Heaven was tearing down all around, shreds and tatters of beauty streaming away in the winds between the worlds, and Seijin could sense it now, the chilly nearness of home. A golden banner whipped by, followed by a young woman. She was dressed in white, her feet tightly bound, and she was smiling beneath her glossily lacquered helmet of hair. Her palms were together, as if praying. She smiled, bowed, and was whirled up into the rising storm.
Seijin now stood on a little bridge, looking down into chaos. The Emperor was behind this: Mhara's presence—calm, implacable, working—was very clear: Seijin could taste his spells on the wind and they were strong and sweet. They burst into ashes in the assassin's mouth, like the taste of failure. Once more Seijin howled, any semblance of control gone, as the Emperor dismantled Heaven all around and sent Seijin spinning down.
Chen and the badger were following Inari as quickly as they could, running down their own stretched lifelines back to between. The Shadow Pavilion called Inari like the tolling of a great bell: she could hear it ringing across the worlds and pursuing it was easy, she simply let it reel her in. She could not feel Seijin at all and that frightened her, that the assassin had already met an end and it only needed to catch up with her.
"Inari, wait!" Chen shouted once, racing through the ravaged chambers of the Dowager Empress toward the portal.
"I can't!" she cried back, anguished, a fish on the taut and snapping line of between. Something old and cold and heavy caught at her flying feet and weighed her down, but only a little; after a moment, she recognized its nature and its source: an earth spell, cast by the badger. It touched her to the core. It also allowed Chen and her familiar to catch up, so that they tumbled through the portal together and left Heaven.
Abyss. The Sea of Night, gleaming dark below. Back across the Three Realms, Heaven on the right, the bright and distant shore, Hell's smoky cliffs looming far away to the left and beneath it all, the endless stars. Inari glimpsed Earth, cried out once more for her home, her body, the smell of salt and tea in the morning, a spray of jasmine, everything she might never know again. Hold on, she told herself. Hold on. Chen and the badger are depending on you. That thought steadied her, as she had known it would. She turned her face from Earth and flew, hurtling over the Sea of Night and the boat containing the woman who still sat and rocked and schemed and would never, Inari somehow understood, come to terms with changed circumstance. The boat was a single drop of bitterness, in all that bitter ocean, teaching Inari how not to be. And then between, glimpsed swiftly under its green and twilight sky, with the impossible edifice of the Shadow Pavilion roaring up to meet her. She shot through into a circle, red heat discharging around them, diving through flame, with Chen and the badger hitting the floor, rather harder, on her spectral heels.
Chen cried out as the flame touched him and the sound tore at Inari, literally dispersing her to the four corners of the dusty ceiling. This frightened her beyond anything that Seijin had done, but again, that touch of chilly earth magic brought her back together again, badger weaving old deep spells, knitting fragments of ghost.
They were not alone in the room. The Gatekeeper was there, wringing ethereal hands.
"The Lord Lady is coming! You must go!"
"No," Chen and Inari said, together. "We're staying."
Between was breaking down. Seijin could tell this easily, flying in. To someone unused to the bleak expanse, it might have appeared unchanged, but Seijin knew the location of each rock, each crag, and it was plain that the landscape was thinning, becoming more diffuse.
Surprising, the extent to which male and female self had held things together, the glue of a personality, and a land. But Seijin was beyond mourning. Matters had been allowed to progress too far; it was time to regroup, redress a balance. But looking down, Seijin noticed a transparency in one hand, the rocks glimpsed through it. Not too late, Seijin whispered. Not too late.
The Shadow Pavilion was looming ahead, with the red circle of Seijin's own magic burning in the upper chamber. Seijin soared in through gathering twilight, noting the emptiness of the landscape beneath: normally, at this hour, the creeping predators of the shadows would have been prowling around the pagoda. But now, the doors stood firmly shut and the Pavilion appeared closed in upon itself, a shuttered eye.
The circle was waiting, welcoming, drawing in, and Seijin fell, rather than stepped, through it.
And was not alone.
Chen had begun the incantation some minutes before, with Inari hovering in the corner of the ceiling and the badger at his heels. He hoped, Inari knew, to blast Seijin out of the circle, sending the assassin to the limbo between all worlds, including that of the lands of the Shadow Pavilion itself. Seijin would not live, would not die, would hold those who depended so reluctantly upon the Lord Lady in balance. It was tenuous and Inari did not like it, as no more did Chen, but they had little choice.
The incantation tore at Inari, caused the room to rock. She could hear the badger's dark voice beneath Chen's murmured words, weaving earth spells into the conjuring. Power rose, ripping upward through the Shadow Pavilion, drawn by some undreamed-of well in the foundations of between. With her ghost's sight, she could see its outline all around Chen, a bright blackness, flecked with gold, growing until Chen had almost disappeared. Soon, all that Inari could see of her husband was a silhouette against a background of power, one hand upraised.
But Seijin was on home ground. The Lord Lady came through the circle and slammed Chen against the wall. The Pavilion shuddered, earthquake on the way. The power that Chen had raised spilled out across the floor, a palpable tide as though a sea wall had been breached and let in the flood. Inari, huddling against the ceiling, saw Seijin give a great raw grin, as primal as an ape. But breaking Chen's power took its own toll. The Shadow Pavilion creaked like a tree in a storm, then groaned with the sound of rending timber, then split in half.
Inari once more found herself outside the Pavilion. The green sky was racing with gathering cloud, and far away on the horizon she saw a lightning bolt bridge cloud and earth. The mists that had so characterized between had been blown away: everything was sharp, clear, translucent, breaking. Looking back, the struggling Inari saw that the Pavilion had split in half from summit to foundation. A chasm of some ten feet separated Seijin and Chen.
Chen threw a spell across the gap, but the Lord Lady took a dancing step out of the way and the spell splattered against the wall. He could not win, Inari thought in despair. Seijin, the killer of thousands, had experienced several hundred years of additional practice. The Pavilion creaked again, alarmingly, and the gap widened. Inari was staring straight down the chasm and saw now that it went far beyond the foundations of the actual pagoda. She could see Earth—no, she could see her own body, lying calm and peaceful in Mhara's temple in Singapore Three.
Her lips, blue in a pale face, moved. Her body said to her: Restore the land.
"What?" Inari said. It was as though she was at the same moment very close to her body, and very distant from it. Close to it, she could see two faint red threads: the lifelines of Chen and the badger.
"Restore the land!" her body said again, impatient, and when Inari continued to stare blankly at it, her lips moved again with a single name. She could see the words now, a crimson slash of characters. They floated up through the rift between the worlds until the name was hanging in front of her in the storm-driven air.
Inari read it out loud: Sei Lan.
At the moment she spoke the name aloud, everything changed. The Shadow Pavilion, the shifting landscape of between, Chen and the badger, everything was gone. Inari stood on a slight rise of ground near a river. It was early evening, summer, a light breeze rippling the endless grasslands like a sea. The air smelled sweet, perfumed by a thousand flowers, and a very faint odor of woodsmoke. Looking to her left, Inari saw a distant congregation of round white tents, springing mushroom-like from the surface of the steppe. Tall poles with horsehair banners stood around the yurts, somehow alive and filled with presence. Horses grazed and she heard a voice raised in song.
Then this, too, disappeared, and there was only the grass, and the sky, and Inari.
And Seijin.
The Lord Lady was as Inari had first known the being. Seijin stood in the long grass, wearing a gray robe. The black hair was tied, so that it resembled one of the horsetails.
"Sei Lan" Inari said.
The assassin bowed. "Not yet."
A woman stepped out of Seijin's form to stand beside him: female self, no more than a whisper on the air. Male self soon followed.
"Sei Lan?"
"I am Sei Lan," the child said. Unlike male or female self, the child was quite distinct, solid. Impossible to say whether it was a girl or a boy; it had Seijin's grave face and graver gaze. The child said, "This will not do, O my father/mother."
"Where were you?" Seijin asked, in a whisper, and the child said, "Swallowed in the blood you shed."
"I shed that blood to protect you!" Seijin cried.
"Perhaps at first. But then? I am weighed down beneath the stones of their souls; you must set us free. You must set us all free."
"No," Seijin protested.
Inari felt a curious snap, as though something in the world had broken or, conversely, had been locked together. She looked down at herself. She was no longer a ghost. She had flesh, and it was demon-cool, pulsing with life. But something had joined her, something very basic, that had no voice—a spirit? I am possessed, Inari thought in alarm, but the thing did not feel like an alien entity either.
The child—Seijin's oldest self, Sei Lan—turned to her.
"Will you?" the child asked, strangely timid, and all at once Inari knew what it was talking about. She hesitated, remembering the story of the Lord Lady's origins.
Born of a demon father and a Celestial mother.
Born on Earth, the exile of both.
Born to become a killer of gods and demons and men.
Can one really change the destiny of a soul? Make something good, from base clay? Well, Inari thought, I can try.
"Yes—" and immediately the child was gone. Across the grassland, the assassin was beginning to collapse, flesh withering, skin sagging.
"Save me!" Seijin whispered, and reached out a hand.
"But I just did," Inari told it, and watched as the Lord Lady sank down into the grass, watched until there was nothing more than a bloody stain on the black soil of the steppe, watched until that, too, was gone.