The Secrets of Jin-Shei (37 page)

“He actually tried to kill you?” Liudan said.

“He almost succeeded,” Nhia whispered.

“I
have
heard complaints about his arrogance, but he has good reason to be proud,” said Liudan. “There is always jealousy for the stars of any heaven, and he is the brightest gleam in the circle of the Sages. But sorcery?”

“It was by sorcery he ensnared Nhia.”

Tai still looked mutinous and warlike in her small, furious way, but held her peace. Nhia, another whole ocean of pointless tears just waiting for a chance to spill from her brimming eyes, also kept silent.

“Well,” Liudan said after a pause, “I cannot do anything about dismissing Lihui, even if I wanted to meddle in the affairs of Sages. But, as it happens, there have been other developments. Nhia …” She crossed over and perched casually on the edge of the bed, the glittering Dragon Empress of Syai herself, and smiled. “How do you feel about joining the Imperial Council?”

Nhia’s jaw dropped open, and Yuet, all healer in this instant, roused up like a mother hen protecting her young. “She is convalescing, Liudan!”

Liudan threw her a reproachful look. “I do not mean instantly,” she said. “I will make sure that you have every care, and that you take all the time that you need to recover. But when you do choose what to do next, I have need of a Chancellor.”

Yuet gasped, in unison with Nhia herself. “They will never accept that!” Yuet said. “Not even you, Liudan! And just what have you done with poor Zibo?”

“I? Nothing,” Liudan said with utter sweetness. “He has done it all to himself. He says it is his heart, and his ulcer, and any number of other things. But he wishes to resign, and I have accepted the resignation. And I am not a fool, Yuet,” she added, a trace more sharply. “I know that this is not going to be easy. But I have named myself Empress, and they
will
put that Tiara on my head this summer and make that official. And I
will
have people I trust beside me. Nhia?”

“But …” Yuet began again, and was this time interrupted by Nhia herself.

“But Lihui took most of me,” she whispered. “Everything that had the potential for greatness or for wisdom.”

“You know that is not true,” Liudan said, with a gentleness that was rarely heard in her voice.

Unexpectedly, Tai now came to Liudan’s aid. “She’s right, Nhia. You were reckoned wise by the people of the Temple long before the priests took a hand in teaching you the esoterica of the Way. If you never learn another method of meditation, you will not be the worse for it. But nobody can take away the core of you, who you are.”

“As I said before, you understand things everyone else merely knows,” Liudan said. “I want that on my side. If you don’t feel up to taking the
office on your own, I would happily appoint a token Princeling as your co-Chancellor—but all of us would know whose advice I really valued.”

Despite herself, and through her tears, Nhia laughed. “I’d like to fall down at your feet right now, as I am supposed to do anyway.”

Yuet snorted. “Healer’s orders. You’ll stay in that bed for at least one more day. You were
transparent
when they brought you here, Nhia. You gave me a proper scare.”

“Well?” said Liudan inexorably.

“But …”

“What, Tai?” Liudan asked patiently, turning to face her.

“She will be in Council. In the Palace. All the time.”

“Yes?”

“So will
he
.”

Nhia flinched, but Liudan smiled, a thin, wolfish smile which made Yuet, shivering at the sight of it, swear to herself never to do something so abhorrent to Liudan as to have that smile turned onto herself.

“As to that,” she said, “there I can help. Trust me.” She rose, in a rustle of dark red silks that should have reminded Nhia forcefully of Lihui’s red silk robe but somehow had the opposite effect, erasing the power of the other from her mind, attaching the color to Liudan instead. “Good, then,” Liudan said. “Yuet, it’s your call—and Nhia’s, of course. But when she is ready to come and take her place, let me know. I will make sure that she is safe. Now—back to Khailin. What, exactly, has happened to her?”

“She seems to be Lihui’s wife,” Yuet murmured, “although nobody in Linh-an has heard anything about this marriage. And Nhia says that she is kept a prisoner in whatever estate he calls home.”

“The Khailin who vanished mysteriously just before she should have married the Princeling who is now Aya-Zhu?” Liudan said.

Yuet nodded.

“Complex,” Liudan murmured, tapping her lip with her index finger while she considered the matter. “Marriage is still beyond my power to meddle in,” she said at length, with real regret. “I may not intervene in a man’s private life—unless, perhaps, I catch him mistreating his wife before my very eyes, but most men who would do such a thing are careful not to do so in public. I can make inquiries, though, and I will do that. And maybe the very fact that Lihui knows that I am making such inquiries, and I will make sure that he knows, might make him think twice about doing anything irrevocable.”

“You won’t find anything,” Nhia said faintly. “He has her beyond our help. The only way out is if she learns how to counter his spells.”

Liudan’s interest sparked briefly. “She is a student of the dark arts, too?”

“Not unless
yang-cha
is the dark arts, and it’s been practiced by countless adepts in the Way,” Nhia said. “I have never really practiced that side of it myself, nor has it been one of my interests—I have always sought to reach my goals through meditation and prayer, the internal alchemy, the
zhao-cha.
All I wanted to do was find out about the ethereal realms, the fields of Cahan, the spiritual world. That is what I thought my teachers were guiding me in—but Lihui … Lihui transcended that. What he does goes beyond the concept of external alchemy, as we know it in the Temple. I have seen the remnants of his experiments, in the beggar king’s house.”

“The beggar king?” Liudan said sharply.

“The head of the Beggars’ Guild,” Nhia said

“You met the head of the Beggars’ Guild?” Liudan asked. “Interesting. I am told that not many know his identity.”

“I don’t know his name,” Nhia said. “They called him Brother Number One. He warned me against Lihui. I should have listened.”

This time Liudan’s glance was genuinely startled. “What has the head of the Beggars’ Guild to do with an Imperial Sage?”

“I have no idea, Liudan. But he spoke of alchemy in a way that made me think he knows it from the inside. Not the words he said, even, just the way he said them. And somehow, I don’t know how, he knows Lihui. Or at least knows things of him. He knew about the sorceries.”

Liudan stood in silence for a moment, contemplating this, and then smiled once more and reached out to lay a delicate white hand on Nhia’s shoulder.

“Rest, now,
jin-shei-bao,
my Chancellor. I will await your coming with great pleasure. Ah, the winds of change that we can make blow through that stuffy Palace, you and I!”

She turned the luminous smile on Tai, gave Yuet a friendly nod that was both a farewell greeting and a command to take good care of Nhia, and swept out of the room.

“Now there’s an honor for you,” Yuet murmured. “She does not make house calls for just anyone, Nhia.”

Nhia’s stay at Yuet’s house extended from days into weeks. Unable to face going back to her studies, going stir crazy waiting in Yuet’s sitting room while the autumn rains lashed Linh-an, Nhia took to helping out
with Yuet’s work, working in the stillroom under Yuet’s supervision and preparing the simpler medicines. She even accompanied Yuet on her visits to the inner court at the Guard compound, where the healer was still keeping an eye on the aftermath of the summer epidemic, and pitching in with whatever needed to be done there.

Nhia and Qiaan struck up a strange relationship based on a mutual respect for the other’s willingness to get their hands dirty if that was necessary, and they shared a mutually admired knack for making large numbers of small children behave for extended periods of time. Nhia even found herself revisiting some teaching tales from the Temple, and telling them to an audience every bit as rapt as the ones she had left behind in the Temple Circles, together with her title. She had not set foot in the Temple since her return from Lihui’s ghostly mansions.

She was allowed to drift for a while, to find her own way back. The problem was that she was making drifting into a way of life, that she was choosing not to choose—Liudan’s offer was still before her, a place at the Empress’s side as Co-Chancellor of Syai—but Nhia shied from taking the final step of accepting it. It was well into Chuntan, late that autumn, that Nhia’s entire
jin-shei
circle seemed to rise, independently and then collectively, to the challenge of bringing her back to the real world.

“You know there is a place for you in my home for as long as you need it,” Yuet told Nhia, watching her pulverize a dried herb mix into a fine powder to be stored over the winter, “but you cannot hide out in my still-room for ever. You are not made for mixing poultices and potions. You are meant for greater things.”

The very next day Qiaan, watching from a doorway with her arms crossed, waited for Nhia while she shepherded together a small group of young children whom she had been keeping occupied for the better part of an hour. Qiaan, dressed in an elegant turquoise silk gown with the sleek shapes of fish embroidered on it in darker blue and silver, watched Nhia’s simple brown outer robe over an inner gown of pale cream silk, and shook her head. “You cannot bury yourself in here for ever, you know. And wearing dowdy clothes still fails to disguise you. You’re young, and you’re pretty, and you ought to be out there in the world. Making a difference. You are made for that, you know.”

Tai, who had broached the subject with Yuet in the meantime, had been given the go-ahead to try and find her own solution to Nhia’s complete withdrawal.

What she did, finally, was take Nhia back to the Temple.

As skittish as a deer in hunting season, Nhia was ready to bolt at the slightest pretext; she was only there out of loyalty to Tai, who had trumped up an excuse as to why she needed to go and why she needed a companion for it. And then, when they got there, she told Nhia that her business would not really take all that long, and practically bullied her into going into a
ganshu
reader’s booth and get a long-overdue reading while she waited.

This had all been set up with the reader in advance, and there were no queues to join, no excuses for Nhia to wander off and hide herself in the booth of some friendly craftsman like So-Xan and his son. She was in the reader’s booth, with the privacy curtain drawn and the pebbles being shaken in their cup, before she had time to protest.

“I would tell you to think on your problem while we do this,” the reader said, “but you have the haunted look of someone who has been thinking of nothing else for too long. I can see why your friends asked me to see you.”

“I don’t think that I need …” Nhia began, but the reader raised her left hand for silence, and rolled the six pebbles from the cup, one at a time, laying them out on her silk-covered table in triads. The triads came out in identical patterns—black/white/black, twice.

“Tan and Tan,” the reader murmured. “Treachery has been in your recent past. It has made you afraid.” She wrote the reading down on a scroll of silkpaper, and gathered up the pebbles, repeating the process several more times, calling the readings in what seemed to be random order to Nhia—the recent past followed by the distant past, the present, the distant future, the near future—two triads at a time, murmuring to herself, writing it all down on the scroll. She finally looked up at Nhia.

“This is what
ganshu
says,” she began. “I will tell you immediately, your far future is unclear; I’ve rolled it twice and it gave me ambiguous readings. So I won’t offer you guidance as to what happens ten, fifteen years from now. For some people it’s clear as mountain crystal, but you—no. There are many paths, and at least one of them is dark. But I can tell you this. You have traveled from a world where you were weak and powerless, and have conquered many obstacles to reach a place where you felt safe, and useful. There was treachery and betrayal in your recent past, something that hurt you deeply. But there was also redemption—you have found out things you did not know, and this is a prize you still do not fully realize
that you hold. Your present is full of fear, and yes, there is great risk—but also great potential. You have at least one powerful friend, and a very powerful enemy, but you do not trust your friends and you are still fighting your enemy because you cannot let him go from your mind. As to the near future, the stones say ‘wisdom’ and ‘leadership.’ Also, ‘justice.’ You have to make some choices, but if you choose now you are going on a bright path, for now at least. Beyond that, I cannot say.”

Nhia gave a brittle laugh. “It sounds like they gave you my life history to wrap in pretty phrases and hand back to me.”

“The one who spoke to me told me nothing except that you were in need of guidance,” the reader said. “But you are not the first one who has charged me with speaking from ill-gotten knowledge because I gave a reading that is close to the bone. But believe me, what I tell you comes from the stones, and from no other source.” She rolled up the silkpaper scroll and tied it with a twist of red ribbon. “You may keep this.”

When Nhia came out of the booth, Tai was waiting for her a few steps away.

“You planned all this,” Nhia said accusingly.

“Brought you here to show you that you could come and that it wouldn’t turn on you, yes,” said Tai. “The
ganshu
thing was mostly Qiaan’s idea, and Yuet agreed that it might help, so I organized it. Yes, I planned it. What did she say?”

“She said exactly what she needed to say.”

“Yes, but was it true?” Tai persisted.

“I should make you go in there and then demand that she tell you when you are going to marry Kito,” Nhia said, with a slice of unaccustomed malice.

Tai blushed, casting her eyes down. Nhia was immediately contrite.