Shadow Pavilion by Liz Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

deal with me because I won’t be your simpering demon bimbo, and you’re trying to send me back, you pathetic little shit.”
    â€œLara—” Go and Beni said together, but it was at Beni that she sprang. Go had a single, appalled image of Lara: her long legs bending backward at the knee, claws ripping on the polished wooden floor, her striped body arcing through the smoking air as she fell upon her agent and tore out his throat.
    That was almost all he saw, because Go was off and running, knocking over the guttering candles in his flight for the door. He kicked the door open and fell out into the hallway. The clear, warm air came as a shock, as if he’d been punched. For a despairing moment, he thought Lara had struck him in the back.
    Almost, but not quite all. Staggering against the opposite wall, he took one look back and saw, behind the curtain of sudden fire, Lara’s head raised and fresh red blood running down her chin into the flames. The gold of the fire was trapped in her eyes and then she leaped upward. He heard the crash and shatter of broken glass as she sprang through the window and then Go himself was stumbling backward, bare feet slipping on the boards of the hallway, and he threw himself out of the front door and into the still and midnight garden as the house caught light and flared up like a firecracker.

12
    I t was a relief to reach the temple. Mhara stepped out of the oppressive air of Heaven into a calm, white-plastered room: the little annex that he and Robin used as a portal. Robin—priestess, ghost, but still scientist—had come up with a spell that keyed the annex to her own soul, and Mhara’s: nothing that could be stolen or used, but enough to deter anyone following either of them through, either to Heaven, or from it. It was sad, Mhara thought, to have to be so untrusting, but it was the way of things and he supported Robin’s installation of the spell. He could see it now, taking the form of a thin gilt lattice, suspended in the air before him. He reached out a hand and the lattice was gone.
    â€œRobin?” There was a lamp burning somewhere in the temple; he could feel its tranquil small presence and that of another, far more complex, being. He followed the sense of those two presences until he came to the main room of the temple, the shrine that lay at the end of the simple living quarters, just inside the main door.
    This, too, was plastered white, and the shrine itself bore no image, only a lamp and a niche for a candle. Robin knelt in front of it with her back to him, solid enough in this soft light, although sometimes her form flickered a little, as if seen through clear water.
    â€œHello,” Robin said, without looking round. “How did it go?”
    Mhara sighed. “Tedious. I wish you could have been there.”
    â€œWell, I could have,” she agreed. She had decided against attending the coronation. I’m not one for big state occasions, and anyway, I don’t want to cramp your style . She’d felt it might be embarrassing for the new Emperor, having his dead human girlfriend showing up on the big day. “I’m sure your mother thought I’d have made a scene. Would you like some tea?” She motioned to a battered iron kettle that set on a table near the door. “I just made some oolong.”
    Mhara laughed, but he did not feel able to contradict her. “Thanks, I will.” He went to the table and poured steaming green liquid into a bowl. “And Mother made a bit of a scene herself. Wanted me to wear the big state robes, and I thought—not my style. She’s going to have to get used to that and she’s going to have to get used to you, Robin. I’ve already explained to her that you’re here to stay.”
    â€œI thought,” Robin said, without turning her head, “that you might be up for some sort of political marriage.”
    â€œRobin—this isn’t the