The Secrets of Jin-Shei (50 page)

She could have taken the ghost road out of there at any time after the house had ceased to be her prison. But running away would have meant admitting defeat—and Khailin was also bitterly aware of the fact that she had nowhere to run to. The house protected her, while she was within it. If she left, and Lihui ever tracked her down, she would be spelled into a stone statue for the eternity that was Cahan, or fed a potion that turned her limbs to glass. She had seen Lihui do those things, and worse, to people who crossed him, or to those unlucky enough to have been brought in for him to run his latest experiment on. Khailin had seen the cripples and the poor orphans of the streets and the old and abandoned being brought to the house for Lihui’s needs—Linh-an’s dregs, the ones who would not be missed, the people nobody valued or cared about.

Except their master—the Beggar King—the one who called them
my people.

“I knew that I had to destroy the place, and him, before I could finally leave,” Khailin said to the Beggar King. “There was no freedom for me otherwise. Even the law would say I belonged to him—I was his wife.”

“They could not prove that marriage,” Nhia said. “When we looked into it at the Temple, there were no records. You could have just walked away.”

Khailin looked down at her hands. She had instinctively folded her fingers over her thumbs, from which she had long since removed the rings of her bondage. “If I had walked away,” she said, “there would have been records. He would have made sure they existed.”

“She is right,” the Beggar King said. “But go on.”

“I came up behind him, when he was pouring acid into a flask,” Khailin said, “and I poured a powerful antagonist into the flask when he was done … and when it bubbled and hissed, which it shouldn’t have done, and he turned to look closer, I made sure the acid bubbled over. And while he nursed his burned hands, I threw the rest of it into his face. And his eyes.”

“You cannot use the ghost road without sight,” the Beggar King said softly. “Of course.”

Khailin threw him a startled look. “How do you … ?”

“I know enough,” he said. “You blinded him. What happened then?”

“I told the house to fall,” Khailin whispered, “and it folded down into the cellar that was his office. And I told it to burn. And I stood and watched the fire until there was only ashes, and all that was left of him underneath them. He is dead.”

“You did not see the body,” the Beggar King said.

“No, I did not see the body. But I saw the house collapse on him, and I saw it burn, and I knew that he was in there, too wounded for the ghost road,” Khailin said.

“Never be so certain of anything,” murmured the Beggar King. “Give me your arm.”

“Why?” Khailin said, jerking back.

“Lacking sight in my eyes, I rely on what my fingers tell me,” the Beggar King said. “Please. Indulge me.”

Khailin unwillingly extended one arm and the Beggar King ran his long fingers down the dragon-shaped scar on her forearm.

“Interesting, this,” the Beggar King said. “If that house accepted you, it means that he taught you too well, better than he knew. What do you plan to do with the knowledge of the sorcerer, young enchantress?”

“Learn,” Khailin said simply. “Keep learning. There is still so much that I do not understand.”

“Be careful,” he said. “This is a serpent that you hold by the tail. Beware of its fangs. Beware of the poison.”

“You speak as though you have tasted that poison yourself.”

The Beggar King chuckled dryly. “One way or another, we all have,” he said. “Some of us are given a deeper draft than others—and some of us reject it, some learn from it, and some become it. I tell you again, take care. I give it a year, at most, before you might be called upon to make some hard choices. There are dark clouds on the outside, and smoke within; we are on the wings of the storm.”

“But that is what I first came to ask you about,” Nhia said. “You once said that I would know when to come for answers. But all you give me are more questions I cannot answer!”

“You already have my counsel,” the Beggar King said. “But when you need me most, when the first breath of the hot wind touches your face, I will be there. I promise you that.”

I
f she had hoped that coming to the city, the coming to know the other side of her birthright, would cure the empty places of her heart, Tammary found herself losing those illusions as the years slipped past.

She continued being Yuet’s assistant and unofficial apprentice, and she was good at it—the oral traditions of her people allowed her quick mind to absorb, catalog, and annotate anything that she was told until she was a walking encyclopedia of herb lore and the healing arts. Perhaps being an acknowledged and focused trainee in the art of healing could have given her a sense of direction, but that was not what her real goals were, and Yuet, perhaps sensing this, had never suggested that their relationship be formalized in any way.

Tammary was aware that Yuet did feel a stab of guilt at not taking on a real apprentice, passing on her skills and knowledge to another generation in the manner that Szewan had trained
her
—she had said as much to Tammary once, after they had worked together on a difficult birth and managed to save both mother and child against all odds. Later that night, in Yuet’s house, over a cup of rice wine, Yuet had been exhilarated and relaxed enough to succumb to a rare moment of complete trust, dropping the odd and constant wariness with which she still treated her mountain wild child.

“I don’t feel I need an apprentice,” Yuet had said to Tammary. “I mean, you’re doing so well at it. I know what you know, I know I can trust it. Somehow I feel taking on a complete beginner at this point would drive me mad.”

“You’re still young,” Tammary had said. “There is plenty of time to train a successor. I am not your heir, Yuet, but I’m happy to be an assistant.”

“You’re a problem,” Yuet had said to her, with a slow smile that the efforts of the day and the potent rice wine had painted on her mouth.
“Some day the Gods will come to me and tell me what I am supposed to do with you.”

In a way, that moment of unguarded honesty had catalyzed something in Tammary that Yuet might have done better to leave alone.

She had been a ‘problem’ back in the Traveler village, too.

The world, it seemed, was full of perfect niches made to seamlessly fit those destined to fill them. Tammary’s niche appeared not to exist. Oh, how the Gods must have laughed—the
chayan
ones and the Traveler ones, both, collaborating on a practical joke—when they had made her! Torn between the two cultures, Tammary was a peg made to fit two holes, but she had angles where one hole had curves, and curves where the other hole had angles, and she was uncomfortable and frustrated in both.

Tammary adapted, in the city, in the best way she knew how.

She had Court connections through her
jin-shei
circle, and she did not avoid the Palace, although Liudan was never told of Tammary’s true identity. But the stiffness of Court etiquette irritated Tammary, used as she had been to the Traveler freedom of dress and speech all her life. The ordinary folk of Linh-an, the people whom Yuet had once accused her of studying as though they were exotic animals in a menagerie, were a different story, and Tammary, after a year of being on the outer fringes of everything in Linh-an, began to explore the boundaries of taking part in the vivid life of the streets.

She had started spending more and more time at the city’s teahouses, and she explored the whole range, no matter what kind they were. She had first discovered them as a step down from the Court audiences, following the aristocracy into the plush teahouses of the inner city, where the benches had satin cushions with golden tassels on them and some of the older men, retired officials or minor Princes in their high-collared Court robes of silk brocade, would sit quietly puffing away at a bubbling pipe of viscid poppy brew, inducing mostly a gentle drifting stupor with a handful of vivid dreams interspersed in between. Tammary was recognized there—she was Yuet’s shadow, and someone with her coloring stood out like a fire-salamander among a clutch of brown geckos. People spoke to her with courtesy and with charm; she would have deeply philosophical conversations with the half-stoned old men and with ambitious junior members of the aristocracy or senior civil servants. But it was an environment only marginally less stuffy than the Palace, and Tammary quickly cast her net wider.

The community teahouses on the corners of major streets, out in the teeming residential streets of nonaristocratic Linh-an, were a totally different scene. When Tammary first started dropping in on these, she inevitably began by being a source of gossip, and the cause of much giggling behind fans and concealing hands of the neighborhood women. They quickly discovered that she was privy to a lot of stories they could have no hope of knowing anything about other than through her. When a few of the matriarchs started actively cultivating her, Tammary found herself a popular addition to the teahouse circles. But then she discovered the third kind of teahouse, one which the habitués of the other two considered only one step above the bawdy houses on streets like Nhia’s Street of the Night-walkers—the ones that were known as “water teahouses” because dispensing tea was not really the reason for their existence. And she passed from being a source of gossip about the upper crust to being a fount of gossip as and of herself.

In a way, the water teahouses finally released something that Tammary had kept in strict check ever since she had first arrived in Linh-an. There was a license there, inhibitions and stodginess were left at the door, and Tammary learned to dance to the music of the city. She had a sensuous nature and the lithe body of a young woman in the prime of her life. When the first men sat up and took notice, she saw the interest in their eyes, and taking her first lover had not been too great a step beyond that. He had not lasted long; Tammary, not finding what she sought, quickly turned away and sought another pair of interested eyes. Then another.

In the arms of these men she was not, however briefly, a “problem.” She shared her loneliness; she helped, maybe, someone else’s, however briefly.

“She’s gathering herself a reputation,” Qiaan, with her own burgeoning street informant network, had warned Nhia. “There’s talk of a party for her twenty-fourth birthday in the spring, and by all accounts it isn’t going to be an innocent party. Can’t Yuet do something?”

“I’ll talk to her,” Nhia said. “I’ll talk to both of them.”

But she hadn’t found an opportunity to speak to Tammary. And it wasn’t until she saw Tammary with her own eyes, walking away with a hot-eyed young man in the Street of the Nightwalkers, that Nhia had realized just how far things had gone.

For a moment Nhia had wondered if she had been projecting—she had just come from another meeting with the Beggar King, and the Street of
the Nightwalkers, in its bright and glowing night guise, held some potent memories for her. She could not seem to forget the night that she had found herself there, straight off the ghost road, fresh from Lihui’s dark Palace—it was burned into her memory. But no—it had been a different season, and she had been a different person then, and in any event there had been no mistaking that spill of fox-colored hair tumbling loose down the back of a girl emerging from one of the houses in the Street. The red-haired girl had looked Nhia’s way, and the shock of recognition in those familiar dark eyes was too clear to be imagined, even across the expanse of darkening street. Tammary had dropped her gaze and looked away, tugging at her escort’s arm until he turned and walked with her away from Nhia, toward the far end of the street.

Nhia had told Yuet of Qiaan’s original warnings, but Yuet had been skeptical about the whole thing in the early stages, although she had avoided the direct question of just how many women there could be in Linh-an, with Tammary’s particular shade of hair color, to whom the gossip could be attached. When Nhia came to Yuet to tell her what she had now seen with her own eyes, Yuet had just stared at her.

“It just can’t be,” she said stubbornly. “I know she does go out to the teahouses and spends hours there, even the ones with a reputation, but not
that
kind of establishment. Not the Street. Tammary is a people-watcher, has been ever since she came here. Where else but in the teahouses … ? But no, she can’t be out at all hours like that, I could tell—there would be bags under her eyes from lack of sleep, a slump in her bearing. She works hard, you know, she doesn’t sleep the days away. She’d have collapsed by now.”

“Yuet,” Nhia said, “Qiaan says that they have a name for her in some of the teahouses you swear she has never set foot into—they call her the Dancer.”

“Oh, for the love of Cahan.” Yuet buried her face in her hands. “I don’t believe it. I just can’t! There is so much at stake for her.”

“I can show you,” Nhia said. “Qiaan even told me which teahouses she likes best.”

“All right,” Yuet said sharply. “I don’t need to go crawling after her to see. I am not her keeper—but I wish there was something I could do.”

“Talk to her. Better still, get Tai to talk to her. For some reason she listens to Tai more than to any of us.”

But it was already too late to keep the secret which Tammary had
brought with her to the city. For it had not been any of the three who knew the truth about Tammary who got a chance to talk to her first.

Qiaan had a dozen or so personal “projects,” people she had taken an interest in over and above the requirements of several organizations which she now headed. One of these was a desperately poor family which had been blessed with two sets of twins in quick succession in the last three years, and who now had six children under five in the house. One of the latest set of twins had been born with a bad disability, a cleft lip which left the child unable to suckle naturally and almost unable to feed at all, and Qiaan had taken it upon herself to try and help in any way she could, knowing that the child was probably not going to last the winter. Her visits to this home always left her unaccountably furious at the world in general.
How could such a thing be allowed to happen? Why should an innocent child be made to suffer like that?
The aides she had assembled around her knew better than to speak to her at all after one of these visits, until she had had a chance to control her anger or at the very least find some other hapless subject on which to vent it.