The Demon and the City

the comma was a plexiglass opening, beyond which his captors stood, gaping at him like people in front of an aquarium. Ei rapped on the glass. "Can you hear me?"
    "Yes."
    "Good. I want you to be aware of a number of things, demon. Firstly, you're in Paugeng's prison unit. Secondly, you're being held for unprovoked assault, which carries an extensive sentence under local corporate law: three years, according to city statute. No remission, and no diminution. Thirdly, your employer has been notified and will be obliged to pay for your board. If they refuse, the money must be repaid within thirty days of leaving this building, otherwise you're back inside. It's not very fair, but you should have thought of that when you attacked Dowser Roche."
    "Have you spoken with Jhai Tserai?"
    "Madam Tserai's gone to Beijing, on business."
    "When will she be back?"
    "I don't know. That's up to her," Ei said primly.
    "I see," Zhu Irzh remarked. He sat down on the molded bench that extended from the wall. His new position had not yet sunk in; the remains of the trank still fumed within his brain. With an effort, he tried to get a grasp on the situation, but he was starting to fade and soon, they were all gone again.
     
    Somewhere in the recesses of imagination, Zhu Irzh was distantly aware that he dreamed. He was floating deep in the airless, starry depths of the Sea of Night. Globes hung close by, like glowing fruit. Zhu Irzh thought they might be worlds. Warmth sang through his veins with the heat of a sun; its grip took him with a force beyond orgasm and he gasped. It punched him through the membrane between death and life, Heaven and Hell. He could feel all the worlds at once. A great red eye, many times his own height, gazed at him for a moment and then the crack through which it glanced closed up. The sound of his own blood beat in his skull like a drum. All was silence for a moment, then a wave was upon him. He stood surrounded by it, like a man on an island, and despite the roaring in his ears he heard the tinny clatter of metal. Looking down, he saw that the coins of the I Ching lay at his feet, scattered across a web of light. It was curiously familiar; bending down, he saw that it was a map of the meridians of the city, as faint and fragile as one of the skeins of silk that the spiders draped across the hibiscus hedges.
    Then the vast rushing tide was gone. The demon turned. Out of the shadows a speckled, doglike creature padded, and looked at him with human eyes. The beast opened its mouth and exhaled a great sour breath of rotten meat.
    "Look what I have become," it said.
    "What are you?" the demon asked. "What were you?" And the beast sighed.
    "Only a human woman, but I wanted more. I risked everything," the beast said, with a laugh like a hiss. "And I lost everything. I should be in Hell, but instead I am here, between all the worlds that are."
    Zhu Irzh remembered a crack, opening between the worlds, and a crimson eye, watching. Memory made him shiver and Zhu Irzh, a demon after all, did not like this added humiliation. He crouched beside the beast and said, "What is happening, to this world and Hell? Can you tell me? Why should you be in Hell? What is this risk that you took?"
    The beast gave its long lipless smile.
    "Someone is gambling for high stakes. As high as Heaven itself. I was told that my help would buy that prize for Hellkind, the greatest prize of all. So that all the worlds would become one world, beneath the thrall of Hell. I was told that my power would be limitless. Instead, they killed me once my role was over."
    "Someone. Who?"
    The beast said, "The goddess Senditreya. She who is the patron of dowsers. She has fallen, in Heaven. She is no longer one of the great ones. She wants her rightful place back again, even if it involves the betrayal of her world to Hell. And she has human help."
    "Who?" the demon said again, pressing.
    "Myself, when I lived. Jhai Tserai, who lives now, but for how much longer? Tserai lied to me. She told me I was at her own right hand, that I would rule Earth alongside the demon and herself. She told me that together we would open a gate between the worlds and so we did, but the price was my life and my soul. Now she and Senditreya plot while I walk the waste between life and death. This was not," the beast added pathetically, shaking its brindled coat, "what I had planned." It glanced uneasily over its shoulder, as if something might be listening. "You can save the city, if