The Secrets of Jin-Shei (35 page)

The red gates of Lihui’s courtyard were closed, but they opened at her touch as they had done before and Nhia found herself standing in a disorienting place where all seemed mist and shadow.
Turn right,
Khailin had said, but Nhia almost instantly lost all sense of direction, lulled and confused by
half-seen shapes looming out of the mists. The gates were behind her, already barely visible through the mist, as though she had moved away from them without being aware that she had done so.
Right,
Khailin had said right, there had to be a reason for this. Nhia turned her head, keeping sight of the gate, keeping the red wall at her right hand, and began limping slowly along a curiously solid ribbon of pale cobbled road which had materialized at her feet as soon as she had consciously chosen a direction.

It was not an even road, and she would have found it hard going to walk this place at the best of times without the help of a cane. And this wasn’t the best of times. Her head ached abominably, despite Khailin’s medicinal tea, and her body felt broken and weak, her limbs even more strengthless than usual.

The memory that kept returning despite her efforts to banish it from her mind was her first encounter with Lihui in the gardens of the Temple, the first time their paths had crossed, hers and Khailin’s and Lihui’s. The vision mocked her with the raw potential it had held; and was superseded by flashes from Nhia’s sessions at the Temple with her mentors—all of whom, or so he had claimed, had been Lihui himself, all of whom had been her enemy—and she found herself mouthing the words she had written down so dutifully in her study journal.

In a way the memory was a white pain, because of all that had followed. But on another level the teachings of the Way now came to her rescue. The mists at her side—the wall of Lihui’s house had long vanished—showed her glimpses of things every so often. A gathering of laughing people. A funeral. A cup brimming with golden liquid. A sundial in an overgrown garden. A child writhing in flames, tied to a wooden stake. Three naked women, dancing on a floor of green glass. A striped cat stalking a sparrow. A yellow sun in an autumn Linh-an sky. An old woman spinning wool, with a little girl sitting at her feet and watching with adoring eyes. A solitary wildflower nodding beside an empty road winding off into the distance.

The sky of the Immortals. That deep, deep blue she had known once
and would never forget. Somewhere, even, the distant sound of an eagle’s cry. Nhia’s breath caught on a sob.
Familiar,
she thought turning from her dream, focusing her mind, holding on to her true nature.
Not a dream of flight. I am Nhia, daughter of Li the washerwoman, of the city of Linh-an. I am crippled. I am human. I do not have those wings. I have never seen those stars with my own eyes. Focus. Familiar. She said, familiar.

The mists parted on a garden, and Nhia’s step faltered. Was this the Temple garden? There, the pond with fat golden carp in it, the slim fingers of willow trailing in the water.
Is this what she meant?

A low growl sounded somewhere very close to her, and a large green-eyed tiger padded into the quiet garden, staring straight at Nhia. The amulet at her throat suddenly went cold, a small piece of ice, a warning. But she had not come to a complete halt, had just slowed down, and she clutched at the amulet and stumbled past the inviting and peaceful garden, a twin to which had once held so much peace for her. The tiger’s eyes passed over her; then they darkened, suddenly, and the tiger flowed into a man whose black hair spilled over his shoulders, over the crimson gown that he wore. His face was set in a scowl. Nhia’s breath caught and she tripped on a loose cobble on the misty road, but she caught her balance, staggered forward, kept walking. The wraith of the black-haired man stalked toward her, brushed past her,
through
her, and was gone. So was the garden. Nhia shivered; she had once held a captured bird in her hands, and had felt its fear in the terrified, wild beating of the tiny heart against her fingers. Now her heart beat the same way. A bird in cruel hands.

Familiar. Somewhere I’ve been before.

Somewhere, she realized with a painful clarity, that was not the Temple to which she had given so much of her life. Anywhere but there.

Another voice swam into her consciousness, one heard more recently, one which had fought a battle with Lihui’s in her mind on the night before she had set out to find Lihui’s house.

Do not go to him.

The beggar king.

Even as Nhia’s memories fluttered helplessly around this vision like moths suddenly attracted to a candle flame, the mists parted once again and she glimpsed a city street. It was full night, and the street looked different to the one she had found herself in once before while the sun was riding high, the houses she remembered as shuttered and cold now streaming light from
windows and open doors onto the dark street. But she was sure this was it, the Street of the Nightwalkers. Familiar. A place she had walked before.

Nhia stopped.

The street flowed around her in a slow, dreamlike quality, in a silent limbo, and then, when she was totally surrounded by the welcoming houses and Linh-an’s solid walls, it all snapped into place, and the sound of the street rushed in.

She was here, solidly here, a blindly questing hand reaching out and finding the blessed, firm, familiar texture of gritty brick wall. Nhia sobbed, once, in sheer relief.

She could hear laughter spilling from the open windows, and music, and as she watched, a man and a woman stumbled out of the nearest doorway, arms around each other, reaching to kiss in the shadows of the street. Nhia could see the man’s hand on the woman’s hip, outlined dark against the light-colored shiny silk of her figure-hugging gown, and the way his fingers moved across her hip bone possessively.

The Street of the Nightwalkers.

The significance of the name struck her suddenly, and she was surprised into a brittle laugh.
I should have understood at once what …

The laugh changed into a gasp and then a strangled scream as an arm slipped around her own shoulders from behind.

“And what are we waiting for out here all by ourselves, my dear?”

Nhia recoiled with a violence that surprised even herself, staggering back away from the man who had accosted her, blind panic bubbling into her throat—this man thought that she … he wanted to
touch
her, hold her …

She wailed, suddenly, a blind, lost cry that stopped her would-be carousing companion in his tracks. “What in Cahan …?”

Turning, Nhia fled into the shadows, seeking solitude, running from her memories, from herself, from the laughing ghost of Lihui, the imprint of whose burning hands and mind she still bore on her body and her soul. Her eyes were full of tears, her eyesight blurred, and she did not see the body stretched out in an alleyway’s shadows until she tripped over it and went down in a heap beside it. Her hair—she had had neither time nor strength to do more than just braid it loosely when she had risen from Lihui’s bed—pooled beside her in a dark coiled rope, and she began to cry
in earnest now, great racking sobs that shook her entire frame under the cover of her concealing cloak.

“Watch where you’re …” the shadowy shape she had tripped over had started protesting indignantly, but paused in mid-sentence as Nhia collapsed into her storm of weeping. “Hey, now. What happened? Did someone try to force you? That’s a crime here on the Street, you know. You can report him to the Guild and they will deal with him.”

A rough but comforting hand, streaked with street-dirt and with black rims under the ragged fingernails, reached out and touched Nhia gently on the shoulder. She twisted away again, whipping her head around. “Don’t …”

“He really did a number on you, whoever he is,” the voice from the dark said with an edge of anger. “I’ll take care of you, don’t worry. Wait here.”

Nhia heard scrabbling sounds, then a noise as though something was being dragged along the street; her tear-streaked vision and the lack of lighting gave her only an amorphous shape that could have been man or woman, emerging out into the street from the side alley on a pair of wooden crutches. She crawled backward until she felt the comforting sturdiness of a solid brick wall behind her, and curled up into a tight ball, oblivious of the street, of the light and laughter in the bright houses, of the strange savior in the alley.

Focus.

Focus on your true nature.

But what was her nature now? How could she focus on something that had been so bitterly ripped from her—the very instant of undertanding, when her spirit had taken flight, had been no more to Lihui than the moment in which she had been ready for him to take. It all meant nothing. Nothing mattered.
I do not know who I am.

The next coherent thought that came to her was that she was no longer in the alley, but lying on a bed, loosely covered with a threadbare but finely woven wool blanket.

A bed
… She shot upright, suddenly terrified, but this time she was not constrained in any way, and she was quite alone. The room was small, not opulent but comfortable, with a braided rug on the floor beside the bed and
even a scroll of a delicate ink landscape painting full of inscrutable light and shadow mounted on the wall above her. There were wooden shutters on the window on the opposite wall, drawn, letting in a grayish, rain-hued sort of light. It was day—not even morning, but later, noon or beyond.

“Where am I?” Nhia murmured. It was, on the face of it, a completely futile question since she had nobody to ask it of and she had no answers to offer, but a wintry smile touched the corners of her mouth as she realized that part of the reason she had spoken it out loud was to chase away the ghosts of her last awakening. When she had woken to silence, to finding her voice just the first of the things that were to be taken from her. If she could hear herself talk, she was not back at Lihui’s strange house. She was safe. Maybe she was safe.

As though summoned by the soft whisper, the door to the room clicked open. Nhia braced herself for … for something, she didn’t quite know what, except that the girl who entered was quite possibly the last person she would have expected to see.

“
Tai?
” Nhia whispered. “What are you doing here? Where
am
I?”

“You’re at Yuet’s house,” Tai said. “Thank Cahan you’re all right. Yuet said that you would sleep after she gave you the draft, but not even she expected you to sleep for nearly two days. It was like you just decided never to wake up again. Yuet is at Court, but I stayed to watch you, just in case. Shall I bring you some tea? Are you hungry?”

Nhia looked down at the hand she had laid down over her coverlet, and realized it was trembling uncontrollably. “Two days?” she said weakly. “Tai, how did I get here? I remember nothing after I tripped over in the alley.”

“Shhh,” said Tai. “I’ll get the tea. Yuet left an infusion for you, if you should wake up. Something calming and herbal. I’ll get it, and I’ll get the cook to bring you something light to eat—rice cakes, maybe, nothing heavy. Then I’ll come back and we’ll talk.”

She slipped out, just as Nhia raised a shaking and ineffectual hand to stop her—
Don’t leave me alone!
—but at least she now knew she was in a safe place, with friends. She lay back, tried to quiet her heartbeat, focusing on the window and the grayness outside. It was raining; she could see the shadows of drips forming on the shutters.
There was a time, only days ago, when she could have heard each individual raindrop as it hit the wooden shutter or the wall beside it, and every drop would ring with the clarity of a crystal bell.

She clamped down hard on that thought. She would not think of that. At least not right now.

Tai poked her head around the door again, and then nudged it open with her hip, both hands busy balancing things—a porcelain cup full of fragrant tea, a woollen wrap draped over her arm, a pewter plate with a couple of nut biscuits on it.

“Here, wrap this around you, it’s turned damp and miserable outside and we don’t want you catching anything,” she said as she divested herself of her load and handed Nhia the wrap. “Cook says that she’ll bring you up a light meal later, just rice and steamed vegetables. In the meantime I brought you these. They’re my own special recipe, I made them myself. It’ll take the edge off the hunger. And drink that tea while it’s hot.”

“Are you Yuet’s apprentice now?” Nhia said with a hollow laugh, as she sat up in bed and dutifully accepted things in their turn.

“No, but she’s been carping about wanting one. She’s suddenly in demand.”

“How did I get here?” Nhia said, a shade more calmly, accepting a biscuit into her hand but making no attempt to eat it.

“Eat!” said Tai peremptorily. “Or I won’t tell you
anything
until Yuet comes back. And that could be hours.”

Nhia grimaced, took a bite of the biscuit. She could have sworn that she was not hungry, that she would never be hungry again, that she never wanted to taste another mouthful as long as she lived—but that first bite released an unexpected sweetness into her mouth, and she ate the rest of the biscuit with relish.

“All right, then,” she said, smiling despite herself at Tai’s triumphant little grin, “tell me.”

“Yuet said they came to get her very late that night, she’d already gone to bed.”

“Who came to get her?” Nhia interrupted blankly.

“Apparently you turned up in a street far to the south of the city, called the Street of the Nightwalkers, known for the houses of pleasure along there—the man who found you said that he thought you had been attacked on the street, and that was against Guild rules—but then he found the man from whom you ran, and he was just as scared by it, and …”

“Tai,” Nhia said. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Well, then, you tell me what you know,” said Tai, after a mutinous little glance. “That way I can just fill in the blanks. Where were you? You missed quite a show, by the way. Liudan’s Closing of the Autumn Court was quite a shocker. Have you heard?”