They searched the room again and Chen performed a basic locating spell, but there was no clue, either physical or magical, to Miss Qi's disappearance.
"I don't suppose," Zhu Irzh said in the hopeless tone of the unconvinced, "that she'd have just popped out for a breath of fresh air."
"Don't be ridiculous." Worry made Chen uncharacteristically snappy. If Miss Qi had gone missing in Singapore Three, he would have been calmer, but here, with so few resources, the situation struck him as bleak. "This is Hell. There is no fresh air, and anyway, it's hardly likely she'd have popped out in it."
"How are we going to explain this to Heaven?" was Zhu Irzh's next thought.
"We're not," Chen replied. "We won't have to. Because we're going to find her."
He warded both window and door, then closed the door to the room. On Earth, his wards were stronger, since he had jurisdiction there, but not in Hell, yet they still possessed a certain degree of power and would stop any curious minor demons from entering the room, if not one of Hell's hierarchy. Zhu Irzh watched approvingly. Then Chen, followed by the flustered desk clerk, went back downstairs.
"Call the staff, please. I want to see if anyone knows anything."
He didn't hold out much hope and, indeed, what little he held was not fulfilled. The staff—a motley, shifty assortment of demons—had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. They shuffled their ill-favored feet and stared at the ceiling or the floor.
"If anyone does know anything," Chen said at last, "then you know where to find me. It doesn't matter if you have to wake me up—" not that demons would worry overmuch about disturbing other people's sleep "—as long as you let me know."
"Is there a reward?" one of the staff members said, a small, ragged person with a backward-facing head. Lords knew what he'd done to deserve that: having your feet reversed was a common punishment, but it wasn't usual to see folk facing in the wrong direction. As it was, he had to stand with his back to Chen.
"We might be able to arrange something," Chen said cautiously.
Zhu Irzh nudged him. "Go for it," the demon whispered. "It's the only way you'll get anything out of this bunch."
Chen knew he was right, and he let the tentative offer stand. He went back upstairs with Zhu Irzh to await developments, and sure enough, they were not long in arriving, via a soft knock on the door.
Chen was not surprised to see that it was the reversed-head person.
"I saw 'er," he said, without preamble. "Your mate. They took 'er out the back."
"Who was it?" Chen asked. "Did you see?"
The demon's maltreated face became sly. "Yes, but—"
"All right," Chen said with a sigh. "How much are we going to give him, Zhu Irzh?"
"Five hundred dollars," reverse-head interrupted.
"What! You're joking. I'll give you fifty."
"Do I look like an idiot?" the demon howled. And so on. Five minutes later, Zhu Irzh was handing over fifty dollars with the promise of a further hundred.
"Right, well, there were three of them, see. I think two of them were blokes but I'm not sure about the third."
Chen was taking notes. "When was this?"
"About an hour and a half ago."
Chen did a rapid mental calculation. Given the time that the search and enquiry had taken, Miss Qi had been abducted while he and Zhu Irzh were on their way back from the birthday dinner. That meant that anyone who had been at the banquet could have taken Miss Qi and, somehow, Chen thought that this was significant.
"And what did they look like?"
"The two blokes were in black, shadow-wear. But the other one—maybe a woman, I told you, I don't know for sure—was in red, from head to foot."
Zhu Irzh, who had been listening intently, perked up at this.
"Red? A lot of people at the Min of Lust like to wear red. Lucky color, you see."
Chen decided not to investigate the implications of that last sentence. "Ministry of Lust?" Interesting. Throughout their trip, the twin threads of the Ministries of War and Lust had been interweaving. He turned to the informer.
"You're sure about this, are you?" One could hardly chastise a denizen of Hell for lying, but at the same time, one had to make sure. Chen took out his rosary and flicked it around the demon's reversed head like a boomerang. It shot back into his hand, leaving a scarlet flame in its wake, slowly fading. The informer gave a cry of pained outrage. But he had been telling the truth.
"Sorry," Chen said with a shrug. "You never know."
"Quite right, too," Zhu Irzh remarked. He rose from the seat in which he had been lounging and grasped the informer by the front of his robe. "Excuse me. I just want to try something." He spoke a word that made both Chen and the informer flinch. Fascinated, Chen watched as words tumbled out of the informer's mouth, spiky ideograms bursting like red leaves in the air. As they began to disappear, a picture formed instead, tiny and perfect as if unreeling onto a screen. Miss Qi, backed against a wall with the midnight sky of Hell far above her, fighting grimly. One of the shadow-forms went down, but the others—one black, one dressed in bloody red—stepped up behind her and threw a cloth like a fragile web over her head. It glowed briefly, and Miss Qi sank to the floor. The two demons in black, moving with a curious jerkiness, picked her up by the head and the feet and ran with her down the alleyway, followed by the lithe shape in red. Then they were gone and the image glowed once, searingly bright, then faded, leaving a little glowing coal which fell through the air into Zhu Irzh's outstretched hand.
"Impressive," Chen said. He knew Zhu Irzh had magical abilities, but he did not often see them demonstrated: the demon preferred to rely on his sword.
"Thanks." Zhu Irzh gave a modest shrug. "I had to wait until he'd spoken and you'd proved that he was speaking the truth. I can't do that on Earth, in case you're wondering. Too many restrictions on what I can and can't do. Here, it's a bit easier."
Chen nodded. It was the same for him, down in Hell.
"Can I go now?" the informer spoke with the truculence of fright.
"Yes. But not before giving us your name and your address."
The demon did so, with a very poor grace, then gathered what dignity he could and stalked off into the depths of the hotel. Chen was not confident that he'd been telling the truth this time.
"Well," Chen said with a sigh, "I suppose we're a bit further along. We've seen who took her, even if we're not sure where they come from."
"I didn't want to say so in front of our friend, but there was something familiar about that figure in red."
"Was it female, do you think?" Chen had been unable to tell although there had been a supple litheness about the red-clad figure that suggested that the informer had been right.
"I don't know. I think so."
"And do you still think that they were from the Ministry of Lust?"
"I don't know, but we can find out," the demon said. "Follow me."
Chen went with him to the room that had been Miss Qi's. He was at once praying that Zhu Irzh was right and hoping that he was wrong: he did not want to think of the pure Miss Qi in the clammy, collective hands of the Ministry of Lust, but at the same time, they needed to know where she had been taken.
"Right," Zhu Irzh said. He took the coal from his pocket and placed it on the table. Then he extracted a small feng shui compass from his other pocket and held it over the coal, which began to glow and expand. Once again, Chen saw the scene unfold in the air before him: Miss Qi fighting, being overcome, and carried limply away. The needles of the compass were swinging wildly, veering around the metal surface.
"Someone's putting a block on this," Zhu Irzh said, and grinned a wolfish grin. He blew on the compass, a fiery breath that sent a heatwave out into the air and caused the image to shimmer. The edges of the image shriveled, like a piece of paper held over a flame.
"This should get rid of the block," the demon said, as burning fragments spiraled down through the air and the image seemed to harden and grow clearer. The compass needle stopped its erratic wandering and grew still, pointing east. Chen went to the window, pushed aside the curtains. The Ministry of Lust stood outlined against a reddening sky, a bulbous wart against the horizon of Hell.
"Looks like you're right," Chen said. He drew the curtains closed, but not before he had, once more, glimpsed a shadowy shape disappearing back into the bushes.
"Zhu Irzh!"
"What?"
"There's someone down there," Chen said.
The demon squinted into the darkness. "I can't see anyone."
"I'm sure of it. I saw someone last night, too."
Zhu Irzh frowned. "Maybe we should go down and check."
They went back down to the lobby and the demon sidled out onto the steps, motioning for Chen to stay back. A moment later, he reappeared.
"Well?" Chen asked.
"If there was anyone there, they're not there now. Unless you wanted to search the gardens?"
Chen shook his head. "No, not with Miss Qi missing. We know where she is. I'd bet that the Ministry of Lust has sent someone to spy on you and me, though."
"They'd be pretty incompetent if they didn't," Zhu Irzh said.