ALMA ALEXANDER
The Secrets of Jin-Shei

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Alma Alexander 2004

Alma Alexander asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007163748

EPub Edition © JULY 2016 ISBN 9780007392063

Version: 2016-07-21

Dedication

to the women who shaped my life

my grandmother

for her unconditional love

my mother

for her sometimes deeply bewildered pride

and to my own jin-shei circle

(you know who you are)

for everything

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part 1

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part 2

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part 3

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part 4

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part 5

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part 6

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part 7

One

Historical Note

The making of a novel

Glossary and Characters

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

When I was a girl and the world broke, I thought I would always divide my life by that night in the mountains – the day before, the day after. Nothing would ever be the same. I remember the noise like thunder when the earthquake came, and the smell of blood and ashes in the air, and the way my skin felt gritty with the dust of the shattered Palace, and the taste of fear and loss metallic on my tongue. I remember the surprise I felt to see the sun rise that morning. But the sun rose, as it always did, as it always would. And I lived, and the world I knew died.

I grew up in this new world, and I thought that nothing would ever hurt me again.

I was so young – so very, very young.

But I learned quickly there are so many places for pain to hide in this earthly life we are given to live, outside of the blessed realm of Cahan, the Three Heavens where the Immortals dwell. I was loved by those who were born to love me – my mother, my children – and by those who chose to love me – my husband, and the sisters of my heart. And I lost or outlived them all, and now I am an old woman waiting in the starlight until the sun rises, once again, on a brand-new day – waiting for the day that the sun will rise and I will see the dawn on the shores of that river which I must cross before I am together once more with the ones I have loved.

I have lived in three Imperial reigns. Mine was the time of love and fire, of pain, of loss, of joy, of grief, of laughter, of greed and arrogance and dreams and betrayals. Mine was the world of family, and of ancestors, and of the bond of jin-shei, the sisterhood of women which shaped the society I had been born into. I belonged in my world, and it belonged to me – and yet it was but one tiny corner of Empire in which I too played my small part.

All women in Syai are given the gift of the secret vow, the promise that is everlasting, the bond that does not break. I shared my own life with a healer, an alchemist, a sage, a soldier, a gypsy, a rebel leader, a loving ghost and an Empress who dreamed of immortality and nearly destroyed us all. The years of sisterhood. The jin-shei years.

Kito-Tai

Year 28 of the Star Emperor

Part 1

‘We dream in Atu until we are called again

to the tears and toil of the life

and are born, and learn to walk again

in Liu.’

Qiu-Lin, Year 3 of the Cloud Emperor

One

It had been the hottest summer in living memory. The letters that came to the Summer Palace from those left behind to swelter in the Imperial Court in Linh-an were full of complaints about the heavy, sultry heat that wrapped and stifled them until they gasped for breath, the clouds that built up huge and purple every day against the bleached white sky but never brought anything except dry lightning and a distant threatening rumble of thunder. And it was barely the middle of the month of Chanain. Summer had only just begun.

But there were few left in Linh-an. At the Summer Palace in the mountains, although it was still hot enough for servants with enormous peacock feather fans to take up posts beside the royal women’s beds until they fell asleep at night, one could raise one’s eyes to the distant white-capped peaks and be comforted with the dream of coolness. There was always a breeze in the gardens, too, whispering in the leaves of the dwarf mountain magnolia trees planted around the inner courtyard. It was pleasant to linger there in the early morning, when the bird chorus was just starting up, or in the late afternoon with its long shadows and golden light. The voices of wild crickets mingled with captive ones in tiny wicker houses which hung concealed in the trees. There were cool ponds and fountains where water played over the smooth mottled grey stone brought here from a great distance by a long-dead Empress to grace her gardens. There were white flowers and red ones, some with a golden cast, and some with heavy purple petals making their heads nod in the breeze. And there were the butterflies.

It was the butterflies that brought Tai there. She was not of the Court, not even of the Court’s retinue; by rights she should have had no real access to the Imperial gardens at all. Imperial life was complicated. Down in Linh-an, the great capital city, the lives of the women of the Imperial Court were governed by endless rounds of etiquette and protocol. There were people to see, petitioners to receive; the higher-ranked princesses and concubines held their own courts, and were expected to grace public ceremonies with their presence and attend to the day-to-day business of their own households. All of this required strict rules about attire and adornment. Summer was the only time when a woman of the Imperial Court of Syai was permitted to appear outside her bedroom without the mandatory hours of preparation and perfection. Here, in the Summer Palace, the Court was on holiday; the women were allowed to wear their hair down, to emerge from the seclusion of their rooms without the heavy ceremonial outer robes, to go barefoot in the gardens.

And summer was the only time that the ladies had the time to devote to the preparation of the necessary ceremonial garb for the Autumn Court at which they were all to appear to mark their return to Linh-an from their summer frolics. Everyone required a brand-new formal suit of robes for that occasion, and the Summer Palace was always a happy muddle of bolts of sumptuous silks, bright velvets, furs for lining hoods and tippets, and a thousand embroidery hoops with half-finished flowers and hummingbirds.

Tai’s mother, Rimshi, was always part of the entourage which the Imperial ladies took to the Summer Palace. Rimshi was a sorceress with the needle. She could transform silk and velvet and brocade into lavish robes, and her services were much in demand. Ever since she had been widowed, three years ago now, Rimshi had taken Tai with her to the Summer Palace. Tai had been just six when she had first come here clinging to her mother’s skirts, and had been fussed over and petted and spoiled with sweets and the royal cast-offs from princesses unlikely to be seen in public twice wearing the same suit of Court garb. Tai had a closet full of luxurious robes which her mother carefully re-cut and re-shaped into clothes suitable for her to wear. She was nine now, but she had become so much a part of the Summer Palace gardens by this time that nobody even thought about questioning her presence there.

She would find an unobtrusive perch in some out-of-the-way courtyard and dream her way through lazy summer mornings listening to the cricket chorus and watching the bright butterflies flutter from flowerhead to flowerhead, contrasting white and blue and violet and vivid orange against the blooms and foliage. One of the gifts that had percolated to her that particular summer, from a bored royal concubine who could not master the art of using them, was a set of coloured chalks and a sheaf of thick creamy rag paper. Tai had loved the idea of drawing the somnolent summer gardens. She was only just beginning to have an idea of how the chalks worked, and her first few efforts were crude and garish, in an attempt to overcompensate from what she was used to, brushes and inks and the cheap thin paper she could get back home in Linh-an. But she was learning, and these dazzling summer butterflies were her favourite subject.

She was smudging the finishing touches to a surprisingly delicate rendition on a hot, slow afternoon, sitting in the mottled shade of an ancient twisted chestnut with her feet tucked tidily away under her robe and oblivious to everything else around her, when she was startled to hear a voice from behind her.

‘That is actually very good,’ the voice observed, a young woman’s voice, sounding at once lofty and warmly approving.

Tai, who had paused in her work and had been sitting with her eyes tightly closed and her head lifted in a pose of furious concentration, dropped her paper and scrambled gracelessly to her feet. The voice was patrician, aristocratic, and in any event anybody in this garden had to be part of the Imperial Court and it was not etiquette for Tai to be seated in the presence of a woman from the Court.

The owner of the voice was perhaps only a few years older than Tai, but even in the permissive déshabillé of the Summer Palace there was no mistaking her rank. She wore a light summer robe that left her arms indelicately bare, and they had taken on a golden glow from the sun, but her hair was gleaming and plaited with pearls where it coiled in thick black braids under a wide-brimmed hat which shaded her fair complexion. She was leaning on the trunk of the chestnut tree with one hand, and it was placed with the long-fingered elegance of one trained to grace in every movement. Her eyes were dark, slanted up at the corners, touched up with kohl – languid, friendly, but with a definite glint of imperiousness lurking in the corners together with a hint of irrepressible laughter.

Tai dropped to one knee, lowering her eyes.

‘Oh, don’t,’ the Princess said, waving her up. ‘It’s summer. It’s too hot for protocol. You draw well. What is your name?’

‘Tai, Highness.’

‘Rimshi’s girl? I think you were presented to me once. A year ago, maybe two. You’ve grown.’

Tai searched her memory frantically. She had been presented to several Imperial ladies, but one so young? This young Princess could not have been more than maybe fourteen or fifteen herself; that would have made her …; what …; perhaps thirteen when Rimshi had presented her little daughter to her. There couldn’t have been many.

There weren’t many. There was only one. Antian, First Princess, Little Empress, the heiress to Syai’s throne.

Tai, who had started to rise at the Princess’s behest, dropped down into the courtesy again.

‘Your Imperial Highness,’ she squawked.

‘I said, rise,’ said Antian. ‘I recognize your tools. Hsui never could apply the chalk properly. I’m glad she had the sense to give them to someone who would make better use of them. Do you usually draw with your eyes closed?’

The question was unexpected. Tai blinked. ‘Princess?’

‘That’s what made me come here to you,’ Antian explained patiently. ‘I saw you from across the court, and you were alternately concentrating on your art and sitting there with your eyes tightly shut …; and sometimes your hands were moving on the paper even when your eyes were shut. This intrigues me.’

Tai smiled. ‘I close my eyes so that I can see,’ she said.

It was Antian’s turn to look surprised. ‘You close your eyes to see?’

‘I cannot draw from life,’ Tai said. ‘I can see the butterflies on the flowers, but before I can draw them with my hand I have to close my eyes and draw them in my mind.’

‘Ah,’ said Antian softly. ‘I would like to take a closer look at this drawing.’

Tai’s first instinct was to hide the paper behind her back, a childish gesture as natural as it was futile. ‘Princess …; it is not very good …; yet …;’

Antian held out her hand. Obedience and deference, things Tai had been painstakingly taught and bred to, won out over diffidence; she brought the paper out and gave it up reluctantly. Antian studied the sketch, tapping her lower lip with the fingertips of her free hand.

‘Yet?’ she queried at last. ‘This is fairly accomplished, if indeed you are a beginner.’

‘I have drawn in ink, Princess, just patterns, and then in silk.’

‘Silk?’

‘Embroidery. My mother has made sure that I practise needle art.’

‘You embroider?’ Antian said, raising an eyebrow. ‘How good are you?’

‘You are wearing some of my work, Princess,’ Tai said, unable to quite hide a smile.

Antian glanced down at the hem of her robe, where a swirling pattern of stylized birds was embroidered in scarlet thread. ‘Yours?’ she asked, lifting the hem of her skirt to observe it better, sounding impressed.

‘Pattern and needlework,’ Tai said.

Antian dropped the robe, straightened, handed back the drawing with a small imperious motion of her hand. ‘You interest me,’ she said, and gave Tai a small smile. ‘We will talk again.’

Tai dropped into obeisance again. ‘Princess.’

But she was gone, a small gesture bringing her entourage of four attendants to fall in line beside her. Tai, raising her head, saw the straw hat bend as the Princess said something to one of the four ladies who had waited for her on the path while she had stopped to talk to Tai; the sound of soft laughter drifted back to where she stood with her chalk drawing still in her hand.

The light had changed, and the sun was almost dipping behind the mountains to the west. The Palace was built clinging to a mountainside; its gardens were tiered, its courtyards enclosed in the safety of high walls and the pavilions of the cloistered women, but there was a series of open terraces on the various levels of the gardens which hung almost suspended from the face of the mountain, separated from the sheer drop only by a carved stone balustrade, and from which the steep valley opened up towards the west in a breathtaking view. At sunset the narrow ribbon of the river, a long, long way below in the valley, turned into a thin skein of gold thread – only for a few minutes, when the angle of the sun was just right, a river of gold flowing off into the mysterious west. Tai could not believe that she was the first to discover this moment of beauty, but either everyone else was already weary of it or perhaps the open balconies made visitors nervous, because she inevitably had the place to herself when she came on her sunset pilgrimages.

On this day, distracted by the encounter with Antian, she was late – almost too late. The glow was already starting to fade when she got to her perch. Usually she left with the sun, coming to this place only to salute its setting, but this time she stayed, watching the sky darken into amethyst, then violet, then deep blue-black. She watched the stars come out above the sharp black silhouettes of the mountain peaks, and had the oddest feeling of transience, as though all of this was just a glimpse, as though the world would turn away in the next moment and she would never see the twilight in the mountains again.

She stayed on the terrace, curled up deep in thought and dream, until the sun-warmed stone against which she leaned had turned cool to her back, and then made her way back through lantern-lighted courts to the outer apartments where she and her mother were housed.

‘You are late,’ Rimshi said as she entered the room they shared.

‘I met the Little Empress,’ Tai said, perhaps by way of explanation.

‘Oh?’ Rimshi said. ‘Your dinner is on the table. Eat, and tell me about it.’

‘She wore a dress which I embroidered,’ Tai said.

‘And …; ?’ Rimshi prompted when Tai appeared not to wish to go beyond this simple statement.

But that was all that Tai had to tell about the encounter at this time. The rest, she was still thinking on. We will talk again, the Princess had said. Whatever had she meant? Her life and Tai’s touched rarely – would not have touched at all had Tai not sneaked into the Imperial gardens to draw butterflies.

Rimshi did not push it; she and her daughter had a good close relationship, and it would come when Tai was ready to talk about it. ‘It’s late,’ she said when Tai had done with her food, clearing the dishes away and setting a pile of scarlet silk and a tangle of bright embroidery thread on the matting next to the oil lamp where she would be finishing off the day’s work. ‘The yearwood, and then bed.’

The yearwood box was at the foot of Tai’s bed, as always. The small carved chest which had been given to her at birth contained the record of her years – the small neat bags containing the bead strings for the years past, marked by bold numbers brushed in ink, and the delicate split wand of the yearwood itself with its beaded strings of the current year. Siantain and Taian hung completed from their pegs, forty beads on each string, a record of another spring of her life having passed, another spring of the reign of the Ivory Emperor. The current string, Chanain, the first month of summer, had only ten beads on it – the first week, with a knot below it. It was the end of another week this night, and Tai obediently extracted ten ivory beads from the box and strung them carefully onto the Chanain string with the help of the bone needle attached to the end of the string. Another week; Chanain half-gone now, a knot tied with small neat hands at the end of the ten beads. Tai worked with focused attention; this was almost an act of weekly devotion for her, this counting of her days. Her task completed, she glanced to her mother for approval and received a nod and a smile.

The duty done, Tai turned to a less demanding task but one that she had always enjoyed a great deal. She fetched her inkwell and brush and the cheap journal book she had been given on New Year’s Day, its thin paper already curling as she opened the cowhide binding. There was a lot to write this day, and nothing at all; for a while she sat nibbling on the already well-chewed end of her wooden brush, and then wrote with quick, neat strokes, forming the jin-ashu letters of the secret language which her mother had been teaching her since she was six years old:

Met Princess. She liked my drawing. She wore my embroidery. I was proud of both, even though I don’t think I am very good with the chalk yet. Saw sunset from balconies, and the golden river flowing west, as always. Saw stars come out. Today something has changed.

Two

Tai stayed away from the inner gardens for several days after her meeting with the Little Empress. She could not have said why – she had felt both exhilarated and frightened by her encounter with Antian, and something in her preferred to avoid a repetition until she could sort it all out in her head.

She made herself useful to her mother instead. She had been trained well, by a renowned artist, and despite her tender age she was already an accomplished seamstress and needleworker, with a gift for design and a meticulous transformation from sketch or a mere mind-picture to magnificent Court garb embroidery. The hem on Antian’s gown had been simple, an early attempt. By this time Rimshi was trusting her daughter with gold embroidery, with designs including pearls and little pieces of coloured glass, with complicated swirls representing dragons and water-serpents. Tai had been working on one particular design, using the stylized symbol for the Female Earth symbol of the Buffalo – her own birth sign – for some time, her small, neat stitching covering the hem and the edges of a heavy formal outer robe made of stiff brocaded golden silk; she used her days of self-imposed exile from the gardens to devote herself to finishing this complex task. When she handed the completed robe to Rimshi for inspection, her mother smiled at her, covering her mouth with one hand as was her habit to hide a missing tooth.

‘This one is for your friend,’ Rimshi said.

Tai would not have claimed the friendship, but knew immediately to whom Rimshi was referring. Her cheeks flushed scarlet. ‘For the Princess? This is for the Little Empress?’

‘Herself. You cannot avoid what is there for you,’ Rimshi said, rather cryptically. She was given to being oracular sometimes.

Tai went back to the garden the next morning, early, while the quick-drying summer dew was still on the flowers. Some were still closed, sleepily waiting for the sun to clear the high walls and pour its golden light into the courtyard, and others were open, eager, breathing in the morning air. It was already warm.

She had brought her drawing stuff but the garden was still drowsy with morning and only just stirring into life. She rarely went out onto the balconies in the morning, because their treasure lay in the sunset hour, but she decided to go out and sit looking at the mountains until the butterflies returned to the inner courts.

She had thought she would be alone out here, but drew a startled breath as she padded out onto the smooth paving stone of the terrace, paper and chalk under her arm, and saw that someone was already there.

Someone with her hair dressed in two long, simple, unadorned black braids which reached almost to the backs of her knees, dressed in the sleeveless robe whose hem Tai recognized. Someone who turned at her approach, and smiled, motioning her forward.

‘I looked for you in the garden,’ Antian said, with only the faintest tone of command in her voice.

‘I was working on a robe,’ Tai said. And then, because she couldn’t help it, smiled. ‘Yours, Princess. The one with the buffalo border. I share the sign.’

‘I have not seen it yet,’ Antian said, returning the smile. ‘I look forward to it, knowing the hand that worked it. Have you been drawing?’

‘Not in the last few days, Princess.’

‘Call me Antian,’ said the other, with a wave of her hand. ‘We are alone, and there is no need for protocol here, in this place, halfway between heaven and earth.’

‘I come here in the evenings,’ Tai said carefully.

‘And I, in the mornings,’ said the Princess, with a little laugh. ‘And nobody else I know comes here at all.’

‘Why?’ Tai asked, looking at the valley and the river below them. The light was different, bright, molten-white summer morning sunshine; it almost blotted out the looming mountains with its sheer intensity. ‘Why the morning? You can’t see anything.’

‘My time is less my own in the evenings,’ Antian said. ‘Tell me about what you come here to see.’

So Tai described, haltingly at first, then with increasing confidence, the golden river flowing into the sunset – and then the new thing she had absorbed for the first time only the other day, the stars coming out in the summer sky. Antian listened, not interrupting, until Tai came to a halt and drew a deep breath, her eyes still shining with her vision. She realized that the Princess was watching her with a small smile of admiration lighting the slanted dark eyes.

‘You have a gift,’ she said. ‘You have the sight and the tongue of a poet. Not only through your hands but through your heart and your mind and what you see and you hear.’ She tossed her head impatiently. ‘So few around me have that ability,’ she said, ‘to paint me a picture – with chalk, or with thread, or with words. I have to come here at sunset one day and see these things of which you have spoken. Would you like to join my household?’

The last was unexpected, a question that rounded the corner of the rest of Antian’s words and ambushed Tai with the force of a blow in the stomach. Her eyes were wide with consternation, but what came out was something that was surprised out of her, something that, had she had the remotest chance of thinking about, she could never have said at all.

‘No, Princess.’

They stared at each other in mutual shock – one because she was not used to being refused, the other because she could not believe that she had just uttered the words of refusal to the face of an Imperial Princess.

But Tai knew why she had said what she had said. Driven to explain, to take back that blurted no that had come tumbling out of her, she raised the hand which still clutched her chalks and her paper.

‘Princess …; Antian …; I …; I am honoured. But my mother has told me …;’

‘Don’t look like that. You are not a slave, and I won’t go out and buy you with gold,’ Antian said, her voice startlingly sad. ‘I like the way you make me see things. That’s all.’

‘My mother has told me something of the Imperial Court,’ Tai said. ‘Of the way things are done, they have to be done, the way everyone’s life is planned and controlled, the way you have to make sure your hair is in place and your hands are in position and you are not allowed to smile or to talk or to look where you are not supposed to look.’

‘Yes,’ said Antian, ‘I know.’

‘I would have to be like that, too. And that would mean …; I couldn’t watch the butterflies.’

‘I know,’ said Antian again, this time with a sigh. ‘You are right. It is a life that binds. You made the buffalo robe with vision but I will wear it with ceremony. I was just wishing …; for someone to let me see the things that ceremony makes me blind to.’ She looked up at the battlements behind them, rising tier upon tier, and straightened. ‘I should probably go in now,’ she said, suddenly reverting to a curious formality. ‘I will look forward to seeing you in the gardens again soon, Painter of Butterflies.’

‘Wait,’ said Tai impulsively as the Princess turned to leave. Antian turned her head, watched as Tai fumbled within her sheaf of papers, extracted the drawing she had been working on the day Antian had first seen her in the gardens. She held it out, suddenly shy. ‘I’d like you …; to have this …; if you want to.’

Antian took the somewhat smudged drawing with a small smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said. There was the slightest of hesitations, as though she had meant to say something else and caught herself, and then she merely inclined her head in a tiny regal motion and turned away.

Tai stayed on the balcony for a long time, alone, staring out into the valley.

‘The Little Empress liked her gown,’ Rimshi said to Tai when she returned to their room later that day after an afternoon fitting session with the princesses. ‘I told her it was mostly your work, and she was pleased to give me something for you.’

Tai looked up, wary. ‘For me?’

‘So she said.’ Rimshi raised her hand to cover her smile. ‘I have brought it to you, here. She said, “Tell your daughter that this is for the butterflies and for the golden river.”’

Tai took the small square package wrapped in an oddment of scarlet silk and unfolded the material to reveal a small book, a journal with a hundred pages gleaming white and blank and waiting to be filled with thoughts and visions, bound in soft, bright red leather with leather ties to hold it closed. Tai’s hands caressed the smooth binding, opened and closed the book several times. Tears which she could not explain stung her eyes. This, after she had told Antian no?

‘This is a precious thing,’ Rimshi said, observing her daughter’s reaction. ‘She thinks highly of you, it seems.’

‘She likes what I see,’ Tai murmured.

‘Ah,’ said Rimshi, still smiling. ‘Use it well, then, to share that vision.’

‘Look,’ Tai said suddenly, lifting a piece of very fine paper which had been laid between the last page and the back cover. ‘There is something else here. Look!’

‘It looks like a letter,’ Rimshi said.

Tai looked up in consternation. ‘I cannot read letters!’

‘This one you can, I think,’ Rimshi said. ‘She would have written in the women’s tongue.’

‘Jin-ashu? The princesses know jin-ashu, too?’

‘All women know jin-ashu,’ murmured Rimshi. ‘It is our language, the language of jin-shei – passed from mother to daughter from the dawn of time, letting us speak freely of the thoughts and dreams and desires hidden deep in a woman’s heart. Of things men do not understand and do not need to know.’

Tai opened the folded piece of paper with reverence. ‘There is only one thing here,’ she said.

‘What does it say?’ Rimshi asked, although she knew, and her heart leapt at what her daughter had just been given.

Tai lifted shining eyes. ‘Jin-shei,’ she whispered.

So young …;

Rimshi had been twelve years old when she had exchanged her first jin-shei vow – with Meilin, the daughter and heir of a family which owned a thriving silk business in Linh-an. It was in their workshop that the young Rimshi had first seen silk thread, had first touched silk cloth, had embroidered her first clumsy sampler in silk – all when she was younger still, much younger than twelve years old. And then the friendship with Meilin had deepened into something else, and they had said the words to each other – jin-shei. After that Meilin, the elder by a handful of years and therefore more accomplished, saw to it that Rimshi’s talents were noticed, and she had been given training and instruction in the silk embroidery.

Jin-shei had shaped Rimshi’s life – it was jin-shei that gave her the gift of her trade, and it was jin-shei, with another jin-shei-bao who had gone on to be an Emperor’s concubine, that had given her the place to practise it. Rimshi had told Tai about the second story and Tai knew all about the romance of it, the glory of the poor but beautiful girl being taken into the Imperial Palace to be a princess. Tai knew only the light of jin-shei, its joys; Rimshi had thought she would still have time to teach her daughter about its duties and its responsibilities. And now it was here, offered by a girl who would be Empress one day.

It could be refused, simply by making no response to the offer, by not accepting jin-shei by responding with the same words. But Rimshi looked at Tai’s face and the bright wide eyes and could think of no reason for her to refuse this great gift that she had been offered. There would be time still, Cahan willing, to teach Tai about the true meaning of the sisterhood – time enough for everything.

But right now it was a star, a bright and glorious thing that lit up Tai and made her whole being glow with the joy of it.

‘Jin-shei,’ Tai repeated, almost with awe. ‘The Little Empress wants me to be her friend.’

Rimshi slipped an arm around her daughter’s thin shoulders and hugged her into her side, tightly. ‘The Little Empress,’ she said, ‘wants you to be her sister, my Tai.’

Three

Summer wrapped Linh-an, the capital city of Syai, like a shroud. The walls of the city shimmered with it well before the bells of noon from the Great Temple. But summer or winter, the Imperial Guard compound had its routine. The trainees traditionally found something to whine about in every season of the year. Come late autumn they would complain about being expected to do their drills in the cold rain; in winter they would carp about chilblains and frostbite; now, with summer just beginning to settle in, they did their manoeuvres in the cobbled practice yard, the heat reflecting off the grey compound walls, the straw-covered cobbles warm through the thin soles of their practice boots in which their feet slid and sweated. The orderly hierarchies were observed here as everywhere in Linh-an – the élite cohorts practised in the cool of the early morning, or in the early evening when the evening breezes would start to cool their bare arms, sheened with sweat. They made it all look so easy – the choreographed fights with single blade, double blades, iron-tipped staves, unarmed wrestling in the corner of the yard where the ground was left unpaved to lessen risk of injury. They wore black pants, tucked into their boots, and black sleeveless practice singlets, men and women alike; a bandanna tied low on their forehead mopped up the sweat dripping into their eyes. These were the old pros, the survivors, their arms tattooed with the insignia of several Emperors. The oldest of them wore up to three or even four – the tusk for the Ivory Emperor, currently on Syai’s throne, then the sigils that had belonged to the Sapphire Emperor, the Serpent Emperor. Two even wore the sign of the Lapis Emperor, the oldest of the Guard, the best.

The current cadre, Guardsmen and Guardswomen with a single tattoo or maybe two, trained straight after the élite forces while the mornings were still as cool as they were going to be in that molten summer, or just before them, in the shimmering heat which pooled in the courtyards in the late afternoon. That left the practice yard free for the rest of the day for the young ones, the children raised by the Guard to fill their ranks.

Often these were the sons and daughters of the Guard, but these children were not forced into their parents’ profession, and there were always gaps to be filled. With the unwanted, the orphaned, the abandoned – the ones adopted, clothed and fed by the Guard, the ones who owed their life to the Guard. It wasn’t indenture, quite, but in some ways it was worse. Although there was always a theoretical way out for a child like this, they were never allowed to forget their debt to the Guard, and by the time they were old enough to choose for themselves they could not choose other than the only life they had ever known. Sometimes barely weaned babies, still in their swaddling clothes, were found abandoned on the doorstep of the Guard compound – orphans or children from families too poor to raise them. That had been Xaforn’s lineage.

The only thing Xaforn knew about herself was that she belonged to the Guard. There had been nothing left with her when she was found – no amulet, no word, not even a name. All of what she was, all of who she was, she owed to the Guard. She had started watching the élite forces at their daily drills when she was barely five years old, and by the time she was seven and her own cadre of youngsters had been started out on the basic falls, rolls and gymnastics training she had been practising a few things on her own and shone out like a diamond. She was tough and wiry, long-legged, with promise of height; hard daily physical exercise kept her lean and limber. Within six months of starting training she had been plucked from the novices who were still stumbling around getting no more than bruises out of their early training and started as the youngest trainee in the cadre two levels above raw beginners. She was two, even three years younger than everyone else in her ‘class’, and the fact that she was better than many of them earned her few friends in the cadre. She preferred it that way. She was one of the few to take whatever the season threw at her without a word, without a whimper – summer sweats or winter chills, she was Guard, and she trained with a focus and a silent concentration which sometimes scared even her teachers.

‘That one will kill early, or be killed,’ they’d tell each other, watching Xaforn go through her exercises.

‘Be killed in training,’ they’d add, as they watched her challenge much more advanced opponents to practice fights, and lose, and challenge again with her strategy and her movements changed from one fight to the next, learning from every defeat, every mistake.

‘She scares me,’ one of the three-tattoo élites had murmured once, watching Xaforn trying to perfect a particularly difficult kick, doing it again and again, losing her balance, refusing to accept defeat. ‘Give her a few more years in the practice yard, and I’d send Xaforn to guard the Palace alone against an invasion of barbarians from the plains. They’d be dead of exhaustion before any of them got close enough to wound her.’

Xaforn didn’t know about that remark, but she trained as though she was trying to live up to it. She trained as though she was preparing for some imminent war that only she could see coming.

Her only vanity was her hair. Most of the women in the Guard cut theirs short; it fit better under helmets and took less care. Xaforn’s was in a long braid which she usually wore wrapped tightly around her small head; but sometimes, when practising alone, it was left to hang down her back and it whipped as she whirled and kicked and rolled her way through the fight exercises. For some reason this made her look even more dangerous. She was due to turn ten at the end of this long, hot summer, and already they were talking about promoting her up to yet another level in the coming autumn. She would be training with the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, the class only a year away from full induction into the Guard.

She fully intended to join the Guard at the first opportunity offered to her. When she was fourteen, maybe; thirteen, even. There could be uses for someone as young and light on her feet as Xaforn was.

But, for now, she was still young, she was still a trainee, she was still fair game for chores and message-running if someone more senior managed to collar her before she gave them the slip. Leaving the practice yard, braid swinging, mopping the sweat glistening in the hollow of her throat, an equally sweaty and flushed Guardsman stopped her at the entrance to the compound.

‘Ah. Good. You can run the errand for me, and I can get back to my business,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Captain Aric is needed at the Palace. See that the message reaches him.’

‘Where is he?’ Xaforn shouted at the Guardsman’s retreating back.

‘How should I know? That’s why I’m sending you,’ he retorted, trotting away back to the group fencing with sword and dagger out in the yard.

Muttering imprecations under her breath, Xaforn broke into a jog and made for the inner compound where the living quarters were. She didn’t like that part of the compound – perhaps it reminded her too much of all that she had never known. Foundlings and orphans, the children left to the Guard to raise, were housed separately in their own dormitories; the closest they came to experiencing actual family life was observing the family compound, watching children sired or borne by individual Guards tumbling around the inner courts while the women of the household squabbled and cooked and chased toddlers intent on finding trouble. There was a part of Xaforn that fiercely desired the closeness, the sense of belonging, that seemed to cling to these walls – and another part of her despised it for its weakness, its vulnerability, for being the soft underbelly of the Imperial Guard. For Xaforn, family meant only the cadre – the group of warriors that she had been raised to become a part of. She had never known a mother or a sibling; her life had been lived under discipline, not affection. She was incorruptible, unbribable, there was nobody whose welfare mattered to her enough to tempt her into betraying her calling – and she could see a Guardsman father hesitating at the threat of a knife held to the throat of one of these cherished children.

At a cursory glance the courtyard appeared to be full of only the vulnerable ones, just the women, the children, the families. But then she noticed Aric’s daughter, Qiaan of the long face – few people could lay claim to ever having seen that girl smile – and veered off to intercept her.

‘I’ve been sent to look for Captain Aric,’ Xaforn said without preamble. ‘Do you know where he is to be found?’

‘He was here earlier,’ Qiaan said, with studied unhelpfulness. Her eyes were hooded, her expression carefully blank. As a child of an Imperial Guard captain, she was steeped in Guard traditions – but Xaforn, the foundling, belonged to the Guard far more comprehensively than Qiaan, its daughter, had ever done. Qiaan could not, had never been able to, understand the devotion to duty, to being a honed weapon. She didn’t know what she was, but she knew what she wasn’t – and she wasn’t Xaforn’s kind of animal at all.

Xaforn would have been tearing the eyes out of anyone who would attempt to make the grave error of turning her into a lady who wore silks and reclined gracefully in Palace luxury; Qiaan had likewise snarled at the merest suggestion that she might consider the Guard as her path in life. All the children were asked; only a few of them accepted, but even those who did not were still Guard enough to admire or at least appreciate the Guard and the lineage it gave them.

Qiaan, however, was different.

Qiaan’s father was a high-ranking Guard captain, and his duties frequently kept him away from his family, but at least he was affectionate to his daughter when he was with her. But her mother, Rochanaa, veered between a kind of despairing affection and an inexplicable coolness; sometimes it seemed that it was all she could bear to just look on Qiaan’s face. Bounced between these reactions, the child had never known what reception her overtures to her mother would receive, and had, in the end, stopped making any. By the time Qiaan turned eleven her relationship with her mother had soured and solidified into something scrupulously correct and curiously formal. With her father all too often physically absent, and her mother abdicating emotional closeness, Qiaan was adrift, detached from her own immediate kin and incapable of belonging to the often insular ‘family’ of the Imperial Guard. If anyone had asked her, she would have dismissed the idea of ever having wanted to achieve this distance from the Guard and all that the Guard meant – but she was reminded of her failures, her possible inadequacies, when she met up with someone who truly belonged, like Xaforn.

The two of them reacted to each other like two explosively opposite chemicals in an alchemist’s alembic, aching to absorb the best they saw the other as possessing. They were still too young to understand the reasons why.

Face to face in the courtyard, Xaforn, the younger by fully a year, managed to draw herself up and give every impression of looking down on Qiaan as someone clearly younger or inferior. ‘The captain is wanted at the Palace,’ she said, ‘and I will go in search of him myself. But you ought to have enough respect for his position and his duty to make sure the message reaches him as soon as possible, if I do not find him.’

‘Oh, I know all about duty,’ said Qiaan, a little acidly. ‘Good hunting, Xaforn.’

‘Soft,’ hissed Xaforn, just before she swept out of earshot.

‘Besotted,’ Qiaan returned, making sure she had the last word. She was rather good at that.

Both girls departed, pursuing their own errands, equally stung. It was the summer, it was the heat. Tempers were frayed everywhere.

But this was the summer of trial for both of them.

Xaforn was intent on becoming. All her life she had been a chrysalis, and this was the last summer she would have to wait for her metamorphosis. If she was good, if she stayed ahead of the pack, autumn would bring promotion, and the next year would, maybe, bring more than that. Xaforn knew, knew with a passion born of yearning, that once she was a full-fledged Guard she would always have a place to belong, she would know who she was, she would have a home.

Qiaan was equally focused on being. She was cast in a role, but one which she found it difficult to interpret. She was young, but she was not unobservant – and there was a coolness between her parents, a coolness which she could sense deepen when she entered the presence of both of them at the same time, a coolness which her mother then passed on to her when her father departed once again to take up his duties at the compound and the Palace. Qiaan was an unwitting pawn in some adult game – but that was just an instinct, not a knowledge, and she had no idea how to act in order to lessen the impact of the situation on her own life. She tried to be a dutiful daughter, to the best of her ability. When her mother, a transplanted Southerner who was sometimes fiercely homesick for her own people, thawed far enough to share some aspect of her childhood or her culture with Qiaan, the child tried to listen, to learn – but those times were rare, and it was more common by far to be rebuffed by a cool word or a refusal of a touch. Rochanaa did her duty and passed on to Qiaan all that a mother should teach a daughter – but no more than that.

They were both, Guard foundling and Guard daughter, fiercely lonely.

In the third week of Chanain, with summer coming to a boil and the skies bleached white with the heat within city walls, Xaforn turned a corner in the Guard compound and discovered four boys surrounding a hissing and bedraggled cat. They appeared to be passing something from one to another, laughing, keeping it from the cat which was trying to get at whatever it was, ears flat, fangs bared, howling.

The boys were all three or four years older than Xaforn, and at least two of them were Guard family. Ordinarily she would have left them to their hijinks – what business was it of hers what they were doing to the cat? But then she distinctly heard the thing being tossed from hand to hand whimper softly, and caught a glimpse of a spread-eagled kitten tied to a pair of crossed sticks.

The Guards were just, fair, honourable. This was part of the training, the foundation of Xaforn’s ‘family’. Wanton cruelty had no place here. Besides – although that had nothing to do with it, of course – she rather liked cats.

‘Put it down.’

The timbre of her voice took even her by surprise. It was low, level, dangerous.

One of the boys turned – not one of the Guard ones – and obviously failed to recognize her. He saw a girl, long braid swinging forward over her shoulder, dressed in wide trousers and summer over-tunic, bare feet thrust into a pair of rope-soled sandals.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You want to play? Ow!’ Distracted, he’d allowed the mother cat a free swipe, and she had caught him squarely across the shin. He kicked, hard, swearing first at the cat and then, turning, at the girl who had been the indirect cause of his wound – and who had not moved.

‘Put it down,’ Xaforn repeated, taking on the kitten’s cause. One of the other boys did recognize her, and tugged at the scratched one’s sleeve.

‘Dump it,’ he advised his friend, eyes flickering over Xaforn. ‘Not that one.’

‘You afraid of a girl!’

‘That girl, yes. She’s a Guard.’

The other boy snickered. ‘A trainee Guard kid. I got me a trainee Guard kid. Let’s see what they teach them in classes.’

Both the Guard boys were now hanging on the arms of the young show-off, but advising caution merely seemed to inflame his desire to make trouble. It had been he who had been holding the spread-eagled and weakly meowing kitten in his hands; now he tossed it to his fourth companion, who stood looking indecisive as to whether to listen to his gang leader or the two insiders who seemed to have information that the leader lacked.

Xaforn was a head shorter and much lighter than her opponent, and all the boy saw was a thin girl who had challenged his authority. One good blow, and it would be over – she’d be across the courtyard, in a heap in the corner, and there would be good blue bruises all over her face the next morning – or at least that was the plan. He swung, and he never knew what hit him. Xaforn ducked under his arm, pivoted on the ball of her foot, came up behind him and landed a blow on the small of his back and across the kidneys which felled him to his knees, and then drove the edge of her hand into his solar plexus as he tried to rise. He swayed for a moment, his eyes crossed and focused on the tip of his nose, and then fell face first into the cobbles.

The rest, throwing down the kitten, fled.

It had taken a fraction of a second. Xaforn was left in possession of the field, triumphant, a little guilty.

‘You aren’t supposed to beat up the general population,’ a voice said, apparently giving tongue to her guilt.

Xaforn looked down. On her knees on the dusty courtyard cobbles, heedless of a pretty silk robe, Qiaan was extracting the kitten from its torture apparatus.

The mother cat had retreated a few steps and now stood growling softly deep in its throat, but making no sudden movements.

‘What are you doing here?’ Xaforn said waspishly.

‘Just passing through, same as you,’ Qiaan said. The kitten fell into her hands, freed at last, barely breathing. Its eyes were still closed. ‘I don’t even know if it’s old enough to be weaned yet.’

‘Will she take it back?’ Xaforn said, coming down on one knee beside Qiaan to have a closer look at their prize. Both girls were completely ignoring the erstwhile bully, who was still on the ground, groaning.

‘Even if she did,’ Qiaan said, ‘it might die. It’s so tiny. I wonder where those bullies found it.’

‘They probably killed the rest.’

The mother cat snarled, but when they looked up at the sound she was gone, melted away into the shimmer of heat. Xaforn sighed.

‘Well, that’s that.’

‘Do you want it?’

‘What would I do with it?’ Xaforn snapped. She’d been caught in a moment of softness and it rankled – especially because it had been Qiaan, of all people, who had been the one to see her succumb to it.

‘Then why did you save it?’

‘Because they were Guard,’ said Xaforn. As though that made all the necessary sense in the world. In her world, it did.

Qiaan could even understand it. But her understanding didn’t change matters. ‘It’s dead anyway, then,’ she shrugged. But she tied her sleeve into a makeshift sling and cradled the weakly mewling kitten into it. It quested with its tiny nose until it found her finger, and then it started sucking on the fingertip, hard, making tiny complaining noises when it refused to yield any sustenance.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’ll take it home,’ Qiaan said. ‘See if I can’t find something. Milk going to waste. Something.’

‘Sappy.’

‘Mad,’ countered Qiaan.

They got to their feet, spun apart. Behind them, the poleaxed young bully was only just beginning to sit up and shake his head in confusion. The girls stalked off in opposite directions, and then Qiaan turned to look at Xaforn’s stiff, retreating back.

‘You can come see her if you like,’ she called softly.

Xaforn paused, half turned her head. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

Qiaan shrugged. ‘To see if she survives the Guard.’

Xaforn’s braid snapped like a whip as she turned. ‘It wasn’t Guard did that to it!’

‘To her,’ Qiaan said. ‘And if they hadn’t you would never have interfered. I’ll be seeing you.’

‘Witch,’ muttered Xaforn.

‘Bruiser,’ came floating back, just as Qiaan passed out of sight.

Xaforn turned away. She tried to scowl, but however hard she schooled her features her mouth kept on coming up into a twisted little grin instead. Of all the people …;

But she had an awful feeling that she could not resist going to see the cat. She. That pathetic little bundle of ragged fur, bloodied and weak and barely flickering with life. How did Qiaan know it was a female?

Four

Xaforn shared a dormitory room with three other Guard foundlings. She had a utilitarian relationship with her room-mates – she did not have anything much in common with any of them. She had both given and received bruises from sparring sessions with all of them, but they shared the space amicably even if Xaforn didn’t join in with the giggles and the compound gossip the other three girls were prone to. The single Guard members were given to transient and shifting flings with others in their cadre, and Xaforn’s room-mates always seemed to know who was attached to whom any given week. Xaforn did not particularly care to know, and had developed a habit of generally tuning out specific conversations, those spiced with heavy doses of titters and whispers. But gossip was also a mine of information about the general day-to-day lives in the compound and Xaforn did not dismiss everything that found its way into her room through her chatty bunkmates.

She was sitting on her bed fixing a broken sandal barely a week after the incident with the kitten when a comment involving ‘cats’ found its way past her defences, and she lifted her head fractionally, starting to listen without giving the least impression that her attention was suddenly on things other than the half-completed repair job in her lap.

‘ …; adorable,’ one of the girls was saying. ‘It must be only a few weeks old, and it must have suffered something terrible, there are still marks on it where it had been tortured.’

‘Where did Qiaan get hold of it?’ asked another.

‘She won’t say, she says nothing of where she found it or how she got it,’ the first one said. ‘But I think it’s going to make it. She still feeds it four, five times a day; it suckles on her finger like a baby, An told me.’

So. The kitten lived. Xaforn bent over her sandal, obscurely pleased at the news. She made a mental note to keep an ear open for news of it – of her – her lips quirked again, remembering Qiaan’s quiet insistence on that point. She toyed briefly, as she had done a number of times already in the past week, with the idea of visiting the cat – the cat, not Qiaan – and then dismissed it, as she always did, staunchly resisting the impulse. There was nothing for her in the inner compound, with its teeming children, its squabbling women, its families, its cats.

She muttered a soft curse under her breath. The kitten’s tiny, vulnerable face, the delicate suckling on Qiaan’s finger, the scrabbling little wounded paws …; Xaforn jabbed a repair hook too deeply into the rope sole of her broken sandal, annoyed at the kitten’s insistent hold on her mind’s eye. She had interfered because two of the torturers had been Guard, damn it all, not because she was a bleeding heart for waifs and strays. She didn’t care what happened to it, after. She didn’t. She could swear she didn’t. She was glad the little thing had clung to life, but she’d tried to dismiss the creature from her orbit and she had every intention of forgetting about it. Especially now that she knew it had survived.

But the cat incident seemed intent on coming back to haunt her. The day after she had overheard the conversation about the kitten’s well-being, Xaforn was summoned into her cadre leader’s presence.

‘Is it true?’ JeuJeu, the scarred veteran in charge of training for Xaforn’s group, demanded without preamble as soon as Xaforn came into her cubicle.

Somehow Xaforn didn’t need to ask what she was talking about. She clenched her teeth. Qiaan – Qiaan probably told them everything.

‘It was Guards who were torturing it,’ Xaforn said, with a touch of defiance.

‘Guards,’ JeuJeu repeated blankly.

‘There were four of them, and two were Guard trainees,’ Xaforn said. ‘This was not …; honourable.’

JeuJeu was betrayed into a grim smile. ‘You took on four older boys on behalf of a half-dead street cat because what they were doing was not honourable? For the love of Cahan, Xaforn. Did you know who the boys were?’

‘Just the Guards,’ Xaforn said.

‘The others were far more important,’ JeuJeu said. ‘The one you landed in the House of Healing for five days was the son of a City Councillor. His father was not pleased.’

‘The City Councillor’s son is a bully and a fool,’ Xaforn said trenchantly. ‘He was told by the others –’

‘Yes?’ JeuJeu prompted when Xaforn came to a grinding halt. When Xaforn remained stubbornly silent, JeuJeu heaved a deep sigh and sat back in her chair, stretching her legs out before her and crossing them at the ankles. ‘I’ll tell you, then,’ she said. ‘The others told your target that he shouldn’t mess with you. He didn’t listen. He paid for it.’

‘Am I in trouble?’ Xaforn asked warily.

JeuJeu laughed, a sharp bark of a laugh, betraying amusement but not mirth. ‘Oh, a great deal of it,’ she said. ‘You broke so many rules that it would probably take me less time to enumerate those you did not break. There are people out there exceedingly angry with you, who won’t forget your name in a hurry. But you took on an adversary against the odds – they were bigger and there were more of them – and you did it on a matter of principle.’ JeuJeu shook her head. ‘Yes, I’d say you’re in trouble. But I also dislike interference with Guard matters, and they were in the compound. So technically they were in our jurisdiction. And it was our cat.’

Xaforn, who had kept her eyes down, stole a look at JeuJeu’s face at those words. The damn cat had become a symbol, somehow.

And it hadn’t been Qiaan who had squealed. It had been that malicious bully with his flabby muscles and soft belly. Once he had recovered enough to whine, that is. Xaforn allowed herself a small smile at that thought.

JeuJeu caught it. ‘Don’t look so smug, you aren’t getting off scot-free,’ she said sharply. ‘We’re holding you back this autumn. You’re ready to go up a level, but you obviously need to learn more about strategy and prudence. So your cat has cost you advancement, this round.’ She saw Xaforn’s stricken face, and allowed herself to smile. ‘For what it’s worth, it is my own considered opinion that it won’t matter one whit, and that you will be the youngest Guard to be inducted into the Imperial Corps. But it will be a year later than you hoped. Xaforn, I don’t want you to learn the wrong lesson from this. I am proud of you. We are proud of you. You understand honour; now you must start learning to weigh when and how it can best be defended. You could have come to me with this and I would have done something about it – I like torture no more than you do.’

‘But the cat would have died,’ Xaforn said softly.

‘Maybe,’ JeuJeu said. ‘And maybe not. And maybe both it would have been alive and you would have had your promotion. And maybe you’d never have known what it was that you really believed in.’ JeuJeu’s smile turned a little wry. ‘Truth? I don’t know that I would have done any different. I’ll see what I can do for you, for my part. You may go.’

Xaforn left, her thoughts churning. She found herself utterly ambivalent about the cat, the bully, her actions. Her gut told her she had done the right thing; her reason railed against her having risked anything at all that would have harmed her sole focus, her chance of belonging, of being Guard – full Guard, part of that family – as soon as she could make that happen.

That cat.

The damned cat had survived. The odds had been against the kitten, just as they had always been against Xaforn achieving impossible goals. Xaforn was not blind to the irony of this. She was suddenly curious to see how the cat was doing – but that would mean, of course, going into the family quarters again. Where Qiaan was.

‘I might as well get it over with,’ she muttered. ‘I should probably never have meddled at all.’

Xaforn wore such a fierce scowl as she came through the archway and into the inner compound that perfectly innocent children instinctively sidled out of her way, avoiding the sense of being somehow at fault which circled around Xaforn just waiting to find a target to land on. The scowl only deepened when she emerged from the passageway leading through into the inner garden surrounded by the mews where Captain Aric lived, and found Qiaan seated on the grass, a straw hat on her head, and another on the ground beside her which had been made into a nest of sorts where, now, a black kitten with white-edged paws curled up asleep. There were a dozen children there, some playing knucklebones, others acting out domestic dramas with rag dolls or attacking each other furiously with wooden swords, a few of them keeping an eye on the kitten and waiting for it to wake up and enchant them with its antics.

The damn cat had become a celebrity.

Xaforn’s scowl deepened even more when a few of the noisier children lapsed into silence, watching her progress across the yard. A couple of the small faces registered alarm.

‘Don’t be scared,’ said Qiaan, who hadn’t turned to look but somehow knew that the children had become wary. She was supposedly addressing the children, but her voice had been pitched for the visitor. ‘She’s just come to see Ink.’

‘Ink?’ Xaforn repeated, blindsided by the fact that the cat had survived long enough to gain a name.

‘One of the little ones said she looked like somebody had been holding her by the paws and dunked her into a pail of ink,’ said Qiaan, with a straight face.

Coming closer, Xaforn noticed the paper smoothed over a wooden board in Qiaan’s lap, and a small bottle of ink, the writing kind, beside her on the grass. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Drawing her,’ Qiaan said, turning the board.

‘It isn’t very good,’ Xaforn said tactlessly, studying the brush-and-ink rendition.

Qiaan shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s only for me.’

Xaforn, somehow always on the defensive with Qiaan’s particular brand of passive resistance, sidestepped. ‘I suppose it’s better than I could do.’

The kitten chose this moment to stretch and yawn, revealing sharp, delicate and somehow impossibly feral needle-like teeth. It opened one eye, just a narrow slit gleaming green in the black fur of its face, and then both, giving Xaforn a guileless, wide-eyed stare.

Captivated, Xaforn reached over a finger.

‘Careful,’ said Qiaan, ‘she …;’

The kitten began purring softly, butting its head against Xaforn’s fingertip.

‘ …; scratches,’ Qiaan finished, and then grinned. ‘Well, look at that.’

The cat was a tangle of conspiracies. Xaforn flushed, snatching her hand back. ‘I just wanted to make sure she was all right,’ she said.

Qiaan smiled again at the ‘she’. Xaforn and the cat continued looking at one another warily. Still smiling, Qiaan picked up the narrow brush lying by the inkwell, dipped it into the ink and sketched out a few letters of script beside the cat picture. She blew on the ink gently to dry it, and Xaforn’s attention switched back to her.

‘Here,’ Qiaan said, picking up the paper and handing it to her visitor. ‘You keep that.’ Her eyes were veiled behind long dark lashes as she added, ‘Although it isn’t very good.’

Xaforn took the paper automatically as it was thrust at her, and her face settled back into its scowl.

‘What’s this?’ she said, staring at the letters Qiaan had put onto the page.

Qiaan started to answer, and then stared at her. ‘You don’t know, do you? And how could you?’

Caught in an inadequacy, straight after having been pilloried for being far too good at what she did, Xaforn flushed darkly. ‘Perhaps I didn’t need to know.’

‘Jin-ashu,’ Qiaan said. ‘The women’s language.’

Taught from mother to daughter. Rochanaa had done her duty by this, at least – Qiaan knew the script of the women’s language, the secret language. But who had there been to teach foundlings like Xaforn? Qiaan stared at the other girl, curious and oddly astonished by this discovery. Did none of them know it? Were all the female Guards who had come here as foundling babies illiterate in this secret that the women of Syai had cherished and passed down from generation to generation for a thousand years?

She could not believe that. So much of her world was built on its existence.

Or was it just Xaforn herself – did Xaforn slip through the cracks, so intent on belonging to the Guard that she never learned how to belong to herself and her heritage?

‘It says “Ink”,’ Qiaan said, her voice completely free of sarcasm or mockery, the twin weapons with which she often faced the world. She picked up the brush again, dipped it into the ink, sketched out a new set of letters on a shred of paper which had been lying underneath the sketch she’d handed to Xaforn. She handed over this, too, without a word to the other girl. Xaforn took it, stared at it.

‘So I can’t read it,’ she said. ‘So?’

‘It says jin-shei,’ Qiaan said, suddenly a little unsure of herself, of the impulse that had made her offer this sacred trust to the one person in Linh-an who apparently had neither knowledge nor appreciation of it.

Xaforn may have been ignorant of the secret language; she could hardly have grown up female in Syai, foundling or not, and not be aware of the existence of the jin-shei sisterhood itself. But this was a female mystery, a women’s secret, and it was something that Xaforn had dismissed as irrelevant to the life she chose to lead.

‘What use do I have for that?’ she said, raising as shield the brashness and the roughness of her warrior training – the male attributes thrown up to parry the insidious attack by the softness of the feminine in her, ruthlessly suppressed since she had taken up weapons and chosen to learn how to kill. ‘And what’s in it for you? You, of all people, and me?’

‘Do you think there are no jin-shei sisters in the Guard?’ Qiaan said. ‘You are ignorant, then. This is every woman’s heritage, be she princess or the lowest urchin in the beggar guild.’

‘The beggar women know jin-ashu?’ Xaforn said sceptically. ‘I don’t believe it.’

Qiaan shrugged. ‘The beggars may be largely illiterate but their women will have enough jin-ashu to communicate with someone like me,’ she said. ‘You can believe it or not.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Xaforn said abruptly, coming to her feet.

‘You can choose to accept it, or not,’ said Qiaan. ‘But jin-shei is not something that can be unsaid. You have the paper.’ She glanced at the kitten, which was contemplating the twitching of its own tail with a hunter’s deep concentration, and smiled. ‘We share the cat. And someday – jin-shei-bao – there may be a better drawing of the cat. And you can write her name on that yourself.’ She met Xaforn’s eyes, squarely, without flinching. ‘Or your own.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Xaforn repeated, backing away. Her eyes slid off Qiaan, lingered for a last moment on the kitten, and then she stalked out of the courtyard, her shoulders hunched.

‘Temptress,’ she muttered as she departed, clutching the drawing of the cat, trying not to let her eyes stray constantly to the mysterious symbols on the paper. Letters. Writing. Language. Sisterhood …;

‘Coward,’ Qiaan responded.

Xaforn had to clench her teeth against the sudden urge to laugh out loud.

Five

Nhia had started out thinking of the Great Temple of Linh-an as a deliciously confusing maze, a labyrinth, a box within a box.

To the child that she had been, the place was enormous, layered like a lotus flower, and full of mystery. Its outer walls were whitewashed with lime, like some of the poorest houses in the city; its three massive gates, cut into this white expanse, were old and scarred wood and had no air of holiness or even magnificence except maybe for their immense size. But they always stood open – except for one single night of the year on the Festival of All Souls when the Temple was closed to be purified – and they were gateways to a constant stream of worshippers hurrying in and out.

Nhia, who had practically grown up on the Temple’s doorstep, knew the outer rings of the Great Temple intimately.

The First Circle, running right around the inner perimeter of the whitewashed walls, was primarily taken up with Temple vendors and the stalls of diviners and soothsayers – and Nhia claimed the acquaintance of most of them, at least by sight. Some had been there for as long as she had been coming to the Temple – old Zhu, and his incense booth so meticulously devoted to one particular scent a day (‘It only confuses the customers when you show off everything you’ve got,’ he had confided to Nhia once, nodding sagely); the Rice Man, whose name she had never learned but whose family of eight children and their ailments and joys Nhia and her mother had known for years; So-Xan the yearwood bead-carver and his young son and apprentice, Kito.

Trestles within individual booths were neatly laid out with such merchandise as incense sticks suitable for individual deities or specific prayers, bowls in appropriate colour or pattern, flasks of rice wine or tea, grains of rice or of corn and powdered dyes. When Nhia was a curious toddler only just starting to lisp questions – before life had made her mother taciturn and edgy – she had demanded explanations for all of these mysterious offerings and paraphernalia.

‘Why yellow bowls, Mother? Why only thirteen grains, Mother? Why tea and not rice wine, Mother?’

‘Yellow bowls for Lord Sin, because he is Lord of the East and that’s where the yellow sun rises. Thirteen grains because of the thirteen lessons of Ama-bai. Tea and not rice wine because the Sages are lower than the Emperors.’

Nhia was to remember those times with a pang of regret. It had been years since she had asked her mother a question like that. Years since she had expected a reply from her.

Other stalls in the outer cloister housed the makers of carved yearwood sticks, or sold funeral arrangements, preparation of the paper effigies of the things the deceased needed to take with them into the next world, amulets or talismans, marriage and betrothal tokens, or – slightly clandestinely, because the Temple officially frowned on these – low-level alchemical potions guaranteed to increase fertility, virility or long life. Ganshu diviners elbowed one another for space here, their clients waiting in patient queues for their turn inside the screened booth where the diviner performed his or her work.

An open corridor cut across this cloister from each of the three gates, and led through into the courtyard. Beyond a narrow strip of grass rose a clay wall with three arched openings in line with the three gates; it was painted a ghost-blue, a colour which was almost white except for the wash of blue that made it look like the sky of Linh-an in the full blaze of the summer sun. The wall surrounded a perimeter precisely one flagstone wide around the next level of the Temple, the Second Circle, a building painted the same colour as the wall around it, itself boasting an inner cloister surrounding an open court. But this cloister was clear of anything requiring an exchange of money. It was two storeys high, with an open balcony above the lower cloister. The entire inner wall of the building, on both floors, was a catacomb of wall alcoves and niches, with space for incense and offerings; each niche held an image or a figurine before which some devotee was praying with a fragrant incense stick smelling of cinnamon or flower essence or rain grass in one hand and a bowl with precisely counted rice grains in the other.

Many niches were empty, their own particular deity yet to appear. These were the Later Heaven deities and spirits, the lesser Gods, the spirits of Rain and Thunder and Wind and Fire, Tsu-ho the Kitchen Spirit of Plenty, Hsih-to the Messenger of the Gods, the Syai Emperors of old, and the Holy Sages. This was the place of propitiation, of honouring the Wise, of paying respect to the Great, of asking for advice. Nhia would sometimes drift past the niches with supplicants (sometimes more than one, companionably sharing a deity’s time and attention and often the offering) and absorb the whispers going on around her – whispers asking for help, giving thanks, telling the Kitchen God of the success of a particular feast which was held in the midst of plenty and humbly giving him credit.

‘Please, Rain Spirit, our fields are parched and drying, we humbly come to ask …;’

‘I offer rice and grain in humble gratitude, for my son has found a good bride …;’

‘O Holy Sage, who knows of these things, I come to ask for guidance, for the examinations are near and this problem is too great for me to understand …;’

‘Holy Hsih-to, Messenger of the Gods, please help me make my husband stop being angry at me – for I did not mean it when I said to him …;’

‘Help me, Hsih-to, for my mother-in-law is driving me distracted …;’

These were the simple questions, but they were also the most fundamental ones, the ones lives were built on – and the shrines were open, and there were few secrets. This was the backbone of the Way, the little things that, left unattended, would grow into catastrophes – but which were still small enough, human-scaled enough, to belong to these lesser Gods and spirits and for which the greater deities were not to be disturbed.

For more, for greater miracles, the three arrow-straight corridors leading from the outer gates pierced this Circle full of incense and whispers. Within the inner courtyard of this Second Circle stood another building, this one painted a darker blue, the blue of an autumn sky. Its inner cloisters, also on two floors, were quieter, more sparsely populated. Here, in the Third Circle, there were fewer niches, and the Gods in them were the lower deities of Early Heaven – Cahan, the Spirit Paradise. Here resided Yu, the general of the Heavenly Armies; Ama-bai the Great Teacher; the Rulers of the Four Quarters – Kun, Lord of the North, Sin, Lord of the East, T’ain, Lady of the West and K’ain, Lady of the South. These were the weavers of human fates, the first deities in the tiers of the Heavens with real power over lives, dreams and destinies. Nhia’s astrological antecedents had been complicated – she had been born between two Quarters, and her mother had made offerings to both Sin and K’ain, making sure that she left no stone unturned when she came to pray for Nhia – but it seemed that the in-between children were neither Ruler’s responsibility and Nhia’s mother’s prayers had fallen in the cracks.

It was more expensive to come here than in the Second Circle, for the deities of the Third Circle had their own attendants who tended to the offerings and the lighting of candles and incense sticks so that all was harmonious and acceptable. There was no companionable sharing of Gods and altars here. People came to the Third Circle with a purpose.

Another level deeper in stood the Fourth Circle – not a round building like the others, but a three-sided, three-storey structure. Each of its three sections, all three floors of it, was devoted to one of the Three Pure Ones, the rulers of the Three Heavens of Cahan – the Shan, the I’Chi, the Taikua, the realms of Pure Spirit, Pure Energy, Pure Vitality. The building was painted a darker blue, inside and out, and inside its many candles and lanterns gleamed like stars. The place was full of silence and mystery, and Nhia loved to lose herself here sometimes, when she had hoarded enough coppers to buy an offering rich enough to allow her into this Circle. The inner garden, separating the Third from the Fourth Circles, had scented flowers, and meditation areas with golden sand raked smooth and granite rocks placed as focus for a supplicant’s thoughts. The altars in the Fourth Circle were carved in smooth marble or covered with costly golden silks, tended by special attendants clad in blue and gold and sworn to each deity’s service. There were secluded alcoves where those who came to honour these deities could withdraw after making their offering to the acolytes, and commune in private with the God they had come to revere.

The three straight corridors passed through this quiet, holy place too and finally entered the heart of the Temple – a midnight-blue tower standing in the middle of the inner court of the Fourth Circle, the home of the Lord of Heaven. The worshipper entered this place barefoot, leaving shoes outside the gates, for this was holy ground. Nine small altars ringed the centre of the Tower, three to each gate; these were followed by an inner ring of three larger ones, one per gate, where oil lamps always burned to signify the presence of the God. Beyond these, three steps on a marble platform, was the altar of the Lord of Heaven where the Emperor himself came to sacrifice for Syai’s well-being on the eve of every New Year – an altar where a holy fire burned in a central bowl and cast a flickering light on the carefully arranged offerings tended by one of the three Tower priests. High above, reachable by a catwalk that clung to the walls of the Tower well away from the altar, hung the gigantic brass bell which was rung by the priests every day at noon.

A complex place for a complex faith, an orderly set of beliefs on which heaven and earth were made, a creed which assigned everything to its perfect, particular place.

Nhia had been brought there for the first time when she was a babe in arms, barely born, perhaps a week old – her mother had brought her in, purchased amulets, purchased potions, offered her child and her child’s troubles to the deities of the Second Circle and begged for deliverance. But Nhia’s twisted leg and withered foot did not go away. The child crawled a lot later than most children did, unable to put any weight on the crippled limb; she had not walked until she was almost four years old, and even then it was with a pronounced limp. By that time her mother had progressed to the Third Circle, entreating for salvation from higher authority – but no amount of incense or rice wine helped, and ganshu readings were inconclusive.

The Temple was a daily stop, and more often than not Nhia was required to accompany her mother the supplicant so that she could show the Gods just what they had to do for her. Any other five-year-old or six-year-old or seven-year-old, and as the years wore on Nhia reached and passed all those milestones, would have started pulling the Temple apart stone by stone from sheer boredom. Nhia was different. Her physical disability focused her mind on things others might have missed, and even as a very young child she was an acute observer and an astute interpreter of the throngs of humanity she saw parading in and out of the Temple every day. By the time she was ten she had taken to coming to the Temple by herself. She would strike up conversations on the theology of the Way with some of the younger and more indulgent acolytes of the outer Circles, or some of the older ones willing to indulge an interested and precocious child. It was all couched, as much wisdom of the Way was, in ancient tales and fables. There were many, but there was one which most of Nhia’s Temple friends always returned to in the end.

‘When the evil spirits tricked Han-fei into raiding the Gardens of the Gods …;’

‘I know, I know,’ Nhia would interrupt when this sentence was offered to her. ‘He picked too many of the plums from the Tree of Wisdom, and could not carry them, and had to leave all of it behind when he was driven from the Garden by the angry Gods. I know, sei, I know. The plums of wisdom should be taken one by one and savoured. But I would still like to know …;’

The Temple teachers would shake their heads and smile.

But Nhia was told much, and had seen more than any Linh-an child her age and twice as well born as she could lay claim to. She had even glimpsed the Tower altar by the time she was eleven.

By the time she had turned thirteen, Nhia could recite the correct offerings for any deity within the Great Temple – their composition and their timing – to a precise degree. Her mother, Li, had exhausted her avenues of help and appeal in the living world, the healers and the hedge-healers and every connection she had ever had, including her handful of jin-shei sisters. Nothing had helped, and Li had turned almost wholly to the Heavens now, praying daily for intervention in the circumstances concerning Nhia’s withered foot. But for Nhia herself that foot had long since ceased to be of any importance. She would listen to her mother’s entreaties to the Gods, which had started out as abasement and pleading for a miraculous cure and had then proliferated into all kinds of peripheral demands – Send her a husband who will care for her. But Nhia knew that it was unlikely that she would ever marry, or at least unlikely that she would marry well – she was the daughter of a washerwoman, with no inheritance or dowry to speak of, and the handicap effectively removed any possibility of entering some wealthy house as a concubine whose children, taken as such children always were to belong to the primary wife, might stand a chance of inheriting something of their own.

Nhia’s life had been written for her by the Rulers of the Four Quarters long before she was born. This much she knew from her conversations with the acolytes of the Third Circle. There would probably be no marriage, no children for Nhia – but there might be something different, something else. She just wished she knew what. Her mother still regularly haunted the booths of the ganshu readers for answers concerning her crippled child, answers which had a more and more direct bearing on her own life and needs as the years slipped by, but Nhia herself had spent a few precious coppers on a couple of readings from the cheaper ganshu readers – those in the bazaars, not the ones allowed access to the Great Temple, she couldn’t even think about spending that much money on a whim. The readings had been inconclusive and vague, or the readers had been less than adept. Either way, the path Nhia was to tread remained opaque to her.

Six

If Nhia had any gift that set her apart from the rest, it was to make people trust her – not necessarily like her, because she was a bright and intelligent child who appeared to know far too much for her age, and didn’t hesitate to tell what she knew. But people would tell her things, people who otherwise had no business telling her anything, and it was partly this that pushed her into the path of the Gods when she came stumbling into the Great Temple barely a week after her thirteenth birthday, in that hot summer which held all of Linh-an in its iron grip.

The Temple was blessedly cool after the steamy streets, and Nhia paused to catch her breath and rest her aching foot in its special sandal. Her mother always had a spare copper or two for the Temple if Nhia asked, and she had come armed with a handful of coins with which she hoped to buy enough in the way of offerings to get her into the Third Circle.

Thin strips of garden separated each Circle from the next, complete with a handful of carefully cultivated trees bearing plums or peaches, symbols of knowledge and immortality, or just blooming with great scented flowers in their season. But the inner garden of the Third Circle was particularly lush and pleasant. Scattered pools held golden fish, and tiny artificial waterfalls added the murmur of running water to the serene hush of the inner Circles. It was in these gardens that Nhia often found the acolytes who were willing to talk to her about the things that interested her. The Second Circle was full of a chattering and a muttering, and desperate attempts to hush whimpering or wailing children, and shuffling feet, and the occasional squeal or shout; it was hard to gather one’s thoughts here, although Nhia sometimes came there to do just that as an exercise in concentration. But she preferred at the very least the quietness of the Third Circle or, if she had a choice, the hushed holiness of the Fourth.

She was out of luck with her offerings this time – her hoarded coins managed to suffice for barely enough incense to placate one of the Second Circle Sages. But her luck turned when she met up with one of the acolytes she had got to know better than most in the time she spent at the Temple, and was invited to come through with him into the Third Circle as his guest. Nhia accepted gladly, contemplating half an hour or so of pleasant conversation, but they had barely crossed into the inner court of the Third Circle when another acolyte hurried up to them and whispered something in Nhia’s friend’s ear with an air of agitation.

‘I apologize,’ said Nhia’s acolyte courteously, ‘but it seems I am urgently required elsewhere. We have one of the Nine Sages in the Fourth Circle today, and he has been …; demanding. But please, walk in the garden. I will see if I can return when my duty is done.’

‘Thank you,’ Nhia said.

He bowed formally, and hurried away with his companion.

The Nine Sages were almost mythical beings to Nhia. They were learned men and women, great Sages, most of whom would gain niches in the Second Circle of the Temple at their passing and many of whose predecessors already inhabited their own niches there. They were adepts of great power and knowledge, Imperial advisers, the first and most honoured circle of the Imperial Council. One of them had crossed into the Later Heaven fairly recently; Nhia had been in the street crowd at his funeral parade, and had been deeply impressed at the cortège and at all the implements, meticulously recreated in folded and painted paper, which he required to take with him to the Afterworld. His successor – each Sage named his successor in the circle before he died – was a mystery; nobody had yet seen or heard of the new Sage, none of the common people anyway. All that was known about him was that he was male. He had already been the subject of much street gossip. Stories had it that he was no greybeard; he was not young, to be sure, because no youth could be a Sage – certainly everyone knew that much. That left a virile man, in the prime of his life, and everyone from the portly matrons making virtuous sacrifices in the highest Temple Circles to the painted bazaar strumpets was speculating on whether he had taken a wife or a concubine or whether he intended to do so. Nhia wondered briefly and with a spark of passing curiosity whether it was in fact the brand-new Sage who had sent the acolytes of the Great Temple into such a frenzy of activity, but it was unlikely that this would be something that she’d ever get close enough to find out.

Left alone in the gardens, Nhia sat for the better part of an hour contemplating the languid, overfed fish in one of the pools, happy to snatch a moment of perfect peace. It was as she was getting ready to leave that her disability returned to haunt her. She put her weight on her crippled foot in an awkward manner while stepping up onto the paved path leading to one of the gates, and the weak ankle gave way. Nhia crumpled to the path with a gasp of pain.

A hand extended in assistance swam into her field of vision, blurred by the sudden tears that had come into her eyes. Surprised, she took it, and was helped gently to her feet and supported until she gained a steady balance. Only then did she raise her eyes, blinking owlishly, to look at who had come to her aid.

The man’s face was young, unlined, the hair long and lustrous and tied back in a plaited queue like the workers wore – but his hands were not worker’s hands, and his eyes were not a young man’s eyes. The hands were smooth and white, nails manicured, a sure mark of an aristocrat with servants at his beck and call, even if it wasn’t for the telltale fall of expensive material of his gown that spilled in carefully arranged artless folds as he bent to help Nhia up. The eyes were opaque with ageless wisdom, dark and kind and utterly mysterious.

‘I …; thank you, I am fine now,’ she said, knowing as surely as she knew her own name that she was addressing someone a thousand times removed from her in rank and stature and appalled at her temerity in saying anything at all to such a personage. By rights she should have stood quietly with her eyes downcast until addressed directly.

The man dropped one of his hands from her shoulders, and Nhia attempted to stand unsupported but made the mistake of supporting her weight on her weak foot again. She tried to hide the inadvertent wince, but obviously failed when a cultured voice with a Court inflexion and intonation said, ‘I think not.’

He slipped an arm around her shoulders and helped her off the path, steering her to the nearest bench in the gardens, and letting her subside gently onto the seat.

‘Thank you,’ she said again, helplessly.

‘Did you come here to pray about this?’ the man inquired courteously, inclining his head the merest fraction to indicate her foot, not naming the affliction, as politeness demanded.

‘No, sei. No, my Lord, that is my mother’s reason for visiting the Temple.’

‘Oh?’ he said. ‘And not yours?’

‘I come here to understand, not to beg for petty miracles,’ Nhia said, and then bit her lip to prevent a small gasp from escaping. She had offered a discourtesy, at the least, and he could take her remark as borderline blasphemous if he chose.

‘How old are you?’ asked her benefactor instead, unexpectedly, after a pause which might have indicated surprise.

‘I turned thirteen only a few days ago, sei,’ Nhia said, relieved to be back on safe ground.

‘I have heard the name of a young girl who comes here to talk of the spirits with the Temple acolytes,’ the man said thoughtfully. ‘Would that be you? What is your name, child?’

‘NhiNhi,’ Nhia said, instinctively giving her child-name, the name her mother had called her by when she was a baby, and then flushed scarlet. ‘I mean …; Nhia, sei.’

‘Nhia,’ he repeated, with an air of committing it to memory. ‘Well, Nhia, seeker of wisdom, perhaps we shall meet again.’

Nhia dared a quick, flickering look to his face. ‘Yes, sei,’ she said, aware that she sounded like she was indicating an agreement to that future meeting instead of a simple response that his words seemed to demand.

He straightened, gestured to someone out of Nhia’s line of sight, and then bowed to her lightly – bowed to her! – and strode away in a whisper of expensive silk robes.

Nhia realized she was trembling.

When hurrying footsteps approached her a moment later, she lifted her eyes to meet the intensely curious gaze of her friend from the Third Circle. ‘What did he say to you?’ the acolyte demanded, sounding astonished. ‘Do you realize who that was?’

Still thunderstruck, aware of a murmuring crowd gathered in the cloisters which had been a collective witness to this strange encounter, Nhia stared at the gate through which her young lord had disappeared. ‘I think I do,’ she whispered. One of the Nine Sages is in the Fourth Circle today …;

‘He is Lihui. That was Sage Lihui. He is the youngest of the Nine Sages, the one who came to honour us today. I saw you fall at his feet and I was afraid, but he …;’

Nhia’s eyes were wide as saucers. She had been right but …; a Sage? A Court Sage had stopped to raise a crippled child, to ask her name …;

Perhaps we shall meet again, he had said.

Perhaps the ganshu readers had never told Nhia about this encounter because it had never been meant to take place. The acolyte had trusted her with the information that a Sage was in the Temple; the collapse of her ankle might have been pure chance, but a part of her had known at whose feet she had been thrown, and had guided her tongue as she had spoken to him.

Nhia looked around at the flickering lights of candles and oil lamps of the Third Circle, at the haze of brightness surrounding the weavers of human fates, the Rulers of the Four Quarters, and smiled to herself. She had put herself in the paths of the Gods this day. Perhaps she had just taken her first fragile step beyond the veil which ganshu had drawn over her life and destiny.

Seven

‘For the love of all the Gods, Khailin, and for the last time – not today! The Chancellor …;’

Khailin’s face set in mutinous lines. ‘The Chancellor! That means I won’t see you until nightfall, and that means I don’t get my lesson today.’

‘Think of it as a day of rest,’ said her father, with some impatience. Then he smoothed the frown off his forehead, and sighed. ‘Khailin, knowing your hacha letters is not going to magically –’

‘I know,’ Khailin said. ‘I know what it won’t do for me. But there is so much out there that I want to know, and that I will never know if I can’t …;’

She faltered under her father’s rather stern gaze. ‘And you do remember, I trust, that these lessons are based on a proper attitude on your part. I will not have you interrupting me, Khailin. It shows disrespect to your parents.’

‘Yes, Father,’ Khailin said, resigned.

‘Good. That’s settled, then. We will resume our lessons when I return from the Palace. In the meantime, I suggest that you pursue your …; other responsibilities. I will have to speak to your mother about that. Within a year or two you may well be married and will have no time for indulging such whims as books and studies.’

Khailin bowed to her father with the exact degree of respect that was required, keeping her eyes lowered so that he wouldn’t see the rebellion in them. Cheleh, Court Chronicler, permitted himself one affectionate feather-like brush of his hand on his daughter’s hair before bowing back to her with the proper degree of acknowledgement and leaving her alone in her chamber.

When the door safely closed behind him, Khailin picked up a tasselled cushion from her bed and threw it against the wall with a muted cry. She had just come to an interesting section of a text her father did not know she had purloined from his scroll library, and she had become thoroughly bogged down in it. She had hoped to wheedle some information from him that day, without letting on that she had the scroll, of course, and finish reading the text that evening. It was an old astronomical treatise, written by a Sage from a long-dead Emperor’s court; Khailin could tell, even with her inability to completely understand, that much of it was already obsolete, but there had been several descriptions in there which matched something she had been able to observe herself in the night sky with the distance viewer her father had in his study. She had hoped that she would be able to extract enough information from this scroll to confirm her own observations, and perhaps find out where she could obtain more recent material on one particular celestial object which had caught her fancy, a red-gold sphere with an annulus around it.

She had started wheedling her father to teach her hacha-ashu, the script of the common tongue, when she first realized that jin-ashu, the script her mother had been dutifully teaching her since she had turned four years old, was not the language in which the really interesting things were written. Jin-ashu was a woman’s language, and it was the heart of a woman’s world. Its writings tended to be confined to poetry, legends, stories, the wisdom of hearth and home, letters between jin-shei sisters (whether separated by the length and breadth of Syai or three streets apart in the same city). Jin-ashu dealt with the everyday and the commonplace, the household chatter of wives and mothers, the pouring out of an unrequited love or the transports of delight of a new wife just initiated into the pleasures of marriage. Khailin had seen a few of the latter, although she was still to undergo her Xat-Wau coming of age ceremony and was considered far too young for what were sometimes frankly erotic letters between grown and sexually initiated women. But Khailin read what interested her, and if she could sneak an astronomy treatise out of her father’s treasured library, her mother’s stacks of jin-ashu letters were a considerably simpler problem to riffle until she found material that caught her eye. She knew considerably more than either of her parents suspected about what awaited her as a young woman who was rapidly approaching marriageable age.

In fact, she had already started keeping an eye out for likely prospects – young men sufficiently learned to have access to the things that she wanted to find out, or wealthy enough to buy such access, or both. Unfortunately most of the younger suitors she had considered – the ones her parents would consider suitable – were also dismissed early, on the grounds that they were simply too boring to be of any interest. Khailin wondered if she would be able to hold out for a husband who might be considerably older than her but whose age would be traded off for the fact that he could be more easily cajoled by a young wife to allow her to do the things that Khailin had every intention of continuing to do. Study. Read.

A diffident knock on her door interrupted her thoughts, and at her barked call of admittance a servant, hands together and bowing deeply to her young mistress, came in to announce that Khailin’s presence was required by her mother, the lady Yulinh.

‘Tell her I will attend her at once,’ Khailin said, and the servant backed out, bowing again.

Khailin sighed. She suspected her father had stopped off in his wife’s quarters to suggest that she take Khailin in hand today, and she knew what that meant.

She wasn’t wrong.

Lady Yulinh was a great believer in the power of purification and meditation. She visited the ritual baths frequently, an activity that Khailin profoundly despised for the same reason that she found hacha-ashu more interesting than jin-ashu – she didn’t do well when cooped up in the presence of undiluted femininity for long. She found most of the women at the baths tedious, gossipy and unspeakably dull. They found her far too direct, almost abrasive, certainly bordering on rude although she was careful not to directly antagonize any of the matrons whom she might find as a mother-in-law one day. But being on her best behaviour and flawlessly and icily polite for three to four hours at a stretch, which was how long her mother’s purification bath rituals usually took, exhausted her and made her severely irritated. Even her mother had learned not to take her along to these occasions any more often than she could help, and to stay out of her way for a while on their return home until Khailin could work out her waspishness on some unsuspecting servant.

Visits to the Great Temple were another matter. Lady Yulinh was possessed of sufficient stature and financial backing to be regularly admitted into the Third and even the Fourth Circles of the Temple. She insisted that her daughters – for her younger daughter, Yan, had been required to attend these devotional trips since she was eight – perform the required rituals and protocols with her, but once the official part of the visit was over the girls were free to use their time at the Temple as they wished until Yulinh was ready to leave. For Yan, that meant a return to the more colourful and more interesting First and Second Circles; she had become an early addict to ganshu readings and to soothsayers of every stripe. Khailin chose to linger in the inner Circles of the Temple, the Third and Fourth Circles, the ones with fewer people and more power. She preferred her knowledge empirical and her data neatly proved and documented by experimental protocols – but knowledge was knowledge, and the more empirical chemical and alchemical branches of study all had roots in the Temple and the deities it housed. The rest would come.

At least it was the Temple that Yulinh proposed that day. She did not mention the baths, at least not directly. Khailin was grateful for that mercy, at least; she didn’t think she could have handled the baths with any degree of grace that day. The Temple was at least a potentially worthy substitute for the missed reading lesson.

Yulinh and her daughters were deposited at one of the Temple gates in their sedan chair, followed by a couple of quiet servants who had followed close behind in a second chair. Yulinh sent one of the servants to purchase a particular kind of incense, the other to obtain a bottle of rice wine and the proper amount of rice and beans for the supplication ritual she had in mind. Then she swept past the teeming corridors of the First Circle, heading into the inner sanctums. Her two daughters, eyes piously downcast, trailed at her heels.

They had gone straight through to a shrine to I’Chi-sei, one of the Three Pure Ones. Yulinh had been suffering from a lethargy and a lack of energy lately, what with the oppressive heat of the summer. Khailin was privately of the opinion that her mother might have done better to have stayed in the Second Circle and asked succour of the Spirit of Rain instead of beseeching a God of the Early Heavens for the energy which the hot dry weather sapped from her, but she held her tongue. When her mother was immersed deeply enough in her devotions not to notice that Khailin was absent, she slipped away unobtrusively and went seeking her own enlightenment.

In the gardens of the Third Circle Khailin found an acolyte drawing a finely detailed sand painting mandala in an oiled wooden frame. He was seated in front of her favourite shrine, that of Sin, Lord of the East, the deity who was ascendant in her own birth sign and to whom she had a special devotion. Khailin stood watching him for a while, her hands tucked decorously into the wide sleeves of her red silk tunic. She knew better than to interrupt, but when he took a break, sitting back and reaching for a flask of rice wine left at hand, she knelt down next to him.

‘What is it for?’ she asked.

‘It is for a lady wishing for a favour from the Lord Sin,’ the acolyte said courteously. ‘This will be placed in his alcove with a lamp filled with holy oil, until such time as the lady tells us that her wish has been granted, or that she has withdrawn the petition.’

‘Do they work?’ Khailin asked. She had seen them before, the sand paintings, placed in shrines beside more prosaic offerings, beautiful and cryptic and mysterious. She had never seen one being prepared at such close quarters before, and inspected it with some curiosity. ‘What do you use to dye the sand?’

‘Are you wishing to join the Temple some day, young sai’an?’ the acolyte asked, smiling. ‘These are Temple secrets. We do the Gods’ work. As for whether these are successful, that is not something we are in charge of. We facilitate the contact. The wish and the granting of it are between the one who prays and the God who listens to the prayer.’

‘I have heard the saying that the Gods help those who put themselves in their path,’ Khailin said. ‘But this sand painting …; this is so passive. It’s like there’s too much cha’ia energy here, and not nearly enough chao.’

The acolyte raised an eyebrow. ‘You are learned, young sai’an.’

‘Is it not better,’ Khailin said, ‘to know the prayer and to make something that answers it? If a sickness, then an elixir, or a medicine. If a child, then a way of conceiving, or a way of adopting. If a lover –’

‘That is too much for the Gods’ acolytes to aspire to,’ said the acolyte hastily, cutting her off. ‘And much of that, people do get. But not from here.’ He made his disapproval obvious, but did not explain it further.

Khailin, however, had already read enough to know of the dichotomy of alchemies in the Way of the Cha in which the Gods and spirits of the Great Temple were enshrined. That had been in one of the earliest scrolls she’d taken from her father’s library. She had practically learned the thing by heart:

Cha is the path of the spirit and energy and power. Cha is part of every thing and every creature in the world. Pure Cha is what the highest Heaven is made of, a perfect place where the male and the female, the chao and the cha’ia, meet and meld in flawless balance and equilibrium, where the Seeker loses the self but becomes the whole world …;

That was the ultimate goal of the internal alchemies of the Way of the Cha, anyway – seeking ways to meld the adept’s spirit with the Unknowable, become one with the Gods. The internal alchemy, the zhao-cha, was all about ethereal realms which could only be gained by the incorporeal, the spiritual.

The external alchemy, yang-cha, was more concerned with understanding the here and now. The empirical science. The part of the Way which drew Khailin’s deepest interest.

But the Great Temple denied the greatest achievements of those who chose the path of the external alchemy. Astronomers were misunderstood, their findings languishing in old scrolls for only other astronomers to read. As for the preparation of the elixirs, the powerful ones which brought strength, knowledge, even (if legend was to be believed) immortality – those were too secret for the scrolls in Khailin’s father’s collection, their existence only hinted at in darkly mysterious terms until Khailin was driven to distraction with all that was left unsaid.

‘If you will excuse me,’ the acolyte began, back to high courtesy, acolyte to supplicant. But he was interrupted by the sound of sandalled feet slapping against the stone flags of the Circle in some haste, and then the wearer of those sandals, another acolyte, came into view around the corner of the cloister. He was almost running, the expression on his face close to panic. At the same time two more acolytes came hurrying out of the Fourth Circle gate through which Khailin herself had emerged and, seeing the mandala-drawer seated before his unfinished masterpiece, made their way towards him. All three newcomers reached the seated acolyte at more or less the same time.

‘You’re wanted,’ began the one who had come running around the corner.

But one of the others, maybe senior in rank or just more prudent than the rest, raised a calming hand, cutting the more impulsive speaker off before he could blurt out things it was not appropriate for a non-initiate to hear.

‘Brother,’ he said, addressing the seated acolyte, ‘there has been a call from the Fourth Circle. I have been sent to gather the necessary assistance. If you will lay aside your task for a moment, please come with me.’ He turned to Khailin. ‘If you will excuse us, young sai’an, the Temple calls us to obey.’

Khailin, getting to her feet and keeping her face inscrutable enough to hide her curiosity, placed her hands palms together and bowed to them with the reverence due to their station. The one who had spoken bowed back. The mandala-maker had risen too, making obeisance to the Lord Sin in his alcove before stowing the half-finished mandala under the altar for further work when he returned. Then all four of them, with the one who had dismissed Khailin speaking to his companions in a low voice, departed for the gate to the Fourth Circle in some haste.

Left alone, Khailin considered hauling out the mandala for a closer inspection, but happened to glance up first and met the blind stone eyes of the scowling carved effigy of Lord Sin. A superstitious dread stirred in her, and she offered a hasty obeisance in appeasement, trying to scotch any such irreverent thoughts as she backed away. She might not believe in the power of the mandalas to do any practical good, but other people did, and that did invest them with some power. Khailin had already learned to respect power.

Respect it enough to crave it.

When she tried to return to the Fourth Circle to rejoin her mother and sister, Khailin was politely but very firmly refused admittance.

‘But my mother, the lady Yulinh, is in there,’ Khailin said. She was not above pulling rank if she could not get her way by any other means, and in this place it was Yulinh’s rank that mattered to those in power.

‘I think not, sai’an. The Fourth Circle has been cleared for a very special occasion. If your lady mother was indeed here with her devotions, she has no doubt already been escorted elsewhere to complete them.’

‘But …;’

‘I am very sorry, sai’an.’

‘Where would they have taken her?’

‘Perhaps the shrine of Ama-bai,’ suggested the guard.

Khailin turned away, frustrated. The Third Circle was a little more crowded than usual, with a low murmur of voices in the usually hushed garden, but her mother and sister were not at the shrine of Ama-bai. Khailin continued her circumnavigation of the Third Circle, hoping to run into them. She took her time. Something was going on here, she could smell it, and her curiosity was twitching at the undercurrents like a cat watching the mousehole for movement. Her first circumnavigation yielded no Yulinh and no Yan. Other people were standing around, their own devotions obviously interrupted, whispering softly to one another and looking faintly puzzled, and one serene-looking girl of about her own age sat on a bench in the gardens, contemplating the fish meditatively. But there were no answers.

Until, on her second circumnavigation, now prowling restlessly in search of clues rather than her family, Khailin happened to come in line with the girl on the bench again. The girl rose to her feet as Khailin watched, took a few awkward steps to reach a paved pathway of one of the corridors leading through the Circles, and then collapsed in an ungraceful heap as her leg appeared to give way beneath her – almost precisely as an honour guard of acolytes had passed by that particular spot in advance of a man clad in a rich robe and looking like he walked in power.

Every instinct in Khailin quivered at the sight of him. Here was the embodiment of the knowledge she was seeking. It clung to him like an invisible cloak.

How she knew this she did not know, but she watched hungrily as the man bent to raise the crippled girl – for her foot was crippled, Khailin was close enough to see this clearly – and then guide her gently to a seat in the garden, allowing her to subside onto it. They exchanged a few words, very low, too low for Khailin to make out – and then he bowed lightly to the girl and signalled to his escort of acolytes, who moved forward once again. Khailin manoeuvred herself closer, and was in earshot when a young acolyte came hurrying up to the girl in the garden.

That was Lihui, the Sage Lihui.

Khailin’s family was part of the inner Court. She knew of the death of one of the Nine Sages, and of his successor. Nobody had yet seen Lihui in the Palace; it was rumoured that he was waiting for the Autumn Court, at which he would be formally presented to the Emperor, to mark his official entry into society.

And he had spoken to this plainly dressed, crippled child.

What had he said to her? Who was she? How was it that she had caught the eye of one of the most learned and most powerful men in Syai – just by choosing the precisely correct moment to collapse on the path at his feet?

Khailin did not know who this girl was, the one on whom fortune had smiled here in the Great Temple under the eyes of the Gods.

But she would find out. She would make it her business to find out.

In the meantime, she turned and left the Third Circle, rejoining the buzzing throng in the Second where the passing of the Sage was still being loudly and gleefully discussed. Yan had a particular favourite among the lesser spirits of the Second Circle, an ugly little figure made of mud and rushes; it was at this shrine that Khailin hoped to find her missing family. The provenance of this deity, and thus his power and his ability to accede to prayer, appeared to be a mystery to everyone Khailin knew, including her own mother – but the hideous little effigy of the unknown spirit obviously had more worshippers than just Yan because his altar was always overflowing with offerings. Nobody ever saw anyone actually place anything on that altar, or admitted to it, which had made Khailin say to Yan once, baiting her little sister deliberately, that it was a distinct possibility that the little spirit simply worshipped himself. But Yulinh had thought the idea sacrilegious and had made her displeasure at such remarks plain.

Now Khailin wore a small smile as she went in search of the mystery spirit’s shrine. She thought she might have at last – finally – found a use for the ugly little thing. She’d light an incense stick in front of the mystery God, and ask him to help her solve a mystery.

Help her find the crippled girl.

Eight

Nhia mulled over her encounter at the Temple as she limped home. It was something she hugged close. She might have told little Tai, the daughter of the widow seamstress who lived a block up from Nhia’s compound, because Tai had a knack for listening and for both making something a big thing and for keeping it in its place at the same time. Tai was young enough to be impressed and old enough to know why she was impressed. But Tai and her mother were at the Summer Palace, helping primp the Imperial ladies for the coming Court, and Nhia was stuck in the sweltering city enduring the season as best she could. She found herself a little surprised to find what a dearth of choices she had for a confidante; with Tai absent, it had narrowed down to …; to herself. Herself and the things that people who gave her their instinctive trust gave her. But that was different – that was her being talked to, instead of doing the talking.

On the way home through the streets that shimmered with heat and swirled with dust-devils in the alleys, she allowed herself a brief bitter moment of self-pity. Would it have been different if she had been able-bodied? Would the miraculous cure of her gimpy foot also bring her a friend or two she could share her dreams with?

The day was far advanced; Nhia had spent too long at the Temple, even by her mother’s admittedly biased measure.

‘You’re late,’ Li said. ‘Did you find what you sought at the Temple?’

She always asked that. As though there could be a different answer than the one she always got. Her tone, however, was a little pointed this time, leaving unspoken the barbed implication that whatever Nhia had been looking for there could have taken considerably less time.

‘Yes, Mother,’ said Nhia, gritting her teeth, coming up with the customary reply to the usual question, choosing not to respond to the undercurrents. ‘The Temple was fulfilling.’

There could have been a different answer this time, but Nhia, for all that she ached to talk about what had happened, shied from discussing it with her mother. There would be too many questions, too many conclusions being jumped to, too much extrapolation and speculation, possibly far too much unwarranted excitement. That was not what she wanted, not right now.

Li, not knowing that there was anything beneath Nhia’s terse and colourless reply, appeared to be content with the response that she had expected, and delved no deeper. She handed Nhia a pile of mending to be done while she got on with folding the washed, starched and ironed linen ready to go back to clients before starting on ironing the next batch. There could have been nothing more calculated to dampen Nhia’s enthusiasm and initial euphoria. This was what she was. This was what she would always be. Daughter to the woman who did the laundry and the mending for the wealthy and the well-to-do. The crippled daughter of the woman who did the laundry. Someone who could help stir the sheets in the vats, her eyes smarting from the sharp bleach her mother used, or mend small tears in fine tablecloths or women’s underwear. It wasn’t even a craft or a thing of beauty, the sort of thing the much younger Tai could already accomplish with her own needle and the silk embroidery thread. Nhia was neat but her hands were not as skilled, nor her mind that way inclined. For her, the needle was neither more nor less than simple drudgery.

Her mother’s two heavy black irons were set to heat on the heating plate laid over raked embers, and Li had already started on the chore of fiercely flattening recalcitrant starched linen sheets which haughty servants would soon be tucking onto patrician beds draped with brocaded hangings. Li ironed with a fixed snarl on her face, as though punishing the sheets for the pleasure stains with which they had arrived in her establishment – for all the laughter, and the whispers, and the joy with which they mocked her own solitary existence. Li was not widowed – there would have been some sort of honour in that, at least, and she could have held her head high just as Tai’s mother, Rimshi, had done for years. It was worse, far worse. After Nhia’s arrival, Li’s husband had hung around only long enough to realize what his life would be like from then on – the desperate piety, the offerings, the talismans, the ganshu readers, the endless pilgrimages to the Temple, the souring, unrewarded faith – and then he had quietly left one day, simply melting away, taking a change of clothes and his yearwood and nothing else at all. The most bitter blow had been when the rumours had reached Li and her abandoned daughter that her errant husband had established residence on the outskirts of Linh-an, and was openly living with another woman with whom he had started another family. With whom he had a chubby, angelic son who was almost three before Li found out about his existence. A perfect child. Already able to toddle. Nearly ready to run.

A living reproach to the woman who had borne the crippled daughter.

For some reason it was the ironing that brought all this out in her. Most of the time Li was ready to blame the cruel Gods and deities for her lot in life – but when she ironed, through a queer chain of associations, it was all Nhia’s fault – Nhia’s fault that she had been born, that her mother had lived for nearly twelve years now without a man to warm her own bed, without the need to wash her own sheets clean of one night’s pleasures and starch them into crisp cleanliness breathlessly awaiting the next. Nhia knew the pattern, if not the actual details behind it; she knew the lines that crept onto her mother’s face, and knew very well just when it was prudent to make herself scarce.

Nhia found it hard to walk for very long or very far, but somehow there was enough strength in the twisted foot to operate her mother’s pedal-powered linen delivery cart, and so that had evolved into her particular chore. Rimshi, with her Court connections, had helped Li get a lot of commissions from households associated with the Court. There was no obligation there, no duty, no jin-shei tie even – but Rimshi had not needed the weight of a jin-shei pledge to offer what help she could. But while summer was Rimshi’s busiest time, preparing the Imperial women for the Autumn Court, summers were always a lean time for Li – simply because the actual Court removed to the Summer Palace and that meant no copious quantities of carelessly soiled laundry from the women’s quarters and no substantial commissions or generous gratuities from those rich enough to be able to afford them without qualms. But there were other households, on the fringes, and it was mostly those to which Nhia pedalled with her cartload on those summer days.

She preferred to do her rounds in the early mornings or in the late, late afternoons when the sun was not beating down with quite as much fury as during the molten, white-hot middle of the day – but the summer heat was infinitely preferable to Li’s icy and unspoken reproach which inevitably returned to roost in the rafters of their hot little room when Li laid the black irons in the fire. Seeing the instruments laid ready, Nhia deferred the mending, pausing only long enough to grab a broad peaked hat which hung over her face and shoulders and tie it securely under her chin with coarse ribbons before scuttling out of the house.

Her deliveries were marked on each individual bundle, on a piece of recycled paper with names and addresses in jin-ashu script. Li, despite being constantly torn between her devoted love of her daughter and constant dutiful prayers to unheeding Gods to heal the child and the bitterness which held that same child responsible for her lonely, abandoned existence, had held up her share of that particular bargain. Jin-ashu was her daughter’s heritage, it belonged to her as much as it belonged to every woman in Syai, and Li made sure that this, at least, Nhia was not cheated of.

The delivery cart was equipped with a small bell, and at its summons a household servant usually emerged from a side door at any given household to pick up the clean laundry, deliver the next batch of dirty laundry, and hand over Li’s fee, which Nhia slipped into a waist pouch which she wore underneath her tunic. There were only five deliveries to be made that afternoon but Nhia could feel the sun sucking the energy out of her as she pedalled through the dusty streets, could feel rivulets of sweat snaking down along her spine and beading her forehead. Her hair felt damp and plastered down; her straw hat’s snug presence on her head felt like a vice around her temples before she had gone halfway along her route. She passed a sherbet seller who had grabbed a shady spot underneath a courtyard archway and was loudly hawking his cool drinks, but she had spent all her spare coins at the Temple that morning and it was more than her life was worth to hazard any of Li’s hard-earned fee money on such indulgences. A sherbet paid for in the coin of Li’s acid accusations of profligacy on Nhia’s return home was entirely too expensive for Nhia to contemplate. So she just allowed her mind to cool itself on the thought of the sherbet and pedalled on, resigned, to fulfil her chores.

The household of Cheleh, the Court Chronicler, was the last stop on her list. The Chronicler lived in a brick pagoda house of two storeys with a bright red tile roof. It was surrounded by a low wall, with the hacha-ashu symbols for prosperity and happiness – common symbols even those unlearned in the script could recognize – painted on the pillars of the gateway which led through it into the Chronicler’s leafy yard, shaded by a number of magnolia trees. The temperature dropped perceptibly as Nhia drove her cart through this archway and around to the back of the house, riding in the shade of the trees. There even seemed to be a breath of wind here. She paused for a moment, breathing deeply, taking the time to remove her hat and mop her forehead and temples with her sleeve, feeling reprieved enough to look up at the leafy canopy curled protectively around her, between her and the implacable sun, and smile.

Impatient at the sedan chair bearer’s pace, hot and stifled in the curtained enclosure she shared with her mother and docile younger sister, Khailin’s mood was dangerously volatile as the chair approached home. The Temple trip had been augmented by a brief and unscheduled stopover at the hated ritual baths, which had done little to improve Khailin’s disposition, and the long, hot, stuffy trip home had only served to bring her temper from what had been a low simmer up to a definite readiness to boil explosively at the least provocation. Her skin felt greasy from the oils and balms from the bath, her pores clogged and unable to breathe, her clothes sliding unpleasantly on skin slick from sweat and ointment. Apparently unconcerned with such physical discomforts, Yulinh was dozing, reclined into the cushions in the back of the chair; Yan was sitting gracelessly with her legs crossed in an indecorous manner, playing with a couple of puppets in her lap. Yan was entirely too much like a puppet herself, Khailin thought with a savage little frown. She did what whoever was pulling her strings wanted done; she was the perfect child, obedient, respectful, and completely lacking in any initiative or curiosity.

Khailin had peered out of the sedan chair’s curtains just as the bearers had started to turn into the courtyard, and caught a glimpse of the painted symbol on the left-hand pillar of the gate. Happiness. Indeed. Her current rather sour mood saw that sign only as a vague mockery today.

She caught a glimpse of a figure on a pedal cart moving slowly away under the trees at the back of the courtyard, and her eyes narrowed a little at the sight of the cart’s occupant. For a moment it could have been anybody, any one of a thousand thin Linh-an waifs, clad in homespun, features shaded by a huge straw hat. But even as the sedan turned and started to bear Khailin out of sight of the cart and the figure on it, even as she clutched at the sedan chair’s curtains and peered intently at the disappearing cart, the girl on it fumbled under her chin and lifted off her hat, raising her face to the trees, giving Khailin one brief but adequate glimpse of the features she had committed to memory earlier that day at the Temple.

Could it really be this easy?

The little ugly God in the Second Circle was going to have a good fat offering the next time Khailin found herself at the Temple, if indeed this was the same child who had spoken with the Sage Lihui. Khailin scrabbled out of the chair almost before the bearers set it down, drawing a lazy reproof from her somnolent mother.

‘Khailin, when are you going to learn that a lady –’

‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ Khailin said in swift, automatic and thoroughly meaningless apology, and raced into the house.

The thick walls of the pagoda made the air inside soothingly cool after the hot streets, but Khailin didn’t stop to enjoy the change. She skidded around the entrance hall and past the curved staircase leading up to the second floor, and through the door under the stairs, carefully painted to make it practically invisible in the wall, into the back hallway and the servants’ quarters. A woman bearing a tray with delicate porcelain cups on it danced out of Khailin’s way, whisking the tray aside before Khailin smashed into it. A half-closed door further along the corridor stood ajar, giving Khailin a glimpse of a noisy, crowded kitchen. She nearly ran down another servant, this one bearing a neat bundle of laundry in a white linen bag. At the end of the corridor, a lacquered red door led outside – the back door for deliveries and for the servants’ quarters, the door which opened out into the back courtyard. Khailin flung it open, but emerged with a degree of calculated, stately slowness, not wanting to erupt outside looking like she was chasing demons. She was in time to see the back of the cart bouncing away around the corner of the house, with the girl, now wearing her hat again, bent over the steering bar. Seeing just the narrow childish back topped by that gigantic hat like some sort of exotic mushroom …; it was hard to be certain …; but a sure instinct of recognition made Khailin smile to herself.

It was a simple matter after that to find out who the girl was and what she was doing at Cheleh’s house. Less than four hours had passed since Khailin had first set eyes on her in the Temple.

She made a mental note to find out just who the little ugly deity was.

Nine

‘We are here because of jin-shei,’ Rimshi said to Tai as they sat up late, talking, on the night that Antian’s gift and invitation had arrived from the Little Empress.

‘I know,’ Tai said, reaching with delight for one of her favourite fairy tales, the one that had been lived, had been real. ‘You were jin-shei-bao to one of the concubines, and she made the rest of them come to you for their Court gowns …;’ Tai had heard the story many times before but never tired of hearing about it – the story of Xien, her mother’s friend and jin-shei sister, the only child of a poverty-stricken family from the warrens of Linh-an whose bewitching dark green eyes and lotus-blossom skin Rimshi had been instrumental in bringing to the notice of the Imperial agents, and who had been raised to the Imperial Court to be the Emperor’s own love. Xien had never borne the Emperor any children, but she had been a beloved companion for years before a wasting disease took her when she was far too young. The Emperor had mourned her, and the Court had missed her; but by the time she was gone Rimshi, the companion of Xien’s childhood and her jin-shei-bao, was an essential without whose lavish and meticulous adornments on their garb the ladies of the Court felt incomplete and underdressed.

Now Tai had followed in her mother’s footsteps and had gained a sister in the Imperial Court of Syai – but a sister of far higher lineage than Rimshi had ever aspired to.

Tai knew about jin-shei, the theory and the protocol of it, but now it had suddenly leaped off the pages written in neat rows of jin-ashu, had taken a real physical shape from the ethereal words of her mother’s early stories. It was real now, it was hers. She had asked, in feverish excitement, what she had to do in response to the note the Little Empress had sent with her gift of the red leather journal, and Rimshi had instructed her to send a return message bearing the same words. It was Rimshi herself who took this reply back to the Palace, that same evening, and Antian had received it from her hand with a smile.

‘Tell her that I will look for her in the gardens tomorrow,’ she had said.

‘I will, Little Empress,’ Rimshi said, bowing.

It was sealed, thus. Tai had been too keyed up to even think about going to bed, so Rimshi had made them both some green tea and they sat up well past Tai’s usual bedtime, talking about the magical day.

‘How do I talk to her? What do I call her?’ Tai had been in and out of this Court for years, tagging at Rimshi’s heels – but it had always been as someone who was there as an adjunct to somebody else. Someone whom the Court found necessary. A child, who ought to be invisible, addressing nobody and making sure that she was not observed by anyone long enough to be addressed. Now, it would be different …; or so Tai imagined. In all the tumult she had forgotten that she knew how to talk to this Princess, that she had done so already on the lost little balcony that morning.

‘She will not wish you to be too formal with her, now that you are her jin-shei,’ Rimshi said. ‘She wanted a sister and a companion, not a servant or a slave. She has enough attendants; she wants a friend.’

‘But I don’t know …;’

‘Hush, Tai-ban. You have to sleep this night. It will come right in the morning. This is the beginning, that is all – the liu-kala of your first jin-shei bond. It is barely born, in its first age, it cannot be expected to do all and know all.’

‘But it isn’t her first, is it?’ Tai asked.

‘I do not know; this is something that you will find out. This is how the circle grows – if she has other sisters in jin-shei she will tell you about them. They then may become your own, through her, if you choose to pledge with them – or they will remain your jin-shei-bao by proxy, a sister of a sister. But that is something that lies between you and your jin-shei-bao and concerns nobody else at all. I know of this one, now, because I am your mother, and it is still my task to know – but once you are of age, and that is not too many years in the future, this is something that is yours and yours alone. I probably will not know who your jin-shei sisters are when you are eighteen or twenty. I may not even know how many there are in your circle. And that is the right and proper way.’

‘Eighteen?’ Tai said, settling back into her pillow, suddenly sleepy. ‘That won’t be for a long time.’

Rimshi stood over her, smiling, for a long time after she had fallen asleep, her dark hair spilled over the pillow. But her eyes were too bright, and the smile was a little sad; a whole tangle of emotions were filling Rimshi’s mind and heart. She was proud that Tai had been chosen for a tie so deep while still so young – and by no less a personage than the Little Empress herself. But there was also a fear, the fear born of her own past. The story she had never told Tai, who had idolized her father and was still mourning his loss.

Rimshi had been sixteen when Tsexai had begun to court her; he had done it so subtly, so deftly, that she had not even realized that she was falling in love until it was done, and sealed, and irrevocable. And then Meilin had come to her, and Rimshi had known from the expression on her face that she had come with a hard thing to say. And it had been hard. It had almost been more than Rimshi could bear.

‘Tsexai …; his family owns a business like to our own,’ Meilin had said. ‘So do two other families, but none have heirs of marriageable age. Like me. Like him. My family is all set to approach his, to ask for his hand, for me. Rimshi, if this does not happen, my family is going to be ruined – we are the smallest of the silk mills, and we cannot survive – and it is up to me – and I have to do this, this marriage has to happen. I know he wants to wed you. Has he approached you yet?’

Rimshi had shaken her head mutely.

‘Then if he does …; when he does …; will you refuse him? I know what I ask, but I ask it for my family, for my ancestors. I’m sorry, Rimshi, I’m sorry, but I am asking you, in the name of jin-shei – I have no choice.’

And neither had Rimshi.

Tsexai had asked; Rimshi had refused the marriage token; Tsexai had married Meilin. They were, as far as Rimshi knew, happy together – they had a large family, and the combined business of both families was thriving.

For a long time Rimshi had mourned, and when Gan had come for her she had accepted him, although he was much older than her and she was not in love with him. But he had been a good man, a caring husband, and a doting father for Tai, their only daughter. When Gan had died, Rimshi had honestly mourned him – and it had taken Tai a year to smile again.

What will jin-shei give you, my daughter? What will it ask of you?

From Rimshi it had taken joy, but it had returned contentment, and a good life. And a daughter she loved fiercely. A daughter she would never have had with Tsexai. Oh, children, probably – but not Tai, not the Tai with whom the Gods in Cahan had graced Rimshi’s life.

She gazed on that daughter now with a strange premonitory dread, a heavy, sure knowledge that Tai’s fragile shoulders would have to bear the responsibilities of an Empire before this particular jin-shei binding was played out to its end. She had said to Tai that she was only just stepping out on this path, that the jin-shei was in its infancy, and this was true – she would only wake to its first morning on the next day. But where, oh where, was it taking her?

Tai woke early, fretful, on the next morning. Her mother was still asleep on her matting, mouth slightly open, revealing the gap in her teeth. It was far too early for breakfast, it was barely dawn outside, the sky still dark and glimmering with stars. But Tai knew that she would not sleep again – she was fully awake, and all that this day was still to bring was quivering in her already. She got dressed very quietly, trying not to disturb her mother, thrust her feet into her sandals and slipped out of the room. She had meant to go into the garden for a while, but found herself angling for the balcony instead, the one where she had met with Antian on another early morning. For the first time since she had started spending her summers here in the Summer Palace Tai saw the sun rise over the mountains, painting distant snowy peaks first pale pink and then gold as the orb of the sun rose higher and spilled down the steep mountainsides. She watched the stars going out over her head, one by one, smaller and more fragile spirits extinguished by the blaze of the royal sun in the heavens. It was a thing of beauty and sadness and immense expectation, like waiting for something to be born.

She had brought her journal along, the new red one that Antian had sent her, and sat down on the cold stone slabs of the terrace which the sun hadn’t warmed yet, with the journal in her lap, her little inkpot beside her, her jin-ashu letters as tiny and neat and meticulous as her embroidery.

Saw the sun rise. Mother talked about liu-kala last night, and she was right, I feel something new beginning all around me. But nothing begins except that something else has ended, and I wonder what has ended for me this day. Like one of the stars in the sky this morning, I am gone – gone, but there is something else now where that which I was used to be – something greater than I was. Just like the stars vanish into the morning, and the sun appears, and all is light.

‘I didn’t think I’d find you here so early,’ a soft voice interrupted her thoughts.

Tai’s head came up. It was Antian, her hair in two plain long plaits again, looking much younger than her fourteen years, smiling.

‘I came because you told me mornings were beautiful here too,’ Tai said. ‘And …; I could not sleep.’

‘I was eager for the day, too,’ said Antian. She inclined her head a fraction at the red book Tai held, her smile broadening. ‘I am glad to see it is useful.’

‘It is beautiful,’ Tai said, her fingers caressing the soft leather where they held the notebook. ‘I have never owned anything so precious.’

‘Then I will have to see that you get another just like it when you finish it,’ said Antian, sounding genuinely delighted. ‘And then another, every year, my gift. Perhaps you’ll share some of its contents with me some time.’

‘Thank you,’ whispered Tai. It was not a specific thanks she was expressing, not just for the notebook or the promise of its eternal replenishment; she was thanking Antian for opening the world to her a little, for sharing a wider sphere than Tai could ever have aspired to on her own.

Antian understood, and reached out a hand. ‘Walk with me,’ she said.

Tai closed the journal notebook, folded the lid down firmly onto her inkpot, tucked everything into a pocket of her tunic, and reached out her own trembling fingers. Antian took her hand, tucked it under her arm, and led the way. Side by side like that, with the same dark hair braided in the same long plaits with Tai’s only a little more untidy than Antian’s, they really did look like sisters. Real sisters, sharing the same blood and kin.

But this is better, thought Tai, her heart beating very fast. We are jin-shei. We are sisters of the heart.

They left the balcony arm in arm and crossed over into the garden where the butterflies were waking, the flowers were beginning to open and the air was heady with scent. For the time being they did not talk; they exchanged a word here and there, when one of them would point to a hummingbird or a bumble-bee as if neither had seen them before and whisper, ‘Look!’ For the time being, that was enough. They had to learn to share time, to meld two different lives which had been running in two different streams until last night and had now merged into something bigger, deeper, stronger.

‘Look,’ said Tai, yet again, pointing to something that had caught her eye in the garden. But she was also pointing at the pillars of the shaded cloister where the garden merged into the first open pavilions of the Summer Palace, and as she pointed a thin, fox-faced girl maybe a year or so younger than Antian peeled her back off a pillar on which she had been leaning, gave the two walking girls in the garden a smouldering look, and turned away sharply as though she had been stung by the sight of them.

Tai snatched her arm back, embarrassed. The girl had been wearing turquoise silk, and her hair was dressed formally, with silk flowers and pearls.

‘Who was that?’ she asked, cowed. The look that had whipped her had not been friendly.

‘That?’ Antian said, smiling sadly. ‘That was my sister. My angry sister. That is Liudan.’

But the look on Liudan’s face had not been anger. It had been a recoil born of fear. And pain. And loss.

Part 2

‘From mother’s arms to cradles

to cribs we grow, and rise

to our feet and walk; and when they lay the first milk tooth

of Lan into a silk cloth where a fond mother

keeps it always

we are no longer babes.’

Qiu-Lin, Year 5 of the Cloud Emperor

One

It is very quiet out there tonight.

Tai paused, lifting her brush from the page of her journal, listening to the silence.

This was the first year that she had been in the Summer Palace without her mother – Rimshi had developed a debilitating cough and chest infection over the previous winter, and her physician, the healer Szewan who attended the women of the Imperial Court and who had been sent to take care of Rimshi by the Empress Yehonaia herself, had counselled against travel. But this was the second year of jin-shei between Tai and Antian, the Little Empress, and Tai had been invited along in her own right as a guest of the Court. She had not been given the quarters she and her mother usually occupied, out on the fringes of the Palace, in the outer courts. She had a room to herself this summer, close to Antian’s own suite – a room with a window that looked out into the garden, a room full of billowing curtains and soft cushions. There was even a servant who left a beaker of iced tea in the room every morning, when the heat came, as she did in all the women’s chambers.

Tai felt awkward accepting all this. She also felt isolated. That she was jin-shei to Antian was an open secret in the Court – but there were times that the hallowed precepts of jin-shei did clash with the more traditional strictures of status and class, and many of the inhabitants of the plush women’s wing in the Palace did not much like it that a commoner was invited to live amongst them. Antian was of age now, however; Tai had been a guest at the Little Empress’s Xat-Wau ceremony only that spring, and was witness to Antian’s grandmother, the old and fragile Dowager Empress, placing the red lacquered hairpin through Antian’s lustrous piled-up black hair. Antian was an adult, according to Syai custom. She was also a senior member of the Imperial household, with her own personal court which was now her responsibility. She had asked Tai to the Summer Palace, and the other women had to at least be polite.

Or that was the theory of it. Tai had learned to tell the difference between three very specific kinds of women in the Court where she was concerned. There were those who were genuinely pleasant, and offered a smile or a kind word in passing even when Tai was not accompanied by Antian and they felt constrained to be polite in the presence of Tai’s powerful friend and protector.

There were the ones who would pass Tai in silence if they came upon her alone, but smiled and fawned upon her when she was in Antian’s company; Tai soon learned to recognize a smile that did not reach the eyes and the touch of cold, reluctant fingers.

And then there was Liudan.

In the two years of her jin-shei tie to Antian, Tai had completely failed to get anything but cold hostility from Antian’s sister Liudan. It had started on the very first day of the jin-shei, when she and Antian had been walking in the very gardens that her room now gazed out into, when she had pointed at a flower and seen Liudan’s recoil from her.

That was my sister. My angry sister.

Antian had explained about Liudan, later.

‘I was only two when she was born,’ Antian had said, ‘but my mother was the Empress and everyone spoiled me. Every concubine’s child is taken to belong to the Empress, of course, but when Liudan was born, Cai – that’s her mother – did not wish to give her up to be raised by a wet-nurse and then the Court.’

‘Which one is Cai? Have I met her?’ Tai had asked.

‘No,’ Antian had said, shaking her head. ‘Cai is dead. She was at the Court for only a few years, but she lived her life like a comet.’

‘Where did she come from?’

‘She was a daughter of a poor farmer, up in the miserable rocks and stones of the north country. He could not afford to keep her – she was the ninth child in the family, the sixth daughter – and so he took her and two more of his daughters and brought them to Linh-an, and sold them into concubinage. Cai was the only one who made the Imperial Court.’

‘What of her sisters?’ Tai had asked, her eyes wide.

‘Who knows? Cai never did, or at least never spoke of them after to anyone here in the Court.’

‘So what happened?’ Tai had asked, held rapt by the sorrow she could sense between the lines of this tale, by the tendrils with which this sorrow had snared Liudan herself.

‘She might have been happy,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t know, I was only a child. Cai caught the Emperor’s eye quickly enough, but rumour had it not for long. She did bear him a daughter, though. One of only three daughters, including me, that he sired on his women. And we were all more or less born at the same time, too – there is just over a year between me and the next daughter, and then another year between her and Liudan. She’s the youngest of the female line. The rest, well, his line runs to boys. His sons, now, range from their twenties to babes in arms.’

Tai was old enough to do the numbers on this. Inheritance went through the female line in Syai; the Emperor might rule the land, being male and having that power vested in him, but he came into his power through the woman he had married and who had been his path to the throne, and his legacy rested in the daughters he had sired. So the Emperor had secured his succession, and then provided a couple of spare heirs to the Empire, two other daughters, in case anything happened to the Little Empress. The boys would be married off well, and were of no further importance.

But Liudan was the Second Spare, born of a mother who, once her duty was done, became a shadow in the Court, no longer noticed, no longer needed, supplanted by other women in the Emperor’s retinue of concubines. The only thing of value Cai would have had would have been her child …; but Tai had extrapolated from Antian’s earlier words. Cai had not wished to let others raise her daughter – and perhaps, if she had borne a son, she would have been allowed to keep the child and rear him. But she had borne a potential heir – one twice removed from the throne, to be sure, but a potential heir nonetheless – and the child was taken away from her not long after it was born.

‘She must have been very lonely,’ Tai had said.

‘She had two of us she grew up with,’ Antian had said, misunderstanding and applying Tai’s words to Liudan, of whom she had just been speaking.

‘I meant Cai,’ Tai had said. ‘What happened to her after Liudan was born? When did she die?’

‘I don’t really know,’ Antian had said thoughtfully. ‘I do know they said that she was pregnant again less than a year after Liudan was born – but after that, I don’t know. It may be that it was thus she died – in childbirth – her and the babe both because when she disappeared from the Court there was no child left in her wake that I know of, male or female. But then there were the rumours.’

‘Of what?’

‘She was in some sort of disgrace,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t recall what, but she had done something that reflected badly on her. And that meant on Liudan, too, on her child.’

And Tai had suddenly understood Liudan’s recoil in the garden. ‘She was the one left behind, wasn’t she?’ Tai had whispered. ‘The child of the erring one. Without friends. Except you, Antian. Except you.’

Antian had looked at her with lustrous dark eyes. ‘You see? You always understand. Yes, she grew up as the Third Princess, the youngest in protocol, the last in line, the not-quite-needed. And her mother had fallen from grace, and nobody wanted any part of her other than her continued existence.’

‘And she was afraid, wasn’t she? That morning in the garden, she was afraid that she would be the price of my coming into your life. She’d be abandoned if you chose another companion.’

‘Oh, she was never a companion – not like that – she is my sister.’

‘Is she mine, now, too?’

‘No, the jin-shei bond doesn’t mean you have to take Liudan on,’ Antian had said with a smile. ‘Not like that. She is my blood-sister, and that makes it different from the jin-shei bond. And she is wrong, in that I am not going to abandon her just because I have found a jin-shei-bao to share my heart with. But she has always felt the edge of the Court turned at her, and she has always been angry at the world. And she has grown up alone, for all that these halls are teeming with brothers, sisters, and women who had been her mother’s companions.’

‘She is very pretty,’ Tai had said.

‘So was Cai,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t remember her, not really – but there is a portrait that the Emperor had done, on ivory – the miniature stands in the Palace back in Linh-an. I’ll show you some time. She was very beautiful.’

‘It was a pity she was not loved,’ Tai had said.

Antian had given her a strange look. ‘Yes,’ she had said slowly. ‘It was a pity.’

It was the custom of the Court that one of the heirs always had to stay behind in Linh-an when the rest of the Court came away to the Summer Palace – just in case of some calamity. In the year that Tai and Antian entered into jin-shei, the third sister, Second Princess Oylian, had been the one to have remained in the sweltering capital city over that long hot summer. The year after that it had been Antian herself. This third summer it was Liudan’s turn – and Tai, despite a guilty cast to her sense of relief, was not entirely unhappy that she did not have the angry Third Princess watching her and Antian together with smouldering, jealous eyes. Her feelings for Liudan ran the gamut from pity to deep resentment that she should be the focus of so much undeserved hatred for no better reason than that she was Antian’s chosen companion.

Second Princess Oylian was a gentle, pliant, pleasant girl who drifted through life – she was a stream of water which flowed around obstacles rather than try and shift them.

‘The worst thing that could ever happen to Oylian and to Syai,’ Antian had said to Tai once in a low whisper one early morning out on their balcony on the side of the mountain, ‘would be for her to ever become Empress. Whoever her Emperor proved to be, he could make her do whatever he said and she would do it to keep the peace. She was born to a family, not an Empire.’

But the Second Princess would smile at Tai, even if she didn’t have much to say to her. Liudan would simply sweep past and ignore her whenever she could. Tai was the danger – Tai was, like Liudan’s own mother had been, of common stock, only one step removed from Liudan’s own now-high station, a reminder of what she could easily have been if she had not been born royal. The Third Princess was a complex mixture of insecurities – left adrift because she was the second spare heiress and therefore less urgently needed than Oylian, left alone because of her mother’s fall from grace for reasons that even Liudan herself did not really understand, afraid of the thin veneer that separated her royalty from the land-grubbing poverty from which her mother’s family had come. Liudan wanted the royalty, needed it as a shield against all kinds of terrors – and it was a thin shield, barely there. She was only Third Princess, after all.

But this summer, the summer that Antian had invited Tai up to the Summer Palace as her guest, Liudan was mercifully absent, back in Linh-an, suffering the summer heat in the Imperial Palace – and probably doing it with better grace than the other two would ever have done because at least it was a signifier of her status, an indication that she was important enough in the hierarchy to be preserved and sheltered against the potential of disaster. And her absence meant that Antian and Tai could laugh more freely, more often, without waiting for Liudan’s brooding presence to cut the laughter short when they met her eyes.

In a way, though, Liudan’s hostility was what made Tai aware of her own status in this Court – although Liudan’s presence was uncomfortable, she and Tai were two points of the same star, both sisters to Antian after a fashion, balancing one another. Without the unconcealed hostility of that one amongst all the Imperial women, it was somehow harder for Tai to winnow the genuine from the sycophant in the rest of the Imperial royal women in the Summer Palace. It was as if, with Liudan there, Tai was on her guard against Liudan alone. With her gone, Tai was on her guard against everybody else.

But she was here, now, in the royal quarters, bent over her journal by candlelight even while the sky lightened in the east. She and Antian were to meet at their balcony that morning, later, but Tai had woken early, uncomfortable about something, not sure what had woken her – until she had picked up her inkwell and her brush and her journal and it had come into focus for her.

It is very quiet out there tonight.

She stared at the line she had written down, and became preternaturally aware of the stillness that had broken through the depths of sleep to wake her, the silence that surrounded her, the world holding its breath. She thought she heard, far away in a kennel somewhere, the despondent howl of a trapped dog, but even that was there and gone almost before she had had a chance to identify the sound. The silence was absolute.

And then the mountain shuddered, and crumbled.

Two

In less time than it took to blink, silence was a memory. Masonry groaned; things skittered across the surface of the lacquered table, or fell to the ground, leaving the floor strewn with debris. Above it all there was an indescribable sound that was half heard and half absorbed directly through bone and muscle – the roar of wounded stone.

Instinct had taken over in the first moment of terror, and Tai had streaked out of her room and into the garden, out under an open sky. She felt the ground shake under the soles of her bare feet, staggered to keep her balance, lost the battle, fell sideways into a bed of swaying flowers still closed in the pearly pre-dawn grey darkness. Before Tai’s horrified eyes the tiered Summer Palace folded into itself as though it had been made of sticks and leaves, walls falling inward, tiles falling in slow motion and tumbling end over end before shattering into dust, columns snapping in two or falling sideways and knocking out the next column in line, collapsing them in turn like dominoes. Graceful arched windows and doorways became piles of broken brick and crumbs of plaster; wooden window frames snapped like matchsticks. Glass was a precious thing and not often found outside the Imperial Palaces, and even there rare and used sparingly; now, with the wooden frames bending and breaking, the night was alive with the eerie sound of breaking glass, like fairy chimes.

A tree groaned and began to fall over, in slow motion, pulling its old roots out of the ground.

Lifting her eyes to the top of the mountain whose peak had always towered above the Summer Palace, Tai became aware with a shock that the peak had vanished. It was partly the huge rocks from the disintegrating mountainside that had helped wreak this havoc – smashing down on top of buildings, flattening structures in their path, rolling onward in destructive fury. One had levelled a fountain in the gardens, and the spilled water, still dark as the night it reflected, saturated the flowerbeds and flowed into the courtyards whose cobbles looked as though they had been ploughed.

Somewhere in the ruins of the Palace a spark started, then a fire. Then another. And another. Columns of smoke rose into the sky; the air tasted acrid with dust and ashes and fear.

When the noise of tumbling rocks and crashing buildings had subsided at last, leaving an echo ringing in Tai’s ears, she began hearing another sound – human voices, groaning, screaming, weeping. She became aware that she was herself uttering small whimpering sounds. Curled up in the middle of a once-graceful flowerbed, now sodden and blighted out in the shattered gardens, she was barefoot, an almost translucent nightrobe all that she wore – but she was whole, and unharmed, and still clutching the red leather-bound journal that had been Antian’s gift.

Those who had been deeper into the warren of the Palace and had no way to get out …; those who had not woken to the silence before the wrath of the Gods …; those who had tried to run but had not made it out fast enough …;

They were all still in there.

In the wreck of the Summer Palace.

In the piles of still settling dust and rubble, under the weight of a mountain.

Antian.

The sky was lightening in the east, and dawn crept over the ruined Palace, brighter, faster now that the mountainside which had reared up against the eastern sky was gone.

Dawn. Early morning.

The balcony on the mountain.

Her rigid fingers wrapped tightly around the red book that had been Antian’s gift, Tai scrambled to her feet and stood, indecisive, torn, in the shattered garden. Her nightrobe was streaked with mud, her feet and her face smeared with mud and with dust; she had an urgent need to go and do something – help those buried in the rubble, dig with bare hands until she found someone whom she could haul out of the wreckage – and knew that the only one she wanted to find was Antian, the Little Empress, lost somewhere in this chaos. And unable to move – because if she ran to the Palace Antian could be out on the balcony, and if she chose the balcony Antian might die buried under the weight of the broken Palace.

She saw someone running towards the buildings, a weeping servant, followed by another who clutched an awkwardly bent arm and had a face smeared with blood. It might have been this that decided Tai. There would be others coming to the Palace soon – not everything had collapsed, surely, and there had to be people who could move, who could help – but nobody else knew that Antian was going to the balcony that morning. If she was there, then nobody knew to go to her aid.

She turned, and ran.

Somehow the gate that led to the outer balcony was still intact – its capstone in place, the wall surrounding it deceptively innocent and peaceful in the early morning light. But taking a step through it, and looking up, Tai realized for the first time the extent of the catastrophe that had touched the Summer Palace that day.

The mountain above the Palace wore a different shape. Half of it was gone, vanished. The mountain peak had disintegrated, and a lot of it had fallen down into the buildings and the courtyards of the Palace. The rest of the mountainside had sheared off in a layer of stone and mud and simply slid down the slope, taking a large chunk of the Palace with it.

The lacy pattern of open balconies hanging over the river that flowed golden when the sun was setting was no more. The mountain’s face was a gaping wound of broken balustrades, platforms teetering over nothing, piles of shattered stone a long way below, all the way down to the river. Some balconies had been ripped off completely, and gaping holes in the walls opened from the Palace courts directly out into the abyss. Others were hanging on by a narrow ledge only a single flagstone wide, or by part of a balustrade. Yet others were crazy, broken, multi-levelled wrecks with holes where flagstones had smashed or been ripped in half, looking as though they were being observed with a mirror put together from glass shards, each reflecting a different angle, different aspect.

Tai stood at the edge of this devastation, eyes wide with shock. If Antian had been out here …;

She tried calling, but her voice seemed to have died in her throat, and all that came out was a soft wail. But the sound seemed to have triggered some response, for the broken stones sighed and whimpered and a familiar but very weak voice replied.

‘Who is there?’

Tai’s first reaction was a rush of relief, a fierce joy, the sheer euphoria of hearing that voice at all. And then that soft voice dropped, fading into almost a whisper. ‘Help me.’

No! screamed Tai’s mind. But she stifled it, tried to cling to the happiness she had felt a bare moment before, batted at the sudden rush of tears with the back of her hand. Almost unwillingly, not wanting to see what lay beyond the ruined balcony, not wanting to know the inevitable, Tai crept carefully forward towards the edge, peering over.

Just out of arm’s reach, on a ledge of broken flagstone caught on a rocky protrusion on the mountainside, lay Antian, the Little Empress. One of her long braids had curled on her breast in a long black rope, like a living thing that had come to comfort her; the other had slipped down her shoulder and now hung over the edge of her resting place, swinging out into the chasm below her. She held a hand – always graceful, still graceful! – to her side in a fragile kind of way, as though she was trying to staunch a wound with no strength left to do it with, and indeed there was a dark stain that was spreading into her robe underneath her fingers. Her hand was smeared with red; so was her face, with a gash on her forehead oozing a thin stream of blood into the corner of her eye and down her temple and another graze red and bleeding along the line of her jaw. One of her legs seemed bent at an unnatural angle.

But her eyes were lucid, and she tried to smile when Tai’s face appeared over the edge of the ruin above her.

‘Don’t move,’ Tai said, her voice catching a little. ‘I’ll go get help.’

‘Wait …;’

But Tai was already gone. There had been something about Antian that she could hardly bear to watch – a kind of brightness, an aura that was more than just the first fingers of the dawn’s golden glow, an otherworldly light that told her that Antian had already taken that first irrevocable step into the world beyond, the world of the Immortals.

Tai skidded into the courtyards, panting, her eyes wild, her feet bleeding from scratches and gashes delivered by the broken cobblestones she had stumbled over in her haste. There were people in the courtyards now, but only a few of them were actually moving about or doing something constructive. Bodies were laid out in the garden, and a handful of bloodied survivors had been taken to a sheltered area where one or two servants, themselves bandaged and bleeding from scratches or hobbling on makeshift crutches, tried to tend to them. Someone was crying weakly for water. Somebody else was weeping, a curiously steady sound, as though she did not know how to stop.

A young woman in a white robe streaked with dust and blood was leaning over a woman’s body, gently probing with long fingers, but even as Tai watched she straightened with a sigh, closing her eyes. Her expression told it all.

Her face was familiar, underneath its coating of grime, and Tai fought her own panic and fear to dredge the name from her memory – this was someone who could be useful – who was it – she knew her, it was precisely the person she had come looking for …;

Yuet. The name swam into her mind, followed by another – Szewan – the healer woman who had tended Tai’s mother that spring. Yuet had tagged at Szewan’s heels. Yuet was the healer’s apprentice.

Szewan was in Linh-an. Yuet was here. Yuet was the healer.

Tai ran to the older girl and snatched at the sleeve of her robe.

‘Come! Oh, you must come! It’s Antian – it’s the Little Empress – she needs your help.’

The young healer turned her head, blinked in Tai’s direction for a moment, the words not sinking in. Then, as she parsed the sentence, as she realized what had just been said, she sucked in her breath.

‘Is she alive?’

‘Yes. Yes! Hurry!’

Yuet drew a shaking hand across her forehead. ‘The Gods be thanked for that, at least!’ She showed no sign of having recognized Tai, although they had met several times during the spring, but right now Yuet would have been hard put to recognize her own mother. All she could see was the death all around her, the death written in the broken women they were scrambling to dig out of the ruins, the despair written in the faces of those who had come to the call for help, themselves bruised, cut, bleeding. The death written in the toppled mountain that had annihilated everything.

The Emperor and the Empress were both dead. The rescuers digging in the rubble of the Palace knew that much already. Oylian, the Second Princess, they had not found yet – and that could not be a good sign. And now, this …;

‘Take me to her,’ Yuet said, turning away from the body at her feet and starting out towards the ruined Palace.

‘This way!’ Tai, who had not let go of her sleeve, tugged her away and across the gardens.

Yuet stopped, confused. ‘Where is the Little Empress?’

‘She was on one of the balconies …; out on the mountain.’

What little colour was left in Yuet’s cheeks drained away. ‘What in the name of Cahan was she doing there? When this was all coming down?’

‘We were supposed to meet at the balcony this morning.’ Tai pulled at Yuet’s arm. ‘Hurry!’

Yuet followed, frowning, until her eyes suddenly lit briefly with recognition. ‘You’re from Linh-an, you’re her jin-shei-bao.’

‘Hurry.’ Tai seemed to have forgotten every other word she ever knew. All that was beating in her heart, in her blood, in her mind, was hurry. The broken doll on the ledge below the balcony, that was just the shell of Antian – but if they didn’t hurryhurryhurry the shell would melt and shred in the mountain winds like a cloud and disappear for ever …; and this was Antian, the Princess who laughed, who cared, who loved, who would be Empress one day …;

Yuet had the presence of mind to snag a relatively able-bodied male servant on their way to the balcony, surmising – rightly – that Antian would have to be extracted out of some unspeakable wreckage before she could be helped. But that hadn’t prepared her for the devastation of the mountainside when the three of them finally emerged onto what was left of the little balcony. Yuet gasped, her hand going to her throat.

‘She survived this?’ Yuet said breathlessly.

Tai had run to the edge of the chasm. ‘Antian? Antian, I’m here. I brought help.’

The manservant reached out and scooped the struggling Tai out of harm’s way, and peered carefully over the edge himself.

‘We would need rope, I think,’ he said.

‘There is no time for that now.’ Yuet had approached and was gauging the distance between herself and her patient. ‘I think there is space enough. Lower me down, and then go fetch a rope and another pair of hands to help you. This will need doing gently. Dear sweet Cahan, she is still alive. Princess? I am coming down to you.’

Antian whispered something, very softly, and Tai thought she heard, No, it is too dangerous. But Yuet had already grasped the manservant’s wrists with her hands, and he had wrapped his own fingers around her wrists and was trying to judge the most stable spot to lower her down on.

‘I don’t think there’s a good place,’ Yuet said at last. ‘There’s no time, there’s no time! Lower me down there and go get help!’

‘Yes, sai’an.’ He grasped her wrists firmly and the corded muscles in his arms knotted as he lowered her slowly, gently, down to where Antian lay. Yuet felt her feet touch something solid, then it lurched beneath her heel. She gasped.

‘Wait!’

‘I won’t let go, sai’an,’ the servant said, his voice tight with the effort of holding her suspended above the tumbled chaos at her feet. ‘Not until you tell me.’

Yuet felt with her foot, found a foothold that felt solid, tested it. It held. She brought the other foot closer, fitted her heel into the arch of the grounded foot like a ballerina, found her balance, stood. The manservant felt one of her long fingers tapping at his wrist.

‘You can let go now. Go, get a rope. Get help. For the love of Cahan, run!’

‘Yes, sai’an, I go!’ He released her arms, turned, and ran back the way they had come. Tai could hear him calling out urgently as he ran, but then he was dismissed from her mind and she knelt on the edge of the ruined balcony and craned her neck down to see what Yuet was doing.

The healer shifted her weight very gradually, very carefully, aware that a single false move she made could send both her and the Little Empress tumbling all the way down to the bottom of the chasm below.

‘I come, Princess. I am coming.’

‘It’s too late,’ Antian whispered, her voice a breath.

Yuet bit her lip, looking at the broken body at her feet. The fingers of Antian’s hand, lying over the spreading black stain on her robe, were slick with the blood that had seeped through. The cut on her forehead was starting to clot but was still seeping, and a thin stream of it had flowed past the corner of her eye and down her temple, soaking the glossy black hair. Yuet could read the signs, and the signs were all over the Little Empress – the pallor of her skin, the white shadow around her lips, the shallow breath that moved the thin ribcage beneath the blood-soaked robe. This was just one more face of the death that Yuet had found at every turn in the Palace that grim morning.

‘Oh, no,’ Yuet found herself whispering. ‘No, no, no, no.’

‘Do something,’ Tai said desperately from the edge of the balcony, just above them.

Yuet took another careful step, which brought her right up to Antian’s body, and went down gingerly on one knee. ‘Let me see, Your Highness.’

Antian allowed her hand to be removed from her bloodied side, her eyes closing. Her lips were parted, and she breathed so shallowly that Tai, staring at her from her perch on the edge, could not swear that she breathed at all. The breath came a little more sharply as Yuet’s gentle fingers probed the wound in Antian’s side and came away bloody. Yuet kept her eyes lowered, looked down the line of Antian’s hip and onto the unnaturally bent leg, allowed her fingers to linger there as well, drawing another sharp gasp of pain.

‘That’s just a broken leg, we can mend that,’ Yuet said soothingly. ‘I will make a splint, just as soon as we get you up.’

Antian’s eyes opened, cloudy but alert. ‘What …; happened to …;’

Yuet tried to look away but a sudden rush of tears she could not hold back betrayed everything, and Antian bit her lip.

‘They are dead, aren’t …; they? All of them?’

‘I …; I don’t know, Your Highness, but …; we have not found Second Princess Oylian yet.’

‘So she won’t …; be Empress,’ Antian said, and glanced up to catch Tai’s eye. It cost her something, because she could not help a soft moan as she tried to turn her head. ‘And neither …; will I.’

‘It’s just a broken leg,’ said Yuet stubbornly.

‘And this?’ Antian whispered, only her eyes flickering down to her side. It seemed that her eyes were all that she had the strength to move.

‘Where is that man with the rope?’ Yuet snapped, fretting.

‘I can help you,’ Tai said suddenly. ‘I can help you bring her up here.’

‘You can’t hold her weight,’ said Yuet sceptically, glancing up at the slightly built eleven-year-old on the ledge above her.

‘She is not heavy. And if you will hold her from below, I can catch her up here.’

‘We should not move her at all!’ Yuet said with an edge of despair in her voice. ‘Let alone a push-me-pull-you method like that! Her ribs …;’

Tai’s breath caught on a sob as she turned around and scanned the gardens behind her for any sign of the returning manservant with the rope and the reinforcements. ‘She’ll die.’

She is dying anyway. She will be dead by the time the man gets back here. The thought was as clear in Yuet’s mind as though Szewan, her mentor and the master-healer woman to whom she was apprenticed, had spoken them while standing right beside her.

She glanced up again, to where Tai had risen into a crouch, tense, weeping. Then down, at the fragile broken body at her feet. Then at the ledge where she stood, precarious, unstable. If she moved too fast, too carelessly, if she turned an ankle on a loose piece of rubble …;

‘All right,’ she said abruptly. ‘Wait there until I say.’

There was a long tear in Antian’s robe; she must have caught it on something as she was pitched over the edge and fell. Yuet took hold of the fabric and ripped it all the way, leaving herself with a ragged strip of silk in her hands. She folded this up into a thick wad, tucked it underneath the robe over the wound in Antian’s side, took off her own belt and tied the pad into place.

‘Can you hold on to that, Princess? Just so that it doesn’t move?’ She lifted Antian’s almost lifeless hand and placed it over the makeshift pressure pad. It was not going to help. Nothing was going to help, but she might as well try.

Antian’s hand landed with her usual grace. ‘I’ll try,’ she said weakly.

Yuet looked up.

Tai straightened. ‘I’m here. What do I have to do?’

‘I will try and lift her. Can you reach down for her shoulders? Oh, what are we doing?’ Yuet said, aghast. ‘We’ll all be down there in pieces in a minute!’

‘I can do it,’ Tai said. ‘I can do it!’

‘We’ll kill her,’ Yuet whispered despairingly, looking down at the girl at her feet.

Antian’s eyes opened again, and there was a shadow of a smile in them. ‘You cannot do that,’ she whispered. ‘It is out of your hands.’

Yuet was seventeen years old. She had had her Xat-Wau ceremony nearly three years before; she had been first apprentice and now assistant to Court Healer Szewan since she was seven years old. She was good. She saved lives. And right now all she wanted to do was bury her face in her hands and weep for the pity of it.

All her choices were doomed here. Antian was right. Yuet could not kill her – because, except for these last few breaths of pain, she was already dead.

‘Help me,’ Yuet said to Tai, waiting on the ledge. She checked the tie on the pad, made sure it was as secure as it could be, lifted Antian’s slender body as gently as she could. Antian let out a soft sob of pain and Yuet winced; she could feel the blood from Antian’s side seep warm and wet into her own robe as she held Antian against her body; she cradled the Princess for a moment, shifting her grip, and then slid an arm along her back, laying Antian’s spine against the long bones of her own forearm, straightening the Princess’s body as much as she was able. ‘Just keep your hand there, Princess,’ she said, anything, just to keep talking, for Antian to hear voices. ‘Stay with us. You …; what is your name?’

‘Tai. I’m Tai.’

‘Tai – catch her under the shoulders – gently, gently – slowly. Have you got her?’

Antian’s shoulders were on the edge of the broken balcony, her head lolling sideways. Tai had both hands under her shoulders, trying not to pull on the wounded side, using her arm and shoulder to keep Antian’s head from lolling down onto the stone. ‘I have her,’ she gasped, straining. Antian was a small-boned girl with a fragile build, but she was a dead weight in their arms right now, her eyes tightly squeezed, her face a mask of pain, her breath coming in short sharp gasps.

For a ghastly moment Tai thought her grip was slipping, that Antian’s silk-clad shoulders would slide from her fingers and that she’d have to watch her fall, all the way down, all the way into that river she had once watched flowing into the sunset and thought golden. But something gave her the strength and she managed to get Antian anchored on the edge of the solid remnant of the balcony. Then, miraculously, other hands arrived and somebody took up the slack, supported Antian’s body where Tai could not reach, helped lift the Princess up and lay her gently down against the wall of the balcony. Someone reached over and helped Yuet scramble back up; Tai, all of whose attention was on Antian now, heard something break and go tumbling down, crashing and crumbling against the mountainside, and a part of her shuddered at the sound, but that was all in the background.

Antian’s lips were white with pain; the pad against her side was soaked with her blood. Yuet herself looked like she had been stabbed in the heart, a dark red stain spreading across her robe, as she came to kneel on Antian’s other side.

‘They brought a stretcher, Highness, if we can just get you …;’

‘You have done,’ Antian whispered, ‘what can be …; done. Tai …;’

She tried to lift a hand, but it barely cleared her abdomen before falling back weakly. Tai reached for it, weeping openly.

‘What is it, Antian?’

‘Do …; something for me …; jin-shei-bao.’

‘Anything,’ Tai said. ‘You know it.’

Antian’s eyes closed. She squeezed Tai’s hand, once.

‘Take care of her,’ Antian said, almost too softly for Tai to hear. ‘Take care …; of my sister.’

Three

A rush of white noise roared in Tai’s ears as Antian’s lifeless head rested on the arm which she had slipped underneath the nape of Antian’s neck as support. For a moment she could not move at all. She felt like the entire Palace was coming down in ruins all over again, only this time she was inside it, deep inside it, and it was all falling on her and around her and burying her with the pain. It took Yuet several tries before she could get a reaction from her, but Tai eventually became aware that the older girl had her by the shoulder and was speaking to her in a gentle voice.

‘Tai. Tai. Listen to me. Look at me. Look at me. Good.’ Tai had raised her eyes, her pupils dilated with shock, her face stark. ‘I have to go back to …; they will take care …;’ Yuet’s voice faltered for a moment, and then she seemed to change her mind, come to a different decision. ‘No. You go with them. Take the Little Empress back to the summer house in the garden. Make sure she is tended with honour.’

Tai stared at her, swallowed what tasted like bitter aloes. ‘I will.’

‘I will look for you, after. I have to go and take care of …; of whoever is left up there. I will come for you. I am relying on you.’

‘I will do it,’ Tai said, getting to her feet.

Yuet could see that she was not entirely steady as she stood beside Antian’s body, and did not feel happy at leaving her alone – her healer’s instincts told her that what Tai needed right then was someone to cling to, a warm blanket, something hot to drink, all the things needed to stave off shock. But all this was the healing of the mind. She was not physically hurt, and there were others out there who would need Yuet, who might be pulled out of the rubble half-alive, whose lives Yuet could save.

Yuet looked up at the waiting servants. ‘Take the Little Empress to the summer house.’ She hesitated; all hands would be needed, but she could not just leave Tai alone. ‘One of you,’ she said, ‘stay with her and with Tai. And somebody find Tai an outer robe.’

‘Yes, sai’an.’ The man who had gone for help bent down and gathered Antian’s body into his arms, very gently, as though she was a precious porcelain doll, and waited for Tai to lead the way. Tai turned away from the edge of the ruined balcony without looking out to her river again. She walked past Yuet without a word, almost without any sign that she was aware that the healer stood there.

‘I shouldn’t leave her alone,’ Yuet murmured to herself as the servant bearing Antian followed the younger girl into the garden.

But already she could hear the screams and wails, the pain and the terror that was waiting for her in the rubble of the Summer Palace. The voices drew her; for a moment she forgot about Tai, she forgot about Antian whose life’s blood she wore on her own robe. There were other lives.

The morning had fled quickly. They put out two of the smaller fires but the biggest one, the one that had started deepest in the ruins, quickly spread out of control. Thick columns of black smoke rose into the innocent blue of a flawless summer sky, and orange tongues of flame added to the day’s gathering heat. There were survivors – but few, so few, and the lines of bodies covered with sackcloth grew.

Yuet was perched precariously on the edge of a hole she and a few other able-bodied survivors had been excavating into the rubble, chasing down an elusive sobbing cry they had thought might indicate someone alive down there, when the first aftershock hit the mountain. The pile of debris that Yuet had been standing on tilted, nearly throwing her into the hole, and then settled at a different angle, a different slope. When the panicked shouts had settled down, they could no longer hear the voice they had been following in their attempts at rescue, and Yuet had called her team of aides off.

‘It’s useless, look, it’s all fallen in down there.’ She looked up and out across the debris, wiping sweat and dust and drifting ashes out of her eyes, and straightened up as she met the eyes of Antian’s little jin-shei-bao. ‘You? What are you doing here? Are you all right?’

‘I want to help,’ Tai said, her voice trembling just a little. She wore a borrowed gown, at least two sizes too large for her, and looked pitifully small and young and fragile.

‘Wait there a moment.’ Yuet scrambled down from her pile of rubble and came to stand next to Tai, lifting her chin with one hand, peering into her eyes. ‘You should be lying down somewhere and …;’

‘Please,’ said Tai, ‘I cannot. Let me help.’

Yuet hesitated. ‘There is little that you can do.’

Someone shouted out, a shout that held gladness; Yuet looked up. A senior servant of the women’s quarters, his tunic torn and his face and arms scratched and sooty, came scrambling over at a trot, carrying something in his arms.

‘It’s a miracle, but he is still alive,’ the servant said, offering Yuet a bawling baby swaddled in a torn silk wrap. ‘I don’t think he is hurt, even; the crying is just fear and hunger.’

Tai intercepted the child, cradled him in her arms, and he stopped crying, blinking up at Tai’s face with a puzzled expression and teardrops caught on his long dark lashes. ‘Shhhh,’ Tai said, rocking him gently against her. ‘Shhh, it will be all right. It will be all right.’

The ground trembled again under their feet, and Tai could not suppress a cry, clutching at the child, who whimpered but did not resume his desperate wailing.

‘Where did you find him? Are there …; ?’

‘No,’ said the servant, dropping his eyes. ‘Only that one. His mother is dead.’

‘Are there other children?’ Tai asked.

Yuet nodded. ‘Maybe half a dozen or so. From swaddling babes like this one to six- or seven-year-olds. They’re in the outer wing.’

‘I know it,’ Tai said. It was the wing where she and Rimshi had always stayed when they were at the Summer Palace. ‘I will take care of the children.’

‘You need …;’ Yuet began, but Tai lifted glittering dark eyes and Yuet stopped, biting back what she had been about to say.

‘I need to do it,’ Tai said, very softly. ‘For her.’

‘Go,’ Yuet said, after a pause. ‘Go, take care of the children.’

‘You are still wearing …;’ Tai began, but then her eyes filled with unexpected tears again, and she turned away quickly, gathering the child to her, and was gone. Yuet glanced down at her robe, and smoothed down the part where Antian’s bright blood had now dried into a stiff brownish stain. Yes, she was still wearing …; she was still wearing Antian’s own blood.

She almost forgot about Tai and the children in the next few hours, taken up with trying to cope with the aftermath of the disaster. She set broken limbs, tended burns, cuts, grazes, gashes and bruises. She cleaned and bandaged and gave out some sedative herbs to the worst-off. She took control of the servants, sent a clutch of them to set up a makeshift kitchen, brew copious quantities of soothing green tea, prepare a meal for the shocked survivors. In the Imperial Palace, decimated of its royalty, Yuet, the healer, reigned as queen for the day, and none questioned her or disobeyed her.

When she finally circled back to the children, they were no longer in the place where she had told Tai they would be, and after some searching she finally found the whole small group in the stables. There were more there than she realized; the survivors from the villages close to the shattered mountain had crept to the Palace in pitiful groups of two or three at a time, seeking help, and Tai had shunted all the children into her group. There were now maybe two dozen youngsters there. Tai had herself commandeered a single servant, and between them they had cleaned out several mangers and made them into makeshift cribs for the youngest babies. Some of them were wailing from hunger, but they were all clean and freshly swaddled and many of them were blissfully asleep. Tai had discovered a litter of eight-week-old puppies in the kennels, and had brought them out to the stable yard where the older children played with them happily, squealing with delight at puppy antics.

Yuet stopped dead, watching the scene; it was the first sight she had had all day of innocence and contentment. She felt the weariness fall from her shoulders, a little, at the sound of children’s laughter.

She found Tai huddled inside the stables themselves, sitting on a bale of hay with her chin resting on the knees drawn up against her chest into the circle of her arms. White-faced, with dark circles under her eyes, she looked as though she had aged ten years in the space of the last few hours.

‘You have wrought miracles,’ Yuet said, coming up beside her.

Tai looked up, without releasing her legs from the circle of her arms. ‘You have had the harder task.’

‘May I?’ Yuet said, indicating the bale, and Tai shifted sideways, giving Yuet space to subside beside her with a sigh. The healer knuckled her eyes, kneaded her temples with weary fingertips. Her head ached abominably. Her heart ached worse.

‘I am glad you were here,’ Tai said suddenly.

Yuet looked up, startled. ‘What?’

‘You care,’ Tai said.

‘I care about life,’ Yuet said.

She could not remember a time that she hadn’t had a calling to heal. Her very earliest patients had been the handful of animals on the tiny homestead where she had been fostered when she had been orphaned at barely four years of age. And then, aged only six, Yuet had stood beside her foster mother as she spoke to a passing dignitary, no less than a healer to the Imperial Court of Syai. Yuet’s foster mother had made some respectful remark about the health of the royal women, and somehow it had come out that she herself was suffering from a blistering headache at the time.

‘Willow bark,’ the young Yuet had piped up before the royal healer had had a chance to respond. ‘You should boil up some willow bark.’

‘Hush, child!’ Yuet’s foster mother had said, embarrassed at the utter lack of decorum shown by the orphaned child whom she had charitably taken into her household less than two years before, mortified that her teachings had not instilled better manners in the girl.

But the healer had lifted her eyebrows and was gazing at Yuet with interest.

‘And what would you do for a stomach ache?’ she had asked, almost conversationally.

Yuet had told her. The information had been accurate, and delivered without an ounce of self-consciousness or shyness.

The healer had smiled, and it had gone no further at that time. But less than a year later the letter had come to the house, written in flowing jin-ashu script, asking if Yuet wished to be apprenticed to the Imperial healer in Linh-an.

Yuet had had a very clear sense of her future, and knew that she would probably have graduated quite naturally to becoming the healer and still-woman for her village’s wounds and sicknesses, both animal and human. But even as a very young child she had always possessed a profoundly practical and realistic streak, and she had realized that she’d just been offered an extraordinary chance to pursue her calling in the far more exalted sphere of the Imperial Court when she had apprenticed to old Szewan. She had gone to the city the morning after Szewan’s letter reached the homestead where she had spent her earliest childhood.

She could not have known then that this day would come, that disaster would be a price she would have to pay.

Before Tai had spoken, she had not even realized that she was afraid, but now she suddenly faced it – that small flicker of fear that had been part of what had driven her to the lengths to which she had gone. There was healing – and then there was the fact that this was the Imperial family, and that there might be questions raised about what she, Yuet, had done or had not done, whether any of the dead could have been saved with a more experienced healer at the helm, or someone who had simply made different decisions at critical moments. The numbers were already devastating – there had been fifty-eight people in the living quarters of the Summer Palace when the earthquake had struck; some were still unaccounted for, but the bodies of more than half of them were laid out in the gardens and four of those bodies had once belonged to the highest of the Imperial family of Syai.

Tai’s words were balm, unexpected, healing to the healer – here was someone who was there with her, who had seen what had happened, who could vouch for the decisions that she had made.

But Tai was far away again – or as near as the shattered gardens, the ruined balcony, the dying Princess in the first golden light of the dawn.

‘I wish …;’ she whispered, very softly, almost to herself.

‘What do you wish?’ Yuet asked after a beat.

‘I wish I knew how to keep my promises.’

If Tai was Yuet’s witness, Yuet was hers. She had been there when Antian had spoken her dying words. Take care of my sister.

‘She wanted you to be there for the Third Princess. I mean, for Empress-Heir Liudan,’ Yuet said slowly.

‘Liudan hates me,’ Tai said simply.

Yuet reached out a hand and laid it over Tai’s fingers where they interlaced around her knees. ‘She does not. She will not. She will need a friend.’ She paused, suddenly unsure of what she was about to do, but it felt true, it felt right. ‘And so will you. I know I am not the Little Empress, I know I cannot take her place, but if you wish it I will be jin-shei-bao to you, I will help you keep your promise.’

Tai had turned her head a little to look at her, a long, steady look, and then nodded imperceptibly. ‘You are still wearing her own heart’s blood,’ Tai whispered. ‘I think she would wish it. Jin-shei.’

They limped back to Linh-an, the survivors, with a slow, snaking line of horse carts bearing twenty-seven bodies in caskets draped in the white of mourning. The walls of the city – massive constructions of dressed stone, nearly sixty feet thick at the bottom and almost forty feet high – were almost hidden, from the north approach, by the white ribbon banners that had been hung from the top battlements. The broad ribbons shifted and eddied in the breeze, and from a distance it looked like the walls themselves had come alive and were trembling with sorrow.

The people of Linh-an met the procession in the streets, standing silently as it wound its way through the north gate and into the heart of the city, almost eight miles of twisting roads to the Great Temple which waited to receive the four most important bodies – the Ivory Emperor, his Empress, the Little Empress Antian his heir, and Second Princess Oylian. The houses the procession passed were hung with white ribbons, like the outer walls, or banners with inscriptions of blessing or farewell. The city was stunned. The country reeled.

The survivors grieved.

Tai had returned with the Court, back to Rimshi, her still ailing mother, and had clung to her for a long time in silence after the cortège left its dead in the Temple and those who returned from the Summer Palace had gone their separate ways. Tai would not speak of it at all for days, just sat white-faced and silent in a corner of the room or spent long hours at the Temple. There was little spare money to make all the offerings such a death demanded, but Rimshi set aside every copper that she could; Tai burned incense sticks, and offered up rice and saffron for the safe passage of Antian’s soul into the Immortal Lands.

The Ivory Emperor, Antian’s father, was given his traditional niche in the Hall of the Immortal Emperors, in the Second Circle of the Temple. The new shrine overflowed with the offerings of the people who came filing past to pay their respects or offer up their grief.

But Antian was not the Emperor, would never have a niche for herself where people would come and pray to her bright spirit. Tai would think of this, her eyes bright with tears she could not seem to shed, as she sat beside the Ivory Emperor’s shrine and watched the cascades of white mourning candles fighting for space with incense holders for sticks saturated with frankincense or lilac essence, with piles of peaches symbolizing immortality, with mounds of rice and of tamarind seeds. The Ivory Emperor would become a lesser God. Antian would remain a fading memory.

But Tai could not cry. The loss was lodged too deep, like a dagger in her heart, and she nursed the pain fiercely – it was as though she believed that this alone would keep Antian alive for her. The funeral would not be for another twenty days, so that the Emperor’s body and those of his family could lie in state for the proper period. The period of mourning for a dead Emperor was fixed at nine months for the nation, three years for his surviving family. For three years Liudan, now the Empress-Heir, would be allowed to wear only pale colours and no silk garments, in mourning for her family. But because of the way that the Emperor and his family had died, the unnatural and violent way in which they had been taken, it had been decreed that there would be a full year of mourning for the city, during which time all would wear white ribbons and pieces of sackcloth on their garments. But for Tai this marking of time was meaningless. She had seen too much on that morning in the mountains, she had lost something that had barely begun to bloom into a rich and treasured thing in her life, and her mourning was deep, and absolute, and she felt as though it would never end.

When the tears did come, it was not at the Ivory Emperor’s shrine, or at the sight of his mourners there, or even as she lit her own candles on Third and Fourth Circle altars for Antian. It was an ordinary thing that set her off, not the memory of loss, but a reminder that life went on without pausing to grieve for what was lost, that each sunset was followed by a new dawn …; that a new Emperor would follow this one.

She had been on her way to the gate, stepping out of the Second Circle into the chaos of the First, and had happened to pass close enough to the stall of So-Xan the yearwood bead-carver to notice the bin of carved bone beads out by the side of the trestle table, and Kito, So-Xan’s son, patiently rasping at the carvings, smoothing the round beads into even, featureless globes which would be dipped into white lead paint and sold for the duration of the mourning year to be strung onto the yearwood sticks to mark the passage of the time.

It was this, finally, that reached out and drew the dagger from Tai’s heart. She did not expect the pain, the rush of heart’s blood that followed the simple realization that something was over, irrevocably over, that the reign of the Ivory Emperor was done …; and that Antian would never choose the Emperor who would take his place. Tai’s breath caught; she staggered, catching herself on a nearby booth for support.

Kito happened to look up, took in the white face, the wide eyes dilated with shock, and dropped the bead he had been working on back into the bin he’d taken it from, leaping to his feet.

‘Are you all right? You look ill.’ He closed the distance between them in two long strides, cupping Tai’s elbow, bending over her solicitously. ‘Xao-jin!’ he called, summoning the proprietor of a booth four or five trestles down. A round, moon-shaped face popped around a partition in response. ‘Bring me a cup of green tea! Hurry!’

Something had snapped, and Tai suddenly found herself racked by great heaving sobs, shuddering convulsively as the tears came. Kito steered her into the inner recesses of the bead-carver’s booth, installing her on a bench, leaving her side only long enough to step out and grab the bowl of steaming tea brought by the man he had summoned and murmur a brief word of thanks. Then he was back, dropping to one knee beside the bench on which Tai sat and wept as though her heart would break.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘drink this. It will make you feel better.’

The very absurdity of this comment made Tai hiccough and gulp down some of the brew. Kito’s concerned eyes never left her face, at least not until he was satisfied that some colour had returned to her cheeks and that, although she was still weeping soundlessly with an inconsolable grief, she was in no imminent danger of doing herself damage from it.

There was an awkward moment of silence in which Tai would not raise her swimming eyes to look at him and he sat back helplessly, at a loss as to what to do next.

‘Are you all right now?’ Kito inquired at last, as she cradled the nearly drained tea bowl between her hands. It would have been impolite to ask, they did not even know each other’s names, but Kito had always had a high degree of empathy for people and some part of Tai’s pain had reached out and touched his own spirit. He found himself wanting to do something to help, anything, but not knowing the cause of it could not do anything to alleviate it.

Tai understood his reluctance to ask, but felt that she owed him an explanation for bursting into tears upon catching sight of him at his work.

‘It’s …;’ she began, but her voice was still thick with the tears. She swallowed, hard, fighting back a new wave of weeping. ‘The Ivory Emperor’s beads. You were …;’

Kito glanced back at his abandoned task. ‘Yes,’ he said, and his voice was oddly gentle. ‘I am making the mourning beads. And after that I will have to make the regency beads. For the Empress-Heir is still too young to be raised to the throne, and we do not know yet what the next reign’s bead is going to be.’

Liudan. In all the time since she had nursed her grief for her lost jin-shei sister, Tai had given little thought to the promise she had given as Antian lay dying. Take care of my sister, she had said. Liudan. The angry one.

The Empress-Heir. The Empress to be.

‘But how can I do that?’ she gasped, out loud, answering her own thoughts. How was she to fulfil her last vow to Antian? Liudan had never given Tai the time of day. She was three years older, proud, wounded by too many things Tai could not heal – and yet Tai had promised to take care of her.

‘Pardon?’ Kito said, startled.

Tai finally raised her eyes, and there was gratitude in them, and a warmth of what was almost affection. She got to her feet; Kito unfolded his long adolescent frame and rose also, accepting the tea bowl she handed back to him.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and even managed the shadow of a smile. ‘You have helped.’

She is beautiful, Kito thought, irrationally, the thought having just swum into his mind from the Gods alone knew where. A part of him scoffed at it, because there was nothing of beauty in Tai’s flushed cheeks and eyes that were red and swollen from first the unshed tears and then the ones that had come out in a torrent of released grief. But there was something in that half-smile that was luminous.

She bowed to him, formally, her palms together and her fingers laced, and stepped away, about to leave the booth.

‘Wait,’ Kito said suddenly, instinctively.

He reached into the bin of the carved beads he had been working on, took out a whole one as yet unmarred by his ministrations, and folded Tai’s hand around it.

‘They will not,’ he said quietly, ‘all be destroyed.’

The smile on her face lit up her eyes, just for a moment; her fingers closed tightly around the bead. Tai nodded her thanks, backed away, escaped through the outer gate into the streets of Linh-an, leaving Kito staring after her with an expression of astonishment.

Four

Tai was not part of the funeral procession which wound its way through Linh-an’s streets when the Emperor and his family were taken to their resting place. She could have been, if she had asked – for a jin-shei-bao had every right to follow a sister to her funeral. But this was too raw still, much too private and too deep a grief to expose it to the crowds in the streets. Tai had thought she could pay her respects her own way, just by being in the throngs on the pavements when the procession passed, but she had been resigned to being unable to see much of Antian’s last journey from within the crowd which would gather in the streets. All of Linh-an would be there, the throng would undoubtedly be five or six deep on the pavements – she would have to bid farewell to the sister of her heart from behind a wall of humanity. But the Gods, who had given her so much and then capriciously took it all away again, seemed to have repented of their whim and now showered Tai with many small gifts as if to make amends.

One was an unexpected friendship begun in the bead-carver’s booth. It had been Nhia, Tai’s neighbour and friend, who had finally formally introduced the two – she had been acquainted with Kito and his father, amongst the many craftsmen and merchants in the Temple’s First Circle, for most of her young life. Nhia had accompanied Tai on one of her Temple visits during the weeks prior to the Emperor’s funeral, and Kito had chanced to notice them, and called out a greeting.

‘We are kept busy,’ he had said, in response to Nhia’s polite inquiry as to his well-being. But his eyes had been smiling at Tai, and hers were downcast, although her mouth curved upwards a little at its corners. Nhia’s eyebrow rose a fraction, and she said smoothly, as though she had noticed nothing at all, ‘I do not know if you have met my friend. Tai, this is Kito, son of So-Xan, the bead-carver. Kito, this is Tai, daughter of Rimshi, the seamstress.’

They bowed to each other.

‘Perhaps you will share another bowl of green tea with me some time,’ Kito said. He had been addressing, in theory, both girls – but since Nhia, for all the length of her acquaintance with him, had never partaken of green tea in the bead-carver’s booth she assumed there was a story behind this tea party which excluded her.

Tai had blushed. ‘I would enjoy that,’ she said, and once more Nhia was excluded.

Nhia passed over the mystery with studied innocent ignorance. ‘Perhaps later,’ she murmured, and was rewarded by both her companions throwing startled glances first at her and then, very briefly, at each other. They had made their farewells, and the girls had passed on into the Temple while Kito pretended to turn back to his work – although both Nhia and Tai were sharply aware of the weight of his eyes on their backs.

‘He gave me the last Ivory Emperor bead,’ Tai had said to Nhia by way of an explanation as they walked away. ‘I saw him polishing the carvings smooth, making the mourning beads, and he gave me a whole one, one he had not yet marred. He gave me my memory back.’

‘And a bowl of green tea,’ Nhia murmured.

Tai blushed again, uncharacteristically. ‘I was crying,’ she said softly. ‘That was …; the first time I cried for her.’

Nhia knew that there had been some connection to the Court, over and above Rimshi’s usual Summer Court duties, but she had not known what – and this sentence was cryptic, to say the least. But she was Nhia, and people trusted her – and Tai, after all, was her friend, perhaps her only friend. And now that Antian was gone, there was no secret any more. Tai raised her head and met Nhia’s eyes.

‘She and I were jin-shei,’ Tai said. ‘This was the third summer that I shared with my heart-sister. And there was so much in those three years, Nhia, so much! I have already lived a lifetime with her. And now she is gone.’

She had still not named a name, but since this was connected to the Imperial Family it had to be one of the two girls lying dead in the Temple at this very moment.

‘Jin-shei?’ Nhia echoed. ‘With Second Princess Oylian?’

‘With Antian,’ Tai said. ‘With the Little Empress.’

Nhia’s step faltered a little. ‘You were jin-shei-bao – to the Little Empress? How in Cahan did that happen?’

So Tai told the tale again, as they sat side by side on one of the benches by the pools of the Third Circle gardens. The tears ran free now, leaving trails on her cheeks as she spoke, and Nhia’s eyes filled in sympathy. She hugged Tai at the end, unsure of what to say to lay balm on the hurt – but she was Nhia, and she was overflowing with the stories and the parables and the wisdom that she had picked up during her years within the Temple’s walls, and now she pulled one from her memory.

‘When Han-fei crossed the Great River and entered the realm of the Gods,’ she began, smoothing away Tai’s hair from her eyes with a motion as tender as a mother’s, ‘he walked far without meeting anyone, and keeping his eyes on the ground, so that he would not offend any being he met by looking at them without their permission. By and by he came upon a beach, and the beach opened onto a great lake, and the lake was dark and still, like a mirror, and beautiful. More beautiful still was the thing which he saw in the lake – glorious mountain peaks, rank upon rank of them, rising majestic and capped with snow, so high that the sky above them was eternally sprinkled with stars. “O, beautiful!” he said, and fell to his knees in worship of it. And a voice said to him, “This is the image, Han-fei, now look up and behold the truth.” And Han-fei looked up, and the mountains were real and stood around the lake in all their majesty and were not offended that he looked upon them, and knew them, and loved them.’ She paused. ‘It may be,’ she said gently, ‘that the thing which you shared with the Little Empress is just a reflection of something greater and truer that will come to you, that she came to you to show you the way. That she was the image on which you must now build your truth.’

Tai suddenly turned and gave Nhia a fierce hug. ‘You’ve always been my friend,’ she said.

‘Sometimes I think you’ve been my only friend,’ Nhia said with a trace of bitterness.

Tai sat back and gave Nhia a long look. ‘That’s not true,’ she said. ‘Everybody likes you. People are always asking you what you think. People trust you.’

‘People have never liked me, Tai,’ Nhia said.

‘But you’ve solved all sorts of problems back in SoChi Street.’

Nhia dismissed that accomplishment with a wave of her arm. ‘That’s not the same. People trust me, yes. Sometimes I think people tell me more than they think I ought to know. But that leads away from affection, not towards it! If they know I know all those things about them, yes, they trust me – but they will never like me. Folks never like those who know too much about them.’

‘You’re one of the wisest people I know,’ Tai said sturdily, loyally.

Nhia smiled. ‘That’s because you haven’t met many people yet.’

‘I have,’ Tai said rebelliously. ‘In the Summer Palace …;’

The words sank into a pool of silence that was sorrow. Nhia reached over and squeezed Tai’s cold fingers.

‘I know you have lost something wonderful,’ she said. ‘But you’ve always been a little sister to me, Tai. Sometimes you really were the only person I could talk to. Whatever else happens in either of our lives, I wanted you to know that. It doesn’t make up for the Little Empress, but …;’

‘But I’ve had a real, live jin-shei-bao living next door to me all my life and I never knew it,’ Tai said.

Nhia gave her a startled look. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she began, but Tai turned her hand and laced her fingers through the older girl’s.

‘But I mean it,’ she said, ‘if you wish it.’

For a moment, Nhia could not find the voice to speak at all, and then, when the words did come, they were raw with emotion.

‘I can hardly take the place of the first heart’s sister, of the one who would have been Empress,’ she said, ‘but I’ll be your sister if you want me to be. I would be proud to have you call me that.’

That had been the second gift, another jin-shei, another place for the love that had been Antian’s legacy to be bestowed.

The third gift of the Gods had been even more unexpected.

Five

Although she’d been coming to the Temple since she was a babe in arms, it had been only in the last year or so that Nhia’s presence had begun making a real impact there. She had barely turned fourteen when she and a young acolyte she had been in conversation with had been approached by a politely deferential older woman who posed the question – to the acolyte – as to which deity she should approach with her problem. ‘Help me, blessed one, for I am not certain which of the Gods would be best to approach – I am not worthy of what is being asked of me, I need to know …;’

It had been Nhia, aged only fourteen and not bound to the Temple hierarchy at all, who had responded to this plea, with a story of Han-fei, the hapless adventurer whose encounters with Gods and Immortals were such a fertile ground to harvest good advice from.

‘When Han-fei met with an Immortal beyond the river Inderyn where the Heavens are,’ Nhia had spoken into the expectant silence, while the Temple acolyte was still pondering the question, ‘he threw himself at the feet of the Blessed Sage and would not raise his eyes from the hem of the robe that the Immortal Sage wore. “I am not worthy, O Blessed One, I am not worthy!” The Sage said, “What do you see when you look into the mirror, Han-fei?” And Han-fei said, “I see a man with no beauty in his face and no wisdom in his mind and no humility in his spirit.” And the Sage bade Han-fei take a mirror from his hand and said, “Then look again, for what I see is a man with the beauty of face which is a reflection of the modesty of his soul, with the wisdom of mind to know what he does not know, and with the humility of spirit to spend his life in trying to learn and understand the things he is ignorant of. Rise, Han-fei, for you are worthy.”’

The woman had taken Nhia’s hand and kissed it, in silence, and backed away, bowing. The acolyte had stood and stared at Nhia for a long moment.

‘Where did you learn that tale?’ he had asked.

‘I hear many of them, in these halls,’ Nhia had said. ‘I see the teaching monks with the children in the courtyards sometimes. I listen, and I remember them.’

‘That is good,’ the acolyte had said carefully, ‘except that the one you just told has never been one of the teaching tales. For all I know, it has never been recorded as having happened to Han-fei.’

‘I didn’t just make it up!’ Nhia had protested, her heart lurching into her heels. ‘I must have heard it.’

‘You invented it, Nhia, and it was perfect,’ the acolyte had said.

Nhia’s first reaction was a rising panic. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ she pleaded. ‘I won’t do it again. I just meant to …;’

‘But why ever not?’ the acolyte had asked. ‘You’re a natural teacher. Perhaps one day you will even be a real part of this Temple; you already know more than some who have been pledged to it for years.’

Whether or not the acolyte told anyone about the incident, Nhia never found out – but only because events overtook her. Even if the acolyte had held his tongue, the woman to whom Nhia had told her Han-fei tale obviously had not.

Haggling over a fish at the marketplace, perhaps a week or so after the encounter at the Temple, Nhia turned to a gentle tugging on her sleeve and was surprised to recognize the seeker from the Temple. The woman was accompanied by a brace of small children, one of them only a few years younger than Nhia herself, all of whom stared at Nhia inscrutably. Nhia stared back, nonplussed.

‘I wished to thank you, young sai’an,’ the woman said in a low, deferential voice. ‘You have helped me understand. My husband’s mother is in need of your wise words, also, but she is bedridden and cannot go to Temple often. Perhaps if you would come?’

‘But I am not one of the blessed ones of the Temple,’ Nhia had said helplessly.

Just for a moment, the woman looked surprised, and then her expression settled into certainty again. ‘Maybe you are not one of the ones wearing the robes, sai’an, but you have the wisdom of the Immortals in you. My mother-in-law would be grateful if you would come. If only for a few moments. We live in ZhuChao Street, in the yellow house on the corner. If you please, sai’an.’

Nhia had wanted nothing more than to bolt into the midst of the marketplace and to lose herself in the crowds – but she could not run. She could not ever run. Not from this; not from anything. The irony of this made a wry grin touch her lips. The woman interpreted this as acceptance, or dismissal – in any event she had backed away, bowing, accompanied by her brood.

Several other customers at the fishmonger’s stall had been witness to this exchange, and the fishmonger himself, who had known Nhia from babyhood, stood with her intended purchase still in his hand.

‘So you are a Sage, now, young NhiNhi,’ the fishmonger had said. There was an attempt at levity there, but there was something else also – a curiosity, a careful interest. The marketplace lived by gossip and rumour, this was how the news was spread from one corner of the sprawling city that was Linh-an to the next. There was, maybe, a story here.

‘I am no such thing,’ Nhia had said, very firmly, and had brought the subject of the conversation back to the fish.

But another woman had stopped her in the street two days later, asking a very specific question. The question concerned the child whom she held by the hand and who stood staring at Nhia with the blank obsidian gaze which was very familiar to her. She had worn that mask herself. The child’s other arm and hand, not the one held by her mother, were thin and withered, her fingers bent into a pitiful claw which she held folded into her belly. This was another Nhia, a cripple whose mother was driven to ask for help where she thought she could find it.

Perhaps it was this that made Nhia speak to her. There had been a parable to fit. Then she had told another tale, directly to the child, another Han-fei story but one aimed at the old pain so familiar to herself, trying to ease the little one’s burden. She had been rewarded with a softening of the eyes, a shy smile. The mother noticed, and her own eyes lit up. She took the incident away with her, cherished it, spoke of it.

After that, more came.

Somehow, before she reached her fifteenth birthday, Nhia had found herself sitting in an unoccupied booth in the First Circle one morning, telling teaching tales to a gaggle of children at her feet. At first it was an irregular thing, just every so often – when sufficient numbers of young disciples accumulated around her, Nhia would sit down somewhere, they would all subside on the ground around her, and the cry ‘A story! A story!’ would be raised. But it quickly grew into something more. Something that became striking enough to warrant the attention of the Temple priestly caste. Several times, in the middle of one of her tales, Nhia would look up and catch the glimpse of a discreet observer, an acolyte draped in Temple robes, who would stand with eyes downcast and hands folded into his sleeves and listen intently to what she was saying. When she caught their presence, Nhia tried to be careful and tell only the tales she knew she had heard before here in the Temple, told by the Temple Sages and teachers. But it was sometimes hard to remember which ones she was sure about. All of the stories she told sounded so old and familiar to her. Which ones were old and venerable teaching parables, and which ones had she just invented?

Li, Nhia’s mother, had been wary of the whole thing, and afraid that the Temple would take exception to Nhia’s activities – especially since she often told her stories in the Temple’s own precincts.

‘These are games,’ Li had said, ‘and they can be dangerous. You are setting yourself up above the people. You have had your Xat-Wau, and you are no longer a child, Nhia – think about what it is that you want to do with the rest of your life.’

‘But perhaps I am already doing that,’ Nhia had said slowly.

No marriage; no children; she had come to terms with that. But perhaps these could be her children, the ones who came to her and whose lives she knew she could touch, could sometimes heal. She had much to learn – but already, it seemed, she had much to teach, also. A part of her gloried in it. Her body could not run – but her spirit could fly.

But Li had not been entirely convinced of her daughter’s calling. She had even gone so far as to approach one of the higher-ranked Temple priests, and ask for absolution if Nhia presumed.

‘We considered chastisement,’ the priest had told Li, ‘but first we listened to what she had to say. She makes the children hear her. She has said nothing to which we have taken exception. We think that it has gone far enough that, if she did not do it here, she would do it elsewhere – out in the marketplace, or in the streets.’

‘Not if you forbade it, sei.’

‘But why would we forbid it? Those she touches come straight home to us. She does the Temple’s work,’ the priest had said. There had been something complacent in his smile, but the priests of the Temple had always been pragmatic about their religion. A Temple which had an entire thriving outer Circle devoted to the commerce of faith could not be other. ‘But I understand your concern – we will make sure she is taught.’

So Nhia’s life had started to turn around the Temple, more and more. She taught the young, and in her turn she learned the meditations and the mental purifications of the zhao-cha, reaching out to touch the edges of the luminous, following Han-fei into the gardens of the Gods in search of the Fruit of Wisdom.

Khailin, daughter of Cheleh the Chronicler, had made it her business to keep the crippled girl who had attracted the attention of Sage Lihui under observation. In the months following that encounter in the Temple, Khailin had found out that Nhia frequented the Temple Circles, and had many friends there. She also found out that she and Nhia had more in common than she had thought. Although their focus and their ultimate desires were different, coloured in part by their differing stations in life and their place in Linh-an society, they shared an interest in the Way and in the manner in which it functioned. Nhia’s interest was more in the wisdom and the purity of the path – the zhao-cha, the internal alchemy of the mind and spirit, the calling of the sage, the seer, the wise-woman. Khailin was more attracted to the yang-cha – its rituals, its mathematical magic, its chemistry, its eminently practical nature. They had both been driven to learn, to understand. This was something which Khailin could build on. This could even be part of the reason the Sage Lihui had been interested in Nhia; perhaps he had been drawn to the fierce flame of curiosity, intelligence, yearning to learn. Perhaps, Khailin thought, she and Nhia could be useful to one another.

So she had started keeping an eye out for Nhia at the Temple. A part of Khailin marvelled at how Nhia had found a way of gaining access to all the disciplines of the Way. And she had done it all without reading a single hacha-ashu manuscript about forbidden things. Khailin was uncomfortably aware that her own time was running out.

She had already rejected several suitors whose representatives had come bearing the so ji, the carved jade marriage proposal token. All it had taken, as tradition had it, was her refusal to accept the small sculpture into her own hands from the formally attired elderly aunts and cousins who had been entrusted with its delivery. As my beloved wishes, the words had originally meant. If the bride or groom being courted accepted the token, the marriage proposal was deemed to have been accepted, and the betrothal was official from that moment. Khailin’s suitors had not been to her liking – one had come from a large and tradition-hidebound family, which would have trammelled her like a wild bird in a cage; another had been a man quite a few years her senior, with whom she already had a passing acquaintance at Court and whom she could have accepted except for her utter inability to get past his constantly sweaty palms which, upon reflection, she decided she could not bear near her on a regular basis.

When two emissaries of a prince of Syai came calling just before her Xat-Wau ceremony was due to take place, Cheleh had made it clear to his wayward older daughter that another refusal would have been severely frowned upon. The Prince was young, positively callow, precisely the kind of vacuous young man Khailin had no wish to marry. She could see herself delivered into the soft life of the noble houses, being an obedient young wife, having to obey endless rules of protocol and decorum, having to endure the hated ritual baths with the rest of the pampered ladies – perhaps never again to have access to the kind of arcane information she craved or the opportunity to test her knowledge …; but, on the other hand, she would be a princess, which was a kind of power in its own right. And the young husband-to-be might be sufficiently mouldable into the kind of husband Khailin could live with. The kind of husband who could, if necessary, be hoodwinked into closing his eyes to her study of the yang-cha.

Khailin had accepted the Prince’s token, gritting her teeth. The wedding would take place the following summer, but in the meantime Khailin had done her best to make sure that her betrothal did not interfere unduly with the last year or so of freedom. It could turn out well – it might have been for the best – but sometimes she wished savagely that her body was crippled like Nhia’s was – that a good marriage had been harder to arrange. That she had been given more time.

But perhaps Nhia herself would open a few doors.

So Khailin made sure that their paths crossed in the Temple, that Nhia learned to recognize her face, that they started nodding at one another in passing, that they finally exchanged a word of greeting, and then of conversation. Khailin the courtier had cultivated Nhia with all the precision and cunning of any seeker in quest of favours from a higher-ranked aristocrat or sage.

For once, the things that Nhia was being told were not because someone instinctively trusted her with the information, but rather because this was the information that somebody else wished her to know. Since she had never had to field such an approach before, she had not recognized it as artificial; she had accepted Khailin’s overtures, after a startled wariness that such a one would seek her company, with pleasure. She had found a companion of her own age with whom she could discuss the things that interested her.

They spoke of many things, and Khailin, despite the initial venal motives with which she had approached this relationship, found herself growing to like Nhia. She was surprised by a stab of jealousy when Nhia inevitably spoke of Tai, her only close companion before Khailin herself had appeared on the scene.

‘She is so small and delicate,’ Nhia had said to Khailin as they walked in the Temple, less than a week before the Emperor’s funeral procession was due to take to Linh-an’s streets. ‘She wanted so much to say goodbye, but she won’t even see it, not if she is out in the street, behind the crowds.’

Nhia had not mentioned the exact nature of Tai’s connection with the Imperial family, but Khailin’s curiosity was aroused, and she was nothing if not practised at extracting the information she required.

‘We will all mourn,’ Khailin said. ‘This summer has brought great loss to Syai.’

‘No,’ Nhia said, shaking her head, ‘for Tai it is more.’

‘She spent summers at the Palace?’ Khailin asked. ‘With her mother? You said her mother was the Court dressmaker?’

‘Rimshi is the seamstress, yes – and she has taught Tai well, too.’

This was straying too far into minutiae. Khailin brought it back to the Palace. ‘How old is she now – she is a few years younger than you?’

‘Eleven,’ Nhia said.

‘A few summers at the Palace, and she is but a child. It’s been a tapestry to her, a living dream. I can see why it would be hard to let go.’ But then Khailin had suddenly trailed off, her eyes becoming thoughtful. Her family was part of the Court, and she and her sister, although they did not attend the social occasions at the Imperial Palace frequently, attended often enough for someone like Khailin to pick up on Court undercurrents. And one of those undercurrents, in the past year or so, had been a connection forged by Antian, the Little Empress. The Princess who had been killed in the summer’s earthquake.

Tai had wanted to say goodbye.

For Tai, the mourning was more than that of the land for its anointed.

‘But I can understand,’ Khailin said, taking a chance. Putting two and two together and coming up with a conclusion that was tenuous but of which she was suddenly very certain, she made her voice sound compassionate and deceptively assured. ‘It would be hard to come to terms with such a loss. Losing even just a friend to a calamity like this would be difficult. A sister …;’

Nhia’s head had come up sharply, but she said nothing for a moment, watching Khailin’s face. Khailin allowed her features to soften into a small sad smile. ‘There was talk in the Court. The Little Empress and a companion she had taken to spending time with. That was your Tai, was it not? I thought I heard mention of jin-shei.’

‘Yes,’ said Nhia after a pause, ‘they were jin-shei.’

‘But that should be enough to ensure that Tai is given a place of honour, if only she spoke up that she wished to be there.’

‘You don’t know her,’ Nhia murmured. ‘She was First Princess Antian’s jin-shei-bao, but she would never take advantage of …;’

She might have manipulated Nhia into offering up the confidences, but the sudden brightness that crept into Khailin’s eyes was genuine. ‘I have never had one,’ she said. ‘I have never had a sister who understood me, who knew me. Yan does what our lady mother tells her to do, without looking right or left – if she were told to walk off the edge of a cliff she would do it and never question why. She would go into the marriage they have planned for me, and be utterly content with it, as she would be content with everything.’ She glanced at Nhia, and veiled her eyes, suddenly afraid of showing too much of her emotion. ‘If I were to die,’ she blurted, unable to keep the words under control as firmly as her features, ‘there would be nobody to mourn me.’

‘Your parents …;’ Nhia began, but Khailin cut her off with a sharp motion of her hand.

‘Nobody,’ she said with conviction.

‘I would be sorry,’ Nhia said after a pause.

‘As you are my friend?’

‘Yes, as I am that.’

‘Would you be my sister if I asked you?’

‘Are you asking for jin-shei?’ Nhia said, suddenly sitting very still.

It had not been quite what Khailin had intended. Her emotions were still high, though, and even as they washed over her and made the blood rush into her cheeks she was also thinking, with a rational part of her mind, that this was what she had wanted, exactly what she had wanted, when she had set out to draw Nhia into her circle. For jin-shei sisters, it would be easy to twine lives and fortunes together – and Nhia could be the only thing left to Khailin, the only source of knowledge, of that power that she needed to keep within reach if she were to remain herself and whole. It would not be the first jin-shei bond which had been born out of a more prosaic need rather than of a purity of heart – but even those, according to Khailin’s mother’s stash of jin-ashu literature, were overcome by the power of the vow. However it began, it always ended as a powerful binding. Someone would care. Someone would be required to care.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

Nhia reached out hesitantly and took her hand. ‘If you wish it.’

Khailin felt a weight she had not known she was carrying slip off her heart, and she sat up a little straighter, leaving her hand in Nhia’s for a moment.

‘Tell Tai,’ she said abruptly, ‘that she is welcome to watch the procession from the balcony in my family’s house. They will pass along our street.’

That had been the third gift.

Instead of trying to find a way to see past the shoulders and the elbows of the crowds in the street, Tai and Nhia had ascended the spiral staircase in Khailin’s home and had stood on high, Linh-an’s crowded, mourning streets below them, and the three of them had watched the Imperial funeral procession from Khailin’s balcony.

First came the drummers, their instruments fluttering with white ribbons, beating a slow marching pace. They were followed by the carts piled high with the offerings for the dead. The first few carts carried the intricate copies manufactured in paper and papier-mâché of the items the dead would require in the afterlife – there were three life-size sedan chairs, draped in cloth-of-gold; an intricately painted and folded miniature paper carriage complete with figures of horses, intended to transport the spirits to Cahan; a number of full-sized human figures with folded hands and painted faces, servants to take care of their needs; cups, fans, musical instruments, writing tablets, a paper replica of the Imperial Diadem, all meticulously crafted, created, painted, ready to be set to the flame as the bodies of the dead were given to the fire, the ashes of all these necessities mixing with the ashes of the dead, taking form in Cahan where they would have need of them. These carts – and there were a number of them, each carefully compiled for each one of the four dead – were followed by others, bearing ingots of gold and silver, draped with white banners inscribed with prayers and blessings and others extolling the virtues of the departed, and then still more, glowing with shimmering white candles, bearing plates and bowls laden with stacks of ceremonial honey cakes, pomegranates and peaches, and flasks of rice wine.

It took a long time for this all to pass by, but finally a long sigh out in the crowded street heralded the arrival of the first of the four bodies in the procession.

Grief had set Tai’s shoulders as she watched the four caskets pass by, each placed on a cart drawn by a single white horse and piled high with white flowers – some real, some artificial silken creations. The horses paced slowly, each led on a rein by an Imperial Guardsman cloaked in white, each cart surrounded by an honour guard – twelve Guardsmen for the Emperor and for the Empress, six for the Little Empress Antian, four for Second Princess Oylian. Behind the last cart, Oylian’s, walked the remnants of the Imperial Court.

They were led by Empress-Heir Liudan, walking alone, her feet in simple rope-soled sandals, robed in a plain white cotton gown. Her hair was dressed in two long looped braids, and banded with white ribbons; she wore no make-up, her eyes untouched by kohl, staring fiercely in front of her as she paced behind her sister’s cart. She looked neither right nor left, seeming to concentrate on just putting one foot in front of another, her head held high. She had never looked more regal.

‘She always wore formal dress, even in the Summer Palace,’ Tai murmured. ‘She was always so – so royal. Now she looks …;’

All three girls looked closely at Liudan as she walked in Linh-an’s streets to lay her family to rest, and each of them saw a different thing.

Khailin saw the future Empress, the high royal pride of the small tilted chin, the nobility of carriage and posture. Nhia saw past all that, looking deeper, and saw flickers of fear beneath the haughtiness. Tai saw her through a beloved ghost, and saw the loneliness, and the pain, and that same sense of loss with which she had once looked at Tai herself when she had first believed that Antian was turning away from her.

And Liudan saw nothing, heard nothing, walked in white silence behind her dead, her spirit a fierce emptiness, an empty vessel waiting to be filled with her life’s destiny.

Six

Yuet, the healer’s apprentice, had watched the procession of the dead from the window of her room, on the top floor of the home she shared with her mistress, the healer Szewan. Her view was not quite as good as Tai’s but she too had been watching Liudan walk behind the biers, and she was remembering the conversation she had had with Tai in the stables of the shattered Summer Palace. I will help you keep your promise.

Liudan walked alone, isolated even in this tragic procession, her eyes bright and burning in her pale face. Watching the girl, Yuet was painfully aware how prescient Antian, the dead Little Empress, had been. Yuet’s path had crossed with Liudan’s several times in the halls of the women’s quarters, on the occasions that Szewan the healer had had to visit the Third Princess or her sisters during some childhood complaint. Yuet and Liudan had never spoken directly; Yuet had always been in Liudan’s presence as Szewan’s assistant and helpmeet and had been expected to be at hand to help Szewan with whatever she required, with her head bowed and her eyes downcast. But even under those circumstances Yuet had formed a clear impression of the girl. Liudan had always had the knack of appearing to be proud and strong and self-sufficient, but she was still vulnerable and dependent on others, more so now, in fact, than she had ever been before. She was an Empress in waiting, but she was still a child.

Officially so, in fact. Many of Liudan’s contemporaries had already had their Xat-Wau rites by the time they reached her age, but Yuet knew that Liudan herself had still not started her monthly cycles, and had therefore still not reached an age at which girls were ceremonially taken across the threshold from childhood to womanhood. Yuet herself had been fourteen years old when her own Xat-Wau ceremony had taken place, so it wasn’t unheard of – but Yuet was unimportant, a healer’s apprentice, and her passage into adulthood had not been something upon which the world had turned. In Liudan’s case, her status as a minor child meant a formal regency until such time as the Empress-Heir could be properly taken through her Xat-Wau rites.

Yuet had not had time to watch Liudan in the procession for long before someone came knocking on the door of the healer’s house with a screaming child who had fallen and fractured her wrist while perched on a high windowsill trying to see the carts and the mourners. It had been Yuet who had had to deal with the patient. Szewan was getting old, arthritic and half-blind. These days she preferred to act in an advisory capacity, and leave the actual work of administering treatment and medicines to her young apprentice. Many patients had stopped asking for Szewan altogether, and simply called for Yuet’s services. Szewan had been talking for some time about officially retiring and passing her practice over to Yuet completely, but there were still some clients – the older people, who had spent their entire lives under Szewan’s ministrations, and a large portion of the clannish Imperial Court families – who still insisted on at least having her present while Yuet swabbed, bandaged, and concocted poultices and draughts. By the time Yuet had set the child’s broken wrist, immobilized it with a splint and sent the patient and her mother on their way, the procession was past and all that was there to be seen was over.

The crowds were thinning, some streaming to the place of the burning where all the paper offerings would be displayed on and around the four pyres before the whole thing was set alight; that spectacle would draw many witnesses. But for the city the show was over, and the mourning was about to begin.

Liudan and the rest of the Imperial Court would return to the Linh-an Palace in sedan chairs, via a less circuitous route, out of the crowd’s eye, once the immolation ceremonies were over; and once they did so the business of governing Syai would become an issue that would occupy the high-ranking ones in the Palace for some time to come.

I will help you keep your promise, Yuet had told Tai. But, as she cleaned up after her patient, Yuet found herself wondering how she could have possibly made such a rash statement. Tai had been jin-shei-bao to the Little Empress – but that was where the connection to the Court began and ended, and Yuet was certainly in no position to further that connection. She herself was still officially a healer’s apprentice – a journeyman, to be sure, and more and more independent, but nonetheless still coasting on Szewan’s own reputation where the Court was concerned. She certainly had, and would have in the future unless things changed rather quickly, no intimate access to Liudan herself except in Szewan’s presence, and certainly no means to procure such access to someone like Tai. Perhaps Tai could have used the jin-shei connection to gain entry into the Court itself, but Liudan would be very careful with her favours and allegiances right now, especially during the regency period, and the fulfilment of Tai’s promise, a promise doubly binding because it had been asked by a dying woman and in the name of jin-shei, seemed bleakly improbable.

Szewan had come to the window briefly to peer at the procession but had not stayed long.

‘My hands are hurting me terribly,’ she said, rubbing her swollen, arthritic knuckles. ‘I’ll take a poppy draught and retire to bed for a few hours. You can handle anything that comes up.’

‘I’ll make the draught,’ Yuet said.

Szewan grunted in assent, reaching out to draw the shutters closed, trying to keep the worst of the heat out of the room.

She had already divested herself of her outer robe and had slipped in under the thin sheets in her shift when Yuet came up with the cup of poppy. Her nose twitched at the draught as Yuet proffered the cup.

‘It smells strong,’ Szewan said.

‘I made it strong,’ Yuet said. ‘If you are in enough pain to retire to bed in the middle of the day, you may as well try and sleep through the worst of it. As you say – I will handle anything that comes up.’

‘One of these days,’ Szewan said, taking a delicate sip of the sleeping draught, ‘I will have to draw up the papers properly, and make you a partner. You are no longer an apprentice, Yuet-mai.’

Yuet blushed. ‘I’ll never know all you know,’ she said.

‘You already know more than you think you know,’ said Szewan shrewdly, ‘and, I think, more than I think you know. Sometimes I believe you keep secret notes on everything I say and don’t say. When I am gone and you go through my papers, there is little that you will learn that you have not already found out.’

‘I listen, Szewan-lama.’

‘I know,’ said Szewan. ‘Sometimes you hear far too much.’ She yawned, showing a mouth with many teeth either missing or yellow with age and decay, and handed the cup back to Yuet. ‘I will sleep now. Leave me.’

Yuet bowed her head in acknowledgement and withdrew as Szewan closed her eyes and pillowed her withered cheek on her arm.

‘I will sleep now,’ she murmured again, as Yuet closed the door gently behind her.

There were no further emergencies that morning, and only one house-call she had to make on an ailing patient too ill to come to her, so Yuet spent the morning in her stillroom, making up the supplies of the herbal remedies she used to ease the more common aches and pains of Linh-an and checking up on the stocks of the more rare medicines whose existence was written down in secret books and only in jin-ashu script where a woman might read of them. She looked in on Szewan just before she left to see her patient, but the old healer still slept peacefully, snoring gently through her parted lips. Yuet’s patient appeared to be on the mend – still weak but definitely improving, sitting up and taking solid food for the first time in many days – and Yuet returned home feeling pleased with herself.

She was met by first disaster, and then potentially deepening catastrophe.

The first person she saw as she stepped into the entrance hallway of the chambers she shared with Szewan was the woman who served the healer’s household as cook and maid-of-all-work. She stood in the hall, wringing her hands, her expression equal parts panic, fear and grief. Yuet’s heart stopped for a moment. She instinctively knew what must have happened – but stood frozen, her hand still on the door handle, staring at the servant in silence.

There was a dose of guilt in the servant’s demeanour, too.

‘I heard her breathing funny, mistress – I swear I didn’t know what to do, and you weren’t here, and I went in and I saw – she was breathing funny, mistress, and she was lying on her side with her face into the pillow so I came in to look and I just tried to turn her head, just a little, so that she could get air, and she just …; she just …;’

‘Oh, dear Gods,’ Yuet whispered.

‘I’m sorry, mistress, I didn’t know – I shouldn’t have touched her – I should have waited – I should have sent for you – I should have …;’

‘Is she …; is Szewan dead?’

The servant burst into tears. ‘Yes, mistress, she is dead. I turned her head, just a little, so that she could breathe and she, she, she choked and started coughing and then choked again and it was as if she couldn’t get enough air, and then …;’

‘Enough,’ said Yuet, her eyes full of tears. ‘It is not your doing.’ She hunted for an activity, something to give the servant to do, something familiar to calm her nerves and soothe her panicked guilt. ‘Go …; go make some green tea. Bring it to the sitting room.’

The servant sniffed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Yes, mistress.’

Yuet closed the door behind her, very slowly, kicked off the sandals she had worn to go outside and set down the leather bag she had carried to her patient’s house. She made her way into Szewan’s sleeping quarters, walking softly on the balls of her bare feet, as though a sharp noise could wake her mistress.

I gave her a strong poppy draught. What if it was this …; ? Should I have made it weaker? Oh, dear Gods.

Szewan was lying half on her side, half on her back – the ministrations of the servant, no doubt. Yuet checked, but it had not been any physical obstruction that had blocked Szewan’s airways – she had not choked on her tongue or anything like that, an event that Yuet had seen occur and had prevented more than once with patients who suffered from fits or seizures. On that, at least, she could reassure the poor cook, who probably thought that her very touch had made the old healer drop dead in her bed.

Perhaps it was just age.

Yuet arranged Szewan’s body in a seemly manner on her bed, laying her on her back and crossing her arms on her thin ribcage. As though there had not been enough death in Linh-an in the month just past. There would be things to arrange with the Temple – there was no immediate family and it would be up to Yuet, the apprentice and the closest thing to a relative old Szewan had in this world, to perform the funerary rites required. But already she was thinking ahead. She said I was no longer an apprentice, Yuet thought to herself as she fussed with the bedclothes. But the papers hadn’t been drawn up yet. What if …; ? What happens now?

There was a tap on the door.

‘Tea, mistress.’

Yuet crossed to the door. ‘I am coming.’

The servant was still wringing her hands. ‘It’s so sudden, mistress, I never meant …; I didn’t mean to …;’

‘You have done nothing wrong. I have looked at her and there are no signs of anything but that you tried to help,’ Yuet said again, soothingly, calming the woman down. ‘There will still be work for you here.’

That was part of the servant’s panic, the fear that she would be dismissed now that the household had changed. She seemed to relax a little at this reassurance, but Yuet found herself wondering if she was in fact in a position to give it. She stepped into the sitting room to pick up the bowl of steaming green tea which the cook had brought in on a lacquered tray, and then went into the tiny alcove that had served Szewan as an office, piled high with scrolls and papers and bound books of recipes for medicines, patient records, agreements, licences and other legal documentation. Somehow Szewan had never quite planned for dying. Yuet knew she would need to go through all this anyway, it was all her responsibility now, at least until she found out otherwise – but she was looking for practical things, for things relating to what would happen to the healer’s practice now that she was gone, whether a journeyman like herself, who had not yet been quite promoted to full mastery, could take over now or if she would need to go looking for some other Linh-an healer with his or her master’s papers and hand over all of Szewan’s accumulated treasury of information to this …; this usurper.

I should have the papers drawn up, Szewan had said. Barely a few hours ago. If only there had been a witness to that – to the utterance which to all intents and purposes graduated Yuet from journeyman to full-fledged healer.

There was. There might have been.

If the cook was led to believe that her having heard that, that her willingness to swear that she had heard that, may have a direct bearing on her livelihood in this household, then maybe a notary could be found …;

Yuet set the bowl of tea aside, and it grew cold, forgotten, as she immersed herself in Szewan’s papers. In rebuilding a future which, through sins of omission, looked as though it might disintegrate around her.

She owed it to Szewan, safeguarding her secrets. She owed it to Szewan’s high-born patients, details of whose illnesses ought not to become bargaining chips for healers who had not earned the trust or the confidence of those patients.

She owed it to Tai, to her jin-shei-bao, to whom she had made a promise – which she might never be able to keep if she was dispossessed of her status and her position. She owed it to the dead of the Summer Palace earthquake, some of whom had passed in their caskets beneath her window that very morning.

She owed it to Liudan, the survivor.

She owed it to herself.

Seven

Yuet spent a sleepless night amongst Szewan’s chaotic records, trying to make sense of the world she had inherited. She had finally retired to her room in the last dark hours before dawn and fell into a fitful doze; she was not at her best when she was shaken awake only a few hours later by the servant.

‘Mistress? I’m sorry, mistress, I would not disturb you, but there is a message from the Court, for Mistress Szewan. The man says he must have an answer.’

‘Did you say anything to him about Szewan?’ said Yuet, sitting up, shocked awake.

‘No, Mistress Yuet. I said I would come and wake you.’

‘Thank you. Please tell him I will be there at once.’

It was light outside, full day. Yuet drew on her outer robe in feverish haste, rebraided her tousled hair into a semblance of tidiness with swift, practised fingers, and paused to splash a handful of cold water onto her face, dabbing it dry with one of Szewan’s fine linen towels. It would have to do. It was just a messenger, after all.

The man who had come with the message waited in the hallway, having refused the servant’s invitation into the sitting room.

Yuet greeted him with a bow, and he returned it politely.

‘How may I help you?’ she asked.

‘The healer Szewan is required at the Palace, immediately.’

‘She is …; unavailable,’ said Yuet carefully. She most emphatically did not want the news of Szewan’s death prematurely escaping from this house. She needed time, time to set up her world, her life. Time to organize her future. ‘I am Yuet, her apprentice …; her partner. Is someone ill? May I be of assistance?’

‘If it please you, Mistress Yuet, I come from the Chancellor. Sei Zibo requests the presence of healer Szewan at a meeting of the Imperial Council this morning.’

Yuet’s mind raced. Imperial Council? This had to do with the regency. Why did they want Szewan?

The answer was obvious. Liudan.

‘When is Szewan’s presence required?’ Yuet asked.

‘The meeting is in an hour’s time, Mistress Yuet. I was sent to escort the healer to the Palace immediately.’

‘If you will wait here,’ Yuet instructed, ‘I will need a few moments to make a few arrangements and then I will accompany you myself.’

‘But it is the healer Szewan who …;’

‘She is, as I say, unavailable at this moment,’ Yuet said with a veneer of serenity which hid a wildly beating heart. She was going to gamble on something here; it was a good thing that this was a simple messenger, not a Guard with specific orders, not someone who would think things through and demand explanations. This man was of a lower tier, someone used to taking commands from somebody who knew how to give them, who would follow the last firm command that he was given. All she needed to do was remain firm. ‘Wait here. I will be out as soon as I am ready.’

He was looking a little unhappy, but he bowed his acquiescence and took up a waiting stance at the door. Yuet went back to her room and summoned the servant, who came in so quickly that Yuet was sure she must have been lurking just outside the door, listening.

‘Help me,’ she said. ‘I need assistance with dressing my hair. I will go to the Palace in Mistress Szewan’s name. It is a good thing. At least I will be able to pass on the news without sending wild rumours out. The messenger is waiting to escort me there, we need to be quick.’

The servant nodded, taking up a comb even as Yuet unbraided her hair and shook the rippling dark mass of it out. It spilled, straight and thick and long, almost down to her knees. ‘As simple as formality will allow,’ she instructed, hunting for ornaments on the table in front of her, reaching for the white ribbons of mourning that had to be woven into her hair, sorting out silver clasps to hold the rest of it up. ‘In the meantime,’ she said, while the servant’s deft fingers plaited and coiled, ‘allow no one into the house until I return, and say that Szewan and I are both unavailable at the moment. Take down details of anyone who needs urgent help, and I will deal with that when I get back. But nobody waits here, and nobody gets past you into the house. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Mistress Yuet,’ the servant said, her eyes wide.

‘And when I return I will need to talk to you,’ Yuet said, ‘about Mistress Szewan.’

‘Yes, mistress,’ the woman said, her voice faltering a little.

Yuet left her with that small seed of disquiet. It would do her good to worry on it for a while.

She donned a fresh shift, laced an inner robe of pale silk at her throat, shrugged into a heavy brocade outer robe suitable for a Court appearance, ran a final check over her hair and her make-up, made sure she was wearing the white ribbon of mourning around her sleeve, and swept out of her chambers with a final warning to the servant to lock up after her and not allow anyone into the house.

The escort had a hired sedan cart waiting, obviously in deference to Szewan’s age and infirmities, and since there had been no countermand issued he simply helped Yuet into it and gave the signal for the driver to depart. The streets were empty of people, still wrapped in mourning for the dead Emperor, normal commerce still operating in fits and starts; from within the chair Yuet could hear the intermittent calls of street vendors but the cart was given free passage, not jostled by other conveyances or forced to wait while one of higher rank swept by, and they were quickly at the gates of the Palace where they were admitted, after a brief hesitation, by one of a pair of Imperial Guards on duty. The chair was trotted into an inner courtyard; Yuet’s escort handed her down from it courteously, she thanked him, and he left her with a bow.

Alone before the entrance to the Imperial Palace, Yuet drew a deep breath, aware that her hands were shaking. Szewan had meant to do this, she was sure – had meant to promote Yuet into a full partner, with every right to be here in her place – but she had not done it yet, she had not done it yet

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