“You walked across town in that finery and you don’t remember doing it? Who is it that you seek?”
Nhia hesitated, but the Beggars’ Guild were not ignorant savages. They kept themselves informed, sometimes better than anyone in the Palace. They would know of Lihui.
“The Ninth Sage Lihui,” she said after a pause.
She saw a swift exchange of glances between several of the people in the room, but could not interpret it.
“Lihui is your teacher?” the beggar king asked, and his tone had hardened a little. “How is it that a man like that is the counsellor to one like the Young Teacher in the Temple? It is like a dragon teaching a swan. They both fly, but one spews fire and destroys and the other nurtures and protects.”
“What?” Nhia’s eyes widened in shock. If she had expected the beggars to be aware of Lihui’s identity, she had certainly not expected them to sit in judgment upon him.
“You will not find him anywhere near here,” the beggar king said, his voice cold. “We know him, and we are wise to his disguises. Does he now send you to lull us into dropping our guard?”
“I do not understand,” Nhia said. “I don’t know of what you speak.”
“When he needs bodies for his work, he comes to the streets,” the beggar kind said. “He takes these people, the street people. My people. It matters little to him that there is a living human soul in the twisted bodies he rips apart.”
“Lihui is a Sage of the Imperial Court!” Nhia gasped. “He does not do this abomination!”
“Your teacher is a dark alchemist,” one of the other men said. He stepped forward, into the candlelight, and Nhia saw his own eyes were gone, two white scars in their place. “He did this to me, before I escaped his house. Others were not so lucky. What is he teaching you, Young Teacher?”
“He teaches me the Way,” Nhia said. “He has been my guide to the Fountains of Cahan, to wisdom, to knowledge.” She swallowed hard, remembering her last encounter with Lihui. “He gave me wings, even. In meditation I am whole, I can fly across all of heaven and not be weary.”
“This is much, for one like you,” the beggar king said after a pause, and his voice was full of understanding. “They tell me you are lame.”
“I was born that way,” whispered Nhia.
“Your mother should have sent you to us,” said the beggar king. “We would have trained you.”
“But I am training …”
“I have heard speech of the judgments you give for the Empress, for the ordinary people who come to her courts,” said the beggar king. “We will send you home. But for the safety of your own immortal spirit, I advise you to stay away from the alchemist. He will pour poison into your fountains before you will drink of them. Xi, Lam, get a sedan and make sure she gets back to the Middle City safely.”
“Yes, Brother. Come, sai-an.”
Nhia, dazed, accepted the dismissal and the guiding hands of the two who were detailed to escort her. They were courteous, respectful, and quite firm; somehow, before she knew it, she found herself ensconced in a hired sedan chair, being carried back to the Temple. It seemed to take a very long time to get there. Nhia remembered how quickly she had got to the beggars’ streets from her own threshold that morning, and found herself afraid.
They deposited her at the Temple, and she spent the next few hours sitting by herself in the gardens of the Third Circle, seeking some of the peace of mind that those gardens had always brought to her—but it was in those Circles that she and Lihui had first crossed paths, and that kept coming back to haunt her. She remembered his hands, lifting her that first time, right here in the Temple; supporting her in the Palace; holding her while she swam back into earthly consciousness in the teaching rooms. Gentle hands. The wise words that had accompanied them—the words she had committed to her study journal, just as he had said them, to think on and to seek wisdom and understanding.
A dark alchemist.
How was it possible?
Here in the Temple, far from the presence of the blind beggar king, some of the power of what he had said was stripped from it. His words rang strange, hollow; here in the Temple it was Lihui’s word that held sway.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, as clearly as if she had heard them spoken beside her, she heard Lihui’s voice shaping words: I waited for you, Nhia. Where were you?
Sleep came fitfully that night, and was full of both of them, Lihui and the beggar king. One said, Come to me. The other raised a hand to stop her, his blind eyes staring straight through her, Do not go to him.
She woke, wild-eyed, and it was Lihui’s voice that had been the last echo in her mind. She dressed carefully again, as she had done the day before, and stepped out into the street outside her house. And this time nobody touched her, nobody jostled her, nobody stood in her way. Somehow, not quite knowing how, she found herself standing before a pair of wooden gates set into a high wall, all painted a dark red. The gates opened at her touch, and a silent servant waited inside, bowing to her, to conduct her into a pagoda house, and down a flight of stairs into a windowless room lit with braziers and two brightly leaping fires from two fireplaces set at opposite ends of the room. Painted panels with hacha-ashu writing screened parts of the room from her gaze as she swept her eyes across it. Dressed in a loose robe of crimson silk, Lihui turned from a table against the far wall, a half-full wine goblet in his hand. For the first time since Nhia had met him she saw him with his usually tightly braided hair loose over his shoulders, and it flowed well down past the middle of his back, rich and black, framing his face in a way she had not seen before and bringing the black glowing coals of his eyes into prominence.
“You are here,” he said, his voice light, almost conversational. “Good. There is much to do; let us begin. Some wine?”
“I do not …” Nhia began, but he had already poured some into a second goblet, topping off his own in the process, and had crossed the room to her, handing her the glass.
“Over here,” he invited, stepping aside and handing her into the room as he closed the door behind her. “Have a seat by the fire, and we will start. You are tardy, my student. I expected you here yesterday as I commanded.”
“I …” Nhia usually shied away from wine or any strong drink, but she had taken several small sips from the goblet she held in her hands, through the polite instinct of drinking from a glass handed to her by a host, or maybe through the sheer forceful energy of Lihui’s presence—he had handed her the drink, therefore she must obey and drink it. But even those few small swallows seemed to have started her head swimming. Perhaps it was just that she was unused to it, but she snatched a lucid moment to realize that Lihui had set his own goblet on the table before them and was watching her very closely.
Do not go to him, the beggar king’s voice echoed in her mind, urgent, a warning. A warning she should have heeded.
The tongues of flame from the hearth fire suddenly grew hotter and brighter, and the air in the room solidified into spiced honey in Nhia’s throat. Her fingers opened, nerveless, slack; she never heard the glass shatter on the stone hearth when it tumbled out of her hand, her vision tunneling into licking red flames and then into black. She reached out blindly, groping for support. The last coherent thing she remembered was Lihui’s arm slipping around her waist as she spiraled into oblivion.
Eight
What a strange dream I had.
Nhia, eyes still closed, was dimly aware of lying on a soft surface, a bed, but when she tried to turn and stretch and burrow back into sleep she found herself unable to move. Her arms were stretched loosely above her head, but when she tried to bring them down to pillow her face she realized that her wrists were tied together with something soft but strong which also anchored her arms to a solid and unyielding point behind and above her.
This was no dream.
Nhia’s eyes flew open as memory flooded in. She was in Lihui’s room, but this was a very different place to the one she had entered … how long was
it … minutes, hours, days ago? Most of the concealing screens had been removed. A cluttered L-shaped desk and laboratory bench took up one whole corner next to one of the fireplaces. Half of it bore an eclectic mixture of laboratory equipment, distillation apparatus, alembics, assorted glassware with strangely colored liquids inside, a mortar and pestle, and a small crucible with an open flame above which, as Nhia watched, something in a long-necked glass flask bubbled quietly. The other half was piled with books and manuscripts, an inkwell, a quiver full of writing quills and brushes, a roll of parchment prepared for writing and held down by several paperweights which looked like human skulls. Another skull, fitted with an iron band which hinged at the jaw, sat on a small three-legged stool beside the table, set upside down on its crown in a carved ebony base, its jaw “lid” open.
The Sage Lihui, dressed in a dark draped robe fastened with a clasp on one shoulder, turned from his workbench as Nhia watched, bearing a pewter bowl in his hands. He glanced over at her, realized she was awake, gave her a half-smile and a courtly bow, and then crossed to the skull and carefully poured the contents of his bowl inside, closing the jaw on top of it as he did so. Then he picked up the skull in both hands, swirled it slightly to mix whatever was in it, and crossed the room to the bed on which Nhia was tied.
“Awake, my dear?” Lihui said. “Good. Then we can finally begin.”
Nhia opened her mouth to speak but no sound came out, not even a whisper. Lihui saw the shock of that wash over her features, and smiled, setting the skull down on a delicately lacquered chest of drawers that served as a bedside table.
“Don’t try to talk, Nhia,” he said gently. “You can’t. I took your voice, for now. You will not need it for a while. All you need to do is listen to me, and to do what I need you to do. There is nothing wrong with your senses, in fact they are stronger than they have ever been, and we will sharpen even that.” He reached out, lifted her head and pillowed it on his arm, reached for the skull vessel with his other hand. “Drink, Nhia. This will bring you to the edge of flight. This is a draught of immortality, waters from the Fountains of Cahan.”
The words were lancing—she had thought he had spoken in metaphors before, when he had mentioned the Fountains, but now she had a clear sense that he spoke of a thing that was as real and solid as his gentle but inexorable touch.
“Drink,” he said firmly, lifting the edge of the skull against her lips.
She felt liquid lap against her mouth, tried turning her head away in feeble defiance, but Lihui let her head fall back, just a little, tightening the muscles in her neck. Nhia gasped; her lips parted, the liquid from the skull vessel flooded her mouth, she swallowed convulsively. Lihui set her down, very gently.
“Good. It will take a few minutes. Just relax.”
Colors swirled in her vision as she lay back against the pillow, and then she rose above them, through them, every edge in the room suddenly diamond-etched, sharp enough to cut. She heard rustles of small living creatures in distant dark corners of the room, saw the warp and weft of the weave in the canopy of silk stretched above the bed she lay in, felt the smoothness of silk caress her body—she was aware, suddenly, that she was not wearing her own clothes but a pale robe, twin to the one Lihui was garbed in, fastened at the shoulder with a metal clasp. The taste in her mouth was metallic, an unholy mixture of terror, raw panic, and the chemical soup that had been in the skull potion. The very air sang in her ears, every nerve ending in her body quivering with sensation.
Lihui glanced at her, seemed satisfied with what he saw, nodded. Nhia heard him start murmuring something, in a voice she hardly recognized, in a language she did not know, his back to her now, his arms raised as if in invocation, his long dark hair lifting and quivering at the ends as though in response to some unfelt breeze. His voice rose in a crescendo of power; Nhia heard herself screaming, but knew that she made no sound in the firelit room. Lihui touched the clasp that held his robe; it fell open and he discarded it, leaving it in a crumpled heap of silk on the floor, as he turned and strode back toward the bed. He was nude, his lithe, muscular body painted by light and shadows from the fire, his hair caressing his naked shoulders, his eyes a glow of triumph.
“It was good,” he said conversationally, in his normal voice, “that you were physically marked. A beauty of flesh coupled with that beauty of spirit, and you would have been any man’s prize. But with this …” His hand came down lightly on Nhia’s withered leg, his fingers caressing the length of it until they reached the twisted foot. “It took a Sage and a sorcerer to see the inner beauty. And you have remained pure for me.”
Nhia whimpered, soundlessly, closing her eyes.
“You will feel,” Lihui said, leaning over to whisper into her ear. “You will give. You will give … everything.”
She felt him touch the clasp on her own robe and the fabric slipped free; Lihui swept it from her in a single motion, leaving her lying naked and exposed on the silken sheets. Then his hands came to rest on her shoulders, still gentle, still frighteningly kind.
“And you are a beauty, after all,” he breathed, his thumbs slipping from her collarbone to sweep over her breasts. His touch was fire; Nhia writhed, turning her head away. “Ah, more to come,” Lihui said. “Don’t use it all up now. I want it all. You have known no man before me, I think. Good. Good. The essence is made stronger. The first time, then, for the body; the rest, for the spirit. Feel it, Nhia. Feel it all.”
His hands slipped further down, caressing her breast, her waist, coming to rest on her hips. She felt the bed shudder, then her legs being pushed apart by his knees as his hands came down, further down, fingertips a featherlight touch on her thighs as far down as her knees and then back up on the inside of her thigh, gently, so gently …
“It may hurt, a little,” he said, almost apologetically, as his hands came together and brushed up and down between her legs. Nhia’s body arched, twisted, but there was no escape from his touch, from his gentle voice, from his presence. She would not open her eyes, keeping them tightly closed, squeezing out hot tears between eyelids pressed together—she would not look, she would not, she would not give him even that much. But he was right in that he was taking everything, and her traitor’s body with its preternaturally aroused senses writhed in both anguish and vivid shocks of pleasure that were hateful to her but which she could not barricade her mind against as he opened her with his long fingers and then, his hipbones hard against her own, he entered her with a grinding thrust and groan of his own pleasure. Nhia’s hands were clenched into tight fists, her arms straining from her shoulders, her breath catching in painful sobs as a rending pain jack-knifed her body under Lihui’s on the bed … and then it was over. He was lying on top of her, supported on his elbows, a hand pushing Nhia’s hair away from her face, his voice a miracle of softness and wonder, whispering beside her ear.
“And now,” he said, impossibly, the meaning of his words a searing agony that made Nhia’s eyes fly open in yet more anguish, only to meet the quiet triumph in his eyes, “we begin.”
He pulled out of her and sat up, murmuring more invocations.
What more do you want? Nhia screamed at him, in her mind, still only in her mind
Incredibly, he answered her there. Your body is only a gateway to your soul, my dear. For the rest, we will have to go back to that place where you fly free. But never forget that I hold the power to bring you down. You die at my word, Nhia. Do not forget that.
She felt him inside her then, not inside her body, a greater violation still, inside the heart and mind and spirit of her; he laid his gentle hand on it all, and it was the touch of iron.
Fly, he commanded.
And oh, she did—she was back in the sky that had terrified and exalted her so that first time she had experienced it, and this time it was even greater and bluer and more wonderful than she remembered, and beyond the blue there were stars, she could see them glittering, count them in their multitudes, her eagle’s wings spreading
to catch the wind as she climbed up toward them.
Yes, she heard in her mind, an exultant shout, not her own. Yes!
She opened her eyes then, at last, and looked. She saw a creature of fire rearing over her, his eyes glowing embers of burning red coals, his hair flames about his face. She saw a spirit that had been old when the world was young, its centuries heavy on it, needing sustenance to survive, to endure. She saw the thing that bound her to this monster, a thread of light, streaming into his open mouth; he was drinking her, all of her, taking the essence of a pure spirit and filling up the fiery vessel that was himself, glowing ever brighter as he drained her, sucked her dry.
Even as it came the vision blurred and faded. Nhia’s eagle self became a ghostly echo, and slowly faded from the sky full of stars, or they faded from around her, growing distant and pale and insubstantial. In the earthly anchor of her body, she saw Lihui poised over her, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, his hands on her shoulders, and then even that vanished, slowly, from the outer edges in, as the potion in the skull seemed to lose effect and the cutting edges of things blurred back into just distant, fuzzy outlines and then dimmed into a uniform grayness which deepened into black. And then she knew no more.
When Nhia swam back to consciousness, she appeared to be alone in the alchemist’s room. The fire on one of the two hearths had gone out completely, and the other was just a glow of embers; only the weak light from a couple of guttering candles pierced the gloom. She had been unbound, though, and lay curled up on her side, like a child, covered lightly with a sheet. A strand of her loose hair fell across a naked shoulder showing from under the sheet, and Nhia, bringing her bleary eyes to focus on it, saw that there was white in it, a white streak that snaked through the black tresses. She ached all over, as though she had been beaten senseless. A groan escaped her, and she wondered, vaguely, why the sound should have significance to her, before dredging from her memory the spell of silence that Lihui had cast upon her the night before.
The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 25