“Yes, there’s wine on the cabinet,” Nhia said. “I’m sorry, I should have offered.”
“It’s for you,” Khailin said, crossing over to the indicated cabinet and pouring a glass of rice wine, “before you faint on me. I need you to gather your wits back about you. I’ll answer any questions you have later.”
Khailin was halfway back to the couch where she had deposited Nhia, carrying the brim-full wine glass, when the door opened and Xaforn stuck her head into the room.
“I thought I heard voices. Is everything—”
Khailin froze. Xaforn flung the door completely open with one hand, drawing her sword with the other, already poised to strike. Nhia surged to her feet.
“NO!”
The point of Xaforn’s sword was already at Khailin’s throat. Xaforn said nothing out loud, but her eyes were steady on Khailin’s, and were eloquent: Move, and you die. Until I am convinced otherwise.
“It’s Khailin,” Nhia whispered, subsiding back onto the couch. “It’s Khailin. She’s back.”
“How did you get in here?” Xaforn snapped.
Khailin’s eyebrows rose, and her eyes, just her eyes, moved to catch Nhia’s gaze. Nhia understood. “The ghost road?” she said.
“The same sorcery Lihui uses?” Xaforn said.
“Like fire, it is neither an enemy nor a friend, just a tool,” Khailin said.
“Drop the glass,” Xaforn said.
“It will make a real mess, and the wine was for Nhia,” Khailin said.
“She takes nothing from you until I am sure that it’s safe. And the rest is not your concern. Drop the glass, and back away.”
“Xaforn, it’s all right.”
“I apologize,” Xaforn said, as Khailin obeyed her instructions and backed away from the puddle of wine on the floor with her hands held out to her sides to show that they held no weapon, “if I am discourteous. But my task here is to protect my lady, and all I know is that you entered this room without my leave or my sanction. Sit down.”
Khailin subsided into a chair, a small enigmatic smile playing on her face.
“Xaforn, that’s enough. She saved my life once. She would hardly come back to kill me.”
“And if I had intended that,” Khailin said, looking up calmly along Xaforn’s steady sword, “it would have been done already. I am on your side, Xaforn. Lihui is the one who is dead by my hand.”
“You killed the sorceror?” Xaforn said skeptically.
“We all die,” Khailin said. “Even, when their time comes, the immortals.”
“Khailin, why did you ever … ? How did you … ? Where?” Nhia’s voice petered out helplessly as she tangled herself into her own questions. Khailin’s existence for the past three years was a complete mystery and there was just no place that Nhia could attach a question—no place that was not yet another mystery that needed a back-step to be explained.
Xaforn cut through the knot. “Start at the beginning,” she said. Her sword had dropped down, pointing to the floor, but she was still standing a slice away from Khailin, watching her.
“The beginning?” Khailin whispered. “You really want to hear of the journey of a fool? Ah, but I learned that it is true that you should be careful what you ask of the Gods, because you will receive it in abundance.”
“You were never a fool, Khailin,” Nhia said.
Khailin laughed, her laugh brittle, bitter. “Oh, yes I was. A perfect, naive, arrogant, petty little fool. And in a way, you pushed me into it.”
Xaforn’s sword trembled, ever so slightly.
Nhia recoiled. “I did?” she whispered. “What did I have to do with it?
“Do you remember the Court at which we had our quarrel?” Khailin said.
“Yes. I have often thought of it. For a long time I believed that you no longer wished to even speak to me—and I thought I had overreacted to things, and I was sorry, but you were gone, and you were right about jin-shei—it does not disappear, whatever its origin or motivation. You were my jin-shei-bao then; you remain one today; you will always be one.”
Khailin’s eyes sparkled briefly with what looked like tears. “Yes,” she said softly, “I was almost lost. I had seen how easily it all seemed to come to you, how you would turn and Lihui would be at your side … and I was to have been married to a mewling princeling soon, and whatever power I would have would be as Princess Consort—Zhu-Khailin, locked away in the women’s quarters, enduring other wives and concubines beside me, bearing children who would inherit nothing but a title rooted in an obsolete Imperial bureaucracy. Then I saw one of the other Sages, and he had a woman on his arm, and they were all bowing to her—and she looked like such a perfect, pathetic, tradition-bound little doll. And it was so unfair, Nhia, so unfair, that I had the mind for it all and the passion and I had had to beg my father to give me the few meager pieces of hacha-ashu that he did and then learn the rest painstakingly, through deciphering it out myself, to read the astronomers and the alchemists whose works I wanted to understand. That woman, that Sage’s Lady, would make the perfect princeling’s wife. And I …” She laughed again, mirthlessly. “I would make a perfect Sage’s wife, you see. And he would teach me the things I wished to know. And I would never be trammeled by the silken cords of useless tradition. And there he was, Nhia, and he was young, and he was unmarried. So I haunted the Temple for the next few days, waiting for him, because I knew he came there. And when I saw him, I went to him and humbly begged for a moment of his time.”
“Certainly,” Lihui said, when the raven-haired young woman threw herself on her knees at his feet asking if she could speak to him. “You are, I think, the young lady from the Court of a few days ago? Khailin, I think? Well, Khailin,” he said, when she nodded at the name, “how may I be of assistance to you?”
“Marry me,” Khailin said, her eyes still downcast, but her voice absolutely steady
After a moment, Lihui laughed. “Well, that is something I don’t hear every day from beautiful young women,” he remarked conversationally. “Walk with me, if you will, and as we walk you may tell me why you think that we should be wed.”
He had helped her rise to her feet as he spoke, and now tucked her arm under his own, laying her fingers on his forearm and covering them with his free hand.
At first she had been quiet, and then incoherent—but he paid her the compliment of listening to everything she said as though she were speaking pearls of wisdom instead of babbling, uttering every platitude she could think of. In the silence that broke between them when she finally wound down, Khailin was aware that Lihui was smiling slightly, that nothing she had said had been either convincing or reasonable. His question still hung before her, tantalizing: Why do you think we should be wed?
“Because,” she said at last, lifting her eyes to his, “I want to know everything I can never know as the wife of a junior prince in the Imperial Palace. And I believe you can teach me.”
“You want to learn the Way?” Lihui said, raising an eyebrow. But his fingers had begun stroking hers, very gently, and Khailin suddenly felt queasy and breathless, as though she had walked onto unsteady ground.
“Yes,” she whispered, “I do.”
“Very well,” Lihui said. “Do you wish to have the ceremony right away?”
Khailin blinked. “Did you just say … ?”
“We are here, in the Temple,” Lihui pointed out reasonably. “As you yourself have said, you are technically betrothed to another. This would cause a great many complications if you were to pursue the traditional path, and it would end up costing a lot of people their reputations, including, probably, yourself. As a married woman, however, you may count on your husband to cut through some of the awkwardness. You expressed a wish to wed—I agree. You are here, I am here, we are both willing, the place is here, the time is now.” He cocked an eyebrow at her, demanding an answer, placing her in a position of standing behind her request or withdrawing it for ever more.
“All right,” she heard
herself saying.
He nodded, and led her away into the Inner Circles of the Temple. He had found a priest at liberty to perform the ceremony and the priest had been too cowed by the personage and the occasion to ask questions. A minion had been sent to purchase a set of thumb rings for Khailin in the First Circle—“I may not wear any rings but my Sage’s ring, my dear,” Lihui had explained affectionately, when Khailin’s mute glance asked the question of why just one set of rings. The rings had been procured, the priest had said the words, and Khailin, still in a daze, found herself married, walking out of the Temple with her new rings circles of fire upon her thumbs. She had spared a thought for her family, for her friends, but she had been allowed to contact nobody—“Let me deal with all that, my dear,” Lihui had said—and had been bundled instead into a sedan chair and taken at a fast trot in an unknown direction. To a place Lihui called “home.”
To the house at the end of the ghost road, and the hell that waited there.
Khailin had, incredibly, fallen asleep in the sedan chair, and had been woozy and only half awake when she had been handed out of the chair and into her new home by a silent servant. She would find out very quickly that no servant in this house would speak to her. All were silent and empty-faced, as if they were not alive, as if they had had their souls drunk from them and left to wander the earth as abandoned bodies, corporeal ghosts. Khailin would discover later how close to the truth her initial impressions had been.
She had been left to herself for a long time; she explored the house, going from room to room, quickly discovering that there were many locked doors that would not open to her touch—too many locked doors, too many mysteries. The doors to the outside were locked too, when Khailin tried them. And she began to be afraid.
And then the day faded, and evening came, and she discovered that she had still not touched bottom—because it was then that Lihui, his dark hair loose over his shoulders, came to her room, and to her bed. He had never stopped smiling at her, but his eyes were hot, and his hands were not gentle. Khailin was Khailin, after all—she did not scream, or cry, or even fight him—she had married him, and this was the marriage bed she had made. But her initiation into that world of which she had once read erotic and romanticized accounts in her mother’s secret jin-ashu letters had been hard, and fast, and brutal. Lihui had taken his bride with no gentleness, in the fullness of power, and gave her no softness or joy to cling to. When he was done he rose from her bed, donned the robe he had slipped out of in order to take possession of his property, and took up the taper he had brought in and laid aside on her bedside cabinet as he had climbed into bed.
“Your first lesson,” he said. “Your work requires lead and mercury. You can dig both out of the ground, or you can extract them slowly and painfully from plants like oak, nettle, wolfberry, or reed rushes. You will not try to leave this house.”
And then he was gone, taking the light with him, leaving Khailin alone and turned to stone in the darkness.
“That was how it was,” Khailin said to Nhia and Xaforn in the summer twilight of Nhia’s room. “He would come to me, he would plunge himself between my legs, he would get up, and before he left me he would offer me a sentence’s worth of alchemical wisdom and lore. It was the bargain I had asked for—exactly and precisely the bargain I had asked for. He would teach me. On his terms. And otherwise, he owned me.”
“So how did you leave the house?” Xaforn asked, practical as always, although the account had not left her unmoved.
For answer, Khailin lifted her arms and allowed her wide sleeves to fall back down her arms. Nhia gasped; along the length of both Khailin’s forearms were two puckered dragon-shaped brands.
“What did you do?” Nhia gasped.
“I was afraid of pain,” Khailin whispered. “And until I conquered that, the house held me. But it took me until well after you had escaped, Nhia, to face this. What I did was take the black heart of that house into myself. It burned me whenever I touched it thinking of leaving it—on this day I laid my arms against the dragons on the front door, and kept them there while the house burned me, burned me …” She stopped, drawing a ragged breath. “But afterward, it hid me from him. He never knew where I was again. And by that stage I had found the keys to his locked doors, I had unraveled the spells, I had read his books and I knew his secrets. I knew what he did, to himself, to the people he took. He is ancient, Nhia, and he feeds on new souls—he has to,” she spat out, “he has none of his own. That was how he was immortal—and he knew how to make the elixir that would let him live forever.”
“But you said he was dead!” Xaforn gasped.
Khailin laughed. “Oh yes. I watched the house burn around him.” She looked up, and her eyes were full of real tears now, and they spilled down her cheeks. “I killed him. And in order to kill him, I became him. I am the alchemist now.”
PART FIVE
Ryu
They were so young, my children. They were so young.
I still look on their first milk teeth in silk preserved,
in my treasure box. But now
their children cut their teeth as Ryu comes in its
autumnal glory.
Qiu-Lin, Year 20 of the Cloud Emperor
One
My children sleep. My husband is in his workshop. It is a quiet summer night outside, and tomorrow I will have been married four years. The world should be a place full of contentment and rejoicing.
Tai lifted the brush from the journal page and nibbled on the end of it. The lanterns in the courtyard cast a muted golden glow through the pleated wax paper painted with the signs for good health and prosperity, and moths fluttered uselessly against them, beating their wings against the shield that hid the true light from them. Tai watched them for a moment, and then dipped her brush into the inkwell and wrote again.
There are moths outside, ready to die for a light they crave but which is denied to them, shielded from them, which they can never achieve and which would kill them if they ever did succeed. Sometimes, in the midst of all that I have been given, I watch the moths and see myself as one of them, see the moths in us all. Everybody has a light which they think they cannot live without. I think of my jin-shei sisters, and they all have one, every one of them—Qiaan wants justice, Nhia wants peace, Khailin wants to know why the stars shine and is ready to take them apart to find out, Xaforn wants honor in people who have none, Yuet wants a world as nice and tidy as her stillroom, Amri just wants to be loved, and Liudan … Liudan wants everything, and wants it now.
And what does the moth called Kito-Tai want tonight? What is my impossible light? I seem to have it all—everything that they all want. I am loved, like few women have been loved; I have the peace of my family. Unlike Khailin I don’t need to pick apart a flower to learn what makes it bloom, and I am happy with that; unlike Yuet, and my children are glad of it, I do not need to have every bead and every brush and every slipper replaced in their own proper place, and I am happy with that. I have both honor and justice, they live in me and in the man whom I married. And I don’t have Liudan’s drive to prove anything to anyone at all. But it frightens me that I sit there at night and count my blessings as though they could be taken away any moment. The walls of this city that I was born in, the city which I know and love, rear around me, and sometimes they mean safety, and sometimes I look at them with Amri’s eyes and see what she sees—a cage to keep me in. And yet I speculate on their wishes and their dreams, but Yuet once said to me that what they all actually want is precisely what I already have—the husband, the home, the family. But still they turn from it, all of them, and bat their wings against their own impossible dreams. I love them, I love them all, but I fear how they will fare in a time of testing, when I have everything to fall back on and all each of them has is a single focused driving desire which may not be enough to sustain them. Amri …
A whimper from the children’s room next door to her bedroom made Tai lift her head, listening. When it was rep
eated, a little more insistently, she laid down her brush and went to investigate what ailed her baby, her son Baio, three weeks shy of his first birthday He was awake, kicking at his covers, his face scrunched up into what looked like the beginning of a wail; Tai gathered him up, coverlet and all, and whisked him out of the room before he could wake Xanshi, her three-year-old daughter, asleep in her own cot under the window.
“What is it, Baio-ban?” she whispered, rocking him on her lap. “Is it too hot to sleep?”
The child squirmed sleepily, happier now that he was in his mother’s arms, and Tai sighed inwardly as she watched Baio’s thumb migrate to his mouth, a relic of his early babyhood. She hummed a soft lullaby over her son’s small curled body, his dark head nestling against her shoulder, his lashes black silk against his cheeks. He was soon asleep. Tai sat motionless with him in her lap for a long time, her hand almost unconsciously smoothing back his hair, and marveled at his perfection, at his fragility, at the miracle of his existence. The future held some dark, inexplicable menace for her that night, and a deep unease fluttered inside of her, the thought that her son belonged to that future and that some day it would be beyond her power to take him in her arms and protect him against some horror as yet nameless and nebulous in her mind.
Two
The Sages always had all the answers.
Liudan would probably have been astonished at how forcefully she had brought the Beggars’ Guild and its cryptic leader back to the forefront of Nhia’s mind with that single sentence, uttered when she had come to tell Nhia of Lihui’s inexplicable disappearance from the Court. Nhia had determined then and there that she would go back and seek out the beggars. But events overtook her, and Khailin returned unlooked-for from the dark bearing the news of Lihui’s death. Nhia, at first genuinely distracted from her original intentions, finally had to face the fact that she was shying away from carrying them out. Going back to the lair of the man whom she had begun to think of as the Beggar King, in capitals, would have meant returning to the beginning of a journey that now seemed ended. Khailin swore Lihui was dead, that he was gone; the whole dark episode was buried in Nhia’s past now and it astonished her how badly she wanted it to stay there.
The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 37