Fan's messenger spoke an ancient dialect called Gei-lo-fang, with which Inari was barely familiar. She listened carefully, trying to understand, as the messenger slurred and whispered into the scarred woman's ear, but she only caught a few words that she recognized. "Danger" was one of them, and "grave" another. Inari found this less than reassuring, and she did not like the closed, watchful expression on Fan's face. She could not help remembering the wu'ei, drifting vast as clouds above the city, seeking her own small self, and she wished with a wave of immense longing that she was back on the houseboat, worrying about nothing more than whether her feet would burn if she went to the market.
"Inari," Fan said, and her face revealed nothing. "It seems we may not have to send a message to Earth after all. My messenger tells me that a human has come from that world, here to Hell. A man, not young, not old, who once had the favor of the goddess Kuan Yin. Your husband."
Inari felt herself struck by two conflicting sensations: terror, and relief. She whispered, "Chen Wei is here? When?"
"Not long ago. He has been here for no more than a day. My messenger has made enquiries. Your husband visited your brother, and then he was attacked."
Inari stared at her, appalled, and Fan went on: "I'm sorry. That was tactless. He isn't dead, Inari, or even badly hurt. He was set upon by a band of spirit-dancers, but someone saved him."
"Who?"
"My messenger does not know. It says that he was saved by one of your kind, by a demon, but it is not clear who or why." Inari noted that slip: your kind. So Fan was not a demon herself. What was she then?
"Where is he now?"
"My messenger does not know. Inari," Fan said, and the warning note in her voice was unmistakably clear. "You told me that you would leave Chen, and stay here in your own world, no matter what the price, so as not to bring him to further danger. Do you still mean what you said?"
Inari looked at her. The scarred woman's face was as calm as a summer sea, but the depths of her strange eyes were fathomless. Inari felt suddenly as though the world itself hung on her answer. She thought of the houseboat, and the little life that had been her own for no more than a year: the breeze from the sea, the light that fell over the towers of the city in the morning, just before dawn. A complex, changeable, varied world unlike the perpetual storms and winds of Hell. A world where a person could be different, not bound by conventions as ancient and desiccated as old bones. Then she thought of Chen himself: all the images and memories that she had pushed away ever since she had returned to Hell. How he woke up slowly, was meticulous when preparing tea, was silent at the right times. How he never criticized her cooking, even when it was charred to a crisp and he was late getting home. He never made a fuss over things that didn't matter. How things seemed inexplicably to strike him as funny—a comment on the radio, a bird diving awkwardly into the sea—and he'd sit silently shaking. In all the old stories of romance that Inari had devoured as a young girl, "funny" never seemed to come into it. Love was always dark, and serious, and mysteriously tragic: it was never ordinary. But her love for Chen was ordinary, Inari reflected now, and that was why it was special, and why she couldn't put him through all this anguish all over again. He must go back without her, and find someone human, someone with whom he could live a normal life.
"I haven't changed my mind," she said, in a voice that was no louder than the wind through the hollows of the cave. "I'll stay here in Hell, and I'll give myself up to the wu'ei if I have to." She paused, glancing up into Fan's unreadable face. "But I want to tell him myself. He mustn't risk himself here. I have to find him. I have to send him home."
Somehow, Inari was expecting argument, but Fan only bowed her head. She grew as still as stone, so unmoving that the little blind messenger grew alarmed and plucked at her shoulder with restless claws.
"Fan?" Inari said, and the scarred women looked up at last. Her face was filled with weariness, and there were tears in both eyes, the red and the gray. "What is it?" Inari asked, bewildered, but Fan only murmured, "It is nothing. . . Inari, if we are to find your husband, we have to go back to the city but we cannot return down the path by which you came. We have to find a way which the wu'ei will not readily discover."
"I don't know of such a path. The only road I know is the one I took."
Unexpectedly, this made Fan smile and Inari was abruptly reminded of Chen. The scarred woman said gently, "I know. But I think I remember a way: an old path, little used. It leads into the city from these hills."
"Won't it still be dangerous?" Inari asked, thinking of the coils of the wu'ei in the stormy air above her head.
"Yes, dangerous, but not the danger you're thinking of. This path leads underground, Inari, deeper and deeper yet. And it passes through the lower levels of Hell."