The Secrets of Jin-Shei (25 page)

Kito held the carving out for Tai’s inspection, and she instinctively reached for it, and for a moment both sets of hands were wrapped around it as they bent over the small, exquisite stone. And then they suddenly realized what they were doing, at almost the precise moment that the realization was articulated by Nhia’s voice just outside the booth.

“Are you two plight-trothed?”

Tai snatched her hand back, and Kito flung a corner of the silk back over the carving. Tai’s cheeks were a flushed pink when she emerged from the carver’s booth.

“We have to go back and pack,” she said to Nhia in a low voice, choosing to ignore her comment completely, giving Kito a chance to compose
himself and put the carving away. “Yuet came to me only a few hours ago. We leave with the Empress tomorrow, for the retreat.”

“
Now
?” Nhia said. “But I’ve a session started with …”

Tai sneezed. Nhia glared at her. “And you got soaked running after me over here, didn’t you?” she said. “And you’re going to go and shiver up in the mountains tomorrow, at a time when most sane people are still going south to escape the snows. You don’t even have the …”

“If you’re going to tell me I haven’t anything warm to wear, you’re wrong,” Tai said. “Liudan sent us both warm winter cloaks. Your session will have to wait on the Empress’s pleasure.”

Nhia’s eyes softened. “She has not been gone long,” Nhia said, and she was not speaking of Liudan. “And you haven’t seen that place since you left it to bring her body back to Linh-an, have you? Liudan has a cruel streak.”

Tai dropped her eyes. “Perhaps I
need
to go,” she whispered. “To lay her ghost. To make my peace.”

Kito had composed himself sufficiently to emerge from the shadows of the booth, all adolescent dignity. Tai turned to him, still faintly pink-cheeked, and shrugged out of his cloak, handing it back to him with a bow. “My thanks,” she said.

“My pleasure,” he said. “I do not know what the Empress has commanded, but I hope it goes well, for her, and for you. And I hope to see you again when you return to the city.”

“So,” said Nhia as the two girls hesitated in the gate of the Great Temple, watching the still-driving rain in the streets outside and steeling themselves to throw their shivering bodies out into it, “
are
you?”

“Am I what?” Tai said, with coolly deliberate incomprehension.

“Plight-trothed,” Nhia said wickedly. “I
saw
it, you know. Witnessed, it’s a concluded thing, done, all that it needs is a formal contract. When’s the wedding?”

“I haven’t even had my Xat-Wau yet,” Tai retorted, blushing furiously again. “He was showing me his work, there was nothing …” She paused, held her breath, and then sneezed again with a force that threw her back against the doorway.

“That’s it,” said Nhia, dropping the teasing for the time being and instinctively lowering her voice. “Whatever it costs, we need a sedan chair to get us back. Wait here; I will arrange it. If we
have
to follow Liudan on
this little ruse of hers, at least let us leave the city healthy enough to face the mountain winter.”

“Ruse?” Tai said, turning to follow Nhia with her eyes as the older girl turned back into the Temple.

Nhia paused, throwing a startled glance back at Tai. “Liudan was right, you are an innocent sometimes,” she said. “Of course it’s a ruse. She’s buying herself time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time to choose a man of her own desire, and not one the Court thrusts upon her,” Nhia said. “I’m afraid our Empress is unlikely to be ruled by anyone other than herself.”

“Antian would not have been so obstinate,” Tai whispered.

“Antian was more subtle,” Nhia said. “From what I know, from what you told me of her, the Little Empress would have done what she needed to do, but from within the cover of dignity and decorum and tradition. With Liudan, it is anyone’s guess.”

“I do miss her,” Tai said.

“I think we will all miss her before long. Miss what she was, what she could have been. Liudan is a wild thing, and wild things are unpredictable and dangerous, and not held by a word of command or of restraint. Liudan has the eyes of a lion. Wait there, I’ll be right back with the chair.” She paused, casting around a wary glance. The gate and the corridor nearby were deserted except for the two of them at that moment, but Nhia was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that they had been discussing the Empress of Syai in very frank and familiar terms while out in public. It was, to say the least, a breach of protocol. “We’d better talk about this later,” she said. “We’d better get back home and get ready.”
Ready to follow the lioness into her mountain lair,
she thought to herself. But that was not a thought she would have uttered out loud on the doorstep of the Great Temple. Not even to Tai.

T
hey did not, after all, stay at the Summer Palace.

They could not have done. The place was a shattered wreck, and it was still shrouded in drifts of snow at this time of year. It was full of wind-whispers, and the winter-bare branches of the trees creaked and groaned eerily in the empty gardens, but other than this Tai found it remarkably free of ghosts when she walked up to the ruins, alone, on the day after they arrived at their nearby lodgings. There was nothing of Antian here anymore, not even a memory. Antian belonged to the summer—bright flowers nodding in the warm sunlight, butterflies, summer stars hanging in the heavens in the long, lazy dusk of hot days. Tai had found it hard going to force her way up the winding road into what was left of the Palace courtyards. No carts had gone that way for a long time, and the snow was set hard and deep on the path—but there had been tracks in the fresh powder on the top of the old packed snow, as if someone else had been there recently. As though someone else went there often.

Tai had not expected to see the one who had made the tracks—the footprints were of booted feet, but small, a child’s or a young woman’s, perhaps—and had been considerably startled to catch a glimpse of a darting and oddly furtive form scuttling into concealment as she made her way into the gardens. She could not see much, and when she called nobody answered, but the one thing that she did notice, when the creature’s wrap had slipped down over her shoulders as she ran, was that the other visitor was a girl whose hair was an improbable and unusual shade of golden chestnut which hung in wild, burnished red-gold curls around a pale, narrow face.

She looked like no one Tai had ever seen before, a spirit of the mountains, maybe—slight, lithe, moving with an athlete’s grace and a fawn’s light-footed speed. Tai tried looking for her, peering into the shadows of the ruined Palace into which she looked like she had vanished, but there
was no sign of her. Not even tracks showed where she had disappeared to, as though she really had been an immortal sprite out of Cahan, out to play with a mortal seeker’s eyes.

Whoever she was, it had not been Antian, not even an echo of her spirit.

Tai didn’t spend long at the ruins. They were empty for her.

When she returned to the mountain inn where they were staying, Liudan, sitting by the fire in a simple plaited willow chair which her presence managed to make into a throne, stopped her as she walked past the open door to the inn’s common room.

“So. Did you find her?”

Tai paused. “I do not have to seek her here, Liudan. She is always with me.”

“But the first thing you did was go back,” Liudan said. “To
her.
To the ghost.”

“She is gone. You are here,” Tai said.

Liudan’s eyes sparked with something—a touch of jealousy, annoyance, regret, maybe even understanding—but she did not speak.

She would never have admitted it, not even to her own
jin-shei-bao
or perhaps particularly not to her, but Liudan’s own first instinct had been to return to the ruins of the old Palace. Tai had had no more than a brace of magical summers there, but Liudan had grown up with the beauty of the Summer Palace gardens, with its wicker cricket cages and the brightness of its flowers … and with the presence of the vanished Princess who was at once a bond and a sundering between the two
jin-shei-bao
who survived her. Liudan could remember the times that she spent playing knucklebones in the garden with Antian when she was very little, or Antian reading to her from a slim volume of old legends penned in elegant
jin-ashu
script by some long-gone Imperial ancestress. The Summer Palace gardens held the echo of the only laughter Liudan had shared in her lonely and isolated existence in the Imperial household. And she could also remember, vividly, the stab of jealous rage which had accompanied her first glimpse of Antian and Tai walking together among the fountains of the Inner Court.

“But I have not abandoned you, my sister,” Antian had told her, later, sitting beside her on her bed just before they had all retired that night.

Liudan had been mutinously silent, her head turned away so that she would not be betrayed by the glint of a too-bright eye, and Antian had
finally sighed and leaned over and kissed her on the brow and had said quietly, “It is your own silence that keeps you alone. You know, I think, that I will always be there for you.”

For a moment, there in the sitting room of the mountain inn, Antian’s presence had been very real, her face almost shaped by the air that shimmered between Liudan and Tai. But Liudan had said nothing in response to Tai’s words, and finally Tai, respecting that silence, made her obeisance to the Empress and retreated into the room that she shared with Nhia.

Nhia was there, leaning over Yuet’s shoulder as she pored over an old leather-bound volume thickly and neatly inscribed with
jin-ashu
script. The book looked damaged, its edges eaten by what looked like charring, some of the script partly obliterated by damp which had smeared the ink across the pages.

“Look at this,” Nhia said. “They showed it to Yuet this morning; apparently someone lugged it all the way down from the wreck of the Palace during the summer.”

“When the scavengers were there,” Tai said, sniffling, trying to stifle one of her explosive sneezes. She had brought those with her from the city, legacy of that mad dash to the Temple to retrieve Nhia for the mountain retreat. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure,” Yuet said. “I’m still trying to decipher it, but it looks like Szewan’s hand to me, nobody else could do
jin-ashu
in a manner quite this small and crabbed—until her hands gave out, that is, and I started keeping the books. But this looks like it’s ten, maybe twenty years old; she was still writing up her own cases then. So far it’s pretty ordinary, but it looks remarkably like a copy of the Blackmail Book.”

“The
what
?” Tai said, astonished.

Yuet laughed. “That’s what I always called it. Her secret patients. The ones that were exotic, or unusual, or suffered from diseases or conditions too embarrassing, delicate, or dangerous to keep open records of.”

“There is such a book? Did she really use it to blackmail people?” Tai asked.

“Hardly,” said Yuet, but after a small pause. She could see where arcane knowledge, judiciously applied, could be useful … but this was not something she would discuss with her two nonhealer companions. She had handled Szewan’s book even while the old healer had still been alive, and had riffled through it after her death while she had been going through
the rest of her papers. But she had not, in fact, had time yet to go through the Blackmail Book properly. She had every intention of doing so soon.

She had known nothing about the existence of a second volume.

“Why would she keep a copy of such a book?” Tai asked slowly. “And somewhere out of her direct control, too. She wasn’t even at the Summer Palace that last summer.”

“Did you ever see the healer’s quarters in the Summer Palace?” Yuet said. “They were mine that last summer. And if I had not known exactly where to look, not even I would have been able to find this book. I’m sure that there were things that Szewan wanted to remember, and it was safer to leave them hidden in a place where nobody would know where to find them than to carry notes back and forth across the continent in her backpack.”

“But nobody counted on the earthquake,” Nhia said. “The book must have been thrown from its hiding place when the Palace crumbled.”

“Do you think someone has read it?” asked Tai, her eyes quite round.

Yuet dismissed the possibility with a wave of her hand. “The Traveler women have
jin-ashu,
but they don’t practice it nearly as much as we do,” she said. “It was probably found by someone from the village when they were picking over the ruins for spoils, and then tucked away as a memento. Nobody would read Szewan’s hand for pleasure.”

Yuet hoped so, at least. She was already making a mental note to have only a single copy of any such book that she herself might start to keep, but she had already come to the conclusion that the safest place for any really dangerous secrets was a healer’s memory.

“She was a shaman as well as a healer,” Nhia said. “Look, she kept a notation of the phases of the moon. Is that relevant in healing? I didn’t know.”

“It might be, when you’re gathering certain herbs or fruits,” Yuet said, closing the book and laying a protective hand on its cover. She trusted her sisters but some of the things referred to in this volume would be better off being seen by as few eyes as possible.

“But that’s alchemy,” Nhia said.

“All life is,” Yuet retorted. “They at the Temple apply it differently than we do in the Healer’s Guild—I concoct medicines and poultices where they concoct elixirs and potions. The difference is that the healer’s ones are used to heal and the magical ones are sometimes used to kill.”

Nhia roused in defense of her beloved Way, her hackles up. “That isn’t true, Yuet, not like you mean it! The healers have their own poisons!”

“Yes,” Yuet said, suddenly haunted by the image of herself handing the poppy draft to Szewan on her last morning. “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to imply anything.”