The Secrets of Jin-Shei (59 page)

“My mother was a Traveler he took by force,” Tammary said. “She was never one of the royal women.”

“One could argue that, simply by virtue of having been in the Emperor’s bed, she was,” Eleo said. “That makes you far more of an Imperial Heir than Qiaan could ever be. And there is one more thing. You are older than Empress Liudan. By a very little, to be sure, but you are. That makes you the legitimate heir to the throne of Syai. And, of course, the man you marry will be Emperor.”

“I am already married,” Tammary gasped.

“I do not see the rings,” Eleo said.

“We … I am not … I am Traveler, we didn’t use …”

“If you used pagan rites you are not married under the laws of Syai,” Eleo said. “That will change. But first, I need to make sure that they all understand that you are mine, and beyond their reach.”

He bent over her, and suddenly there was a knife in his hand. Tammary gasped, tried to twist away, but he only laughed. “I wouldn’t hurt you,” he said. “That would hurt my cause. However, I do know of a perfect way to let everyone know what the situation is. I had them do this while you were sleeping,” he continued, picking up one of three long braids into which Tammary’s hair had been plaited while she had been unconscious. “You see, one,” and the bright knife flashed, severing the braid he held just above where it had been tied off with twine, “goes to your mate, the poor weak Zhan, to let him know that I do have you, and that there is no point in him trying to look for you. Another,” the blade flashed again, biting through the second braid, “goes to the Empress Liudan, to remind her that she sits on your throne and that, now you are here with me, you intend to reclaim it. And the last,” a final swipe of the blade, severing the third braid, “to Zibo, once and future Chancellor, to tell him that the game is begun. Ah, but why are you crying, my sweet?”

Tammary squeezed her eyes shut, hot tears leaking out of the corners and spilling down her cheekbones; she could not bear to look at the sight of her hair in his hand, and know the pain and trouble it would cause.

“I swore to Liudan I would not allow myself to be used against her,” she whispered. “She will know …”

“Your Liudan is willing to believe almost anything these days,” Eleo said. “So Zibo tells me. And don’t worry about the indignity of losing your glorious hair—something would have had to be done with that, anyway. For now, you can wear some sort of wig with a more traditional styling and color. Later, when it grows out again, we can maybe dye it. But all that is premature. For now …” He coiled the three braids around one hand, and, having sheathed his knife, reached down to trail langorous fingertips over the contours of Tammary’s body. “… for now we have other more important things to take care of. Like making sure you are properly married, in every possible way.”

“No. Oh, for the love of Cahan, no. You can’t.” Tammary’s mind suddenly flashed on a number of ingenious details from the pain-filled night of their first and only tryst, and recoiled from a possibility that she had not even thought of until that moment. It might have been something to keep
secret, maybe, in the hope that he would never find out, but for one incandescent instant it was all she could think of, and it filled her thoughts, her mouth. “You can’t.
I’m with child
.”

Eleo frowned elegantly. “You are? That’s a new development, something I hadn’t heard yet. You haven’t been together with Zhan that long, so it can’t be far advanced. Well. That does complicate matters. I’ll have someone look in on you later. Perhaps it isn’t too late to get rid of it right now, before it is born and becomes a problem. I can’t have Zhan’s children inheriting my dynasty. Rest, my dear. You will need your rest. I’ll be back soon.” He gave her a mock-courtly bow and departed, caressing the severed braids he carried with the fingertips of his free hand.

Tammary desperately tried to free her hands, but succeeded only in chafing her wrists raw against the cord with which she had been bound. “Liudan won’t believe it. Zhan will come looking for me,” she whispered to herself, trying to keep despair at bay. “Oh,
Cahan,
he is going to take my baby, he will hurt my child …”

She was left alone for what seemed like hours, during which time, between the dry nausea which still racked her and the creeping despair of her captivity, she cried herself into near oblivion. She was also increasingly thirsty, her mouth dry and her lips cracking a little where she ran her tongue over them. When she heard the door open she turned her head sharply, afraid that it was Eleo back again to torment her, but it was an old woman, wrapped in a dark shawl, carrying a basin and a washcloth.

“There, there, my sweet bird,” the old woman said in a voice brittle with age. “I know it’s hard. It’ll all be over soon. Don’t worry.”

“Water …” Tammary whispered.

“In a moment, sweet thing. I’ve come to take care of you.”

She dampened the washcloth in her basin, stowed somewhere just out of Tammary’s line of sight, and then her gnarled old claw of a hand came down over Tammary’s face, wiping her cheeks and closed eyelids with the damp cloth, her touch unexpectedly gentle. It felt refreshing, but the very tenderness of it made tears well up in Tammary’s eyes again.

“I have to get out of here,” she gasped, her eyes flying open against the cloth. “Help me. You have to help me. He’s holding me against my will.”

“It will all be all right,” the old woman said, in the same soothing tone of voice. She finished her ministrations and backed out of sight again. Tammary heard her pouring something, and then she was back, lifting Tammary up very gently and propping a pillow behind her back, offering
her a cup. “Something to drink,” she said. “Here, something to drink, you must be thirsty.”

But the liquid in the cup wasn’t water. It was something herb-bitter, biting, and Tammary took one swallow and choked on it, gasping, turning her head away.

“No! What is that?” Her years of working in Yuet’s stillroom kicked in, her mind running down the lists of herbs. Why would they be giving her potions? Why would they …

The identity of the herb exploded in her mind at the same time as her chain of reasoning brought her to the same place. The herb was called
sochuan,
and it was given for women’s problems. And in high doses it induced …

Tammary twisted, screamed, but the old woman was remarkably strong. Constantly repeating a gentle refrain of, “It’s all right, it will all be over soon,” she expertly whipped the pillow out from behind Tammary’s back, held her nose closed with one hand, and held the cup to her mouth with the other. Much of the contents of the cup spilled over Tammary’s closed lips, down her chin, soaking the cropped ends of her now jawline-length hair. But the instinct to breathe was too strong, and as she finally opened her mouth to gasp for air the bitter herbal infusion flooded in and down to the back of her throat and she swallowed convulsively.

“That’s a good girl,” the old woman said complacently, letting Tammary’s head loll back onto the bed. “Here, you may have some water now. I’ll be here later, when you need me. I’ll be here.”

Tammary moaned, turning her head away.

When the pain came, another few hours later, the old woman was not there. Alone, tied down to a slatted wooden bed with a thin, hard mattress, Tammary screamed and writhed in agony as a clawed hand reached into her and scoured her clean. She felt the rush of warm blood when it gushed down her legs, soaking her dress, going straight through the thin straw-filled pallet beneath her and starting to drip and pool just in her line of sight. Terrified, in pain and in desperate, tearing grief, Tammary became aware of another emotion crystallizing out of the whole potent cocktail. Fury. Cold, bitter fury.
He cannot keep me tied up the rest of my life. And when he lets me go I will kill him.

Tammary’s
jin-shei
circle threw themselves into searching for her. Unlike Qiaan, who was beyond their reach on the ghost road somewhere,
Tammary had to be somewhere in the city. But Maxao, somewhat unexpectedly, took the position that Tammary’s disappearance could be just the goad that Lihui needed to come out of his lair. Although he did finally promise that he would help search for her, it was with every appearance of doing so against his better judgment. The beggars, however, turned up nothing—although Tai muttered darkly to Nhia that she was far from sure whether that was from a genuine ignorance or from deferring to their leader’s fiat to say nothing until such time as he allowed it.

“She could be dead by then,” Tai said, stabbing her needle into the silk stretched over her embroidery hoop with a savage little motion. “Where could they have put her? The beggars swear that she is not in the underbelly, because they would have heard about that—unless they are lying. Xaforn says that she isn’t anywhere that a Guard could have access to. And Yuet has been scouring every place she knows, every hole she had ever been dragged to as a healer, asking questions of anyone she meets. How hard can it be to find her—anyone seeing her, seeing that hair, would remember.”

“They won’t kill her,” Nhia said. “Remember the note? She is the key to power. They wouldn’t destroy that.”

Tai’s eyes filled with tears. “I feel so helpless.”

“I know,” Nhia said. “I feel like it’s all coming apart, and I cannot hold it together anymore. Oh, Cahan, I should have just stayed a little insignificant children’s teacher at the Temple. Or took over my mother’s laundering business. Anything. Anything but this.”

“Even after getting that pitiful amputated braid, a declaration of power-lessness if ever I saw one, Liudan believes that Amri willingly turned her hand to this,” Tai said. “It nearly killed Zhan, because he understood what it meant—that Amri is totally in their power. And yet Liudan … I just don’t understand it.”

“I know,” said Nhia softly. “Liudan has already condemned her. And Tammary will know, wherever she is; she understands Liudan far too well. And Zhan knows, too. Whatever happens, there is no going back for them.”

Summer dragged on into autumn, and that year’s Autumn Court opened with a blaze of glory that few Autumn Courts had ever had. Liudan glowed with jewels, as though every one she managed to put upon her person was another seal on her identity as the Empress of Syai. Her layered robes, encrusted with gold and silk and gems, looked as though their
weight would have crushed a lesser person. But Liudan wore them with a fierce dignity, her spine straight, her shoulders back, her head high under the Imperial Tiara.

The Court was uneasy this year, with a lot of whispering behind fans and gracefully concealing, well-manicured courtiers’ hands. It was as though an expectation weighed heavily on the occasion, as though too many things were hanging, as though all of it could come crashing down, one way or another.

It was one of Nhia’s people who started to break the back of the crisis. The man came to her, hesitating, choosing his words carefully.

“It could be nothing, nothing at all, but all things have significance in the Way,” he said piously, wringing his hands in Nhia’s private chambers where he had asked to be taken to deliver his news, far from any eavesdroppers.

“What do you know?” Nhia said.

“I was in the audience chamber,” he said, “standing right behind Emeritus-Chancellor Zibo and a companion whom I did not know, a young man of small build, dressed very well in gold brocade and gem …”

“I don’t require a description, unless you saw his face,” Nhia said. “What did you hear?”

“The Emeritus-Chancellor whispered to his companion—and this is why I started listening, Nhia-
lama
, because it was a strange remark—that it would not be long before they would have all those jewels off the Empress. And the young man said, also in a whisper, ‘If I ever tame our little wild fox. She’s dangerous. I cannot leave her loose when I am in the room.’ The Emeritus-Chancellor then looked around, as though he was trying to make sure that they hadn’t been heard, and I made sure I was looking in another direction, and I don’t think they know that I heard, and it may be nothing, I mean, it’s the Emeritus-Chancellor, and after all …”

“After all, he has been sidelined by Liudan,” Nhia said. “Thank you. This could mean everything.”

She did not know the identity of the man who had been with Zibo at the Court, but he was enough, for now. Nhia sent Xaforn and a detachment of Guards to bring the ex-Chancellor to a cell in the Guard compound, and sent a message to Khailin to come there as soon as she could. Nhia herself was there to meet an outraged Zibo when he was brought in, spluttering indignantly and demanding to know who was responsible for this outrage.

“I am,” Nhia said in reply to his complaints as he was walked smartly in through the door of the lockup room by two burly Guards, followed by Xaforn. “I know everything, Zibo.”

“Everything,” he smirked. “
Everything.
You can’t use that on me, young lady I used that self-incriminating statement with hundreds of miscreants in my time. And if I really knew anything at all they were usually in chains and in the dungeons, or under the headsman’s ax, not interrogated by some administrator in a low-level jail.”

“All we are waiting for,” Nhia said tranquilly, folding her arms, “is word that Tammary is safe. Then you will be taken to the Empress in those chains you so covet. Together with your accomplice. If Tammary hasn’t got to him first. And we might just let her.”

Zibo’s expression faltered for a moment, but then he had himself under control again. “Safe? Tammary? I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” Khailin, who had come in right behind Xaforn, said very softly.

Zibo jumped, tried to back away. “You keep that witch away from me,” he said. “You have no right to …”

“We have every right,” Nhia said. “You are involved in an activity the purpose of which is nothing less than the deposition of the Empress. That is high treason. You have used an innocent woman,
a jin-shei
sister to the Empress herself and to all of us, as your pawn. And from what I already know about this plot, you have not used her kindly. Oh, you will die for this, Zibo. The chains
and
the headsman’s ax. What was in it for you? Regaining the Chancellor’s chain? What, if you had succeeded, would have been
my
fate, Zibo?”