Inari, wandering through halls . . . Silence and lamplight, the soft fall of shadows, the sudden footstep rush.
Seijin was back. The Gatekeeper had told her but she already knew what was on the way, she could feel it in the air, the change. She shrank back among the cobwebs, merging into tapestry, as the old wooden doors of the Shadow Pavilion blasted open and its ruler came home.
Seijin left a wake, which whistled as it swept through the passages of the Shadow Pavilion. Inari felt it glide over skin that was no longer there, stirring non-existent blood, whispering on. The Lord Lady was long gone by the time she stepped timidly out from behind the tapestry, whirling up into the high air of the upper chambers, and Inari, despite her wishes, was drawn into the assassin's path. Moving fast, feet as still as if she'd stepped onto an elevator, magnet-pulled to the presence of the Lord Lady.
Corridors fled by and the tapestries came alive as she passed, coal-bright eyes glancing out, fingers reaching. A small prancing presence, a sad-faced lion-dog, flickered across her path and away. Inari rushed on, unable to stop, locked into someone else's dream; at the entrance to an upper chamber a man in a leather jacket, face full of hate, stepped out of the air, but Inari went right through him. The door banged behind her. She was still at last, standing in a room empty except for the moth-light of a single candle, and the Lord Lady Seijin.
The assassin turned and Inari gasped. The serene presence that she had last glimpsed in the moment before her death was gone. Seijin's face was a blood-stained mask in the candlelight, one eye gone, only a black hollow left where it had been. A thin thread of smoke misted from the eye socket, as if Seijin was burning up from within. Seijin's lips drew back from pointed teeth; each one gleamed red. The Lord Lady hissed like an adder.
"I left you dead!"
Now that the assassin's unnatural calm had dissipated like the smoke coiling out from the empty eye, Inari found that the tables had suddenly turned. She drew herself a little taller.
"But now I am here," she said, and smiled.
Seijin stepped back, Inari moved forward.
"You killed me, here I am. Forever and a day, Lord Lady." The smile was widening into a grin. Inari spread her arms open so that her long sleeves trailed out like a butterfly's wings. As she did so, she felt her feet drifting up from the floor, so that she was hovering. Without knowing how she did so, Inari shot forward, gliding through the Lord Lady with a cold rush like prickling ice.
Seijin cried out, a terrible wail of woe, and Inari knew a moment of pure triumph. Then she was through the wall to the outside, hovering beyond the Shadow Pavilion. The sky was a sparkling sea-green, the shade that lasts only for a few minutes just before the fall of night, and the bulk of the Pavilion stretched below, a vertiginous series of angles, blocks of shadow that made the building look like part of the mountain. At the window of the room she had left, Inari saw Seijin's anguished face looking out, a wan oval, fleetingly overlain by a snarling warrior and a woman's sad countenance. Then they were all gone and the little light went out.
Inari felt slightly foolish, floating here like a blown leaf. Being dead was odd, however: she knew how to do certain things without even thinking about it. She crossed her arms over her breast, pointed her toes, and sank down through the darkening air to the ground. Interesting, to see the Pavilion like this, though ominous. From the outside, there seemed to be much more going on than had been obvious from within. Inari sailed past an entire dinner party and paused to peer through the window, seeing a lavish spread, a table with blazing lamps and glittering silver, but the faces of the guests were somber and their food looked as though it was made of metal. And in another chamber, a woman wept alone, watched by the grave spirit of a child. This was a house-sized Hell, a microcosmic mansion of the slain.
Inari thought: I am better off than these people. Her faith that Chen would find her was still strong and the fact that she had managed to disconcert—perhaps even hurt—Seijin was hugely empowering. Then Inari's toes touched the ground, a leaf-light landing, and she was once more dragged to the Pavilion steps.
In, she had to get in. Once on the ground, that ferocious compulsion had seized her: she was thrust against the doors as if pressed by an immense wind, with such force that she slid down the unyielding door and lay slumped on the stone.
Someone said: "Is that you, Inari?" What had once been her heart echo-thumped against her ribs—Chen! But it was not Chen; it was Bonerattle.
Inari turned her head with an effort. "I have to get in," she whispered. All the confidence with which she had faced Seijin had now ebbed away, consumed by need.
"Seijin killed you!" the shaman exclaimed. He scuttled out of the darkness, glancing from right to left; Inari wondered what else was out there, remembering the shapes she had seen.
"Yes, it killed me. It came to the Emperor's temple, I was in the way."
"I am so sorry," the shaman said. He put a blackened hand on Inari's shoulder; it was some small comfort.
"It wasn't your fault," Inari said.
"I brought you here, first of all."
"If you hadn't," Inari told him, "I would still have been at the temple and I would still have been in the way and I would still be dead. Tell me, shaman—has anyone ever come here, someone Seijin has killed, and left again?"
"I would like to tell you they have," Bonerattle said. "But the truth of it is, I do not know. The Pavilion is as crammed with spirits as a bottle filled with sand, and I can't enter it."
"But now," Inari said, "I can." She told him what had just happened with Seijin, and the shaman listened intently. The compulsion to get back into the building was still strong, but talking to Bonerattle permitted her to ignore it, up to a point. But it was also fueled by fear of what else might be waiting among the rocks: there were things that ate spirits, Inari knew.
"So," the shaman said, when she had finished. "You are in an interesting position. You are a haunt."
"So it seems," Inari said, with a hoarse little laugh. "What am I to do, then?"
"Go back in," Bonerattle said, "and do your work."