An Inch of Ashes (15 page)

‘There,’ he said, pointing beyond her, smiling broadly now.

She turned, looking about her at the stables. The grooms were standing about idly, their jobs momentarily forgotten, watching the young Prince and his bride, all of them grinning widely, knowing what Li Yuan had arranged.

She frowned, not knowing what it was she was looking for, then turned back, looking at him.

‘Go on,’ he said, encouraging her. ‘Down there, in the end stall.’

Still she hesitated, as if afraid, making him laugh.

‘It’s a gift, silly.’ He lowered his voice slightly. ‘My way of saying that I’m sorry.’

‘Down there?’

‘Yes. Come, I’ll show you...’

He took her arm, leading her to the stall.

‘There!’ he said softly, looking down at her.

She looked. There, in the dimness of the stall, stood the horse he had bought her. As she took first one, then another slow step towards it, the horse turned its long white head, looking back at her, its huge dark eyes assessing her. It made a small noise in its nostrils, then lowered its head slightly, as if bowing to her.

He saw the tiny shudder that went through her and felt himself go still as she went up to the horse and began to stroke its face, its flank. For a moment, that was all. Then she turned and looked back at him, her eyes wet with tears.

‘He’s beautiful, Yuan. Really beautiful.’ She shivered, looking back at the horse, her hand resting in its mane, then lowered her head slightly. ‘You shouldn’t have, my love. I have a horse already.’

Yuan swallowed, moved by her reaction. ‘I know, but I wanted to. As soon as I saw him I knew you’d love him.’ He moved closer, into the dimness of the stall itself, and stood there beside her, his hand resting gently on the horse’s flank.

She looked up at him, her eyes smiling through the tears. ‘Has he a name?’

‘He has. But if you want to you can re-name him.’

She looked back at the Arab. ‘No. Look at him, Yuan. He is himself, don’t you think? A T’ang among horses.’

He smiled. ‘That he is, my love. An emperor. And his name is Tai Huo.’

She studied the Arab a moment longer, then turned back, meeting Li Yuan’s eyes again. ‘Great Fire... Yes, it suits him perfectly.’ Her eyes searched Yuan’s face, awed, it seemed, by his gift. Then, unexpectedly, she knelt, bowing her head until it touched her knees. ‘My husband honours me beyond my worth...’

At once he pulled her up. ‘No, Fei Yen. Your husband loves you. I, Yuan, love you. The rest...’ he shuddered, ‘well, I was mistaken. It was wrong of me...’

‘No.’ She shook her head, then lifted her eyes to his. ‘I spoke out of turn. I realize that now. It was not my place to order your household. Not without your permission...’

‘Then you have my permission.’

His words brought her up short. ‘Your permission? To run your household?’

He smiled. ‘Of course. Many wives do, don’t they? And why not mine? After all, I have a clever wife.’

Her smile slowly broadened, then, without warning, she launched herself at him, knocking him on to his back, her kisses overwhelming him.

‘Fei Yen!’

There was laughter from the nearby stalls, then a rustling of straw as the watching grooms moved back.

He sat up, looking at her, astonished by her behaviour, then laughed and pulled her close again, kissing her. From the stalls nearby came applause and low whistles of appreciation. He leaned forward, whispering in her ear. ‘Shall we finish this indoors?’

In answer she pulled him down on top of her. ‘You are a prince, my love,’ she said softly, her breath hot in his ear, ‘you may do as you wish.’

Joel Hammond stood there in the doorway, watching the boy unpack his things. They had barely spoken yet, but he was already conscious that the boy was different from anyone he had ever met. It was not just the quickness of the child, but something indefinable; something that fool Spatz hadn’t even been aware of. It was as if the boy were charged with some powerful yet masked vitality. Hammond smiled and nodded to himself. Yes, it was as if the boy were a compact little battery, filled with the energy of
knowing
; a veiled light, awaiting its moment to shine out, illuminating the world.

Kim turned, looking back at him, as if conscious suddenly of his watching eyes.

‘What did you do before you came here,
Shih
Hammond?’

‘Me?’ Hammond moved from the doorway, picking up the map Kim had set down on the table. ‘I worked on various things, but the reason I’m here is that I spent five years with SimFic working on artificial intelligence.’

Kim’s eyes widened slightly. ‘I thought that was illegal? Against the Edict?’

Hammond laughed. ‘I believe it was. But I was fortunate. The T’ang is a forgiving man. At least, in my case he was. I was pardoned. And here I am.’

He looked back down at the map again. ‘This is the Tun Huang star chart, isn’t it? I saw it once, years ago. Back in college. Are you interested in astronomy?’

The boy hesitated. ‘I was.’ Then he turned, facing Hammond, his dark eyes looking up at him challengingly. ‘Spatz says he’s going to keep me off the Project. Can he do that?’

Hammond was taken aback. ‘I...’

The boy turned away, the fluidity of the sudden movement – so unlike anything he had ever seen before – surprising Hammond. A ripple of fear passed down his spine. It was as if the boy was somehow both more and, at the same time, less human than anyone he had ever come across. For a moment he stood there, his mouth open, astonished, then, like a thunderbolt, it came to him. He shuddered, the words almost a whisper.

‘You’re Clayborn, aren’t you?’

Kim took a number of books from the bottom of his bag and added them to the pile on the desk, then looked up again. ‘I lived there until I was six.’

Hammond shuddered, seeing the boy in a totally new light. ‘I’m sorry. It must have been awful.’

Kim shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. But I’m here now. This is my home.’

Hammond looked about him at the bare white walls, then nodded. ‘I suppose it is.’ He put the chart down and picked up one of the books. It was Liu Hui’s
Chiu Chang Suan Shu
, his ‘Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art’, the famous third-century treatise from which all Han science began. He smiled and opened it, surprised to find it in the original Mandarin. Flicking through, he noticed the notations in the margin, the tiny, beautifully drawn pictograms in red and black and green.

‘You speak
Kuo-yu
, Kim?’

Kim straightened the books, then turned, looking back at Hammond. He studied him a moment, intently, almost fiercely, then pointed up at the overhead camera. ‘Does that thing work?’

Hammond looked up. ‘Not yet. It’ll be two or three days before they’ve installed the system.’

‘And Spatz? Does he speak
Kuo-yu
... Mandarin?’

Hammond considered a moment, then shook his head. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think so, but I can check easily enough. Why?’

Kim was staring back at him, the openness of his face disarming Hammond. ‘I’m not naive,
Shih
Hammond. I understand your position here. You’re here on sufferance. We’re alike in that. We do what we’re told or we’re nothing.
Nothing
.’

Hammond shivered. He had never thought of it in quite those terms, but it was true. He set the book down. ‘I still don’t follow you. What is all this leading to?’

Kim picked the book up and opened it at random, then handed it back to Hammond. ‘Read the first paragraph.’

Hammond read it, pronouncing the Mandarin with a slight southern accent, then looked back at Kim. ‘Well?’

‘I thought so. I saw how you looked at it. I knew at once that you’d recognized the title.’

Hammond smiled. ‘So?’

Kim took the book back, then set it beside the others on the shelf.

‘How good is your memory?’

‘Pretty good, I’d say.’

‘Good enough to hold a code?’

‘A code?’

‘When you go back, Spatz will order you not to speak to me about anything to do with the Project. He’ll instruct you to keep me away from all but the most harmless piece of equipment.’

‘You know this?’

Kim looked round. ‘It’s what he threatened, shortly before you arrived. But I know his type. I’ve met them before. He’ll do all he can to discredit me.’

Hammond laughed and began to shake his head, then stopped, seeing how Kim was looking at him. He looked down. ‘What if I don’t play his game? What if I refuse to shut you out?’

‘Then he’ll discredit you. You’re vulnerable. He knows you’ll have to do what he says. Besides, he’ll set a man to watch you. Someone you think of as a friend.’

‘Then what
can
I do?’

‘You can keep a diary. On your personal comset. Something that, when Spatz checks on it, will seem completely innocent.’

‘I see. But how will you get access?’

‘Leave that to me.’ Kim turned away, taking the last of the objects from the bag and setting it down on the bedside table.

‘And the code?’

Kim laughed. ‘That’s the part you’ll enjoy. You’re going to become a poet,
Shih
Hammond. A regular Wang Wei.’

DeVore sat at his desk in the tiny room at the heart of the mountain. The door was locked, the room unlit but for the faint glow of a small screen to one side of the desk. It was late, almost two in the morning, yet he felt no trace of tiredness. He slept little – two, three hours at most a night – but just now there was too much to do to even think of sleep.

He had spent the afternoon teaching Sun Tzu to his senior officers: the final chapter on the employment of secret agents. It was the section of Sun Tzu’s work that most soldiers found unpalatable. On the whole they were creatures of directness, like Tolonen. They viewed such methods as a necessary evil, unavoidable yet somehow beneath their dignity. But they were wrong. Sun Tzu had placed the subject at the end of his thirteen-chapter work with good reason. It was the key to all. As Sun Tzu himself had said, the reason why an enlightened prince or a wise general triumphed over their enemies whenever they moved – why their achievements surpassed those of ordinary men – was foreknowledge. And as Chia Lin had commented many centuries later, ‘An army without secret agents is like a man without eyes or ears.’

So it was. And the more one knew, the more control one could wield over circumstance.

He smiled. Today had been a good day. Months of hard work had paid off. Things had connected, falling into a new shape – a shape that boded well for the future.

The loss of his agents amongst the
Ping Tiao
had been a serious setback, and the men he had bought from amongst their ranks had proved unsatisfactory in almost every respect. He’d had barely a glimpse of what the
Ping Tiao
hierarchy were up to for almost a week now. Until today, that was, when suddenly two very different pieces of information had come to hand.

The first was simply a codeword one of his paid agents had stumbled upon: a single Mandarin character, the indentation of which had been left on a notepad Jan Mach had discarded. A character that looked like a house running on four legs. The character
yu
, the Han word for fish, the symbol of the
Ping Tiao.
It had meant nothing at first, but then he had thought to try it as an entry code to some of the secret
Ping Tiao
computer networks he had discovered weeks before but had failed to penetrate.

At the third attempt he found himself in.
Yu
was a new recruitment campaign; a rallying call; a word passed from lip to ear; a look, perhaps, between two sympathetic to the cause. DeVore had scrolled through quickly, astonished by what he read. If this were true...

But of course it was true. It made sense. Mach was unhappy with what was happening in the
Ping Tiao.
He felt unclean dealing with the likes of T’angs and renegade majors. What better reason, then, to start up a new movement? A splinter movement that would, in time, prove greater and more effective than the
Ping Tiao
. A movement that made no deals, no compromises. That movement was
Yu
.

Yu
. The very word was rich with ambivalence, for
yu
was phonetically identical with the Han word meaning ‘abundance’. It was the very symbol of wealth, and yet tradition had it that when the fish swam upriver in great numbers it was a harbinger of social unrest.
Yu
was thus the very symbol of civil disorder.

And if the file was to be trusted,
Yu
was already a force to be reckoned with. Not as powerful yet as the
Ping Tiao
, or as rich in its resources, yet significant enough to make him change his plans. He would have to deal with Mach. And soon.

The second item had come from Fischer in Alexandria. The message had been brief – a mere minute and three quarters of scrambled signal – yet it was potentially enough, in its decoded form, to shake the very foundations of the Seven.

He leaned forward and ran the film again.

The first thirty seconds were fairly inconclusive. They showed Wang Sau-leyan with his Chancellor, Hung Mien-lo. As Fischer entered, the T’ang turned slightly, disappearing from camera view as the Captain bowed.

‘Are they here?’ Wang asked, his face returning to view as Fischer came out of his bow.

‘Four of them,
Chieh Hsia.
They’ve been searched and scanned, together with their gift.’

‘Good,’ the T’ang said, turning away, looking excitedly at his Chancellor. ‘Then bring them in.’

‘Chieh Hsia...’

DeVore touched the pad, pausing at that moment. Wang Sau-leyan was still in full view of Fischer’s secreted camera, his well-fleshed face split by a grin that revealed unexpectedly fine teeth. He was a gross character, but interesting. For all his sybaritic tendencies, Wang Sau-leyan was sharp; sharper, perhaps, than any amongst the Seven, barring the young Prince, Li Shai Tung’s son, Yuan.

He sat back, studying the two men for a time, unhappy that he had not been privy to their conversations before and after this important meeting. It would have been invaluable to know what it was they really wanted from their association with the
Ping Tiao
. But Fischer’s quick thinking had at least given him an insight into their apparent reasons.