The Secrets of Jin-Shei (56 page)

“My father is dead,” Qiaan said.

Xaforn’s lips thinned into a hard line. “They may fill your head with whatever rubbish they want to on that score, Qiaan, but although I do not doubt that your mother was Liudan’s mother too, you were never begotten on her by the Emperor.”

Qiaan recoiled. “I was born in the Palace!”

“Yes,” Xaforn said, “but not royal.”

“My mother was the Emperor’s own concubine,” Qiaan said doggedly. “By rights and by tradition the children that she bore belonged to the Empress, and the Empire.”

“Only when those children were the Emperor’s seed. Your mother might have been one of the Imperial women, but your father was a captain of the Imperial Guard, an honorable man but one of humble lineage. He wanted you to know that he was sorry, that he had sworn to Szewan not to tell you the truth. The reasons she gave him were quite plausible at the time. He did his best to protect you and shelter you—he was proud of you, of the work you were doing, of the woman you were becoming, of
who he had raised you to be. You were the child of a woman he had loved, but he was proud of
you,
of who you were.”

“Aric never knew who I was!” Qiaan snapped. “All he saw was what he wanted to see, and what he wanted to shape! He owed me the truth, at least—they all owed it to me!”

“I can’t argue with you on that one,” Xaforn said. “If anyone knew who my own parents had been, I would have wanted to know. It is my right, and it was your right. But Qiaan, you had a family. You’ve always had a family.”

“I had a lie,” Qiaan whispered.

“And what about me?” Xaforn said quietly.

“Well, what about you?”

“Qiaan, when you took me as
jin-shei
I was a child who knew nothing else except a dream to learn to kill.”

“You are no longer a child,” Qiaan said, “but that is still your dream.”

Xaforn winced. “I had hoped you thought better of me than that. And it is partly your doing that I was better than that, that I learned all the things I had disdained to learn before, because they interfered with my ambition or I deemed them unnecessary for it. You called yourself a charity case—I was left at the doorstep of the compound in a basket, for the love of Cahan, and all I ever had was a fierce desire to be one of the Guard, to justify my entire existence. That’s why they chose me for the special training, because they knew it would ‘take’ best in me, that I already had something to prove. But you,
you
softened that into something else, something greater, something they never expected. They wanted a killing machine; they got a human being. One who may be far too good at death dealing, granted, but a human being. You and that first
jin-shei
gave me a soul. I owe you for that.”

“You owe the cat,” Qiaan said, with a quirk on the side of her mouth that she could not quite suppress.

“You take yourself too lightly,” Xaforn retorted, but her mouth had softened, too.

“Flatterer,” Qiaan said, and there was a real smile there now.

“Fool,” Xaforn said gently.

The smile stayed on Qiaan’s face, as though painted, but faded from her eyes. “You say that as though you meant it,” she said.

“We meant every one of those insults when we started trading them, Qiaan.”

“Did we?” Qiaan whispered, her eyes clouding. “I don’t remember.”

“Come back with me,” Xaforn said urgently. “Don’t let them …”

Qiaan snapped back to attention, her eyes a hard glitter again. “For what?” she said sharply. “Don’t you think I know that Liudan has already condemned me? Is that why you came—to deliver me to her?”

Xaforn flinched, but held the other’s gaze. “If you believed that, you would never have trusted me enough to have this conversation,” she said. “The only reason Liudan wants you dead is because those whom you supposedly lead want
her
dead. It seems that there’s already been at least one attempt on her life. Or don’t you know that they tried to kill her? And if you don’t,” Xaforn said, seeing a flicker in Qiaan’s eyes and pressing her advantage, “what else aren’t they telling you? If you stop acting as figurehead, they will have to start from scratch, and we can deal with it, we can stop it.”

“You’re her creature,” Qiaan said. “Body and soul. How could I ever hope that you would understand?”

“Because I am your friend!” Xaforn said, tears standing in her eyes. “Because I am your sister! Because you armed me for my first real outing as a Guard, because you have always understood me. Qiaan, look at me! I haven’t changed, I am still the Xaforn that I always was, whom you taught to believe in love as well as in honor! Come home. Come to your sisters. Come to your father. This is not the way to honor your mother’s memory.”

It had been the wrong thing to say. Qiaan squared her shoulders, lifted her chin. “My father is dead, and his ashes scattered across Syai, his image in the Emperor’s Gallery in the Great Temple; my mother is, just as you say, a memory, destroyed by the one who trained one of the very sisters to whom you now wish me to return. There is nothing for me to go back to.” Her eyes glittered, as though in a fever, as if she was in the throes of passion, but her voice was flat, inflectionless, as though she was repeating a catechism she had been carefully taught and now delivered in what might have been some sort of final exam. “I have only the people, the people who have chosen me.”

“That is Lihui speaking, not you,” Xaforn said.

As if she had conjured him up with her words, he was suddenly there, Khailin’s husband, Nhia’s enemy, almost as though he had stepped out of the flames on the hearth or from one of the tapestries on the walls. Because of the amulet she wore underneath her dark tunic, Xaforn saw him with true sight, and gasped at it, for he was hideous now.

There was nothing left of the handsome man who had turned Khailin’s head with a smile, whose aristocratic, long-fingered hands had once reached out to support Nhia when her withered foot had led her to stumble at his feet. His eyes were a ghastly, uniform shade of blue-white underneath burned-away lids, his eyelashes and eyebrows gone, his face a mass of puckered scar tissue; the hands were gnarled and ridged with similar scars. Only the voice remained, the quiet, kind, reasonable, treasonous voice.

“Indeed,” he said. “She is an apt pupil.”

He reached out a hand, and Qiaan laid hers into it. “She is to marry me,” Lihui said calmly. “She has already consented to do so. After all, an Empress needs an Emperor by her side.”

“You are already married,” Xaforn said, refusing to allow her fear to show. “If you ever ascend the throne of Syai, it is Khailin who will be queen.”

“Details,” Lihui said. “They will be dealt with in time.”

Qiaan was smiling at him, in a strange, dreamy way, as if she had suddenly forgotten that Xaforn was there at all.

“And now,” Lihui said, his free hand rising in an obvious summons, “perhaps it’s time to clear at least one obstacle from my path. The men who are on their way here believe that you came here to try and kill my bride, the woman who will be queen. They will deal with you on that assumption.”

“I did not come to harm her, I came to save her, with honor,” Xaforn said.

“Honor,” Lihui said, “is for the weak, when they know they have no other way out. The reality is, when you have an enemy in hand, that is the time to destroy him. How you got him to bare his throat is not important when the final stroke is delivered.”

Xaforn wasted no more time in fruitless conversation. The shutters on the room’s windows had been latched tight, but she reached them in two bounds and was already lifting the latch as she heard the door open behind her and the tread of heavy booted feet on the floor. She threw the shutter open and climbed on the ledge, balancing on the windowsill, turning to steal a final glimpse into the room, now filling with armed men, Lihui drawing Qiaan gently out of their way and she following him docilely, as though hypnotized.

“It’s a long way down, Guard girl,” said Lihui languidly as Xaforn jumped from the second-storey window into the courtyard below. She
heard something heavy and massive—a mace, maybe—thud into the window where she had been a moment ago.

She landed on a sloping pagoda roof projecting into her path, fought to regain her balance, and then ran lightly and carefully along the rain-slick roof edge toward a higher concatenation of rooftops to her right, skirted them along the lower layers while keeping an eye on a covered roof-walk on which a number of men seemed to be milling as if in anticipation of something, and leapt over a narrow alley to gain another set of rooftops, dropping down at last into a quiet courtyard with concealing niches in the walls. She flattened herself into one of these and waited, her Guard training stilling her racing heart, focusing her mind. She was aware of a commotion on the rooftops above her, saw shadows passing across the courtyard, heard running footsteps in the alley behind the wall against which she was crouched, but she remained undetected and presently the courtyard sank into silence again. After a cautions while Xaforn emerged, looking around. Everything was quiet.

She ran across the courtyard in the high, light steps she had been taught, using momentum to carry her up a wall, back onto a roof. For a brief moment she was aware of an elderly servant with a lantern who had just entered the courtyard from which she had escaped, an expression of complete astonishment on his face, and then she was over the house, across the next alley, down into the one beyond that, landing lightly on her feet. She looked around warily before she paused to orient herself, and then melted into the shadows. She conjured Khailin’s face in her mind now, and stepped out onto the pale ribbon of the ghost road, almost running. She looked neither left nor right, gathering no glimpses into the ghost road’s treasury of dreams and memories and nightmares.

If the light of the winter stars glinted on a shadow of tears on her cheeks, there was nobody to see.

W
hen Xaforn returned without Qiaan, Liudan withdrew even further into her own glittering prison of the Palace and no longer seemed to trust anyone. Even her
jin-shei
sisters were admitted into her presence less frequently and their visits were made shorter. The Empress watched her borders, watched her city, gave orders in the mornings that were sometimes contradicted by those she gave in the afternoons, and waited for Lihui to make his move.

As though he knew that his best weapon was making her insane with waiting, Lihui kept the unrest in the cities at a low boil, with just enough skirmishes and propaganda to keep the spirit alive and remain just under the threshold of massive Imperial retaliation. There was no further word on Qiaan. Maxao, sometimes consulting Khailin whom he had openly named “mage,” was working on other plans to draw Lihui out—but as long as Qiaan was with him it was Lihui who had the upper hand.

Tammary had no illusions that the more pressing troubles had taken the problem of her own vexatious existence from Liudan’s mind. Tammary’s life had shrunk almost overnight from a carnival ride of wine, music, and laughter in the city’s teahouses into a confined genteel cage where she tried to keep her head down and not draw Liudan’s attention. These days one could not be sure who was safe to talk to, and Tammary did not want herself condemned over an unguarded conversation or a misdirected laugh at a jest that could have been misinterpreted.

But she had never been a caged creature and did not take to captivity well. She began prowling the markets again, as she had done in her early days in the city, seeking escape. A story reached Tai of Tammary’s having been observed wandering up and down the thick walls of Linh-an on the inside, trailing a hand along them, as though she was looking for a breach or a hole to crawl through. Going out to the orchards and the hills outside
Linh-an, to the place that Tai had taken her once, now a long time ago, was not easy anymore—and it would have been almost impossible for Tammary, whose coloring marked her, whose identity was known to the Guards at the gates, and who would treat her desire to climb a hill unfettered by high walls around it as suspicious and therefore as an excuse to trigger Liudan’s paranoia again.

Tammary did talk to Tai about the troubles, including her own increasing isolation. She would come to Tai’s house, hovering on the edge of breakdown, her eyes wild. Tai would brew a pot of green tea and set her to playing with the children, and before long Tammary would be reduced to helpless giggles at young Xanshi’s demand that she be provided with hair exactly like Tammary’s bright mane, and at once. She’d leave still hurting, but calmer, more rational, more able to deal with the situation. But Tai had no practical solutions for her, although she did gently point out that her probing the walls of Linh-an for means of escape could be misinterpreted under the current situation. Tammary knew that Yuet, too, was worried by the circumstances, but she too could do nothing except try and keep Tammary busy assisting with healercraft when she could.

While her
jin-shei
sisters tried to shield and protect Tammary as much as possible under the circumstances, she still felt herself to be a prisoner—in the city, in her own skin—and now she had no outlet for it. She developed a high sensitivity to things, as though unspoken words could raise the hairs on her arms, or make her snap her head around and stare at someone who might have glanced at her, before that glance had even been contemplated by the other. The atmosphere in Yuet’s house was tingling with this electricity. It had to come to a head—but when it finally did it was neither Yuet nor Tai who had anything to do with it.

Several of Tammary’s old lovers had tried to see her, or sent messages in the shape of significant flowers or ribbons painted with
hacha-ashu
characters which Khailin interpreted for Tammary as being invocations of good health and subtle inquiries as to when she would be out to play again. Tammary recoiled from it all, refusing to see any of those visitors, brooding alone in her room, sometimes hovering at a convenient window from which she could see the front steps of the house as one or another of the gentlemen were shown out, trying to catch a glimpse of who it had been, rating her own importance through the identity of those who thought she was worth pursuing. Gradually, however, the visits and the flowers and the
messages petered out. But it was one of Tammary’s old flames who came to her rescue at last—Zhan, son to one of the sisters of the Ivory Emperor. He was Liudan’s cousin, and Tammary’s too.