The Demon and the City

THE DEMON AND THE CITY
Liz Williams
A Detective Inspector Chen Novel
The Demon and the City © 2006 by Liz Williams

This edition of The Demon and the City © 2008 by Night Shade Books
 
Cover art by Jon Foster
Cover design by Michael Fusco
Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen
 
All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-59780-111-9

Night Shade Books
Please visit us on the web at
http://www.nightshadebooks.com
To the Witchcraft Shop Owner
     
    Acknowledgements:
     
    With thanks  . . .
     . . .to everyone at Night Shade Books for being such a pleasure to deal with.
     . . .to Marty Halpern for his help and (considerable) patience.
     . . .as ever, to Shawna McCarthy for all her hard work, encouragement and help.
     . . .to everyone in the Montpellier Writing Group.
     . . .to David Pringle, for accepting the first Chen story for Interzone .
     . . .to everyone at Milford, who kept asking when the Chinese detective story was going to be published. (And now it is!)
     . . .to everyone in the Cantonese group for their help and support, particularly Chris Priest and Leigh Kennedy, and also to Tanith Lee for her unfailing kindness.
     . . .to my parents.
     . . .and last but not least, to Trevor Jones, witchcraft shop owner, historian and best friend.
PRAISE FOR LIZ WILLIAMS
    "In the first rank of visionary science fiction writers."
—Charles Stross, author of Halting State
     
    "In The Demon and the City , Liz Williams does one better than giving you more of the same: she gives you more of what you didn't even know you wanted. Demon. .. has a flavor all its own. .. I'm looking forward to seeing the third book."
—C. E. Murpy, author of Urban Shaman
     
    "If Liz Williams were a casserole chef, she'd have a heavy hand with the garlic, onions, chili, ginger and some exotic spices you can only get in a stall tucked away in an obscure corner of an even more obscure market. But you'd certainly come back for seconds . . . ."
— SFX magazine
     
    "Williams's second novel featuring Chen and his otherworldly sidekick delivers another dose of fantastic adventure, blending Chinese mythology, elements of an old-fashioned murder mystery, and a generous dollop of acerbic humor."
— Library Journal
     
    " The Demon and the City offers readers an entertaining adventure steeped, not tinged, with the supernatural, played out against a labyrinthine industrial murder mystery. You'll get your pulse-pounding pages turned, but you'll also find yourself immersed in Williams' complex cosmology."
—Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column
     
Other books by Liz Williams include:
    Detective Inspector Chen:
Snake Agent
The Demon and the City
Precious Dragon
The Shadow Pavilion (Forthcoming)
Banner of Souls
Bloodmind
Darkland
Empire of Bones
The Ghost Sister
Nine Layers of Sky
The Poison Master
The Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories

Prologue
    The Chinese inhabitants of Singapore Three say that August is an unlucky month. They say that it is called the month of the dead, for it is always during the endless burning days that the dead return, looking for the living, drawn by blood and breath. They tell their children: You do not know how it was when we lived in the suburbs of Beijing and Guangzhou, or the willow villages of Szechuan, in the ancient cities where people understand how to keep the dead at bay. But in this great new city of Singapore Three, where the entrances to the Hell are closer and the veils between them are fractured, we no longer live in a place when a story is only a story, told to frighten a child in the darkness. Nor do you remember when the demons and the hungry ghosts were only dreaming shadows in an ordinary life, until we left the old cities and came to the new, and found that during certain months and certain times, when the eternal Wheel of Life and Death grates on its spokes, the world changes.
    At such times, one can only prepare for the possibility of death as best one can.
    Deveth Sardai, stepping from a downtown tram, was not thinking of death. She was, instead, wondering how to extricate herself from the latest disastrous relationship. The policy of ignoring the girl was clearly not working: Sardai had not phoned her since the previous Monday, but a litany of messages, of increasing desperation, had been left on her answerphone.
    Sardai smiled thinly as she walked down to the retailers' market, to wander, anonymous, beneath the girdered roofs of the warehouse shelter. The