The Secrets of Jin-Shei (65 page)

Khailin twisted her head around at this, trying to see what Maxao was talking about. She could see nothing, nothing except the familiar walls of her laboratory … She sucked in her breath sharply, tensing to try breaking away from Lihui’s relentless grip, and he turned his head a fraction, misinterpreting her gasp, loosening his grip just enough for her to snatch at the chance of escape. She ripped her arm free and fell away from him, stumbling into a bench and sending an alembic and a number of glass tubes flying, splashing Lihui and spilling bubbling liquid on the floor.

Lihui swore, lunged forward, reached for her again. His heel slipped on the spillled fluid; he grimaced in distaste, glancing swiftly down to recover his footing.

Khailin, backed into a corner of the laboratory, felt her hand close around a glass container where a small mound of innocent-looking pellets rested underneath a thick layer of golden oil. Her breath caught, and her hand tightened convulsively around the glass; just as Lihui looked up again, his intent plain on his scarred face, Khailin smashed the container she held onto the floor between his feet. The glass shattered, the oil spilled free and oozed into the already viscid stuff that had been in the alembics and the tubes on the workbench. And the pellets, suddenly exposed to the air without the oil’s protection, burst into flame.

The floor took it and swift liquid fire licked the hem of Lihui’s robe with deadly tongues. Lihui swore, batted at his garment with a free hand, began an incantation, but all it seemed to achieve was to intensify the flames; they caught at his sleeve, raced up his garments and caught at the splashes of chemical on his garments. Lihui clawed at his outer robe, trying to divest himself of its fiery embrace, but his scarred and twisted hands fumbled at the fastenings. In the instant Lihui’s attention was diverted, Maxao drew a small dagger from a sleeve sheath and tossed it at Khailin. It fell at her feet; she stared at it, bewildered.

“I cannot use it,” Maxao hissed.

With a flash of understanding Khailin reached for the weapon, winced as the spilled chemicals burned her fingers where she brushed her hand against them.

Lihui looked up, his face contorted. “You think you can kill me?”

“I already did, once,” Khailin said, and stabbed with Maxao’s dagger.

Lihui caught the blade with his hand, and it sliced across his palm, laying it open. Blood welled through the fingers closed about the knife, oozed down over his knckles. It was an inconsequential wound, a bare scratch, but suddenly Lihui’s face contorted with agony. For a moment he stared at his hand with an astonished, wide-eyed gaze, as though the tiny blade that had pierced him had somehow, in some arcane, uncanny way, found his heart.

And then the man who had once been the Ninth Sage of Syai crumpled onto his knees and began screaming. He screamed for a long time.

“Die,” said Maxao softly. “Immortality is not a toy, Lihui-
mai
, and is not bought cheaply. Now, at last, now it is time to pay.”

The fire reached the spilled liquids on the floor around Lihui. Bright flames engulfed the benches; glassware started shattering in the heat, spilling more chemicals into the inferno. Parts of the fire turned violet, or green.

Maxao and Khailin fled its fury, stumbling out of the laboratory, out of the house.

“What did you do?” whispered Khailin as she watched towering flames burst from the windows of what had been her house and swallow up the gabled roof. “What was on that dagger? Poison? Is that all it took—really? I thought he was immortal …”

“Immortality does not mean invulnerability to death. Lihui could not die, but he could be killed. You knew that—you thought you had killed him yourself, that time in the house at the end of the ghost road that you burned around him. But I think you realize now that was a place of his mind, and not physical enough to hurt him bodily when it was destroyed. The acid which you scarred him with was real, and those wounds were physical enough—but it was beyond you to destroy the house that he had built.”

“So is he dead now?” she asked bleakly, her eyes glittering with the reflection of the conflagration before her.

“Yes,” Maxao said.

Khailin looked up at him. “How can you be sure?”

“Because I know,” Maxao said. “Yes, there was poison on that dagger—the dagger that I could not use myself to hurt him with because of what he laid on me when our paths last crossed. I could not—directly—harm him. But with my knowledge and your hand we accomplished it.”

“I did what I did partly because I wanted to destroy him,” Khailin said bitterly, “and now you tell me that all it would have taken is a drop of strong poison?”

“Not any poison,” Maxao said. “For every being there is something that is deadly beyond any imagining. You did not know what that poison was for Lihui, my dear. I did.”

“But …”

“It is done,” Maxao said with finality. “Let it be.”

Afterward, when the conflagration had cooled and Maxao let her return to the remnants of her workshop, Khailin crouched at the pile of whitish ashes that might have been all that remained of Lihui. She stirred them with her fingers, dry-eyed, until she encountered something solid, an
object concealed in the piled mounds of dust and ash. And then knelt in the wreckage, silent, for a long time, staring at what she held in her hand.

Nhia and Tai waited for news at Nhia’s quarters in the palace, tense as bowstrings. Xaforn prowled the streets, detouring to Khailin’s house, but the doors and windows there were closed and shuttered and nobody had answered to her knocking. She had returned, then, to her
jin-shei-bao,
and shared their vigil. The day darkened into night, and then broke into another day.

“What are they doing out there?” Tai whispered, shivering violently.

“He called her mage,” Nhia said, her face ghost-white. “They can do this. They can kill him.”

“You, too?” Tai said, turning to her. “Is Lihui all
you
can think of, also?”

“No,” Nhia said, “but I do not forget what happened between me and the Ninth Sage of the Imperial Court. Don’t forget—this, which they fight, it has a part of me in it. He took what he took from me, and I can never get that back. I cannot but pray that Maxao is right.”

It was on the evening of the third day that Nhia woke from a light slumber, with a cry. Xaforn, with her battle reflexes and swift reactions, was at her side almost immediately.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

“There is … I can feel…” Nhia’s teeth were chattering, as though she were cold, or terrified. “Look … look outside.”

Tai ran to the window, flinging the shutters wide, and gasped. “There’s a fire. I can see the glow from here.”

Xaforn had helped Nhia to her feet, and they both staggered over to the window.

“That is in the northeast quarter,” Xaforn murmured, gauging distance and direction with a hunter’s practiced eye. “That’s where Khailin’s laboratory is.”

Tai cradled her elbows in visibly trembling hands.
Another. Another one of us.

“That’s the second house she has burned over Lihui,” Nhia said, her voice strange.

A sudden noise inside Nhia’s room made Xaforn whirl, hand on weapon, but the room was empty—as empty as it had been a moment ago when they all ran for the window. Except that there was something … something different …

Xaforn scanned the room through narrowed eyes.

“What is that on the table?” she said abruptly, her sword hissing from its scabbard.

Tai seemed rooted to the floor where she stood, shivering violently. Nhia stepped forward, but Xaforn flung out an arm to stop her.

“Wait here,” she said. “Get away from that window. Your back to the shutter.”

The other two did as they were instructed while Xaforn slipped warily into the room, watching every shadow. She bent over the small bundle on the table, tapping it with the edge of her sword first, and then reaching over with barely touching fingertips to push aside the wrapping. For a long moment she stared at what she found, and then she straightened, turning to the others.

“Come,” she called softly. “Look.”

Nhia recognized the object on the table first, and drew in her breath sharply. It was this, more than anything else, that told Tai what the intricately wrought ring made of some dark metal must be.

“It is his, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Lihui’s? The ring of the Ninth Sage?”

“There is a note,” Xaforn said, poking at a thin slip of paper laid beneath the square of fabric that had contained the ring. Nhia reached out, carefully avoiding touching the ring itself, and pulled it out. She squinted at the writing in the low light of the room, and then passed it wordlessly to Tai, turning away to subside onto the edge of the nearest chair.

The note was brief, only one line in strong, precise
jin-ashu
script:
It is over.

“What?” Xaforn said. “What does it say?”

“He is dead,” Tai whispered, crumpling the note in her hand without realizing that she was doing it. “It’s Khailin’s hand. It says, “It is over. I think they succeeded. I think Lihui is dead.”

“Then everything is fine,” Xaforn said. “If it is Khailin’s hand, then she is fine. She is right. It really is over.” She frowned. “Perhaps now I can try again to find where Qiaan …”

But Tai’s ears were full of the sound of rushing water, white noise, the clamor of her own blood in her ears.

Khailin may have survived her encounter with Lihui, but the note left for her
jin-shei-bao
was not one of victory, or triumph.

It had been a farewell.

I
t took Tammary much longer to gain the mountain village of her childhood than she had thought it would.

She ran from Linh-an with nothing more than a blind desire to flee the place where she had suffered so much anguish, the place where she had had everything she had ever wanted, and the place where she had lost it all. Tai had wanted to bring Tammary and Zhan back together, but the opportunity was lost or wasted through circumstances none of them had had control over—and to Tammary, the news that Zhan had gone to war had been the final blow, a sign, a portent that told her only that she had been right to flee alone.

When she reached a small village some two days’ journey from the city, her immediate past returned to haunt her and she ended up spending nearly four days in bed with a raging fever, writhing in pain which convulsed her body and left her weak and helpless under the care of a kindly woman who—as good fortune would have it—happened to be a midwife and recognized and treated the abuses that Tammary had suffered, to the best of her ability. But even this respite was cut short by a young man returning to the village, wounded, to recuperate from the battles on the border, and bringing news that the war was a sharp and bloody one.

“Will we lose?” a nervous villager asked the wounded soldier.

“Of course not,” he scoffed. “We have the Imperial Army to stop those bandits from the Magalipt, and they are more bluster than fight anyway. And we have quite a few of the Imperial Guards with us, too. Sooner rather than later we will send the Magalipt back to the stinking hovels from which they came. But in the meantime flying arrows are a deadly thing. Many of us have been caught by them. I remember seeing three of them hit our commander at once, one time—he looked like a porcupine! They just thudded into him like this—
thwock—thwock—thwock
—and his
body jerked.” The soldier imitated the stricken man’s spasmodic shudder as the missiles found their mark, and was rewarded by a sibilant, deeply impressed intake of breath from his audience.

“Did he die?” asked another villager.

“I have no idea,” the soldier replied. “It was not long after seeing this that I was myself wounded, and after that I was away from the battlefield and I do not remember. But there are those who died, yes. I have seen their bodies laid out ready to be immolated as the Gods require.”

He had never mentioned an identity, a name, but Tammary’s tortured mind supplied the face that belonged to the body pinned by the arrows. She knew it. She loved it. She had watched it sleep beside her, on soft pillows, a smile of content curving its lips.

Zhan is dead. Zhan is as dead to me as I am to him.

She ran again, with this thought burning her soul, hot tears in her eyes. She followed the river, at first, but then left it to turn north—and lost her sense of direction and of purpose, wandering the roads of the plain for days without reaching a goal or a destination, sometimes sleeping outside in the deepening cold if she could not find a refuge for the night. Her face grew thin, haunted, with deep circles under her eyes; and it was thus, on the edge of her endurance, that she finally reached the foothills she recognized and started climbing the slopes toward home.

She reached the village well after dark on a short winter’s day, and instinctively stumbled toward the familiar house of her aunt, where she had grown up. But another instinct, just as strong, stopped her in her tracks. That house was the place where it had all started—the unpaid debts, the recriminations, the concealment, the lies, her mother’s tragic dreams and ambitions. This was not the place to find healing. She needed … she needed something else.

The sky was black above her, glittering with cold winter stars. She stood on a snow-covered path, in clothes bitterly inadequate for the chill wind that plucked at her and knew that she was on the edge of the abyss—she needed shelter. She needed help.

And there was only one person in this place to whom she could turn. The boy she had once walked away from, accusing him of betraying her just like everyone else had done, whose mercy she now needed to throw herself on.

Raian.
Where would he be? It had been years. Would he have completed his training? Was he in the Chronicler’s house?

Her feet turned that way, unbidden, and she dragged herself to the steep-roofed house at the edge of the village where the old man who had once been Raian’s teacher had lived. She had barely enough strength left to knock on the door, and then collapsed into a shivering heap on the threshold.