like a wave. He fell back into the grass, crying out with the shock. He was panting, and drenched in sweat. His mouth tasted of blood; experimentally he licked his lip and found nothing there. Death hung close in the air, making the hairs at the back of his neck prickle and his throat constrict. Claws flexed from the pads of his fingertips.

It was growing dark, yet surely it was no more than three o'clock. He must have been under some kind of spell . . . He glanced up and froze. Someone was coming out of the temple and walking toward him through the gloom. Hastily, Zhu Irzh scrambled to his feet. The figure was tall, and dressed in a saffron robe. Its hands were outstretched in welcome. Zhu Irzh's hand crept toward the hilt of his sword. He was close enough now to see its face: serene, smiling, filled with peace. The unmistakable scent of peach blossom clung around it. It had come from Heaven and he knew it, now, for one of the spirits that attended the Celestial Court. Slowly, Zhu Irzh relaxed. He released his grip on the sword.

The Celestial being's jaw dropped as though it had been unhinged. Zhu Irzh glimpsed a row of needle teeth, then a probing tongue shot out, aiming at his throat. Zhu Irzh flung up his arm to ward it off and it gripped him by the wrist. The tongue's serrated edge bit into his flesh. Cursing, Zhu Irzh leaped backward and drew the sword, but the tongue as swiftly withdrew. The being threw back its head, making the dislocated jaw flap, and emitted a shrill, shrieking laugh. Then the creature leaped high into the air, displaying long, clawed feet, and bounded like a hare down the hillside. There was a second shriek as