The Demon and the City - By Liz Williams Page 0,57
his claws. The next minute the demon was off and moving backward. The assassin screamed and rushed him, whirling the sword. Zhu Irzh drew his sword, feinted forward and kicked the swordsman in the kidneys, but the demon was a fraction off and the tip of the assassin's blade sliced across and down, under Zhu Irzh's own blade, catching him under the collarbone. He heard Chen hiss through his teeth. Zhu Irzh and the assassin circled one another. The assassin was gripping the blade with both hands and chanting. He made a start forward and then quite suddenly fell. The sword clattered to the floor. Zhu Irzh saw Chen's silent figure poised above the body. Swiftly, the detective reached down and scooped up the assassin's sword.
"Zhu Irzh, stay where you are. Keep an eye on this one. I want to check if there's anyone else."
The demon ignored this. He hauled himself to his feet and followed Chen. At the end of the market was a sort of hangar, used for storing heavy machinery. The rusty iron lattice of the gate was open. No one was there. Zhu Irzh lowered the sword, very slowly. He rubbed absently at his collarbone. They returned to the body: an unremarkable man in a blue Mao suit. Chen rifled his pockets and found a pair of throwing knives, a garrote and a card bearing the insignia of the Assassins' Guild.
"So, he's a professional." Chen said. "Who wants to kill you? Apart from me, on occasion?"
Zhu Irzh gave him an uneasy glance. "Quite a few, I should think."
"Who, precisely?"
"Jhai Tserai's a possibility. I know too much now. Maybe she started having doubts and decided to take me out of the running. Then there's the dowser I assaulted." Zhu Irzh grimaced. "He's shown remarkable tolerance in not trying to dispatch me before now, if you ask me. There's a whole host of Hellkind—ex-girlfriends and so forth. There's that demon-hunter from Beijing we met earlier in the year—he doesn't like me being here."
"I'd be inclined to think that Tserai and the dowser are the most likely candidates," Chen said, reaching for his cellphone. "I'm calling the precinct. They can deal with the Assassins' Guild."
The rest of the night was spent in tedious and protracted statement-taking. A representative of the Assassins' Guild was summoned. When the woman arrived, she tut-tutted in a perfunctory manner over the body and announced that it had been a freelance contract; there was no record of the attempt on their books, and anyway, the police department knew perfectly well that contracts against law enforcement personnel were not permitted. She and Chen then had an argument about client confidentiality, while the demon sat moodily on a nearby bench, pondering a variety of unpalatable options. It was close to dawn by the time Chen and Zhu Irzh got away. By mutual agreement, they headed for the precinct house.
Even at this early hour, the street was beginning to be crowded and there was a definite atmosphere of anticipation and festivity, a hum of suppressed excitement for the eve of the Day of the Dead. The light was growing, a lemony glow in the east, and the night-lit neon glow of Shaopeng was still bright, fuchsia, orange, turquoise: signs for remedies, soft drinks, drugs, and the screaming stylized faces that advertised the demon lounges near the station. Through the window of the tram, Zhu Irzh saw a lounge client stagger out into the morning and bend double, clutching his head. He looked as though it had been worth every minute, whatever it was. Many of the signs were pushing the latest from Jhai's own commercial labs, the red Jaruda bird symbol above a lightning-bolt spill of tangerine tablets.
Along the length of Shaopeng, the chop and cookhouses were opening for breakfast, already flooded with workers carrying plastic cartons of congee; starting early in order to finish by noon and rush home for the start of the festival. Zhu Irzh found that he was ravenous, but Chen refused to stop for food.
"So," Chen said, when they were within the wards of the precinct house. "If we're to gain any kind of indictment against your new girlfriend, we need to set a number of things in motion. We need proof that she was behind the murder of Sardai, and we need to get Sardai's family on our side. The quickest way to do that, I suggest, is to visit the Night Harbor, assuming that Sardai's spirit hasn't already departed for Hell—and