The Secrets of Jin-Shei (60 page)

“This is ridiculous. I have no idea what you are talking about. You have no right …”

Khailin reached out to touch him, and he tried shying away, but the two Guards who still held his arms made sure that he could not avoid the brush of her fingers.

“Oh, he’s in it up to his ears,” Khailin said. “I can taste the fear on him.”

Zibo drew himself up to the full extent his bulk would allow. His chins wobbled with affronted dignity. “How dare you speak to me like that! I am an Imperial officer of high rank, and I demand that I receive the treatment that my position demands!”

A Guard at the door ducked into the interrogation room, whispered something into Xaforn’s ear, stared at Zibo for a moment, and then left again.

“They got Tammary,” Xaforn said. “But the other guy wasn’t there, his friend. Tammary’s jailor.”

“Jailor,” spluttered Zibo. “You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. I insist that you let me go at once.”

He spluttered to a halt as Xaforn drew out her sword with one smooth, economical movement and its tip suddenly trembled at that point in Zibo’s cascade of chins which might be expected to house the vulnerable spot on the throat of any other man.

“You may think yourself well protected, in theory and in practice,” Xaforn said calmly, “but my blade has sliced through harder stuff than your blubber, and you really are in no position to bargain with a woman whom you would have swept away ruthlessly if you ever got to within shouting distance of a Chancellor’s chain again. So I’ll ask you, one more time …”

“He’s her husband!” Zibo spluttered. “There is nothing you can do now to undo that! He married her under every law of Syai, and she wears his rings on her thumbs! That’s more than your precious Zhan ever did for her!”

“Zhan married her in his heart, and she him,” Nhia said. “I was there. Under every law of Syai, as you choose to invoke them, the travesty you forced Tammary to go through was performed on an unwilling woman taken by force. It will not stand. You lost, Zibo. You can still save yourself, maybe, if you tell us where to find him, this …
husband
.”

“He’s at the teahouse now. That’s where he always is. Eleo. He goes back to the teahouses after Court, then he’ll be back to my quarters.”

Xaforn slipped out before he had finished speaking, and he trailed off, looking from one to the other. “You didn’t know any of this, did you? You didn’t
know
it, not until I spoke out.” He staggered backward, and the two Guards at his sides allowed his huge bulk to subside onto the single bare bench in the room.

“Keep him here,” Nhia said. “I’m going to get Yuet. I have a feeling we may need her after Tammary’s been in the tender care of this crew for all these weeks.”

“And Tai. Get Tai.” Khailin stood staring at the ex-Chancellor, her eyes implacable. “I’ll get the rest of it out of this one.”

But it seemed as though they had got the information too late. When they all converged onto the grounds of Zibo’s plush residence not far away from the Palace, it was to see black smoke pouring out of the second-storey
windows. Xaforn sent in her Guards at all the side entrances, and she, with Yuet and Nhia at her heels, charged in through the front. Tai alone hung back, and it was Tai, therefore, who saw the bedraggled figure hunched in the shelter of some ornamental flowering bushes not far from the main building. Glancing at where the others had gone, Tai turned away deliberately and approached what she initially thought was a young man, soot-stained and somehow, perhaps, wounded, with blood smeared on his hands. But then the “young man” lifted his head, and a bright curl of hair escaped from underneath a large flat cap that had been shoved haphazardly on the figure’s head, and Tai’s heart stopped for a moment.

“Amri?” she whispered, quickening her step. “Amri? Is that you? Is that really you? Are you all right?”

“Go, don’t linger here,” Tammary said in a low voice. “Don’t ever tell them you found me. Let them think I died in that fire. Let them rather believe …”

“What have they done to you?” Tai gasped. “I can’t leave you out here. I can’t just …”

“There will be others,” Tammary said. “I’m better dead.”

“But Zhan …”

“Maybe. In time. But no, how could I go back?” Her eyes swam with tears. “They gave me
sochuan,
Tai. Ask Yuet what that means. I will probably never quicken with child again. And he doesn’t need the Empress watching him all the time, waiting for him to make his move. And they married me to Eleo.”

“I know,” said Tai, reaching for her. But Tammary recoiled.

“
I killed him
,” she whispered. “I swore I would, and I did.”

“They told me what happened to you,” Tai said. “Nobody will blame you.”

“Help me,” Tammary whispered, reaching out and clutching Tai’s skirts, her eyes full of tears, bright in her soot-black face. “In the name of
jin-shei,
help me. Help me get out of Linh-an.”

For a moment Tai was far away, a little girl weeping over the dying body of her first beloved
jin-shei-bao.
Antian had asked, too—she had asked, in the name of the bond that lay between them. And Tai had spent her life in the service of that vow.

Now, here, in this dark hour, Tammary was asking her for something—in the name of the same bright, holy name.

Jin-shei,
the promise that could not be broken, could not be refused.

“But you are …” Tai began, after a beat of silence.

“I have to get out of here,” Tammary said, her voice breaking on a sob.

“And go where?” Tai said, looking around desperately for the others. “Come, let Yuet look at …”

Tammary shook her head. “I don’t want that,” she said. “I don’t want to be stared at and prodded and poked and pitied. I need to go. I need to find … I can go home, to the mountains, to the high skies, to where nobody cares.”

“You ran away from there once,” Tai said.

“And perhaps there is no going back, but I need to get out of here,” Tammary said.

“Then Nhia can …”

“No.
Nobody knows about this. Nobody but you. Help me.”

“May I at least tell Zhan?”

Tammary hesitated. “Maybe. In time. I’ll let you know.”

“They are coming out,” Tai said.

“Tai …”

“All right. All right! Stay there.”

She crossed the expanse of lawn back to the house at a run, seeing Yuet emerge, shaking her head.

“Have you found anything?”

“We think we have found this Eleo,” Yuet said. “With a knife in his kidney. And another brace of people, mostly old, mostly servants.”

“No Tammary?”

“No body,” Yuet said.

“We’ll search the grounds,” said Xaforn. “She might be hiding somewhere in the park. What’s the matter with
you,
Tai? You are looking sick to the stomach.”

“I am,” Tai whispered.

Yuet stared at her beadily “Are you pregnant again? If you are, what are you doing out here?”

“I don’t know,” Tai said, seizing on the excuse. “I don’t think so.”

“We can look for her,” Xaforn said. “You go home. Get some rest. You’ve been fretting about this.”

“So have all of us,” Tai said.

“Yes, but you’ve taken it personally,” said Xaforn. “Yuet, take her home!”

“No!” Tai said. They both turned to look at her with some surprise at the vehemence of that reaction. She grimaced. “I mean, if you find Tammary, she needs Yuet more than I do.”

“Go home,” said Yuet. “I swear, if you of all people fall apart on me right now, I’ll go mad. I’ll come by your house as soon as I can, and tell you what happened.”

Tai stole a glance at the shrubbery, but the figure of Tammary was no longer visible.

“But I don’t want to …” she began.

Yuet scowled at her. “Go, and leave me to try and do some good here,” she said.

Tai left, slowly, reluctantly, aware of being followed by both Yuet’s and Xaforn’s eyes until she had reached the outer gate of the courtyard. Then they turned away, and as Tai stepped into the gate Tammary’s fragile voice, like the sound of dry autumn leaves whispering against each other on the ground in late Chuntan, spoke from the shadows.

“Are they still watching?”

“No. But how am I going to get you back to my house undetected?”

“Why back to your house?”

“Tammary, you can’t go anywhere as you are right now.”

“You promised not to tell anyone,” Tammary whispered.

“I didn’t, but I won’t, much against my better judgment,” Tai said, slipping off her own cloak as she spoke. “You asked me to help you get out of this place, and I will do my best to do that. But we’ll still talk about who gets to know about it. Here. Wrap this around you. And follow me.”

Tai had every intention of settling Tammary down, getting her cleaned up and providing her with a change of clothes, and then at the very least having another talk to her about the wisdom of her course of action. She also intended to let Zhan at least know that Tammary was alive, if nothing else. She had seen his face when the hope died in him. It would be heartless to let him go on believing Tammary was gone for good.

But the best-laid plans could go awry, and it was simply unfortunate that, when Xaforn and Nhia brought Zibo before the Empress with a full description of the plot, Zhan happened to arrive at the Palace at just the right time for Liudan to inform him that Tammary was dead.

Liudan herself was distracted by quite a different piece of news that had
just broken—and that was that, against all rules of civilized warfare, the Magalipt riders had launched their long-awaited invasion at last from the passes on Syai’s western borders. To her, Tammary’s death—although Nhia had specifically said that they had found no body—was the conclusion that she had jumped to as the one which offered the most convenient closure to the situation. Her announcement to Zhan was thus less tactful than even she might have been expected to deliver.

“Well,” she had said, “at least that problem is solved. Now I can clear the slate for doing something useful on the border.”

It wasn’t deliberate cruelty. But to Zhan it was shattering. He found the idea of returning alone to the quiet rooms he had shared with Tammary for such a short, idyllic time almost unbearable; she would be everywhere for him, a lingering, bright-haired ghost who would remind him that he had lost both of them, Tammary and the child which she had carried. There was, as it happened, an alternative. He asked Liudan for a chance to lead her troops into the battle against the Magalipt.

Liudan knew Zhan as indolent, and she may have thought of his gentleness as weakness—but she also knew him as intelligent, not without courage, and, she believed, loyal enough despite his unfortunate taste in women. She gave him a command on the spot.

By the time Tai got a chance to send for him to tell him that Tammary was safe and at her house, Zhan had gone to war.

And before the sun rose too high on the following day, Tammary, her shorn hair swept up in a young man’s woolen cap and her bosom bound to give her a more boyish silhouette, slipped out of the Northern Gate and began the long journey back to the mountains from which she had fled so long ago looking for a better world.

E
verything suddenly seemed to be deeper, more serious, more brooding in Linh-an that autumn. Every moment had a curious intensity, a breathless sense of portent.

Tai’s poetry reflected the mood. But much of what she wrote she kept in her journal, instinctively holding it back from Liudan. She knew that the Empress would be disturbed by it.

“Why are you so frightened?” Kito would murmur into her hair, late at night, when Tai could not sleep.

“I wish I knew,” Tai would whisper back, her throat tight. “A long time ago, when I was just a child, when Antian had first called me
jin-shei,
my mother told me that I was in the
liu-kala
of my
jin-shei
days, that everything had its season. I have a terrible feeling that somehow I am in the twilight of that season, that my sisters are in danger, that what happened to Qiaan, to Tammary … that it’s the beginning of an end, somehow. That we are in
ryu-kala,
the age before dying.”

“We are all still young,” Kito said, his arms around her. “Don’t let these dark thoughts in. I know we are living in troubling times, but things will get better. Things always do. That is the way of the world—whenever things get really bad, then they can only get better.”

But his words, however much Tai clung to them, failed to lift her sense of foreboding.

If Autumn Court had glittered more desperately than ever before in that year, the Festival of All Souls, when it came round on the last day of Chuntan, proved memorable for quite a different reason.

The Great Temple was closed to the public on this day, the only day of the year that the three massive gates were closed and barred. The one who wore the Imperial Tiara took on the responsibility of being his people on this day. Traditionally, the Emperor and Empress walked to the Great Temple from the Palace in the morning of the Festival of All Souls, through the streets of the city, and entered the Temple through a special small door on the side of the building, usually kept sealed and bricked up the rest of the year. On All Souls’ Day every year, the wall built before this door was torn down by the priests of the Temple to allow entrance to the Emperor and the Empress; and every year the door was bricked up anew after they had passed through it, to hold in the renewal and rebirth they were bringing into the Temple. The Imperial pair would walk barefoot around the Temple, through all the Circles, and spend the day in prayer and offerings and meditation in the inner sanctum, in the temple in the Tower of the Lord of Heaven. What the actual ceremonies were that were performed there, nobody outside the Temple circles and the Emperors themselves actually knew. Naturally there was a lot of speculation—it was certainly considered propitious to conceive a child on this day, for instance, and the less reverent teahouses would often refer to intimate dalliance as “doing what the Emperor does on All Souls Day.”