The Embers of Heaven (33 page)

“Would it help if I was there?” she asked gently.

“I wouldn’t want you… to see…” He cleared his throat. “The truth is, they asked me to draw a line between myself and her family. Vien’s children. If you were there…”

“Do I need to leave your house?” Amais asked.

“I don’t think that would matter any more,” Lixao said. “It’s tonight. Don’t come.”

But Amais did go. She herself did not know why—she felt as though she owed it to herself, to her mother. Owed a debt—she had to go, to do something… but in the end, she did nothing, only sitting in the back of the room, a quiet witness with tears pouring down her cheeks, as the young people put her stepfather through a chain of indignities and then through pain. They shaved his head, and then poured ink down his pitiful bald pate until it ran down his face and dripped off his chin giving him the theatrical face of a traditional opera demon. They made him kneel on his ancient creaky knees, reach out behind his back until he could grab hold of one wrist with the fingers of his other hand, and hold out his arms as high as he could over his back, twisting his shoulders, trembling with no support as he knelt there—and if he wavered or lurched they said that the time he had already spent in the position “did not count” and he had to start over. They took his glasses and made him smash them and grind them to dust with the heel of his foot. They made him stand on one leg like a heron, stripped down to a loincloth, his saggy old body bared to the laughing world. And then they took him away, after hours of this, and another man was brought out in his place.

Amais did not know if she would ever see him again.

A week after Lixao’s ‘trial’, another big rally was called for the Emperor’s Square—a Golden Wind rally, called by Iloh himself. Amais, despite herself, went—standing on the outskirts, too far away to even see the podium, but driven to be present, to be there, to bear witness.

“The Golden Wind is the flower of the revolution!” she heard Iloh’s voice say, over the microphone, floating above the heads of the cheering crowds. “I am here today to tell you so! I am here to tell you—to show you—that I wear your colors proudly!”

A roar swept the crowd. Amais could not see, but the word came back like quicksilver through the ranks until it reached the outer edges of the crowd, where Amais was.

“Did you see? Did you see? He wore the yellow armband—Shou’min Iloh wore the yellow armband—he said he was one of us—one of the Golden Wind!”

Numbed with foreboding, Amais returned home from the rally—to find two notes left for her while she was gone, one, in her sister’s hand, tucked in between the door and the doorjamb and the other slipped under the door and lying, sealed and addressed in an unfamiliar hand, just inside the entrance. Amais opened Aylun’s first.

They accepted me tonight, there on the square!
The note had a breathless quality, as though Aylun had scribbled it in a rush, probably on the way to some important meeting.
I am to join one of the units of Shou’min Iloh’s Thought Guard, it isn’t the Golden Wind but it’s the next circle—goodbye—Aylun.
It was in
hacha-ashu
, written with what looked like it must have been a pencil stub that badly needed sharpening, little of grace or style in it, only the essential, only the news.
Baya
-Dan would have wept at the sight of it.

The second note was unsigned, but written in a hurried although nevertheless still graceful
jin-ashu
script.

They are coming for you
, it said,
tomorrow. Be warned.

Three

Amais was to remember with some envy some of the letters she had received from Youmei—oh, for a pen where pigs once used to be kept, already dug up and riven, the perfect hiding place for an old cooking pot Youmei had not wanted to lose to the making of Iloh’s Iron Bridge! But she lived in the city, and there were no pig pens here, no convenient hiding places for treasure about to be burned on the altars of ‘progress’ and revolution. Tai’s journals, which had survived four hundred years of history and exile and strife, were never in such peril as this.

But taking the time to think about the problem of those journals—to figure out how to keep them safe, somewhere where they could not come to harm, and doing it before, as the cryptic second note said, the Golden Wind “came for her”—was time torn from the problem of Aylun, and what her sister could be molded into. Amais had already seen the results of Golden Wind raids. The idea of Aylun being involved in something like that, of Aylun being the girl who had it in her to shear off the braids of a child and immolate them on a pyre before child’s own eyes, of Aylun’s being the hand that would toss her own ancestress’s journals into that same pyre, burned Amais’s soul like acid. But she had no idea where to even begin looking for Aylun—and she knew it would tear her heart out if she were forced to watch the destruction of those journals she had carried back to Syai across the oceans of exile.

She did think, briefly, of running—she was no more than human, after all, and she had seen enough of the handiwork of the Golden Wind to be afraid.
I could take the journals, and go—somewhere safe, somewhere they will never find me, where they can’t touch me…
But there were the ghosts of Lixao and Vien, who did not run. Could not run. And then there was Aylun, whom she could not abandon. Not yet.

I could go to Iloh
…

Iloh could protect her. But what would the price of that be? She would owe a life of debt, she would never be free again, not to think her own thoughts, not to pursue her own dreams. He might never put her in a physical cage, but if she asked him for protection she would be in a cage nonetheless—a songbird in a cage, where her spirit would die slowly, a day at a time.

No. Not that. Whatever Iloh was to her, it was not a benevolently tyrannical protector. They had nothing on her, really—
nothing—
it was not for herself that she feared, but for her legacy, for that which she had dreamed of trying to win back, to protect, to cherish. Something of which Tai’s journals were only a symbol—but, for Amais, a potent one, an irreplaceable one.

So. That, first. Make sure the journals are safe—in the night, while the darkness was still her friend. In the morning, Aylun.

She wrapped the books in a length of yellow silk, not unaware of the irony of wrapping her treasure in the colors of the Golden Rising from which she was trying to save it, and then a layer of waterproof material, and then the whole package went into a canvas sack and another waterproof layer around that. It still felt inadequate, for what the packaging enclosed, but it would have to do—and if she had to return to her cache later and amend her arrangements, then so be it.

She slipped out of her apartments in the dead of night, scurrying from shadow to shadow in the street like a thief, scouring her environment for a place where the journals would be safe—at least temporarily safe, taken from the reach of those who might harm them. Nothing obvious presented itself—no pig pens here, nothing where a precious cache might be hidden and kept out of the sight of its enemies. Amais was frustrated, frightened, aware that time was slipping away. Perhaps it was a combination of all those things that made her careless in the end.

To her credit, she hardly expected to meet another person on the streets this late—unless, of course, it was members of the Golden Wind out with a new set of posters and banners to drape the city walls with. But those, the noisy, busy people who were not out to hide themselves or their work, she would have noticed, would have known of their presence, would have given them a wide berth. Another scurrying shadow like herself, out, perhaps, on a similar errand and just as intent to pass unseen as she herself was, proved to be another matter. They practically ran each other down at a corner of an empty midnight street, colliding with a force that spun Amais back against the wall of the house behind her and sent the other staggering into the road flailing for balance.

They froze, then, both of them, holding their breath.

“I am not Golden Wind,” the other shadow spoke, breaking the silence first. It was a male voice. Not old.

“I am not either,” Amais said, some part of her aware of the incongruity of this meeting, of this conversation. She knew that she should be running for her life, for the life of the things that she carried—but something held her, held them both. They were co-conspirators, out on clandestine missions. This was the trust between thieves, knowing that they had it in their power to betray each other if either said or did anything that might be taken as endangering their respective tasks.

In the silence of the night, the only sound was their breathing… and then there was something else, a murmur of conversation, raised voices. Amais instinctively shrank back into the shadows, discovered that there was an archway behind her, and in it an unlocked door that opened to her touch and which gave into a quiet courtyard.
 
She reached a decision in an instant.

“Quickly! Over here!” she hissed at her companion.

He hesitated, but only for a moment; the voices were getting closer. Amais heard him draw in his breath sharply and then he took the few steps between them and flattened himself into the concealing shadows beside her. Amais closed the outer courtyard door behind them, very quietly. They waited there, side by side, tense, aware that the door was their protection and their worst liability both, hiding them from the sight of whoever it had been in the street but also hiding those people from the two of them. Amais and her companion had no idea whether the voices they had heard belonged to people aiming for this very courtyard, which meant certain discovery… and very unpleasant consequences.

The voices did come closer, and soon they could hear actual footsteps, people approaching.

“Oh, Cahan!” Amais’s companion murmured despairingly.

She did not trust herself to make a sound. She merely reached out and covered his mouth with her fingers, an oddly intimate thing to do to a stranger—but it was that, or risk discovery.

The indistinct mix of voices resolved into several muffled but distinct ones, and it was possible to snatch at a passing conversation.

“…leave that one there,” a young woman was saying, “and then we have four more to do in the next street. Come on, hurry up—we are meeting with Huiyan’s group…”

“…the photo—leave the photo—it will be good right there…”

Someone tried the door behind which the two fugitives crouched, but Amais had her entire body weight pressed against it, holding it closed.

“That’ll do,” a young male voice said, after some scratching noises on the outside of the door, and a rustle of paper, and then a muffled fastening of packs, more indistinct conversation,, then footsteps, fading away.

For a long time neither Amais nor her companion moved at all, and then Amais allowed her body to relax and sag away from the door, gulping a long breath of air.

“That was fast thinking,” the young man said in a low voice. “Are they gone?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“My turn, then. Let me look.”

He pushed past her, found the door handle, and pressed it lightly. There was a slight resistance, and then a soft sound of ripping paper. They both froze again, the door ajar, but there was no further noise and the young man furtively eased the door open a little more. It gave without any further resistance at all.

The street was empty.

And then Amais realized what the tearing sound had been and made a small sound of dismay.

“Oh, for the love of Cahan,” she said softly, covering her face with her hand. “We might have brought death into this place…”

He looked, too.

The passing poster pasters of the Golden Wind had stuck a portrait of Shou’min Iloh on the door of the courtyard in which the two fugitives had been hiding. Unfortunately they had pasted the picture right across the middle of the door, and opening it had ripped the portrait precisely in half. Defacing pictures of Shou’min Iloh was a punishable offense. If this one was left here like this—with his face shredded—there would be trouble—but if the two of them took it down, and took it away, the people in the courtyard beyond might be accused of removing the picture if any one of the group who had placed it here happened to pass by and notice it was missing.

“They could not know the door would be opened,” said the young man.

“Or they meant to seal this place,” Amais said. “If they knew there was a portrait across their door nobody would dare open it, for fear that exactly this would happen…”

“Take it,” he said, stripping off the half-portrait on his side of the door with swift, economical motions. “It can’t be worse to take it than to leave it here like this.”

He was right, and Amais made short work of removing the remnant from her own side of the door. There was barely enough light to make out the features on the photograph, but Amais felt Iloh’s remaining eye fix her with a gimlet stare, almost accusing.

“Give it to me,” her companion in crime said, holding out his hand. “I’ll take care of it.”

“We never met?” she said.

“That would probably be for the best.”

“Do you know,” Amais said, taking a risk, but desperate enough for that, “of a safe hiding place?”

He turned his head towards her, sharply. He was wearing a hood that hid his face in shadow, but from within it his eyes glinted oddly as he looked at her. “For you or something precious?” he asked softly. “Is that what you were doing out here at this hour?” And then he lifted a hand in a swift motion, forestalling her reply. “No, don’t tell me. It’s best I don’t know, I guess. It’s odd, though… I was looking for a hiding place myself. Perhaps we could hide each other’s treasures. They might not find things, if they were hidden in places they might not think to look.”

She stared at him, astonished. It made a perfect, twisted kind of sense when she thought it through—
let a stranger hide something you deem precious and those who might be looking for that thing which you treasure would only look in places where they thought
you
might hide it. It might be in plain sight in someone else’s house but because it was not sought there it would not be found…

“What is it,” she said carefully, “that you are trying to hide?”

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, an apparent nonsequitur until he pulled a long blade carved with
hacha-ashu
symbols from a scabbard secured to his back. Amais gasped anyway, took an inadvertent step back. “No, don’t be afraid. This is my treasure. My great-grandfather’s sword. He was in the Imperial Guard once, when they still had an Imperial Guard, and the sword has been passed down from him to his son, and then to his son, and then to me. I cannot bear the thought of its being dishonored in any way—not this, with so much honor upon it. I know they will take it if they come, the Golden Wind. But there are very few places you can hide a sword…”

On impulse, Amais held out her own package. “My many-times-great-grandmother’s journals,” she said. “Four hundred years old. Doomed by simply being what they are—old ideas, old customs, a historical relic written in the language that no woman in Syai seems to speak any more…” She was surprised to find tears spring to her eyes. “She was Kito-Tai. The poet…”

“They are in
jin-ashu
?” he asked.

Surprised, Amais nodded, and then realized he could barely see her in the dark. “Yes. Yes, they are.”

“Then they would be safe from my prying eyes,” he said. “I will make you a deal. Take the sword, I will take the books. When this is over, and if we both live to see the day, we will return the treasures of our families. Until then, they are safer where strangers do not know to look for them.”

She hesitated, for a very long moment, and then nodded. “That is wise.”

He fumbled with the scabbard, let it down from his back, slid the sword back into it with a hiss of metal against tooled leather, and then offered it to her—freely, but with a reluctance she could plainly sense because she shared it, because it was present in the way her own hands clung to the precious journals she was entrusting to a stranger she did not even know the name of.