The Secrets of Jin-Shei (52 page)

“She died, or was killed,” Yuet said. “I am not sure myself which.”

“You think
Szewan
…?” gasped Tai.

There was a soft knock on the door, which had stood a little ajar, and then Yuet’s servant eased it open with her hip, a tray in her hands.

“I brought some tea, mistress.”

“Thank you,” said Yuet distractedly. “Set it down over there.” And then, as an afterthought, as the woman turned to leave, “And shut that door.”

“Yes, mistress,” the servant murmured with downcast eyes, and departed. The door shut with a snick behind her.

Yuet stared at the tea for a long moment before rousing again.

“No, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that. Szewan would not kill.”

“Jokhara was a cousin, remember, and the Emperor had raped one of her own—and you know how the clans are about their people, Tammary.”

“Your Szewan hadn’t been a Traveler for a lot of years,” Tammary said. “Who knows why … ?”

“I know,” Yuet said. “I read it all. She wrote of it in her journal, the entire affair, all except Cai’s death, with she left vague, perhaps on purpose. But the rest is all there. And it’s out now, and Liudan has two half-sisters out there who could be used to stake a claim on her throne. And what’s worse …”

“Could it get worse?” Tai said, with a hollow laugh.

“Everyone was told that Cai had borne a dead child,” Yuet said. “But the child was born alive, and the child was a girl, and Szewan made sure that the Emperor of Syai knew the whole truth. That there was a child out
there, born of a royal concubine who had already borne one of the princesses in line to inherit, whom Szewan could put on the throne.”

“But she was not the
Emperor’s
child,” Tai said. “She was …”

“Qiaan was born in the women’s quarter of the Imperial Palace. Delivered by a healer who could swear, if need be, to a parentage more convenient for her own ends. A child promptly spirited away to be held against future need. A daughter who could end a dynasty of emperors.” Yuet bit her lip. “Qiaan was made for vengeance, Tammary She may not know that yet, but she will. She will. You may renounce the throne, but if someone tells Qiaan the truth of it, she may choose otherwise. I have to wonder how much of their mother is in those two, if there was something in Cai that made them so damnably alike. Qiaan, in her own way, is every bit as arrogant and driven as Liudan ever was. All that it might take for those things to spill out of her could be a call to Empire.”

Yuet’s servant, who had been Szewan’s servant before her, had not overheard this last exchange—but she had overheard enough of the rest, and had sufficient background knowledge and suspicions of her own, to put everything together in her mind. She was trustworthy and loyal, and she had always kept the secrets of the healer’s house—but she was no more than human, after all. All she ever said to the gossips in the marketplace where she went to shop for her vegetables, to give her credit, was that Tammary was not the only one with a touch of the Empire on her. But she had implied enough—that the other one was also someone close to her mistress.

Less than a full week had passed since the first hints about Tammary’s parentage hit Linh-an’s streets before other rumors had taken wing, too. But these were far more specific, and far more precise—and far more verifiable. Qiaan’s own aunt was more than happy, when she was approached by what she believed to be a gossipy acquaintance in the compound, to confirm every damning thing the woman had asked about, finally finding an excuse and an occasion to spill all the accumulated bile that had built up over the years. She remained blissfully unaware of the glittering triumph in the other woman’s dark eyes as she walked away.

I
n the years since her return to Linh-an, Khailin had struggled, no less than Nhia, to rebuild a life that had been touched by Lihui.

At least Nhia had had the advantage that her encounter with the Ninth Sage had not been made public. Everyone, however, knew Khailin as Lihui’s wife—thanks to Liudan’s pointed way of referring to the now missing Sage by his married name on every possible occasion—and now Khailin herself was the focus of all the whispers, all the gossip, all the uncertainty Lihui had always had an air of mystery to him. It had only been intensified by his enigmatic marriage, and the wife who had been effectively absent from Lihui’s side for years—and now the wife was back in the public eye, and the Sage himself was gone.

It all provided juicy material for the Court gossips, and it was aggravated by the fact that Khailin would not simply stay quietly in the shadows. She had paid for the knowledge she had craved and had found in Lihui’s libraries—she had paid with nearly three years of her life and her happiness, and she was not going to let the hard-won prize be wasted. Within a year of her return to Linh-an she had established herself as a scholar and a gifted alchemist. Within two years she had compounded her notoriety by writing a treatise on her work—carefully, in
jin-ashu,
still concealing her real proficiency in the unwomanly
hacha-ashu
script. The treatise, quickly transcribed into
hacha-ashu,
had been distributed anonymously, and used by a number of prominent scholars before it was discovered who the real author was. It had been of particular interest because of the elegance with which it posed some of the basic issues of the alchemist’s craft, and then described the process of seeking the answers, leaving out a single fundamental step. This was done in such a way that it was only discovered by the adepts if they tried duplicating the work, inevitably discovering that there was a last bridge which they had to cross
themselves. The treatise implied that the author had done so, but wasn’t telling any more than that.

It was pure
yang-cha,
but wrapped in the potent language and mystery of the
zhao-cha,
and it was Nhia who had probably been to blame for that, Nhia, who had torn herself out of the Temple and its teachings but had never quite managed to tear the Temple out of herself.

“The world did not just materialize, it was formed, and there were distinct stages of its formation,” Khailin had said during one of their discourses. These were often spirited discussions, with Khailin frequently demanding evidence for Nhia’s more philosophical ideas and Nhia wanting to know how Khailin could hope to know where every crumb of the rich black soil on the great plains of Syai had come from. “And the beginning of all things was merely the end of the creation process, that is all.”

“A time before the beginning, when everything was still part of the cloud of the Way, when it was all energy and no matter,” Nhia had said. “Sounds more like my sphere than yours, Khailin. Are you saying I was right all along?”

“Only because you insist on obfuscating it and making it so mysterious that nobody will ever understand what you’re talking about,” Khailin had retorted. “It’s simple enough. When the world began, when life began, when that which would go on to produce
us
began—that is the beginning. Before that, there was a time before the beginning—and time before the time before the beginning—and then there was just existence. And before that, there was nonexistence. And before that, a time before nonexistence.”

“And if you add a time before the time before nonexistence, you have the seven
kalas
,” said Nhia, who had been ticking things off on her fingers as Khailin had talked.

“The Seven Ages? How do you make that out?”

“Well, you’d have to work backward, I would think,” said Nhia, her eyes sparkling. She loved this kind of metaphysical analysis. “If you count the time before the time before nonexistence as Atu—the Afterdeath, the Beforebirth, the spirit existence, then you could walk it backward through your stages. Give them to me again?”

“The beginning.”

“No, in reverse,” said Nhia thoughtfully.

“The time before the time before nonexistence, Atu. The one before that was the time before nonexistence.”

“That would be Liu, the birth,” Nhia said.

“Nonexistence.”

“Lan,” said Nhia. “Growing milk teeth.”

“Existence.”

“Xat. Coming of age.”

“A time before the beginning.”

“No, you had another one in there before that—the time
before
the time before the beginning. That would be Qai, getting ready to raise a family, collecting the seeds that become children. The next stage, the time before the beginning, would be Ryu, where the children of those children would take you—your
world
—a step forward to the next
kala,
toward an enlightenment. What came next?”

“The beginning,” said Khailin thoughtfully.

“Pau,” said Nhia.

“How do you figure that? Pau is the age of old age and of death! And this is a world just born!”

“Ah, yes, but it has aged into its birth from a time before the time of nonexistence,” Nhia said. “From here it enters Atu again—and then gets reborn into the new set of ages. Ours. That was the world; after that, it is the people of the world. There is always death in a birth; that is what immortality is all about—something always
continues.
That’s part of what constitutes immortality.”

“You should be one of the Sages instead of Liudan’s Chancellor,” Khailin said.

Nhia shook her head. “No,
you
should. And if the now Eight Sages don’t produce a new number Nine soon, I might mention that to Liudan.”

“I don’t want to be the Ninth Sage,” Khailin said, recoiling. “That would really make me into what Lihui was.”

Khailin’s reputation in her craft had been made. Her laboratory, established with Liudan’s help, had been set up to her satisfaction, she had her work, and she had the freedom to pursue the knowledge on any subject that interested her. Her life was set on a solid foundation—or so she believed. But she had not heeded the words that had been addressed to her by the Beggar King at their first meeting.
Never be so certain of anything.

When the shock that rocked her world came, it came unlooked-for, out of the dark.

Despite Khailin’s insistence that she didn’t celebrate birthdays any more, Nhia had insisted that she at least come for dinner to celebrate what she called the latest nonbirthday event. She had been implacable, and Khailin, under amused protest, had dutifully presented herself at Nhia’s chambers at the Palace on the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday. Only two of the usual pack of scribes and the secretaries and the record keepers who usually sat in the Chancellor’s busy office were still there—an ambitious youngster who was apparently eager to get himself noticed, and the eldest of the secretaries, who had been in Zibo’s office before Nhia had inherited him, still working diligently at his desk with a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses perched on the bridge of his nose.

“Go home,” Nhia said, coming out to the office from the inner chambers just as Khailin entered from the outside. “The day’s work is done. There is nothing that cannot wait until morning.”

“Yes, Nhia-
lama
.” The senior scribe laid down his brush and, slipping off his glasses, rubbed the reddened bridge of his nose with his free hand. “I have to admit, my eyes have been giving me trouble today.”

“Go home,” Nhia repeated. The old man began tidying up his desk for the night; the younger scribe, scowling, bent furiously back over the script he was working on. “Both of you,” Nhia said. “That’s an order.”

“I’ll only be a minute, Nhia-
lama
, I need to …”

“Do you need me to give you a hand with that?” the older scribe said courteously.

The younger scribe’s instinctive reaction was to hunch protectively over his page. He caught himself, sat up again, but dislodged the top page of the material he was copying as he did so. He threw himself forward to pick it up, but was not quick enough; it was the older scribe, at whose feet it had landed, who straightened with the paper in his possession, squinting at it, and then giving it a longer look. “What is it that you are doing, Huo?”

Khailin, only a few steps behind the old man, cast an instinctive glance over his shoulder, and then she, too, stared.

“Give me that,” she said.

The old scribe hesitated. The younger one, Huo, snatched at the copied pages that were still lying before him, scattering the contents of his desk as
he launched himself from it. He ripped the mysterious page from the hand of the older man as he ran past him on his way out of the office.

The paper was torn raggedly from the top down, leaving only a couple of fingers’ width of the page in the old man’s hand. He looked at Nhia for guidance, but Khailin had her hand out for the remnants of the page, as imperious as Liudan at her best, and when Nhia nodded the scribe passed the fragment of paper over.

“What is it?” Nhia asked, at the sight of Khailin’s white face. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I have,” Khailin whispered, the torn paper trembling in her fingers. “This is Lihui’s hand.”

The Beggar King’s voice rang like a bell in Nhia’s mind.

I have not sensed that death.

The storm is upon you.

“What does it say?” Nhia said quietly, ignoring the old scribe’s startled look that she should ask Khailin, a woman, about the
hacha-ashu
page that she held. But Khailin had already been scanning it, and shook her head.

“I can’t tell,” she said, “except that it mentions the Western passes, and something about the riders out of Magalipt. It says ‘ready to be unleashed.’ It says ‘spring.’” She looked up. “It says ‘war,’ Nhia, although the word does not appear on what is left on this page. He is alive, and he is coming back.”

Nhia looked at the old scribe. “Say nothing of this to anyone yet,” she said. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, Nhia-
lama
,” murmured the scribe, his eyes wide with fear.

“Khailin, come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To Liudan.”

The Empress had retired to her chambers for the night, but these were her
jin-shei
sisters, even if one of them had not been her Chancellor and the other what she had taken to referring to as her Court Alchemist. Khailin and Nhia were admitted without question. Nhia gave Liudan a summary of the events which had just transpired in the office, and Liudan heard her out without interrupting, tapping at her lower lip with her finger as was her custom when thinking.