The Secrets of Jin-Shei (69 page)

“What do they mean to do with me?” Qiaan asked, gagging on her first sip of the unexpectedly bitter brew.

“My task is merely to mend your hurts,” Xinma said. “Beyond that, it is none of my concern.”

After Qiaan had been patiently held until she had swallowed every last bit of the herbal concoction, the old healer laid her back down on the bed.

“Sleep now,” she ordered.

And Qiaan slipped off into an uneasy, unnatural sleep, compelled by the sleeping potion. It was supposed to be a dreamless and a healing sleep, but she woke later with trails of tears still wet on her cheeks. A stony-faced guard who would not respond to anything Qiaan said brought in a hot broth for her lunch, and Xinma returned to feed her and to administer another dose of herbal medicine. That was Qiaan’s routine, with light and shadow displacing one another at her barred window as day turned into night, and then day, and then night again. Qiaan quickly lost count of how many such transitions there had been since she had been incarcerated in her dungeon. If she were to go by Xinma’s precise actions which never varied—tending her wound, feeding her, administering the sleeping drug—she might have been there forever. But she knew, by the way that the thought of Xaforn still lodged in the heart of her like a stabbing sharp pain, that it had not been long. A week, perhaps.

And then the routine changed.

“You have a visitor,” Xinma announced, ushering in a tall, grim-faced woman in a Guard’s uniform.

Qiaan knew her—JeuJeu, who had once had charge of training the up-and-coming cadres of the Imperial Guard in the days when Xaforn had been a child.

“They tell me you are mending nicely,” JeuJeu said, by way of greeting, when Xinma had left them alone in response to the curt toss of her head.

“Then they are wiser than me,” Qiaan said. “There are things inside of me that will never mend. Why am I still alive, JeuJeu? I thought by now the Empress would have tried and sentenced me, and there is hardly any doubt as to the verdict. I am already dead—it’s only a matter of time.”

“I don’t know that,” JeuJeu said. “She has not spoken out on the matter at all.”

“Is there any chance of seeing her? Of talking to her?”

“You?” JeuJeu said. “I’m not at all sure that she would come to you. Why would she? What can you possibly have to tell her?”

“So why are you here?” Qiaan said bitterly.

“Because you are one of us,” JeuJeu said. “And you have always been. What is it? What did I say?”

For Qiaan had laughed once, bitterly, while at the same time her eyes filled with tears. “That’s what she said, you know,” Qiaan murmured, covering her face with her hand. “She died for me, JeuJeu.”

“And killed for you, if you mean Xaforn,” JeuJeu said. “They counted eighteen bodies in that courtyard, afterward. Some identified later as part of the rising—
your
people—but the rest, all Guards. She killed thirteen trained Guards that night.”

“She was the best you ever had,” Qiaan whispered. “I never told her that. Not out loud, not like that. I always said, ‘Oh, that will do.’ Even when she performed impossible things. ‘That’s not bad,’ I’d tell her. Tell Xaforn that. Xaforn. Who could stare death in the face and make it look away first.”

JeuJeu’s face was oddly gray. “You said that’s what she said, a moment ago,” she said. “What do you mean?”

“I told her her to go, to leave me, that I was dead, that this was a cause already lost and unworthy of offering herself to,” Qiaan said, “and she told me … that she was there because … she said, ‘You are my cat.’ JeuJeu, do you remember …?”

JeuJeu turned her head away very sharply, so that Qiaan should not see the sudden tears in her eyes. “Yes,” she said.

“Can you at least,” Qiaan said after a pause, “ask them to kill me cleanly?”

“I’ll come and see you again,” JeuJeu said, very abruptly, her voice harsher than she had intended—for otherwise she would have wept out loud. She turned to knock on the door to be released.

“JeuJeu, do me one favor. If not the Empress, can you get one of my other
jin-shei-bao
in here? Yuet or … no, Xaforn said Yuet too was dead.” She swallowed convulsively. “What has been going on out there? What else don’t I know?”

“Much,” JeuJeu said. “And a lot of it has been done in your name, although the Empress is not without…” She pressed her lips together, before she said too much. “I will see what I can do.”

She apparently succeeded in that endeavor, for Tai came to see Qiaan in her cell the very next day. She perched carefully on the convalescent’s bed, careful at first not to disturb the arrangements of bandage and poultice, but soon they were clinging together in a tight hug as both wept on each other’s shoulders. Qiaan listened, appalled, as Tai spoke of the toll of the past year. Xaforn was merely the last, perhaps the highest, price paid in the upheavals that had shaken Syai.

“I took her yearwood beads to the scribes myself,” Tai said. “They were so few, so pitifully few, when they were piled together in a representation of a life. She was so young.”

“She may have been the best of us all,” Qiaan said.

“We have all been tested,” Tai murmured.

“What happens next?”

“Her funeral rites were performed two days ago,” Tai said. “The whole Guard turned out to the pyre.”

“But JeuJeu said that she killed thirteen of them that night.” Qiaan gasped. “They must have believed she had turned on them, that she had gone to the bad, or to the other side. It isn’t just that she died, Tai, it’s what she sacrificed in the manner of her dying—it is possible that she could have been called traitor, she, who never strayed from her honor.”

“They knew that,” Tai said quietly. “Every single one of them knows that.”

“So what does Liudan plan to do with me?”

“I don’t know yet,” Tai said. “She has said nothing. She sees almost no one these days.”

“Not even you?”

“Very rarely. It’s as though she looks on the whole world as her enemy, out for her blood. And I don’t know how to heal that, I don’t know how to get through to her anymore. Sometimes when I
am
with her it feels like I am talking to a beautiful porcelain doll. There is no human warmth there, only distance, only emptiness. I desperately want to … I don’t know … sometimes she reminds me of my own children, when they were really small, when they were too young to understand anything and merely withdrew when the world became too much. I could take them and hug them and make it all better—but Liudan won’t let me near her anymore. She barely acknowledges I exist.”

“You’ve always mothered all of us,” said Qiaan with a shadow of a smile.

“It started when Antian told me to take care of her sister, and at first I thought she meant only Liudan—and then there was Tammary.”

“And then you had all of us, and were all her sisters, all linked through
jin-shei,
and you spread yourself thin for us, being there, being you,” Qiaan said.

Tai flushed. “I did little.”

“You cherished and protected, sometimes by no more than your example,” Qiaan said.

“But I have failed,” Tai said, her eyes brimming. “For a long time now I have had this fear—that it was all ending, somehow, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it. And then Tammary fled, and Yuet died, and Khailin vanished, and now Xaforn.”

“And me,” Qiaan said gently. “I am being preserved for some harsh fate, I don’t know what yet but that much I do know. Liudan can’t let me live. It would have been better if I had died in that courtyard and Xaforn was still here, who always shone so much brighter than I.”

The guard outside the door opened it a crack. “Time,” he said.

“I’ll come back and see you every day,” Tai promised.

“Thank you,” Qiaan whispered. “For as long as you are able,” she added, as Tai embraced her one more time and was escorted out of the cell.

But it was Nhia who came to see her next, and Nhia was a little more knowledgeable, and a lot more pragmatic.

“She has been heard to mutter that she will not execute a convalescent,” Nhia said. “In other words, don’t hurry to get well. Your wound is what is keeping you alive.”

“Did she say how?” Qiaan asked, steadily enough, but Nhia saw her hands tremble on the coverlet, and reached out and took one, squeezing it gently

Qiaan returned the pressure, but with little strength.

“I know,” she said, “that I probably deserve everything she has planned for me. But in my defense.”

“Your defense requires nothing else but the knowledge that it was Lihui who stood behind you,” Nhia said intensely. “Nobody understands that part of it better than I do. I’ve tried talking to Liudan about it, but so far she seems to be listening only to the voices inside her own head. She’s been reading up on ancient forms of punishment, I know that much, because I know that she has taken the scrolls from the libraries—and the
jin-ashu
transcripts never pulled punches when it came to describing atrocities. If anything, the women described a myriad of ways to kill someone with a great deal more relish and attention to detail than any man could have done.”

“So she plans on a spectacle?”

“The Guard is muttering against it,” Nhia said, “but …”

Qiaan found this strangely touching. “Xaforn of the Imperial Guard died because of me, and yet when the Empress wishes to destroy me they balk at it?”

“You were both their own,” Nhia said, “and they take pride in protecting their own. They would take the matter of discipline on for themselves, if they could, but Liudan has called it high treason and thus made it the business of the Throne, not Guard law.”

“What is she planning?” Qiaan asked, her hand trembling again, ever so slightly. “I am not good at enduring things, I will make a poor spectacle for her, Nhia. I have always hated pain.”

“Yes, and that is why you were always trying to help others when you saw them suffering,” Nhia said. “That, too, the city is beginning to remember—what came before all this. But Liudan doesn’t listen, and she doesn’t talk to any of us anymore.”

But it was Liudan herself, swept into the holding cell when Qiaan’s wounds were almost healed, who came to tell the prisoner what awaited her.

“I had considered merely hastening your passage to Cahan, by providing you with a pyre of your own before you were too dead to enjoy it,”
Liudan said, “but on reflection it would be too fast a death—so I went looking in the old books. Oh, we can still do the pyre, at the last—and you’ll still be aware enough for it—but before that, I thought we could reinvent the kind of scourge which flays flesh until bones show, and follow that with a slow and careful reduction of the flesh. It all has to be on the pyre, I know, in order for a good passage to Cahan—but nothing I have read leads me to believe that the passage in question would be significantly impaired if your feet, your hands, your eyes, your breasts and perhaps a few other choice pieces arrived at the pyre independently of the rest of you.”

It was a litany of horrors so long and delivered in such detail that Qiaan was left white and shaking under the stream of words.

“You will live for as long as I can make you live before I will allow you to die,” Liudan said. “After this, few will rise against me again. They will know what awaits them at the end of that road.”

“I sought my place in this world,” Qiaan said. “I never wanted yours.”

“Oh? So in whose name was this rebellion wrought, then? Did I imagine your name on the banners?”

“Lihui’s name was all over those banners, all over that rebellion,” Qiaan whispered. “Cahan! How could I have let him? How could I have believed him?”

“Were you hoping to bear his bastard and put the child on my throne?” Liudan said, and her voice was edged with a rage bordering on madness. “I am the Dragon Empress, and I will not let it happen!”

Qiaan stared at her for a long moment, and then let her eyes drop to where her folded hands, quite steady now, lay on top of her coverlet.

“May the gods be merciful to you, then,” she murmured.

Liudan laughed. “You wish that on me?”

“Yes,” Qiaan said, without lifting her eyes. “Because you have not touched Cahan in a long time.”

Liudan’s silence was brittle, as though she had been contemplating a reply and then thought better of it. Instead, she turned and swept out of the cell.

That evening, an unexpected visitor slipped into Qiaan’s cell.

“Nhia? What are you doing?”

“Shhh, quiet.” Warm, gentle hands folded a small glass vial into Qiaan’s palm. “Now we know. We all know. There has been a public announcement.
It is all to take place the day after tomorrow. This … this is for you, if you wish it.”

“What is it?”

“Release,” Nhia said, her voice thick with tears. “You have never deserved what she will inflict on you, and Lihui is already dead, removed from justice. If you wish it, this is a release from pain. You will sleep, that is all. You will sleep, and not wake.”

Qiaan’s hand closed on the vial. “Thank you.”

Nhia, although she could not possibly have known that she did it, echoed Xaforn’s last gesture and kissed Qiaan gently on the brow. “Sleep in peace,
jin-shei-bao.
I cannot grant you life. I can offer you a death less savage than what has been planned for you.”

And then she was gone.

Qiaan rose from her bed, and lifted her eyes to the sky she could glimpse through her small window, segmented by the iron bars. It was deep night, the clear sky shimmering with bright stars, like the storied heavens of Cahan.

Forgive me, Xaforn.

Closing her eyes against a hot rush of tears, Qiaan lifted the vial of oblivion to her lips.

“N
hia?”

“Shhh. It is late. Go back to sleep,” Nhia said, slipping back N into her bed.

Nhia’s current lover turned his head, rubbing his eyes. “I woke, and you were gone—and then I must have dozed off again. Where have you been?”

“Nowhere, Weylin. Go back to sleep.”

Weylin sat up abruptly, spilling the soft cotton sheet that had been covering him from his flat, sculpted abdomen. He was a builder’s apprentice; toting bricks and lumber all day had made his muscles hard as whipcord. He was much younger than Nhia, and far from the social circles she moved in these days, as all her recent flames seemed to be. She seemed to go out of her way to pick up men at best inappropriate, at worst disastrous. Weylin’s predecessor, before taking up briefly with Nhia, had been working some of the city’s less than salubrious “water teahouses,” the ones that Tammary had been frequenting before circumstances and Zhan had rescued her from that life.