The Embers of Heaven (38 page)

“You lie well,” Amais said.

“Saving a life is always a
daoded
,” he said, “a good deed rewarded by the Gods. I did not know it was you, when I first saw him slap you, but I would have gone to the aid of a woman being mistreated anyway—and then, when I recognized you...”

“How did you know it was me?”

He let go of her arm, reached up and brushed her hair lightly. “The other night… the light in the street was enough for me to remember this. Your hair is like no other woman’s that I know.”

“Thank you,” Amais said, lifting her eyes to his for the first time. “I owe you—again.”

“You still have my grandfather’s sword,” he said, and offered a wan smile. “There is already a debt between us. Come.”

“Where?”

“My house. It is not far from here. And if you do then I will not have lied after all—you are, right now, with me, my guest. I don’t know what happened but it should be obvious that you cannot wander the streets looking like you do—it is only a matter of time before another of them finds you. At least let me offer you a place to rest and wash up. If there is any other way I can help, and if you are willing to tell me how, I will try. Come.”

Yuan
. Amais let the fate take her.

When Xuan’s hand dropped back to her arm, to gently guide her around another corner and into a quiet and mostly empty street dominated by a large house with a blue roof, she did not pull away—and somehow, in the space it took to walk down that street to the gate of that house, his hand had slipped down to take hers, holding it gently, without pressure, just a quiet curl of a man’s fingers around her own. She did not remember it happening, or recall making a conscious decision to respond to the gesture one way or another, but it felt good, it felt safe, it felt like a wall between her and that fire that had seared her soul.

Sometime in between their turning their backs on the angry Golden Wind cadre and the door of the house with the blue roof closing behind them, the voice of the bell in the Tower of the Lord of Heaven in the Great Temple of Linh-an fell silent at last.

Nine

“You can soak your clothes in cold water, in the basin, there,” Xuan said as he escorted Amais into a bathroom. “You cannot go out in the street again in those and not be stopped at the first street corner and taken into custody for things you never did. I will have a clean robe brought to you for the meantime. My sister’s should fit you. ”

“You are very kind,” Amais murmured.

He looked as though he was about to say something, and then reconsidered, contented himself with a small enigmatic smile, and bowed himself out of the room, closing the door behind him.

The place wasn’t opulent but by the contemporary standards of Linh-an, it was positively sybaritic. There was a tub, and Amais hesitated for a moment, wondering if she could presume on this hospitality that far—but she did not hesitate too long. There was too much on her, in her, that she wanted to scrub herself clean of. A discreet knock on the door announced the arrival of the robe, but nobody came in to deliver it—this was a household that looked as though it might well have had servants, once, although perhaps it no longer did; the robe had probably been brought by the sister in question, who did not wish to intrude, or by Xuan himself.

The clean water took care of the grime, the soot, the blood, the ashes—all that was left of the ruin of the Temple on the outside of her, on the skin, on the hair. That which remained on the inside… needed other cleaning, other healing. That was still to come.

Amais opened the door a crack when she was done, and pulled in the neatly folded cotton robe that had been laid just outside on top of a pair of felt house slippers. She wrung her wet hair dry as best she could, re-braided it into a damp rope, slipped into the robe and pulled its sash tight around her waist, thrust her feet into the slippers which fit as though they were her own. She inspected the basin in which she had, according to instructions, soaked her own clothes; the water was turning a coppery red-brown, and Amais turned away, suddenly aware of whose blood that was, the bile rising to the back of her throat. For a long time she stood there, her forehead between the palms of her hands laid flat against the door, and then she mentally shook herself and told herself sternly that she could hardly repay the kindness that had been shown her by never coming out of her hosts’ bathroom again.

The corridor outside the bathroom door was empty, but a round doorless arch led off to the right. She followed the rich smells of vegetable soup and sesame cookies through that doorway, across an empty sitting room, and into a kitchen at the back where two women, a young one and an old one, were chopping up a meager haul of vegetables. They looked up as Amais stepped into the doorway, paused there, suddenly and overwhelmingly unable to utter a single word.

The old woman laid her knife down, wiped her hands, and crossed to where Amais waited.

“My son said you had been through an ordeal,” she said. “Have you eaten?”

It was the traditional Syai greeting, a variation of the same words with which Vien and her daughters had been greeted when they first set foot here. But this time, the words appeared to be meant quite literally.

“I can bring nothing to the table,” Amais said. It was customary, a guest always brought an offering—but she was here as little more than a refugee, empty-handed, a burden and not a gift.

“Who can, these days?” the old woman returned. “I am Lihong; this is my daughter, Xinqian. My son, Xuan, you have met.”

Amais only then became aware that Xuan had entered through a different door, bearing a bowl in his hands and stood a few paces away, a slight smile on his face. She dropped her eyes, aware that the color had risen in her cheeks, that they could all see that, that there was nothing she could do about it.

“Be welcome,” Lihong said, taking Amais’s hands and drawing her into the kitchen.

The daughter, Xinqian, glanced up from her work; her eyes were not friendly, but they were resigned. If there was one person in this house to whom Amais’s presence was not agreeable, it was the woman whose clothes Amais now wore, whose shoes were on her feet.

The meal was simple, but a great deal had been done to make the occasion seem cheerful, as though ancient laws of hospitality still prevailed and Amais were really a guest at this family’s table. There was even a sprig of greenery arranged artfully in what looked like it had once been a bottle of rice wine. The household had a sense of a vanished grandeur, of people who knew and could understand beauty and grace but from whom it had been torn—but who dared, however covertly and full of symbolism, to express their dreams of seeing it return someday. A vase made of porcelain or fine glass would normally have been in the place of the bottle of rice wine—but although those precious things were gone now, Lihong, the matriarch, did not relinquish the idea of such a vessel being necessary for a festive table.

After they had eaten, Xinqian murmured something about needing to see to her child, and Lihong busied herself with clearing the table, dismissing offers of help. Amais and Xuan were left alone in the sitting room, with only a couple of cheap lanterns with painted rice-paper shades casting light into the shuttered room.

“They were here, weren’t they,” Amais said, looking down at her folded hands. “The Golden Wind.”

“The morning after I gave you the sword,” he said. She glanced up at that, a swift glance she quickly hid by dropping her eyes again, but he had seen the fear there, and interpreted it correctly. “They are safe,” he said, “your journals. Not even my mother or my sister knows where they are bestowed. But for the rest… they took everything, and wrecked what they could not take—and my sister’s husband they took with them when they left. I was not here when they came, else I, too, might have been taken. You must forgive Xinqian, for tonight. She is still broken with that loss.”

“Do you know why? Where they took him?”

“No,” he said. “I have tried to find out, but I haven’t had much time—and then, the Temple, and all that… It is my mother who has gone out to ask, because she fears what would happen if I were to show up at some overzealous official’s desk—but nobody has told her anything, and I think it will be a long time before anybody will. Tragedy has made her selfish, and she will not let me walk the streets and perhaps be seen, recognized, taken—but my sister only sees, right now, that I am here and safe and being kept safe and her husband is gone. I am afraid she resents that, and me.”

“But you walked the streets today,” said Amais.

“Yes, when the bell began to toll,” Xuan said. “I could not… I could not stay inside like a rat. Not with that echoing across the city.”

“There is nothing you could have done.”

“I know.”

They both glanced at each other at the same moment, caught each other’s eye; Xuan looked away first.

“They are all I have now, my mother and my sister and my little niece,” he said, words that connected to nothing that he had just been saying, but everything made sense in this conversation, in this shattered world, where one clung to spars where one could find them.

“I don’t even have that much,” Amais said bleakly. “My father died long ago, the sea took him, far away from here, in a different land… in a different world. My mother is buried in what is by now probably an unmarked grave, and my stepfather is somewhere in the clutches of the Golden Wind. And my little sister…
is
in the Golden Wind…”

“I can’t promise you miracles,” he said. “I was not able to keep even my own family safe… but I will do what I can, if you will let me help you.”

There was bitterness in that last sentence, as well as sincere concern, kindness, hope. Amais suddenly and vividly remembered the feel of his hand around her own.

As she opened her mouth to speak, a flash of light rippled through the shutters followed by a loud crash of thunder. There had been rumblings, distant and muted, for a while—in the background, but easy to ignore. This was suddenly very close, demanding attention. Both of them looked up, startled, as the thunder continued to roll ominously; and then, without warning, as though someone had upended a bucket over the roof, there was a sudden noise of rushing water. Rain.

They both spoke in the same instant.

“It’s really coming down…”

“Storm was all day in coming. It might help…”

Amais suddenly realized something, something that had been niggling at her ever since she had left Iloh’s last rally on the Emperor’s Square—something had not been ‘right’ with that rally, something had been missing, and it was only now that she realized what that had been. For the first time since he had stepped onto the podium on the Square to speak to the people of the city, Iloh had done so dry. There had been no rain. There had been no rain
then—
and it was now, only now, when the rain would come and put out the fires of the Golden Wind’s scouring…

Suddenly, incongruously, she laughed. Xuan looked at her in mute astonishment.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and the laughter had turned into a hiccup, and then into a sob, and then back into a wild, fierce chuckle again. “I had been told a story, by… by a friend. It doesn’t matter now. But I think… I think that he has lost the Mandate of Heaven…”

“Who?”

“Iloh,” Amais said. “I’m sorry, I know I sound insane. There’s a lot to explain, but before I can do that…”

She suddenly sat up, her eyes wide, her mouth parted.

Suddenly it all seemed to fall into place for her. All of it, all the things that
baya
-Dan had tried to teach her, the cryptic words that Nhia seemed to have sent to her across the centuries, Jinlien’s dying incense burners, Xuelian’s lessons on the women’s language and the way in which Syai’s women had always had a gentle hand in guiding the land’s history. Tai’s poems. The vow that changed so many lives, when Xinmei stayed in the world and sent her
jin-shei-bao
to the holy crag of Sian Sanqin. The young Amais’s certainty, back when she was heartsick at leaving the land of her childhood behind for the strange and unknowable thing that Syai had still been for her—the insight, the firm knowledge, that there would be something for her to do in the land of her ancestors, a task that waited for her hand and no other.

All of it.

In two words.

In a single thought.

Xuan stared at her for a long moment, and then drew a long shaky breath, running a long-fingered hand through his hair.

“You have no idea,” he murmured, “what you look like in this moment. Armies would follow you through fire without question.”

Amais blinked, looked at him; her expression softened, and she actually reached for his hand, folding both of hers around it.

“Please,” she said. “There is something… I have to do. You said you wanted to help me…”

He heard her out, and then protested vigorously at the plan she laid out. She had to concede that he had a point. Going back into the Temple, going back that night, with the remnants of the fires still possibly smoldering in dangerous spots and the wild storm lashing the streets, with roving Golden Wind bands giddy with their recent triumph roaming the city, did seem insane. But that was what her heart was telling her to do, clearly at last, with her path laid out before her—and she was trusting it, just like Nhia had told her to do.

“All right, but I will come with you,” Xuan said at last, having run out of protests and remonstrations, watching them all break on the steel of her resolve.

“You cannot,” she said, “you can’t see this…”

“Is this about the journals?” he asked. “Something in your women’s language? But I won’t even understand…”

“Trust me,” she said. “Please, trust me. I will come to no harm. You can come with me to the Temple, if you need to, but not inside. What I do there I need to do alone.”

So he acquiesced, in the end, and when night fell they both retraced the steps they had walked earlier that day, back to the Temple. They walked in the driving rain, both of them soaked to the skin in the space of only minutes, with great jagged sheets of lightning tearing at the sky and thunder crashing deafeningly around them. Everything looked different, changed; the shape of the street, the city, was altered. Most of the Temple’s great walls were standing but fire and the cudgels of the Golden Wind had eaten at the rest; there were places where supports were damaged or destroyed and the walls were leaning precariously or had even sagged into near collapse. Some smoldered angrily as embers hidden in deep crevices and unreached by the rain burned still. The familiar silhouette of the Tower was gone from the skyline. Amais and Xuan slipped into the grounds through the same door which Amais had used to escape, still abandoned and ajar, and picked their way across fallen masonry towards the Temple proper and the gardens which Amais had left full of blood and fire only that morning. And then she halted, and turned to Xuan.