The Secrets of Jin-Shei (28 page)

Tai grinned back, an echo of unspoken understanding. “Something like that. Speaking of out of mind, have you found anything out yet? About her, the girl in the mountains?”

“Actually …” Yuet had been at the Blackmail Books over the subject, but had found herself thoroughly distracted by the rich mine of esoteric information they contained. She could see the value of such a document, and had already earmarked a special journal for her own volume. Szewan, however, had been collecting material for decades, and it was hard not to follow beguiling red herrings in her search for the Traveler girl’s identity. But Yuet was not about to admit this to Tai. “I’m looking, I just haven’t found my evidence yet.”

Tai had turned serious. “You still won’t tell me anything? Not even this suspicion that you have?”

“Give me a few more days,” Yuet had said.

She had gone back to her home that evening and hauled out the Blackmail Book that Szewan had kept in the city and its battered mate that had turned up in the wreckage of the Summer Palace, intent on just another cursory glance through them in the hope that her eye might snag on the thing she
knew
was in there but could not locate—but she had not reckoned on its usual power of distraction. With a couple of candles providing illumination, and a cooling flask of green tea beside her, she wound up reading late into the night.

Szewan was not linear. The records meandered, twisted, wound in tangled coils within themselves and with one another. The two books seemed to have been used as backup copies of one another, but frequently one would contain information the other would not. It should have been easy to find the thread Yuet wanted, searching for the code word “Traveler” in the heavily annotated and footnoted records—but Szewan seemed to have had inordinately much to do with Travelers when they had been
frequenting Linh-an in previous years. This in itself was interesting, and something that Yuet marked for future investigation—just how did an Imperial healer of some repute find herself so closely connected to the Traveler clans?

From what she had observed, Yuet judged the mountain girl to be between maybe thirteen and seventeen years of age, not older. But in the space of the four relevant years which those estimates bracketed, any number of Traveler men and women seemed to have crossed Szewan’s path. Some she even spoke of in intimate terms in her journal, as though they were close friends, or even kin. On the particular subject which she was pursuing, though, Yuet found herself tracking at least two women patients who had led her to dead ends—both had come to Szewan pregnant, but one of them had delivered a stillborn child and the other’s baby, according to Szewan’s notations, had died aged three from some childhood pox. There could have been no confusion over this because apparently the Travelers had been back in Linh-an at the time of the child’s death, and Szewan herself had closed the child’s eyes.

Yuet finally quit for the night, blowing out the candles and locking the books away again, away from other prying eyes, until she could return to them. Her dreams, when she retired to her bed, were nagging ones, as though she had seen something that was relevant to her search but had failed to give it the proper attention—both glimpsed that night, in her research, and seen a long time ago, sufficiently startling to have given her that sense of familiarity, of awareness, the recognition of the child in the mountains as being in some way significant and dangerous. There had been a name, a woman’s name, Jocasta or Jovanna or something. It wove its way into her subconscious as she fell asleep, producing first a vivid sequence of a wild and unlikely flight of dream-fancy and then something very different—something specific, a memory not detailed but nevertheless precise. She
had
seen the entry in the Blackmail Books before. When she woke, she could remember a sense of shock, and a woman’s name—an impulse strong enough to take her back to the Blackmail Books before breakfast.

This time, as though she knew exactly what she was looking for, she went straight to it.

Jokhara.
The name was Jokhara. And Szewan was brutally explicit when she had described what had happened to the woman named Jokhara in a Linh-an winter night.

Jokhara was small-boned, fair, no older than sixteen or seventeen years of age. When I was summoned to the Emperor’s quarters, she was almost unconscious, her naked body on the Emperor’s bed. There was blood smeared on her thighs. The Emperor was afraid she was dying; I was able to reassure him on that score, but it was no thanks to his ministrations. The Emperor seemed uncertain as to whether she belonged to his household or not, but if she was a new concubine nobody had heard of her when I inquired at the women’s quarters. Thus I made arrangements to take her to my own house, where I allowed her to come to naturally and had a woman of her Traveler clan present when she woke. She remembered very little of what had happened to her, but I told her Traveler companion that I believed she had been raped, and brutally so—she had resisted, and had been beaten into submission, and had been penetrated with what seemed to have been a large foreign object as well as a male member (because there were traces of male seed on her legs). It was too early to tell if any pregnancy had resulted. She was removed to the Traveler camp after several days in my care. Footnote: Injuries included bruising, sometimes severe on arms, legs, breasts, and torso, and also on her temple, and also around her neck where it looked like she had been held in what was almost a stranglehold. Also in her private parts which I examined later.

Armed with an actual name, Yuet could search with more focus for the first time, trying to follow the trail of the case. There had been little in the original account to connect the girl named Jokhara with the child in the mountains, but the time frame was correct, and there
had
been the gradual cessation of Traveler presence in Linh-an not long after this event—not hard evidence, perhaps, but suggestive in itself.

Jokhara’s name came up twice more in the Blackmail Books. Once in the city book—barely a month after her initial rape she had been brought in to Szewan by a female Traveler companion, had been discovered to be pregnant, and had been issued with a dosage of herbs which would terminate the pregnancy.

Once more, in the mountain book, eight months after that, describing Jokhara’s being brought to childbed.

Szewan had been present at the birth of the child, a girl they had named Tammary, according to the records in the book. A child whose birth was the culmination of an impotent rage by Jokhara, who had refused to take the herbs that Szewan had provided, who had wanted to bear the child of
her shame so that she could teach it enough of its heritage to somehow shame the man who had begot it upon her. But Jokhara had never had the chance to teach her daughter anything. She was dead of milk fever before her daughter was a week old.

Tammary remained up in the mountains, to be raised by her Traveler kin.

That was the last time either of them had been mentioned in the books. But Yuet knew, knew deep in her bones, that Tammary was Tai’s snow-dancer child.

Her mother’s status had been moot, and there was no proof that Tammary’s mother had ever been part of the Emperor’s household, but Tammary was the Emperor’s child, and all his children by a concubine were considered as belonging to his Empress. The eldest of his daughters was by tradition the heir to the Imperial throne.

And by the time Liudan, Syai’s Empress, was born, the child that the Emperor had begotten on the Traveler woman was already four months old.

And now that Yuet knew of Tammary’s dangerous paternity, she was also aware of how easily it could make Liudan lash out to protect her own position. Liudan seemed to be in control, but Yuet, of all people, knew all the insecurities that still clung to the young Empress even after she had apparently achieved her goals. Liudan had been no more than a figurehead for so long, had been powerless and dismissed as merely the backup heir to a backup heir, and a tainted one at that. Now that Liudan had reached the level where she was mistress of both her own fate and the fate of an Empire, Yuet knew that she was capable of almost anything to ensure her position. Yuet didn’t want to believe it of Liudan, her own
jin-shei
sister and someone whom she had started to think of as friend, but she was desperately afraid that Liudan could destroy the child of her father’s arrogant passions without a second thought if she feared Tammary could come between her and her legacy. With Liudan, of all people, the stark choice between
jin-shei
and Empire would be an almost impossible one to make.

T
he last week of Kannaian, like a final sting in the tail of summer, was hot and sultry. The sky was often full of angry clouds promising the relief of a storm, but somehow the storm never came. Each heavy day that passed only served to build up the weight of oppressive heat further on the city.

Yuet was given no time to ponder long on what she had discovered in Szewan’s Blackmail Books. She had barely closed them after finishing her research on the Traveler girl named Jokhara and her daughter before a runner arrived to summon her urgently to the Guard compound. There was a problem.

The Inner Court, where the families lived, was a wretched place that morning. Yuet could sense it as she approached, a healer’s instinct, even before the tragic and inconsolable wails of sick children began to penetrate her consciousness. These children cried with a helpless, hopeless intensity which implied that there was no comfort; their mothers and fathers were not leaping up to soothe them, to ease their misery. The crying hung above the courtyard like a shroud. It seemed to be coming from everywhere.

“What happened here?” Yuet snapped at her guide.

“It’s been miserable, Healer Yuet,” the guide, a Guard trainee maybe a year or so older than Xaforn, said. “There’s been no fever, but everyone’s been throwing up all night, or running for the privies. The children are particularly bad.”

“How long has it been going on? Why didn’t someone call me sooner?”

“There were sick people here and there over the past week, but it was nothing like this,” the trainee said. “Yesterday it was suddenly everywhere. Last night was unbearable.”

“What has been done so far?”

The trainee shrugged. “I don’t really know. I was sent to fetch you. They thought, yesterday, it might have been tainted fruit, or something like
that. But then more people started falling ill, and some of them were small babies, and they had eaten no fruit, and …”

“Thank you,” Yuet said, cutting off the incipient speculations, which were of no value to her. “Is it confined to the Court or is it all over the compound?”

“So far as I know, nobody in the outer compound has been ill yet,” the trainee said.

“Let’s keep it that way, then. You’d better not wander in and out of there at will, and pass the word that nobody else is to, either, until I clear it.” Yuet had been running the symptoms that had been described to her through her mental records, and was not happy with the numbers that came up. “I don’t like the speed of this, and I emphatically do not want the entire Imperial Guard coming down with acute ricewater bowel flux on my watch.”

A sour smell of vomit hung about the doorways of most houses Yuet passed. But she could not go into every house and interrogate some poor soul who happened to be a little less sick than the rest. She needed a central source of information. Someone who knew the inner workings here.

Xaforn had spoken of a girl … what was her name?

Qiaan. Daughter of a Guard captain.

It was a start.

Yuet peered into the nearest dwelling, letting her eyes adjust to the shuttered gloom inside. The place was empty except for one dozing woman sprawled on a low pallet by the far wall. Yuet noted a basin with a film of foul-smelling vomit still clinging to it on the floor beside the woman.

“Is anyone taking care of you?” Yuet asked, stepping inside.

The woman’s eyes fluttered open. “My husband was, but it took him too—he left for the privy.”

Yuet touched the inside of the woman’s wrist with light fingers. There was no fever, but her pulse was only a faint, thready beat. Her eyes looked enormous, circles of dark shadow underneath them. “How long have you been ill?”

“I took sick last night,” the woman whispered.

A sound at the door made Yuet look up; a man, his skin sallow and his eyes bloodshot, was leaning against the doorjamb—presumably the husband.

“I will return,” Yuet said, straightening up. “In the meantime, for the love of Cahan, drink plenty of fluid, both of you. Your lives may depend on that. Can you tell me where I can find a young woman by the name of Qiaan?”

The woman didn’t answer, eyelids drooping again, but the man at the door still seemed to have enough wits about him to reply.

“That would be Captain Aric’s daughter,” he said. “She’ll be at the officers’ quarters, at the top of the court.”

The officers’ quarters seemed a little quieter than the rest. A child who appeared perfectly fit and well was playing by herself out in the gardens, and pointed out Captain Aric’s quarters to Yuet with a dimpled grin. The door was shut, but it opened to Yuet’s touch when nobody answered her hail.