The Embers of Heaven (36 page)

She knew what he was going to do the instant before he did it, and closed her eyes so that she did not have to see it. But she heard it, the quiet snap of destruction as he crushed the fragile comb, broke it, rendered it trivial, a piece of garbage, before he tossed it onto the dressing table where it landed with a soft ominous clatter.

She heard the defiler bark, “Bring her!”—and there were sounds of dragging, a thud as a body met a solid object or two, another soft rip as a piece of silk got in the way… and then silence.

Amais turned away from the peephole before opening her eyes. Somehow she just could not bear to see that broken comb on the defiled dressing table. No matter what happened to Xuelian after this night, this was the place where at least a part of her had died. Amais knew that, because she knew what the kingfisher comb had meant to Xuelian, a last link with a past now so long gone as to be almost legend even in her own mind. Without that, without the memory to support her, she was empty—a husk that would take the pain or the humiliation that her captors would visit on her, and would barely know it was happening.

Amais probed yawning darkness in front of her with the toe of her foot, testing the ground. She felt the edge of a step. Shifting her grip on the precious journals, the white silk kerchief folded inside the cover of one of them, she let her free hand trail on the invisible wall at her right and took small, careful, precarious steps into the void.

Six

The sun was closer to rising than Amais had realized. That, or the rest of that sleepless night, wandering the back streets of Linh-an wildly swinging between feeling sharply stabbed by pieces of a broken heart every time she drew breath or simply numb with grief, had passed in a gray blur of mindless wandering. She did not know where she was going or what she was going to do next, but it appeared that her subconscious had taken over and had come up with at least a temporary plan. The first light of the summer morning caught Amais in a street that, although it had also been roughly renamed, looked at least vaguely familiar. A street that led round the back of the Great Temple—not one of the three massive gates through which the faithful were expected to enter, but to the wall that stretched out behind the Temple circles, enclosing the gardens and storage sheds and sparse, monastic apartments of those who served its gods.

Amais knew this place.

She could not hope to gain entry by herself, a stranger who did not belong to the Temple and knew none of the passwords or protocols required for access into these inner sanctums—but she knew someone who did know them.

Jinlien… if I could find Jinlien…

She circled the Temple wall until she reached one of the main Gates, pawing at her pockets, looking for whatever money she had on her so that she might buy her offering and thus her way into the Circles—perhaps, as she had so often done before, she would find Jinlien inside, busy with some housekeeping chore or talking to other seekers in the colonnaded walkways before the niches of the silent Gods. But the pickings were slim—she had a handful of loose change and one very soiled and crumpled small denomination paper note that would not buy much more than a thimbleful of rice wine and perhaps a single incense stick.

She spared a brief yearning thought for the jar that stood on the dresser in her bedroom, which she kept full of ‘Temple money’ and fed with coins whenever she had any to spare—but if someone had asked Amais barely moments before that if she missed anything that had been left behind in Lixao’s rooms, her home, the place where all her belongings still were, she would have given the questioner a blank look in reply. There had been nothing that she felt bereft without—perhaps, at a push, one or two sentimental items that had belonged to her mother, but even those were afterthoughts.

In a way, it was a scathing indictment of her life; she was twenty one years old and too many of those years had now been lived from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, waiting for things to happen or to stop happening, swept along by the whims of the adults in her life or by the winds of war.

The only decision she had ever made for herself had been the spontaneous and imponderable urge to go off in search of a strange Temple on a pilgrimage of redemption for
jin-shei
and
jin-ashu,
the women’s vow and the women’s language. Even Iloh, the meeting heavy with
yuan
that had shaped her life, had been a part of that quest. If she had never gone on that journey, she would never have spoken to an old priestess at the ancient temple, never have come down from the mountain to seek the priestess’s
jin-shei-bao
, never crossed the threshold of Xinmei’s house. She would have had neither Iloh nor Xuelian.

Both lost, now—Xuelian swept away by the Golden Wind to the Gods alone knew what fate, and Iloh… Iloh, who might as well have been on a different plane of existence from her own. Amais tried to remember the feel of his skin, the sound of his voice, and all she could call to mind were the rough texture of the newsprint of his photographs and the tinny, crackling voice that carried across the Emperor’s Square at his rallies. There was a glass wall between them—she could see him clearly through it, but could not bring herself to believe that this man had ever been her lover.

It was very early in the morning, and the stall owners were barely beginning to set up their wares in the First Circle as Amais arrived at one of the three gates and slipped into the Temple. She waited just inside the arch of the doorway, watching, waiting for the merchants to get organized, for the customers to start arriving. But apparently it was a slow day, or else the events of the night before had made most people think it was more prudent not to venture out that day, not even to pray. Only a trickle of people came wandering into the Temple, less than half a dozen of them through the gate by which she stood.

It was a small child hanging onto a haggard-faced woman’s hand who began to shed some light on the situation.

“Will the parade pass by here, Mother?” the child asked, skipping a little as it walked, happy in the blissfully ignorant way of the very young. “Will we be able to see?”

“I hope not,” the mother muttered, just as the pair passed Amais. And then, more loudly, for the benefit of her offspring, added, “Maybe. We will see when we are done here.”

Made reckless by the night that she had just endured, Amais turned her head as the woman passed. “What parade?”

The woman paused for a moment, startled, wary, gripping the hand of her child a little tighter. But the child was too young to fear; the world, even this frightening world that they were all living in, was still merely exciting.

“The whores parade,” the little girl explained eagerly, obviously aping something she had overheard her elders say. Her mother dragged her away with an abrupt tug, sparing Amais another sharp, suspicious glance. But the child, who was loath to lose her audience, turned her head towards Amais as she was being dragged forcefully down the corridor of the First Circle, and repeated her words more loudly, just in case Amais had not heard her properly the first time. “The whores… parade. The
whores
parade!”

“Hush!” her mother hissed, giving the child’s arm a rough yank to make her point. The little girl whimpered, stumbled, and then, chastened, fell into step beside her mother.

The night’s work, it would seem, was not over yet for the Golden Wind.

Amais bought what offerings she could with her meager hoard of money, keeping only a few coppers in her pockets, and wandered into the curiously empty and echoing Second Circle. The atmosphere was tense, the air almost crackling with it, as though the ancient place itself knew something that it was not yet telling those who walked its hallways and corridors. Nhia’s niche was cold and incenseless when Amais came to it; so were most of the rest of them, the brooding figures of the Holy Sages carved from stone staring into empty air and pondering, perhaps, the fickleness of people caught in the turning wheels of time. Perhaps it would  have been better, more expedient, to have sought out some other God—some deity more concerned with lives and fates and with what would happen to her next—but in one sense that would be abandoning herself to the ebb and flow of the tides yet again, bonelessly, doing nothing but bobbing in the oceans of history as no more than a piece of flotsam waiting to be deposited at some other transient anchor of her days.

Nhia—Nhia
was
an anchor. Nhia was part of the old days that Amais had grown up treasuring, had tried so hard to look for when she had first set foot back in the land in which they had flowered so long ago. Nhia was a Sage, with answers, not just a silent and distant God who would counsel nothing more or less than a blind adherence to faith.

Nhia was a friend to the woman whose blood, so many generations later, ran in Amais’s own veins. And Amais, now, could use a friend.

She lit her incense stick from the smoldering head of one of the few that were left alight in this wing, and carried it carefully back to Nhia’s niche, wedging the incense stick in its holder, bowing her head before the statue.

“I am so lost,” she murmured. “Tell me. Help me. Where should I go? What should I do…?”

Her eyes closed, her shoulders folded inwards, her mind opening for any word of advice that Cahan chose to pass down.

Trust the people who love you
.

The words echoed inside her, as though they had been spoken out loud, into her ear, from right beside her. Amais looked sharply left and right, but she was still alone in the corridor. She lifted her head to Nhia’s statue, staring.

“But who is there left,” she whispered, “who loves me…?”

We who are your jin-shei… we will always be with you
.

“I don’t understand,” Amais said, sinking to her knees.

“Amais…?”

In a peculiar replay of a scene which had already taken place at this very niche once before—oh, it seemed to be a lifetime ago, now!—Amais turned her head slowly to encounter a pair of Temple sandals, the edge of a blue robe, and then upwards, to the familiar face of the person she had come here to find.

“Jinlien,” she whispered.

“Are you all right?” Jinlien said, coming down on one knee beside Amais and laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“I think so,” Amais said. “I will be. But Jinlien… I cannot go home. There are people who might be looking for me. I need to leave the city—but I can’t do it yet, not right now, not while the place is still in such an uproar from last night…”

“The Emperor?” Jinlien said softly. “We heard. Someone has been praying for the souls of the Emperor and his family since before dawn in the shrine of the Lord of Heaven. But how are you involved…”

“I think my sister is,” Amais said bleakly. “But that is not why they are looking for
me
.”

“Who is? And how do you know this is true?”

“There was a note,” Amais said. “In
jin-ashu
. I still don’t know who wrote it but it was a warning—and—it’s a long story… Do you have a hole I can crawl into, at least until tonight?”

“There are the second tier teaching rooms,” Jinlien said after a small hesitation. “Nobody has been in those for decades. Nobody is likely to in the next few days. Come with me—but later, you must tell me more. I can give you shelter but I cannot give you sanctuary, not without the permission of my seniors, and I cannot go to them without good reason.”

“Thank you,” Amais said. And then looked back up, at the stone statue in Nhia’s niche.
And thank you. I don’t understand yet. But I will try.

Seven

The “whores parade” turned out to be rather less than the child in the First Circle had made it out to be. Jinlien brought Amais a copy of the newspaper the next day, and there were a couple of photographs in it—all that had happened, apparently, was that a handful of the women caught up in sweep in the Street of Red Lanterns had been shown off by their Golden Wind captors, some with half their heads shaved to show their shame, others with exaggerated make-up applied until they looked like frightening caricatures who would have made any self-respecting male whimper and run for cover rather than approach them for his pleasure. Amais had almost not wanted to look at all, too afraid that she would see Xuelian in some deeply undignified pose or, worse, in pain—but if she had been among the haul she had not made it into the papers.

Another familiar face, however, did—just at the edge of the last photograph, her lips painted halfway up her cheeks by lip rouge and her eyes roughly outlined with kohl until they looked like two black holes in her face, Amais recognized Yingchi. Iloh’s sister. The expression on her face was more one of surprise than one of terror, but Amais’s own heart skipped a beat at the sight. Did her captors even know who she was? Would that identity work for her or against her…? Amais pored over the short article beside the pictures but it did not say much—merely that the younger of the women would be packed off to “re-education camps” in the countryside, where hard work in the fields and diligent study of Shou’min Iloh’s Golden Words would show them the way to a better future. There was no word as to what had happened to those judged to be too old to “re-educate”.

A far grimmer story, and one made more frightening by all the things that it did not say, occupied the first couple of pages of the broadsheet—the killing of the ex-Emperor and his family, and the ramifications of that.

Sensitized as everyone had been to political tone and innuendo, the way that the articles in question spoke of Tang, Iloh’s long-time friend and ally and until recently the head of state in Syai, indicated that his perceived sins and misdemeanors had been deemed to outweigh his usefulness to the powers who now ruled the land. There was rumor that Tang would be thrown to the wolves if the wolves howled for him loudly enough—but until they did, he would be kept close but helpless and disarmed. Iloh knew Tang to be a superior administrator and he would not waste that lightly—but Tang had done too many things against Iloh’s writ, and that would be neither forgotten nor forgiven.  But even given the ominous implications of all that, what was even more clear, and somehow even more terrifying to Amais, was the sense that Iloh had won his battle but lost his war. He had launched the revolution in order to clear the decks and climb back into the high seat himself, because he had thought he was seeing the land sliding back into a morass of antiquated ideas that would only trammel it and tie it down, take it back into the dark ages from which he saw Baba Sung, and then himself, deliver it. But the revolution had taken over, had sparked with a life of its own, had done far more than Iloh had ever bargained for it to do—and he had lost control of it. He had not sanctioned the Emperor slayings. He had said that it was good to rebel, but he had also said that everyone should be given a chance for redemption—what had happened instead was that the Golden Wind had heard only what it needed to hear, and had trampled over the rest underfoot in the rush to achieve their own goals.

There was mention, for the first time since the storm had broken, of the Army. The Army—Iloh’s veterans of the civil war—had been conspicuously absent as the youth of the Golden Wind had rampaged and pillaged and burned; they had apparently been ordered to stay well out of it, were being saved for if and when they would be needed as a last resort to put out the flames of the Golden Rising. Iloh was not quite there, yet; the newspapers carried several quotes from him addressed to the Golden Wind, still praising their revolutionary zeal—but they were definitely aimed at cooling off some of the more out-of-control cadres.

“You can stay a few days,” Jinlien had told Amais when she had brought the newspaper and some sesame buns for breakfast. “Nobody knows you’re here and nobody will ask questions. But Amais… I’ll be back, later, after my duties in the Temple end. You need to tell me what’s happening. Let me help, if I can.”

Trust the people who love you
.

Amais didn’t know if Jinlien really fit into that vision, but she was a friend, a friend who cared, and a friend who might have good advice to give.

“I’ll be here,” she said, studying the bare walls of the teaching room Jinlien had taken her to.

Jinlien smiled. “Stay safe,” she said. “I’ll come as soon as I can.”

Amais, left alone, took Xuelian’s embroidered handkerchief from between the covers of the journal in which she had laid it and sat for a long time holding the piece of cloth against her cheek, remembering her friend and teacher. Then she tucked that carefully away, inside her own clothing, and leafed through the handful of journals that Xuelian had handed her just before the Golden Wind had come for her. One of the last entries, as she had said, was a set of instructions—both on how to find the whereabouts of a certain sword carefully secreted in the basement of the House of the Silver Moon, and, more astonishingly, the way to find the cache of the House treasure the bulk of which Xuelian, with almost preternatural foresight, had caused to be taken to a safe hiding place outside the city.

To the province of Hian—and a place very close, as it turned out, to Iloh’s own ancestral farm, buried near the very land that he had plowed and fertilized in his boyhood. Now that soil would be made to bring forth a very different harvest.

Let it be used, if that is possible
, Xuelian instructed in her journal
, to find and succor the women from the Street of Red Lanterns—and help them begin new lives, if they come out of this storm able to pursue them. Many of them are young enough to start again, with families, perhaps, and lives well away from those who might wish them harm. And if this treasure gives aid or comfort to others who need it, that too will be a blessing.

The journals were more than Xuelian’s last gift to Amais. They were a legacy, a bequest, something to do in her name… and in the name of
jin shei
, too, which she had invoked as almost her last word to Amais in that room where she had then turned to face what was almost inevitably her own death.

Somehow all the voices of Amais’s past had started to speak the same words to her, pointing her to the same path, one that she had started seeking herself long ago but that she had believed to have been lost and buried under the avalanche of the years of war and conflict and revolution.

We who are your jin-shei… will always be with you
, spoke Nhia, from the mists of antiquity, from the time when Tai, whose blood now ran in Amais’s own veins, was young.

Let not her name be forgotten… or your own…
whispered
baya
-Dan from Amais’s childhood.

Let the treasure I leave be used to help begin new lives
, Xuelian said, her voice still echoing in this world, barely a day old.

“I have to go,” Amais murmured to herself, her eyes wide and focused somewhere far away, in the distant past, in a time yet to come. “I have to begin…”

But she could not leave without at least thanking Jinlien, and she stayed put in the quiet gloom of the abandoned teaching room, waiting for Jinlien’s promised return.

Jinlien did not come that night. But there was a teapot in the teaching room, and a burner that had gathered dust of many years since it had last been used; when Jinlien had brought the sesame buns she had also brought some lamp oil, and a small sachet of green tea, and a few other necessities she had felt it needful for Amais to have. Amais, hungry but reluctant to leave this place without Jinlien’s sanction lest Jinlien get into some kind of trouble over it, made do with the last sesame bun she had hoarded from that morning and brewed herself a pot of weak green tea with little ceremony but a great deal of grateful appreciation. The tiny lamp into which she poured the rest of the lamp oil gave off a flickering light barely more than a candle’s worth; it was too dim to read by without strain, and Amais soon gave up, closed the journals, tucked them under her body, and lay down on a pallet at the back of the room covering herself with the single thin blanket she had found lying upon it.

There was no trace of Jinlien the next morning, either, and Amais began to feel apprehensive—she was safe here, but isolated, and anything could be going on in the world around her, things that were a danger to herself and to others. She wrestled with the two conflicting urges for an hour or two—
stay put, wait for Jinlien to come and get me; get out of here and find out what’s happening—
but when Jinlien still did not appear and she became both hungrier and more apprehensive by the minute it was the latter course of action that prevailed, after all. Amais crept carefully out of her hiding place, closing the door behind her, and made her way almost furtively back into the Temple proper.

There were small knots of Temple people—priests, acolytes, novices—milling about the Temple precincts, apparently aimlessly, resembling nothing so much as an anthill which had been poked with a stick and left in disarray unable to formulate a response to the incursion. Amais, trying to stay out of sight, snagged a blue Temple cloak that had been dropped beside an empty niche in the Second Circle, and draped it over her shoulders to blend in better—but she could not figure what precisely had transpired to cause this commotion, although something did nag at her, something that should have held more of her attention if she had not been so focused on the Temple people.

An empty niche
.

It was a niche that should not have been empty. She was in the Emperors’ Corridor, and these niches had been filled with the statues of Syai’s old Emperors—generations upon generations of them, hundreds of years of history personified in carved stone faces with blue incense smoke curling around them

They were all empty now. Every single one of them. Not a single Emperor remained in place.

“What have they done…?” Amais murmured, her eyes wide with shock, and made her way past the looted corridor, through the nearest gate, into the Third Circle.

Some of the niches here had been vandalized, too, the statues of their Gods toppled from the plinths, offerings and incense sticks strewn on the ground. But it was ahead of her, near the gate to the Fourth Circle, that Amais saw something that made her freeze in place, her hand at her throat.

A figure in Temple garb—someone either very short or very young—was bending over the handful of the ancient brass burner bowls beside the gate, the ones Amais herself had been allowed to tend with Jinlien once, the ones that had been kept alive for centuries. The person at the burners had a watering can in hand—not entirely unexpected, this was the Third Circle and there were many plants in the gardens here that might have required watering. Except that what was being carefully and meticulously watered—not much, just enough, just enough to kill—were the burners themselves, with the embers within being doused with just enough water for the living flame to go out, for the burner to start to go cold.

Amais heard her own voice asking the questions, at that very gate, when she was still almost new to the city—
what would be done to a person who let a burner go cold…?

She almost moved, almost surged forward to tear the watering can out of the murderer’s grasp, when a cry stopped her, froze her again in her tracks. Through the gate, her face stark in anguished grief, came the very person she had come out to seek—Jinlien of the Fourth Circle, keeper of the living fire.

“Stop! Who are you? What are you doing? Stop! In the name of Cahan,
stop
!”

The one holding the watering can, a girl barely out of childhood and still carrying its legacy in the shape of her mouth, the roundness of her cheeks, straightened, met Jinlien’s outrage with a triumphant smile. “It is a new day, sister,” she said. “The old must make way.”

Jinlien fell to her knees beside the doused burners with a keening cry. “What have you done…?”

“The old must make way,” the girl-child repeated.

Before Amais’s unbelieving eyes a knife flashed out of a hidden scabbard at the intruder’s waist, sank with a soft tearing noise into Jinlien’s breast. There was a scuffle of feet at the outer gate, the one Amais herself had but lately stepped through, leading back into the Second Circle, and even as Amais shrank back, ducking under a torn altar cloth from a Third Circle shrine, half a dozen cadres in gray uniforms and with a wide yellow band on their right arms came into the Third Circle. Several of them carried burning torches.

“You won’t need those,” the one who had just killed said, straightening, wiping Jinlien’s blood off her blade. “The Tower has fires already burning, always burning. Enough for you to work with.”