Tai leaped from bed, scrambled into his trousers, didn’t bother knotting them, or with a shirt or boots or tying his hair.
He did take his swords. He jerked open the door, noting that he hadn’t barred it the night before, though he remembered intending to.
There was a man on the threshold. He was dead. Sword wound, right side.
Tai heard fighting to his left, the garden. He stepped over the dead body, ran towards the sound of swords, barefoot down the portico, his hair swinging free, sleep gone, the dream gone, in this first light of morning. He reached the end, leaped over the railing without breaking stride.
Wei Song was in the courtyard, spinning Kanlin-style—fighting five men.
It had been six, at least, with the one behind Tai. She was battling in a deadly, whirling silence. Tai swore savagely under his breath: she could have shouted for help! He had an idea why she hadn’t. He didn’t like it.
Sprinting towards them, he screamed: a release of pent-up rage, as much as anything else, directed at anyone and everyone and everything just then. At all of these people acting upon him, and for him, and even through him—from the moment Bytsan sri Nespo had given him a rolled-up parchment at Kuala Nor with a gift of too many horses.
It had gone far enough, this passiveness, this acceptance, absorbing the designs of others—benign, or otherwise. It was not what he was, or would allow himself to be, under the nine heavens. Perhaps he could declare that, with two swords in his hands.
One of the men facing Song half turned towards Tai’s sudden cry. That turning closed the scroll of his life.
Song’s left-hand sword took him on the side he’d exposed. The blade was withdrawn, as cleanly as it had entered, drawing life away with it.
She dropped and rolled through a flower bed, peonies crushed under her. They sprang back up as she did. A sword stroke from the nearest man, meant to decapitate, whistled through air.
Tai was among them by then.
The essence of Kanlin training, as he saw it (others might differ), was the continuous, patient, formal repetition of the movements of combat. Without swords, with one blade, with both, over again, every day of one’s life, ideally, the movements becoming so instinctive that the need for thought, awareness, planning in a fight disappeared. The body knew what it needed to do, and how to do it.
So it was without anything resembling deliberation, without a thought given to how long it had been since he’d done this, that Tai planted his right-hand sword in the earth, left it quivering there, and hurled himself into a twisting dive. A movement which—when properly executed—let the left-hand sword slide under one’s own flying body and sweep like a scythe, parallel to the ground, at someone facing him, or turning to do that.
His blade caught the nearest man, biting deep, just above the knee, sending blood spurting like some primitive sacrifice to the rising sun.
Tai landed (a dangerous moment, with a blade in one hand) and, from his knees, killed the wounded, falling man with a straight thrust to the chest.
Three left. All three turned to him.
“Get away!” Wei Song screamed.
Not likely, thought Tai, anger-ridden.
You each chose a man on either side when there were three lined up straight against two—if they made that mistake.
He switched his single blade to his right hand. Took the man farthest from Song: that was routine. He parried a slash from the bandit, and rolled again through the air to his left, a different move, one he hadn’t realized he remembered. You needed to be careful not to cut yourself with your own sword doing this one, too—that awareness came back in mid-air—but as he completed the movement, before he landed, he slashed at the bandit, and felt the sword bite.
The man screamed, went down. Tai landed in flowers, was up (almost) smoothly, and dispatched this one, too, on the ground. He looked quickly over, dropping down in anticipation of an attack, then stepping back.
No immediate danger. The middle figure was also down.
Song had adapted to what they had given her. She’d used both her swords, slicing as the man turned towards Tai. You could call it elegant, though there was a great deal of blood.
The last of the bandits turned, not surprisingly, to flee.
Unfortunately for him, his way was blocked by a rumpled, irritated-looking poet with grey hair untied and askew.
Sima Zian looked for all the world like one of the grotesque guardian statues placed by the doorway of a house or the entrance to a tomb, to frighten away demons.
“You took me from my first cup of wine,” he said grimly. “Let fall your weapon. Doing so offers you a small chance of living. Otherwise there is none.”
The bandit hesitated, then—evidently—decided that the “small chance” wasn’t real. He shouted what sounded like a name and hurtled full tilt towards the poet, blade swinging. Tai caught his breath.
He needn’t have bothered. He knew the tales, after all. Sima Zian had been an outlaw himself for years in the wild country of the gorges, and his sword—the single one he carried—was famed.
He sidestepped the wild charge, dropped, leaning away, and thrust out a leg. The running man tripped and fell. Before the bandit could recover from where he sprawled by the portico, Master Sima was upon him, dagger to throat.
The sun appeared over a pavilion to the east.
A servant walked into the courtyard from that side, carrying a water basin. He stopped. His mouth gaped.
“Summon the governor’s men!” Song shouted. “They are in front!” She looked at Tai. “And are about as useful as they were at the White Phoenix.” She walked over and handed him his second sword. She had already sheathed her own pair.
“These came in through the water gate?”
She nodded.
The poet had the bandit’s left arm twisted high behind his back. It would crack, Tai saw, with only a little pressure. The dagger remained at the man’s throat.
“Why are you here?” Sima Zian said quietly. “You know the governor’s questioners will be merciless. Answer me, I’ll do what I can.”
“Who are you,” the man rasped, face to the earth, “to offer anything in Chenyao?”
“You’ll have to believe I can. They will be here soon. You heard her send for them. Speak!”
“You will kill me, if I do? Before they …”
Tai winced, closed his eyes for a moment.
“I swear it,” said the poet calmly. “Why are you here?”
“It was my brother they tortured last night. After the two men named him.”
“Your brother hired men to kill Shen Tai?”
“He was told a man of that name might come from the west. To watch for him. Good money if he came to Chenyao and did not leave.”
“Your brother was the one directed in this way?”
“Yes. A letter. I never saw it. He only told me.”
“Who wrote the letter?”
“I do not know.”
“Then why are you here? If it was his task?”
There came a sound from the man on the ground. “Why? They carried him back to his wife last night. Dropped his body in the street. His servant summoned me. He was naked in the mud. He had been castrated, his organ stuffed in his mouth. His eyes had been carved out and they had cut off his hands. This was my brother. Do you hear it? I was here to kill the one who caused this.”
Tai felt himself swaying where he stood, in the spreading light of day.
“The ones who caused this are not here,” said Sima Zian, gravely. It was as if he’d expected these words, Tai thought. “You must know that. They work for Governor Xu, who sought only to stop violence and murder in his city, as he must do for the Son of Heaven we all serve in Kitai. It is … it is not easy to amend a broken world.”
That last was from a poem, not his own.
They heard a jingling sound. Soldiers, half a dozen of them, entered the courtyard at a run. One of them shouted an order.
Sima Zian murmured
something Tai didn’t hear.
The poet’s knife moved. The bandit, face down among earth and flowers, died instantly, before the guards arrived to claim his living body for more of what had been done to his brother in the night.
“How dare you kill him!” the lead guard rasped in fury.
Tai saw the poet about to reply. He stepped forward, lifting a quick hand. Zian, courteously, was silent, but he remained coiled now, like a snake who might still strike.
“How dare you let assassins into this inn yard!” Tai snapped. “Into a garden you were here to guard! I want your names given to my Kanlin, right now. I will wait for Governor Xu to advise me how he intends to make redress for this.”
The soldier looked, Tai decided, very like a fish extracted from his element, suddenly lacking easy access to breathing.
Xu Bihai was, it was already clear, not a man given to half measures. He’d regard this second failure by his guards as a stain upon his honour. These soldiers might well be executed, Tai thought. He wasn’t sure, at this particular moment, if that distressed him.
He took a breath. “I’m sorry your morning was disturbed,” he said to Zian.
The poet flexed his shoulders and neck, as if to loosen them. “Hardly your fault. And it isn’t as if I was asleep.”
“No?”
“Well, perhaps I’d dozed a little. But I was having my first cup. Will you join me now?”
Tai shook his head. “You must excuse me. I have to change for breakfast with the prefect. I forgot about it last night.”
“Ah!” said the poet. “We’d have been late for a dawn departure, even without this diversion.”
“We would have been.”
Tai turned to Song. She looked pale. She had cause. “You are all right?”
“They barely touched me.” It wasn’t true, he saw, there was a line of blood on her left side, showing through her slashed tunic. Her expression changed. “That was a foolish leap for someone who has not fought in two years! It was folly to even come out. What were you thinking?”
Tai stared at her, small and resolute, wounded, glaring up in fury. It was a maddening question. “What was I thinking? Who fights six men without calling for help?”
She looked away, then shrugged. “You know the Kanlin answer to that, my lord. Your servant offers apologies if you believe I erred.” She bowed.
He started another sharp retort, then stopped. He looked more closely. “Your hand is also hurt.”
She glanced at it indifferently. “I rolled over some rocks. I will get these soldiers’ names and have them taken to the governor. Is there a message?” She paused meaningfully. “For anyone else?”
Tai ignored that. “What happened to the two men in the garden last night?”
“They revived. I spoke with them. They took the river path home.”
“You were awake?”
She nodded. Hesitated. “It is why I saw when these others came up the garden.”
He thought about that. “Song, how would they know my chamber?”
“I think we will discover that someone here told them—under duress, or not. We can leave that, unless you wish otherwise, to Governor Xu’s inquiries.”
“Yes,” said Tai. “We are leaving as soon as I return from the prefect.”
“As soon as we return,” she said. She met his gaze. Her mouth was firm, her eyes resolute, indomitable.
He looked back at her. She had just fought six assassins, in silence, to keep him from coming out and possibly being killed in a fight.
He would need to ask her, though not just now, if she truly thought he was best served by being left to lie in bed to be attacked—unarmed and defenceless—in the event they killed her as she fought them alone.
“Your servant will escort you, and wait,” Song murmured. “If that is acceptable, my lord.”
She lowered her eyes, presenting a small, neat, lethal image, all deference and duty, in a black Kanlin robe.
“Yes,” he sighed. “It is acceptable.”
What was the point of saying anything else?
“Shandai is my brother!”
Li-Mei’s voice is louder than she’s intended it to be. They are alone, after all, only the wolves around them in a vast expanse, the sun just risen. But her heart is racing. “That is what you are trying to say? His name? Shen Tai?”
He turns to look at her. There is light, pale and benevolent, warming the land, mist is rising, dispersing. She can see him clearly for the first time, and she knows who this man has to be.
Tai had told them what happened. Well, he’d told their father, with Li-Mei among the willow trees near the stream.
This man with the stiff, ground-covering gait and the lightless eyes will surely be the one assailed by shaman-magic all those years ago, who had almost died. Or half-died. Or had been made into some … thing suspended between living and dead.
Tai hadn’t been able to tell their father which, so Li-Mei didn’t know. Couldn’t know, even looking now. But what fit was the identity, the remembered name—Meshag, son of Hurok—like the puzzle pieces of wooden toys her mother or Second Mother would sometimes bring home for her on market days long ago.
She should be terrified, Li-Mei thinks. He could be a monstrous spirit, a predator like his wolves, malignant, devouring.
He isn’t, though, and so she isn’t. He hasn’t touched her. The wolves haven’t. He is … he is rescuing me, the thought comes. And he is rescuing her, not the true princess, the emperor’s daughter, because—
“You are taking me away because of what Tai did?”
He has been staring at her, accepting her gaze in the growing light. After another long moment, his untied hair moving in the breeze, straying across his face, he nods his head once, down and back up.
“Yes,” he says. “Shan … Shendai.”
Li-Mei feels herself beginning to tremble, is suddenly much too close to tears. She hates that, but it is one thing to be fairly sure of a guess, it is another to be standing here with a spirit-figure and wolves, and be told it is true.
“How did you know I was with them? How did you know to come?”
She has always been able to think of questions to ask. Her voice is smaller. She is afraid of this answer, for the same reasons, most likely, that the Bogü riders were afraid of him last night.
Magic, whether the foretellings of the School of Unrestricted Night in Xinan, the potions and incantations of the alchemists, or darker, bloodier doings up here with mirrors and drums … this is not easy ground.
And the story her brother told, all those years ago, is still the worst she’s ever heard in her life.
Perhaps the man senses that? Or perhaps for an entirely different reason, he only shakes his heavy head and does not answer. Instead, he takes the leather flask from his hip and extends it to her, his arm straight out.
She doesn’t repeat her question. She takes the water, drinks. She pours some into one hand and washes her face with it, a little pointlessly. She wonders if he’ll be angry at the waste, but he says nothing.
His eyes are deeply disturbing. If she thinks about how they became so black and flat she will be afraid. He isn’t dead, she tells herself. Repeats it, within, as if for emphasis. She may need to keep telling herself this, she realizes.
He says, awkwardly, but in her tongue, “Cave not far. You rest. I find horses.”
She looks around at the grassland stretching, all directions. The lake is gone now, behind them. There is only grass, very tall, lit by the risen sun. The mist has burned away.
“A cave?” she says. “In this?”
For a moment she thinks he is amused. His mouth twitches, one side only. Nothing in the eyes. Light is swallowed there; it dies.
She hands him back the flask. He seals it, shoulders it, turns to walk on. She follows.
Shandai.
The world, Li-Mei decides, is a stranger place than any sage’s teachings can encompass. You have to wonder why the gods in their nine h
eavens have made it this way.
They reach the cave quite soon.
She’d missed the depression in the landscape ahead of them. From the edge, she sees this is a shallow valley, with another small lake within it. There are wildflowers on the banks. On the far side, the slope back up is steeper.
They descend and start across. It is full morning now, the air is warmer. At the lake Meshag fills his flask. Li-Mei washes her face properly, shakes out and reties her hair. He watches her, expressionless. He is not dead, she tells herself.
The lead wolf takes them to the cave at the eastern end. Its entrance is entirely hidden by tall grass. She’d never have seen it. No one who didn’t know this was here would see it.
This is not the first time, Li-Mei realizes, that the man and these animals have been here. He gestures. She finds herself crawling, elbows and knees, holding down fear, into a wolf lair.
The tunnel is narrow, a birth chamber, the smell of wolf all around, and small bones. She feels these, with her hands, under her knees. Panic begins to rise in the blackness, but then the cave opens up. She is in a space with rough stone walls and a ceiling she can’t even make out. She stands. It is still dark but not completely so. Light filters in farther up, openings high on the cliff face. She can see.
The strangeness of the world.
Meshag comes through the tunnel. The wolves have not followed them. On guard outside? She doesn’t know. How could she know? She is in a wolf cave in the Bogü grasslands beyond the borders of the world. Her life … her life has carried her here. The strangeness …
He hands her a satchel and the flask. “Here is food. Not leave. Wait. My brother will come after us, very soon.”
My brother. His brother is the kaghan’s heir. The man she is supposed to marry. She is a Kitan princess, a treaty-bride.
She looks at the man beside her. His speech, she decides, is already clearer. Can the dead learn things?
He isn’t dead, she reminds herself.
“Where are you going?” she asks, trying to keep apprehension from her voice. Alone, a cave in wilderness, wolves.
He looks impatient. It is almost a relief to see such a normal expression—if you don’t look at the eyes.
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