Read Online Shadow Pavilion by Liz Williams - Free Book Online Page A

be an opportunity. There always was. It was easier to see now. He was in a high, red room: crimson walls, brighter than blood, and veined with sequins. A silk hanging covered half the door and on it played multicolored embroidered birds. Somewhere, there was an eldritch parrot screech and the hanging fluttered, as if a wind had passed through the room. Outside, between open columns, the badger saw a sky the color of roses.
    â€œWhere is this place?” the badger said.
    â€œWhy … ” the voice replied. A woman materialized out of the air: oiled hair, yellow eyes. Gold and citrine carried a drenching light. She raised a hand, mailed in metal lace. “You are in Hell, little demon.”
    The badger stared at her, coldly. “This is not the Hell that I know.”
    â€œWho said it was yours?”
    She put him on a collar and leash, keeping nimble fingers well out of the way, and the indignity pained him more than anything else. Then, with the silken skirts of her sari whipping around her heels like gilded mist, she led him down indigo corridors and ivory, past a room in which a naked woman and two naked boys lay entwined, past another in which a woman wept alone. The woman had feathers instead of hair, vivid as a parakeet, and her arms were mottled with blood. The badger filed all this away for later: he had seen much before.
    Then they were heading down a long hallway, and here badger saw that the wall was decorated with many wooden and metal plaques. Attached to each of these was a head: some human, with eyes like boiled sweets. Several were white-skinned, wearing curious round hats. Some were clearly demonic, but of forms unknown to the badger. None, however, were animal and of this, the badger approved. At the end of the hall, in front of a lacquered ornamental table, lay the skin of something that had been twice the size of a man, black-skinned, with tufts along its spine and a tusked head. It was slightly askew; badger’s captor pushed it back into place with her foot.
    Next, he was taken outside under a long colonnade, heat struck him with a spicy rush and fountains played in the gardens below. Something arced and golden hissed up into the shadowed ceiling of the colonnade: a small winged snake. Below, running through ornamental stands of hibiscus, were a herd of black antelope, spotted with red. They were singing as they went, with voices like off-key dulcimers.
    Beyond the gardens, he saw mountains, Himalaya-high, but their snow-swept summits were crested with palaces carved of ice. There seemed to be something beyond that, another mountain wall, high and higher yet, but he could not see it clearly. He could smell the wind, though, the snow-breath that carried with it cardamom and sherbet.
    â€œCome along,” his captor said, and tugged not-gently at the leash. She pulled him through a door at the end of the colonnade and here, all was darkness.
    â€œI’ve brought him to you,” his captor said, into shadows.
    â€œOh good.” Another female voice, silvery as bells, and a lamp flared up.
    The badger thought: I have seen you before. I have smelled you . Golden-eyed and tiger-striped, she still had her human face, but as it came into the circle of light cast by the lamp, he saw that it was not the same woman.
    The last time badger had seen a tiger demon in her Hellish shape, it had been in his own houseboat home, in the arms of Zhu Irzh, in Chen’s borrowed bed. Husband had not been pleased, when informed of this indiscretion. Jhai Tserai, industrialist, schemer, demon-who-could-not-be, at least under the poorly understood laws of Earth. Jhai had taken suppressants to conceal her tiger stripes, her tiger tail. Now, the badger stared. Yes. You are the same kind, if not the same woman.
    â€œOh, he’s adorable,” this person gushed. “Look at his little paws! And his little nose!” She stretched out a finger.
    â€œI really wouldn’t—” his