The Secrets of Jin-Shei (32 page)

“Alms,
sai-an?
Alms for the cripple?”

Nhia stopped, bringing her clubbed foot up into a comfortable position, and managed a smile. “Alas, my good woman, you are asking another cripple, but I have a few coppers for you, here. Tell me, what street is this?”

The beggar woman stared at her. “You look too Court for this street,” she said frankly. “What brings you here, and walking? This is the Street of the Nightwalkers, and beyond, there, is the heartland of the Beggars’ Guild … with your foot … but you wouldn’t be seeking them, you are dressed too richly. What
are
you doing here,
sai-an?
”

“I don’t know,” Nhia said, suddenly afraid. “Can I get a sedan chair here?”

“Wait there,” the beggar woman said. She put two fingers into her mouth and gave a sharp whistle. Two urchins, perhaps only a few years
younger than Nhia, tumbled out of the side alleys as if they had been waiting for just such a signal. “Make sure no cutpurse gets her,” the crippled woman said. “I’ll go and see Brother Number One.”

Nhia backed up against a wall, and the urchins took position in front of her, making a defensive circle. Her senses preternaturally sharp, Nhia saw seemingly ordinary men and women turn in her direction, catch an invisible signal from the two guardians, and veer off again after giving her a scrutiny through eyes veiled by lowered lashes. One of the young guardians turned to grin at her, and revealed a mouth which was only sparsely populated with teeth.

“Don’t worry, your ladyship, old Mara will do right by you.”

“Where
did
you come from, though?” The other urchin stared at her, and then turned to his companion. “She couldn’t have walked all the way from the Middle City. You saw her limping. I didn’t see her coming until she tripped over Mara’s cart. As if she stepped right out of that wall there.”

They headed off another opportunist, and then someone else approached, a man dressed in clothes that were threadbare but not ragged, strolling right up to the trio by the wall. The two urchins doffed the ragged round caps they wore.

“Brother,” one of the urchins said deferentially.

“I’ll take it from here,” said the man pleasantly. The urchins ducked their heads, smiled their gap-toothed smiles, and melted away into the alleys again. Nhia’s new companion offered her a small bow. “I am Brother Number Two of the Beggars’ Guild,” he said pleasantly. “If you will follow me, I will take you to Brother Number One.”

“I do not wish to be …” Nhia began earnestly.

Her companion offered her a small bow, interrupting politely but firmly. “This way.”

She was ushered down a narrower alley opening from the main street, and then into a doorway hung with a heavy leather curtain. The room inside was dim, lit only by candles and a flickering fire in a sooty fireplace. A number of people were inside, but Nhia immediately focused on a huge figure sitting in a thronelike chair by the open hearth. His hair was long and gray, and worn loose over his shoulders, held back by a filet; his face, crisscrossed with scars on the weathered, leathery skin, was possessed of an odd nobility of cast. His eyes, however, showed white with cataracts. He was, to all intents and purposes, totally blind.

“Come closer,” the blind man said, “and do not be alarmed. What I do, I do in order to “see” you in my way.”

She approached as she was bidden, and he reached out a hand, tracing his fingers across her brow, her closed eyelids, her mouth, her chin, and up over her piled hair with its pins and combs.

“You are a strange catch for the Street of the Nightwalkers,” said the beggar king.

“I know who that is,” one of the other people in the room gasped suddenly, stepping forward. “Brother, this is the one they call the Young Teacher in the Temple.”

Brother Number One cocked his head. “What do our people say?”

“The reports are good,” said the one who had recognized Nhia.

“What do you seek here,
sai-an?
” the beggar king said, addressing Nhia.

“I do not even know where ‘here’ is,” Nhia said. “All my life I have lived in this city, and I know only a few streets of it well. How I came to be here, I … I couldn’t tell you. It will sound strange to you, who are not of the Way, but I set out this morning from my house in search of my teacher, seeking a place the road to which I did not know. He told me I would know it when the time came. I let the knowledge fill me, and followed it. When next I knew myself, I was here. In your street.”

“You walked across town in that finery and you don’t remember doing it? Who is it that you seek?”

Nhia hesitated, but the Beggars’ Guild were not ignorant savages. They kept themselves informed, sometimes better than anyone in the Palace. They would know of Lihui.

“The Ninth Sage Lihui,” she said after a pause.

She saw a swift exchange of glances between several of the people in the room, but could not interpret it.

“Lihui is your teacher?” the beggar king asked, and his tone had hardened a little. “How is it that a man like that is the counsellor to one like the Young Teacher in the Temple? It is like a dragon teaching a swan. They both fly, but one spews fire and destroys and the other nurtures and protects.”

“What?” Nhia’s eyes widened in shock. If she had expected the beggars to be aware of Lihui’s identity, she had certainly not expected them to sit in judgment upon him.

“You will not find him anywhere near here,” the beggar king said, his voice cold. “We know him, and we are wise to his disguises. Does he now send you to lull us into dropping our guard?”

“I do not understand,” Nhia said. “I don’t know of what you speak.”

“When he needs bodies for his work, he comes to the streets,” the beggar kind said. “He takes these people, the street people. My people. It matters little to him that there is a living human soul in the twisted bodies he rips apart.”

“Lihui is a Sage of the Imperial Court!” Nhia gasped. “He does not do this abomination!”

“Your teacher is a dark alchemist,” one of the other men said. He stepped forward, into the candlelight, and Nhia saw his own eyes were gone, two white scars in their place. “He did this to me, before I escaped his house. Others were not so lucky. What is he teaching you, Young Teacher?”

“He teaches me the Way,” Nhia said. “He has been my guide to the Fountains of Cahan, to wisdom, to knowledge.” She swallowed hard, remembering her last encounter with Lihui. “He gave me wings, even. In meditation I am whole, I can fly across all of heaven and not be weary.”

“This is much, for one like you,” the beggar king said after a pause, and his voice was full of understanding. “They tell me you are lame.”

“I was born that way,” whispered Nhia.

“Your mother should have sent you to us,” said the beggar king. “We would have trained you.”

“But I
am
training …”

“I have heard speech of the judgments you give for the Empress, for the ordinary people who come to her courts,” said the beggar king. “We will send you home. But for the safety of your own immortal spirit, I advise you to stay away from the alchemist. He will pour poison into your fountains before you will drink of them. Xi, Lam, get a sedan and make sure she gets back to the Middle City safely.”

“Yes, Brother. Come,
sai-an.
”

Nhia, dazed, accepted the dismissal and the guiding hands of the two who were detailed to escort her. They were courteous, respectful, and quite firm; somehow, before she knew it, she found herself ensconced in a hired sedan chair, being carried back to the Temple. It seemed to take a very long time to get there. Nhia remembered how quickly she had got to the beggars’ streets from her own threshold that morning, and found herself afraid.

They deposited her at the Temple, and she spent the next few hours sitting by herself in the gardens of the Third Circle, seeking some of the peace of mind that those gardens had always brought to her—but it was in
those Circles that she and Lihui had first crossed paths, and that kept coming back to haunt her. She remembered his hands, lifting her that first time, right here in the Temple; supporting her in the Palace; holding her while she swam back into earthly consciousness in the teaching rooms. Gentle hands. The wise words that had accompanied them—the words she had committed to her study journal, just as he had said them, to think on and to seek wisdom and understanding.

A dark alchemist.

How was it possible?

Here in the Temple, far from the presence of the blind beggar king, some of the power of what he had said was stripped from it. His words rang strange, hollow; here in the Temple it was Lihui’s word that held sway.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, as clearly as if she had heard them spoken beside her, she heard Lihui’s voice shaping words:
I waited for you, Nhia. Where were you?

Sleep came fitfully that night, and was full of both of them, Lihui and the beggar king. One said,
Come to me.
The other raised a hand to stop her, his blind eyes staring straight through her,
Do not go to him.

She woke, wild-eyed, and it was Lihui’s voice that had been the last echo in her mind. She dressed carefully again, as she had done the day before, and stepped out into the street outside her house. And this time nobody touched her, nobody jostled her, nobody stood in her way. Somehow, not quite knowing how, she found herself standing before a pair of wooden gates set into a high wall, all painted a dark red. The gates opened at her touch, and a silent servant waited inside, bowing to her, to conduct her into a pagoda house, and down a flight of stairs into a windowless room lit with braziers and two brightly leaping fires from two fireplaces set at opposite ends of the room. Painted panels with
hacha-ashu
writing screened parts of the room from her gaze as she swept her eyes across it. Dressed in a loose robe of crimson silk, Lihui turned from a table against the far wall, a half-full wine goblet in his hand. For the first time since Nhia had met him she saw him with his usually tightly braided hair loose over his shoulders, and it flowed well down past the middle of his back, rich and black, framing his face in a way she had not seen before and bringing the black glowing coals of his eyes into prominence.

“You are here,” he said, his voice light, almost conversational. “Good. There is much to do; let us begin. Some wine?”

“I do not …” Nhia began, but he had already poured some into a second goblet, topping off his own in the process, and had crossed the room to her, handing her the glass.

“Over here,” he invited, stepping aside and handing her into the room as he closed the door behind her. “Have a seat by the fire, and we will start. You are tardy, my student. I expected you here yesterday as I commanded.”

“I …” Nhia usually shied away from wine or any strong drink, but she had taken several small sips from the goblet she held in her hands, through the polite instinct of drinking from a glass handed to her by a host, or maybe through the sheer forceful energy of Lihui’s presence—he had handed her the drink, therefore she must obey and drink it. But even those few small swallows seemed to have started her head swimming. Perhaps it was just that she was unused to it, but she snatched a lucid moment to realize that Lihui had set his own goblet on the table before them and was watching her very closely.

Do not go to him,
the beggar king’s voice echoed in her mind, urgent, a warning. A warning she should have heeded.

The tongues of flame from the hearth fire suddenly grew hotter and brighter, and the air in the room solidified into spiced honey in Nhia’s throat. Her fingers opened, nerveless, slack; she never heard the glass shatter on the stone hearth when it tumbled out of her hand, her vision tunneling into licking red flames and then into black. She reached out blindly, groping for support. The last coherent thing she remembered was Lihui’s arm slipping around her waist as she spiraled into oblivion.

W
hat a strange dream I had.

Nhia, eyes still closed, was dimly aware of lying on a soft surface, a bed, but when she tried to turn and stretch and burrow back into sleep she found herself unable to move. Her arms were stretched loosely above her head, but when she tried to bring them down to pillow her face she realized that her wrists were tied together with something soft but strong which also anchored her arms to a solid and unyielding point behind and above her.

This was no dream.

Nhia’s eyes flew open as memory flooded in. She was in Lihui’s room, but this was a very different place to the one she had entered … how long was it … minutes, hours, days ago? Most of the concealing screens had been removed. A cluttered L-shaped desk and laboratory bench took up one whole corner next to one of the fireplaces. Half of it bore an eclectic mixture of laboratory equipment, distillation apparatus, alembics, assorted glassware with strangely colored liquids inside, a mortar and pestle, and a small crucible with an open flame above which, as Nhia watched, something in a long-necked glass flask bubbled quietly. The other half was piled with books and manuscripts, an inkwell, a quiver full of writing quills and brushes, a roll of parchment prepared for writing and held down by several paperweights which looked like human skulls. Another skull, fitted with an iron band which hinged at the jaw, sat on a small three-legged stool beside the table, set upside down on its crown in a carved ebony base, its jaw “lid” open.

The Sage Lihui, dressed in a dark draped robe fastened with a clasp on one shoulder, turned from his workbench as Nhia watched, bearing a pewter bowl in his hands. He glanced over at her, realized she was awake, gave her a half-smile and a courtly bow, and then crossed to the skull and carefully poured the contents of his bowl inside, closing the jaw on top of
it as he did so. Then he picked up the skull in both hands, swirled it slightly to mix whatever was in it, and crossed the room to the bed on which Nhia was tied.

“Awake, my dear?” Lihui said. “Good. Then we can finally begin.”