Inari and Fan had now been traveling for almost three hours, and Inari was hopelessly disoriented. She had tried to keep track of the labyrinth of passageways, but the twists and turns were too intricate to keep in mind: it was as though they were moving through a vast honeycomb of bone. Indeed, Inari thought, the walls of the passages more closely resembled bone than stone. They were pale as ivory, smooth and cool. She remembered what Fan had said: you'll be safe here, beneath the old devil's skull. Yet whenever she tried to ask the scarred woman what she had meant, Inari's throat constricted and her mouth grew dry as dust so that the words would not come. Fan turned. Her face was luminous in the darkness, as though she shone with her own light. She murmured, "Inari? It won't be long now before we reach the transition point. We need to prepare ourselves."
"Transition point? What's that?" Inari asked.
"Where the worlds cross."
Inari blinked. "I thought we were still in Hell. Do you mean we're going to be on Earth?"
Fan shook her head. "No. Inari, this is a route through the levels of Hell. The geography of Hell is complex, and even I don't understand it fully—it travels back upon itself, like intricately folded cloth. We're going to go a stage further down; perhaps even deeper than that."
"Do we have to?" Inari, used as she was to Hell itself, had never visited the lower levels; indeed, her family had always considered it a rather disreputable thing to do, grubbing about beneath the layers of the world like worms. Fan gave a faint smile, as if she knew what was going through Inari's mind.
"I'm afraid we have no choice. We've attracted the attention of the wu'ei, remember? They'll be looking for you, and there are few better ways of covering your tracks than by traveling in the worlds beneath." She turned and began walking swiftly along the narrow, sloping path.
"Don't they have jurisdiction in the lower levels?" Inari asked, following. She heard Fan's soft laugh.
"They have some. They'd like to think they have a great deal, but the truth is, Inari, only the Imperial Emperor himself has any sway over what happens in the lower reaches. The denizens of those parts go their own way; they are perverse, inconsequential, intransigent. Elemental forms, very old, and slow to change. You'll see."
Inari opened her mouth to ask another question, but they had reached a slender split in the rock, as perfect and regular as the curve of a crescent moon.
"There," Fan said with evident satisfaction. "Here is where we make the transition." She glanced round. "When we pass through, you may notice a change in me. And in yourself. As in all movement, something is lost and something gained. . . Take my hand." She reached behind her, and after a moment's hesitation Inari gripped her rough fingers. Fan stepped forwards, drawing Inari with her, and now Inari could see that the arch in the rock was nothing more than an illusion: a crack in the dark air itself. Inari's fingers curled more tightly around Fan's, and they stepped through. But even though she had moved, Inari could not repress the sudden sensation that she had remained still, that the world itself had shifted around her, as though she were the hub of an immense wheel. Inari's vision dimmed and swayed; she staggered, and Fan's iron hand pulled her upright.
"Do you see?"
Inari blinked. For a brief, disorienting moment, it seemed that she gazed out across a vast expanse: a great plain of crimson rock, above which hung three ashen moons as fragile and wan as soap bubbles. Two immense cities jostled out across the plain, composed of spires of red rock that reached up into the heavens; she could see the smoky fires burning in the streets, and hear voices on the wind. It looked like a scene from one of those science-fiction movies that Chen was so inexplicably fond of watching; it looked nothing like the worlds she knew. As she tried to make sense of it, however, it disintegrated, and there was nothing more than a cool, gray twilight.
"The cities of the plain," Fan said into her ear. "Very old—so old that some philosophers say that the world is gradually configuring itself to meet their image, and what we see is nothing more than a glimpse of the far future. But others say that this is not so, and there are no triple moons, no plain; only a writhing chaos onto which we project our own images." Her hand tightened around Inari's as she shrugged. "But it doesn't make a great deal of difference in the end, if you ask me. It still has to be dealt with."
"We're going across?" Inari faltered. The glimpse she had seen was somehow terrifying, something that not even a demon should be permitted to see.
"No," Fan murmured. "We're going in."