The Embers of Heaven (35 page)

She was there, with him, in that memory—in happier times. Not here. Not now. Not waiting for the ax to fall.

Amais backed out of the room quietly, so as not to disturb her, leaving her the solace of that dream—for however long she could still hold on to it.

She managed to get out of the House without further mishap with any of its clientele, and slipped out into the street. Hesitating for a moment in a deep shadow by the House, she weighed her options—Xuelian might have been right, if Amais’s visits to this place had been noted it might be inviting further disaster if she were observed here tonight, especially in the light of the treasure she had left for the House to guard. But the shortest way home lay down the Street, and then across the mercantile quarter, back into the University neighborhood. If she went the other way, out of the Street, she would only be treading deeper into the warrens—where the Beggar Guild still held sway, where danger lurked even without the chance of a stray Golden Wind cadre stepping in her path. The hesitation was brief, and she turned into the Street, hurrying past dark houses, aware that the sky was starting to lighten, however imperceptibly, in the eastern sky above the rooftops.

But there was something different about the street than when she had come here not so long ago—then, it had been full of furtive silence, of waiting, of tense expectation. But that was then. It seemed, during her brief visit to the House of the Silver Moon, that the waiting had come to an end.

At the far end of the street, between her and safety, Amais could see lights, and commotion. There were shouts, screams, scuffles—people spilled on the front steps of houses and in the road, some dressed in the bright colors of the courtesans, others dressed in the drab gray or blue of uniforms.

With yellow bands on their sleeves.

“Oh, no,” Amais whispered, freezing into immobility behind a set of steps leading into a nearby House. Even as she did so the lights in the house were doused; its windows sank into a brooding darkness, in a hope, perhaps futile, that it might look dead and abandoned and that the avengers might pass it by.

But they were being thorough. That much was obvious even from Amais’s hiding place. They had gone from house to house, on both sides of the street, emptying them out, guns pointed at cringing men who had had the bad luck to be caught within, the occasional Golden Wind cadre in the process of removing the wide army-issue belt they all wore and starting to whip the screaming, cowering women with it, buckle end down.

“Oh, Cahan,
no
,” Amais whispered.

And then the stasis broke, and she turned and raced back the way she had come. Back, back to the House of the Silver Moon, and the woman who had been one of the few people in this world whom she had loved, who had truly loved her.

Five

A tiny red lantern hung on the hook by Xuelian’s door, the time-honored signal for privacy although Xuelian herself had long since ceased to require it for the purposes to which it was usually put. But she had her own needs, and it was the easiest, most obvious sign for her girls to leave her alone.

But the time for courtesy and manners was long past. Amais spared the lantern—it had not been there when she had left these rooms, not that long ago—the barest of glances as she flung the door aside and all but fell into the room, cheeks flushed, gasping for every breath as fear closed her throat.

“They’re coming!” she managed to gasp out, staggering into the room, reaching for the dressing table to steady herself. “I am barely ahead of them! There are torches in the street! They’re already in half a dozen Houses!”

“Of course they’re coming,” Xuelian said, very calmly.

“Xuelian, you don’t understand! They’re maybe two doors away! You have to get out of here now, before they…Aren’t you
afraid
?”

“Child,” said Xuelian gently, and her voice trembled only a little bit, “of course I am afraid. But there is nothing I can do to stop what’s coming. I live in a house of silk and paper and it was never built to withstand a storm. I go where the storm blows me.”

“But they will…” Amais finally paused to take stock, and closed her mouth. She had looked at Xuelian, really looked at her, for the first time since she raced into her room, and she suddenly realized that the old courtesan was dressed in her best finery. Her face was made up in the traditional way, with her magnificent eyes touched with kohl and her lips with rouge; her hair, silver-gray, was looped and coiled in a complicated court style that had gone out of fashion decades before, and glittered with gems—and, set high like a crown, she wore the kingfisher comb. Its jeweled edges caught the light, and the delicate blue feathers, wrought into the shape of a flower, trembled as though with life itself when Xuelian turned her head.

Which she did, now, favoring her young protégée with a serene smile. It almost, but not quite, reached her eyes—those were serious, fully aware of what was coming, touched with an edge of apprehension, but not enough of it to be real fear.

“You knew they were coming?” Amais whispered.

“I’ve been waiting for them. Every night for weeks. It was only a matter of time.”

“But you are…”

“I am one of the ones they will most particularly wish to gather into their net,” Xuelian said. “I stand for too much that is now forbidden, rejected or despised. I would be an excellent figurehead.”

“For what?” Amais whispered, suddenly choked with tears.

“Time will tell,” Xuelian said. She rose from where she had been sitting at her dressing table and crossed over to a rosewood writing desk set against the window. There were several leather-bound books on it. The journals. Amais recognized them: Xuelian had taken them out for Amais any number of times, reading from their elegantly calligraphic pages as though she was passing on myths and legends from a time long gone, the woman who had once been a passionate Emperor’s concubine turned into an icon of peace and serenity.

“I want you to take care of these,” Xuelian said.

Amais stared at them blankly. There had been another set of journals that she had barely managed to save—if she had done it at all—Cahan alone knew what the man named Xuan would do with them. And here, now there was another legacy, another treasure to protect.

“But if you hide them in the strongbox…” she said. “Or… or … with the sword…?”

“They will look in the strongbox,” Xuelian said. “That is the first place they will go… after they are done here, in this room. And you don’t want to draw attention to that sword, do you?”

“But they can’t…” Amais said desperately, trying to force herself to believe in a place that would be inviolate, safe from harm. “They would not know where to look… they…”

“But they will know that a safe place exists, and if they have to tear this house down around our ears, they will find it,” Xuelian said. “There is always someone who thinks they know, where the treasures lie and who will offer up the keys to the kingdom of Heaven itself if it will spare them a moment of pain or the merest thought of suffering. Besides, I’ve already taken care of that—I have put your sword in its secret place myself, and none of the girls can be forced to give it up, and most of the gold that was in the strong box is already gone. So are most of the older journals, in fact. Only these are left here now, and I give them to you. I have written in here where I have left the sword… and where the treasure of the House of the Silver Moon is to be found. If you can get there. After the storm. Take them.”

“But what about you…?” Amais wailed, a child again in that moment, her hands closing reflexively around the leather books that Xuelian had folded her fingers around.

“My time is done, my life lived,” Xuelian whispered. “My era has been over for a long time. Now go, while you still can.” She touched a carving on a windowsill, and a wall panel beside the window suddenly clicked and sprang a little way open—a secret door, into a secret passage. “Hurry,” Xuelian said, one hand tugging the panel open, the other on Amais’s back, pushing her gently but firmly into the yawning opening. “The stairs are steep and I am afraid it will be dark in there—be very careful—perhaps it would be better to stay very quiet until you are sure that everyone has left. You will come out into the alley behind the Street, and a few sharp turns will take you into the Beggars’ Quarter. Lie low for a while, and then try and get out of the city. I am afraid this madness that is about to take us… it’s only just beginning. Now go.” She drew the girl to her and kissed her on the brow, gently, like a grandmother would have done. “Go, and be careful.”

Amais stumbled forward, clutching the books, almost blinded by tears.

Xuelian’s voice stopped her. “Wait. Just a moment.”

Amais blinked her eyes clear, turned around. The old courtesan had crossed back to her dressing table and had picked up a square of white silk, embroidered with red poppies and a single tiny golden butterfly hovering just above one of the blooms. It was something that Xuelian herself had made when she had been one of the Imperial women, many years ago, and her hands had still been agile enough to ply an artist’s needle and scarlet and gold embroidery silks, now scorned as decadent luxuries, were her accepted due.

“Take this, too,” Xuelian said, holding out the square of silk. “I would hate to see it… spoiled, or damaged. Take it and… and keep it safe for me. And remember me by it, always.”

Amais reached for the silk, brushed for an instant the papery, aged skin on the other woman’s hand, and felt her soul crying out with a knowledge that she could not deny. This was farewell.

“Go,” said Xuelian. “In the name of that
jin-shei
that you would like to believe binds all of us together, over the centuries. Go—I can hear them coming.”

She gave Amais a final gentle push, and snicked the panel shut behind her.

Darkness folded around Amais’s slender body, an apt physical echo of the way a similar darkness had wrapped her mind. Xuelian’s words that kept her frozen in place for a moment after the panel closed—now, in this hour, when everything seemed to be ending, she had been handed the words she had been chasing all across Syai, that she had wanted to hear for nearly all of her life—she had been asked something, as the women of ancient Syai had once been asked, in the name of
jin-shei
. It was that which paralyzed her, held her perfectly still with the aching wonder of it—that, before the agonizing stabs of fear and pain and loss which laid clawed hands on her and raked across her soul.

And then she heard a crash, and harsh voices, and knew that she had escaped with barely a breath to spare.

She also realized that there was a tiny spyhole, a mere pinhole, in the panel. There was little in this world that she would have wanted to witness less willingly than what was unfolding in Xuelian’s room—but it was beyond her not to look. She leaned forward, careful not to make a sound, and put her eye to the spyhole.

Four of the Golden Wind cadres stood in the room, dressed in identical nondescript high-necked coats and boots that, Amais noted dispassionately, badly needed polishing. They were bristling with weaponry. One of them—by the looks of him the youngest, only barely older than Aylun, perhaps—wore only one knife at his belt. The others had two or even three blades apiece, long serrated butcher knives and paring daggers, mismatched and casually gathered from any available source without regard to possible previous ownership or use, and impersonally lethal. Two of them had rifles; one wore a handgun next to a wickedly gleaming curved knife. One even had a couple of antique throwing stars tucked into the wide sash of his belt.

Not one of them looked to be over twenty years old.

Facing the old woman in the room, they looked like dangerously fey children, scions of the future turned viciously on their past, and particularly savage, almost feral, when contrasted with the quiet serenity of their victim.

Amais had thought they would demand the money of the House, tainted and illicit as it was, gathered by such heinous means—to be redistributed to the more “deserving” in the eyes of the Golden Rising. But that was secondary for these four who were sent; they were here for the woman, and the money that had to be here was merely something that sweetened the pot, it was theirs for the taking and it would still be theirs—poured proudly into the hungry maw of the revolution, but theirs, their own contribution—afterward, after their real work was done.

And the real work was only just beginning.

“Look at you,” spat out the oldest of the four, a young man, his eyes two slits of disgust and righteous outrage that Xuelian’s existence had ever even been sanctioned. “Sitting here like an old spider, in your silks and your jewels, while good people starve and die around you.”

“Nobody has ever starved that I had a chance to help,” Xuelian said, and was rewarded by a stinging slap that snapped her head back. Amais stifled a cry.

“You don’t speak, you with that voice of honey who has led so many astray into this decadent morass of luxury and indulgence,” Xuelian’s nemesis hissed through clenched teeth. “Do you have any idea how many could be fed and sheltered, using just one of these?”

He reached out and snatched a jewelled pin from Xuelian’s hair, brandished it as if it was a weapon every bit as lethal as the knives in his belt and in his dusty boot. Amais saw the old woman wince, and a long strand of hair hung from the despoiler’s fingers. He had not been gentle about it.

His action seemed to be a signal for the others. Hands reached out, poked, prodded, ripped, snatched, pulled. Amais heard silk tear, things drop on the floor as more enticing targets were noticed by the attackers. She did not hear Xuelian cry out, or see her fall.

When the four men stepped back from Xuelian, breathing hard, Amais had to stuff her hand into her mouth to prevent herself from crying out aloud. Xuelian was still standing, but swaying gently on her feet. Her careful make-up was smeared across her face, which was red and swollen and looked like bruises were ready to bloom on every part of it; there was blood at the corner of her mouth, and on her arms, bare, with the sleeves of the silk gown ripped away at the shoulders and long scratches running from shoulder to wrist. The dress itself was slashed into ribbons, only a proud memory of what it had been only moments before. Xuelian’s hair was mostly down, a cloud of silver white, sometimes streaked with blood; the rest was held up only barely by a few stray pins that had been missed in the assault.

And one of her assailants was standing a few paces away from her, holding the kingfisher comb in his hand.

Amais could not quite see Xuelian’s face from where she stood, but from the position of her head, her eyes rested on the comb, not the man who held it.

“And this pretty?” the comb’s captor was saying rubbing his stubby fingers with their short, dirty nails across the beautiful fragile kingfisher blue.

“A gift,” Xuelian said, her voice apparently coming from a place full of pain but still filled with a quiet calm that wrenched at Amais’s heart. “I have had it… for many years. It was a gift from the Kingfisher Emperor.”

“There was never any such emperor,” said the cadre sharply.

“Perhaps not, in the history books,” Xuelian said. “But that was what I always called him.”

Amais could see
his
face, if not Xuelian’s—he was facing directly into the point of view of her peephole. And she saw it in his face—the wash of emotion—the merest dash of envy, followed by anger, a pious righteousness in the face of defiant and unrepentant iniquity, cold fury, contempt, and finally a strange, savage little flash of triumph.