Hidden Cities (15 page)

General Ma was a fat man who had contrived to stay that way down all the many miles of the long pursuit, across half the width of empire, and not by and large by riding horses. Or mules. He was a man who loved his comforts, and one of those was food and another was his carriage, drawn by whatever beasts he could muster, which usually meant the best in any province.

Now, after half a day astride, he did not dismount so much as roll out of the saddle and tumble groundward. He was fortunate to land on his feet and remarkable only for keeping them, for not staggering, not falling flat onto the flags of the courtyard.

He grunted and peered about him at the torches and the lamps and the dark pooling shadows between, looking for another of his comforts, his boy Yueh.

And saw quite another figure advancing at him, and contrived almost to make it look, almost to make himself believe that of course he was not looking for his boy, not looking for comfort, no, not yet. Of course he had been looking for the generalissimo.

“My lord,” he said, with a low and careful bow.

“Ma.” Tunghai Wang still had this disconcerting habit of presence, of being where he was not looked for, even with his army
spread impossibly wide across the country. With that, apparently, came the habit of knowing: where one had been, what doing. “What have you learned?”

“Little enough, my lord. Little that we did not know already. It would be easier to interrogate prisoners, easier far to compare what they say one with another, if we could bring them all together in the same place.”

“You mean in the same city, in Santung.”

“Yes, my lord. It would be easier to see your men fed too and kept in order,” which was General Ma’s other task and had been hard enough in all conscience when they were in Santung before, harder on the long road there, was proving harder yet in this chaotic scattering.

Tunghai waved a hand. “This is an old song, old friend.”

“I know it. But songs get to be old by being repeatedly sung; and truths do not become untrue through overtelling. If you could take Santung again,” said that way just to goad him; of course he could, everyone knew he could, “then I could serve you and the army better. And we would have more prisoners, and far better information.”

“And the boy-emperor could come from Taishu again, whenever he chose, and take the city back once more. We can both of us take Santung, and neither one of us can hold it.”

“Perhaps—though the longer you wait, the longer you let him inhabit it, the better chance he has of holding it. They are already building fortifications. You would do well to interrupt.”

“Fortifications, yes. I know this, I have seen. What more?”

“If you wanted more, you should have kept Ai Guo. I have plans of the works; each man draws them differently,” with a shudder at the memories: the stink and the noise of them, those prisoners snatched in raids or trying to raid on their own account, venturing incautiously beyond the city; the garbled speech and ruined fingers struggling to draw, “but you may be able to make some composite sense from them. It may even resemble what they are actually
doing,” though he at least would not willingly gamble anything on that, not money nor hope nor certainly his life. Not willingly even other people’s lives.

Tunghai Wang looked at him carefully, spoke thoughtfully, said, “Perhaps you are not the right man to organize my intelligence for me?”

There was so much threat in that, for all that they were old friends, for all its bland consideration. Ma flinched physically, and felt himself do it, and knew that Tunghai would have seen.

“No, no,” he said, trying not to gabble, not to plead; and then—spotting the boy Yueh in the shadows, and desperately recovering some little poise because some things were after all possible under a great compulsion—“you will still not find anyone better than me. Only, I could do better work in Santung. And you should not let the emperor sit there too long undisturbed.”

“Is the emperor still there?”

“No.” Another thing learned today, something to give up. Relief. “The emperor has gone back to Taishu, and will send a governor. We don’t know who, not yet.”

“If the emperor can go with such confidence, he can come back. And bring his army back, and take the city.”

“Perhaps—but how many times? He has taken some soldiers with him, and may take more—but he must leave a garrison. He must spend more men every time you come against him.”

“And so must I.”

“Indeed. But you have an empire at your back, and he has nothing but the sea.”

“And the dragon,” Tunghai Wang said gloomily. “She may not fight for him, but she does not work against him. That is almost as good. If she brings another typhoon—”

“It will impact his men as much as yours. And if she lets his army cross the water again and again, that only helps us whittle it away.” It was no easy task to recruit new men for Tunghai Wang; Ma was stretching ever farther for ever-thinner drafts. Still, what
was not easy was at least possible this side of the water. For the emperor, not.

“Even so, we need to address the dragon. Ma, if the legends are true, the mage-smith who chained her originally came from the north. I want you to send—”

It was a habit, apparently, to interrupt an old comrade. Perhaps it would be a good habit to break, if Tunghai Wang won through to emperor. For the while, though, he was only generalissimo, and so: “I have already sent,” Ma said. “More than one party, on more than one route.”
This is what I do
, in case it had been forgotten in this muddy aftermath where all Ma seemed to do was grumble to and fro on a mule.

The north was a long way, of course, and there was a great deal of it. Who knew that better than Ma, who had measured that distance in his wheel tracks, whose task it had been to shepherd an entire army all the way? Tunghai Wang might have led it, the head of the comet, bright and demanding; Ma’s task had been to sweep up the tail, to keep myriad men fed and clothed and shod and fit to fight. And to marshal scouts and spies ahead, to marry their reports to Ai Guo’s interrogations, to track the emperor as he fled. No one knew the country better than Ma, who had mapped it and pillaged it from the Hidden City to Santung.

Which being true, he had his own notions and his own experience to marry to the legend. The stories might speak only of a monksmith mage from the north, but Ma was not sending out his men at random. Ma did not believe in random.

“Ah,” said Tunghai Wang, hearing perhaps the gentle reminders in Ma’s words. “Good. Well then, come in and eat with me,” for all the world as if this were his own house, as if he were emperor already and all houses were his own.

As if Yueh were not waiting in the shadows there, with the promise of a bath, a private meal, other pleasures.

Well. Yueh would wait. The generalissimo, he was not so good
at waiting. And the more chance Ma had to speak to him, the more chance to change his mind, to take him back to Santung in force and speedily, as soon as might be. As soon as next month if it could be managed, and it would fall on Ma’s shoulders to manage it.

h, Jiao.

In the forest, in the dark, in all her pain and fury.

What she most wants, honest above all, she wants to point that fury at herself: for being here, for allowing this to happen. For making herself helpless in the clumsy, unhappy hands of a boy who had no idea what to do with her.

Too late: she cannot find herself. She is lost, somewhere between love and rage and rejection. In the forest, in the dark. Like the tiger’s roar, she seems to be everywhere and nowhere, immaterial, dissolved. Her body she is sure of, as ever: it stands just here on the valley slope, that way is east and that way back to the road, that the shortest way to the city, that to the sea. But her body is not her self, and never less like it.

She should have known, she did know. Of course she did. None of this is Yu Shan’s fault. What else could he say? She would have said the same, only less kindly. She was … not kind. No. She could be generous, but that was another thing.

She should never have followed him here; she should never, never have let him catch her on the path. She was better than that.

She used to be better than that. When she was herself, before she lost herself in a pair of green eyes and a touch of the unworldly, the tingling touch of jade.

Well. She had learned; she would not follow him again. With those eyes of his and those broader senses that the stone in him enhanced,
here in his own hills too—no. She would not. Let him go. She was lost; he was lost to her. She could live with that. She could recover herself, and be content. As she used to be, self-sufficient, pirate of the road …

L
OST SHE
was, but not in body, no. This was his own valley, just opening up before her: a good place to be leaving, swift as might be. Her legs took her upslope, far from the path, to where great rocks and crags thrust out among the trees.

She wanted to be angry at herself, but couldn’t pin it down. Yu Shan was immune, invulnerable; he had done the right thing and she couldn’t fault him for it.

She might have blamed the emperor, because that kind of anger can be as unfair as it chooses, but he was too distant and his responsibility too diffuse.

The voice of the jade tiger sounded again, unnervingly close, except that Jiao had no nerves tonight: or else she was all nerve, a one-string instrument, resonating high and clear and hurtful.

All of that and vicious too, the sharpest edge, cutting where it touches, wherever it is touched.

I
F SHE
was not, if she could not be warrior or lover tonight, if pirate was out of her compass, well. This body could always hunt.

She had hunted men and women in her time. Most of her life she had hunted for her food.

One lean winter, before she made a pirate of herself—or perhaps it was that winter’s work that did it, that turned her feet to the road and her soul to the wild—she had lived by hunting, selling skins and bones and horn in a rough market. Wearing what she couldn’t sell, wearing it and sleeping on it, learning to tan and work leather and to carve. Cutting and drying and keeping, keeping above all, wasting nothing. Sewing with sinew, chewing jerky, hide boots on her feet and bone tips to her arrows.

She’d never hunted tiger. She’d had more sense than that, but not tonight. Tonight her sense was lost with the rest of herself, or she would not be here.

T
HE TIGER
called, and Jiao responded. With no bow, no spear and no help, she licked her fingers to wet her nose, climbed the nearest outcrop to rise above the confusing scents of trees and undergrowth, lifted her head into the cleaner higher air and sniffed for tiger.

It was easy to blame the tiger. It had shown itself in one night to the emperor and Mei Feng, which mattered not at all, and to Yu Shan and Siew Ren together, when she was not there. That mattered cruelly much at the time, and all the more tonight. Its every roar was a goad, if not a gloat. Whatever it meant, it had chosen them and not her. Tonight it rubbed salt into that open sore.

Very well, then. She would be the one who made a choice. She owed nothing to the tiger, or the mountains; nothing to Taishu, nothing to the emperor. What she owed the boy, he had refused.

Very well, then …

T
HE CALL
was deceptive, deliberately so: what better for a hunter than to confuse its prey past reason, so that it knows not which way to flee? The tiger’s voice echoes and swells, it hunts on its own terms, uses fear as a whip to drive its victims this way and that.

Beyond fear, beyond caring, Jiao was too canny to believe the seductions of the tiger’s voice. Her nose had been spoiled in the years since she lived truly wild, but not ruined by joss or perfume or the sewer stinks of low-town life. Piracy had its benefits, and some came unexpected.

There: there was the breath of it on the breeze, the dense musk of cat woven through with the dusty weight of stone. It smelled a little like a wet rock on a hot day, a little like the rain-soaked kitten-cat she had relinquished to Mei Feng, just a little like Yu Shan.

Jiao dropped back to the forest floor, turned her face into the wind and ran upslope, light-footed and long-legged, lean and fatal and fatalistic, hunter on the trail, all else left to pool behind her in the muddy valley.

S
HE RAN
, she sniffed the air, she followed game-paths and sought out pools among the rocks where the high beasts came to water.

She thought this tiger was leading her a dance, it left her so much sign. Here was a pug-mark in the mud, in the moonlight; here was a twist of fur caught around a thorn, stiff between her fingers, so pungent to her nose that she didn’t need her eyes to find it out.

Above all, here and everywhere was the tiger’s song, close enough now that it could not fool her, high on the hill with no encroaching walls to catch an echo.

A
T THE
last, up toward the ridge, the trees failed altogether. Here was open rock and scrub, bright moon; here was Jiao; and here, yes, here was the tiger.