“I knew I should have waited,” said yet another voice from the door, “until I could cut his head off myself.”
Maxao inclined his head, without changing the direction of his blind gaze. “Khailin,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”
It was Tai who looked around and made the connection.
“That’s all of us,” she said, “all except Xaforn who is away from the city and Qiaan, who is … who is …”
“Who is with Lihui right now,” Maxao said. “Who is his eyes. Who is his ticket to the position he has always wanted. Once he knew who she was, what she could be made into, he has spared no effort to exploit her strengths and her vulnerabilities. He has made it possible for her to do what she wants to do with her life, and in return she is his path to power, and to the Empire. Qiaan … your Qiaan is an annoying woman,” Maxao said musingly. “There is that in her which insists on helping people who sometimes need no help whatsoever. She has repeatedly tried to better the lives of not a few members of my Guild—people who, even with the tithes they pay to the Guild, make a living out on the streets the extent of which would stagger a few of you in this room. But because a man is lame or a woman old and toothless or a child dirty and barefoot in the streets, they must be taken into shelters and forcibly fed and clothed and remade into what Qiaan saw as useful members of society. It vexed her no end that so many of those she thus saved escaped at the first opportunity to return to their own lives. Nonetheless, she must return to Linh-an at once—even if it does mean that she continues her exasperating activities.”
“Return to Linh-an?” For the first time, Liudan’s voice betrayed a genuine interest. “Return from where?”
“You have not tried looking for her already?” Maxao said. “And have you not found that she has disappeared completely? She is no longer in Linh-an, Empress. She hasn’t been for some time. And now we have the problem that someone must go and snatch her from Lihui’s side—for with her as his willing guide he has suddenly become powerful and dangerous again.”
“How did he get to her?” Khailin demanded. “How, if he wasn’t able to use the ghost road himself, could he get to Linh-an and take Qiaan?”
“Because he found a temporary pair of eyes somewhere on the road as he wandered, because he must have lingered in some place where some poor kind soul stopped to find out what the matter was and if this wreck of a wounded man could be helped in some way. That compassionate being is long gone, of course—useful only for long enough to be Lihui’s eyes on the ghost road, and then killed, discarded, abandoned while he stalked Qiaan and finally found occasion to get close to her, and to tell her the secret none of you would tell her. That she might be royal. That she could do by decree and by fiat what she had been doing with her own two hands for years. He lied to her, of course—he always lies—and told her that she was far more royal than she is. But his lies are always the more dangerous when built upon a kernel of truth, and this was a powerful kernel indeed—and he retains the power of cloaking his lies with beauty. To her, he is not scarred or blind or someone who needs her in order to survive—to her, I have no doubt, he seems a very prince of power. And the longer she stays with him, the more potent the illusion becomes.”
“What must we do?” said Tai.
“Someone must go to where Qiaan is, and bring her back,” Khailin said.
“And she must come willingly,” Maxao added. “Taking her by force means that the illusion holds, and she will return to him as soon as she is left alone for long enough for him to regain control over her mind. No, she must understand why she must come, and agree to it. No force, no weapons, no coercion. She must listen to somebody she trusts, and believe in what she hears, and come of her own free will. She must renounce him” His voice had become a thing of power, the words he was saying almost a spell of enchantment. “And because of that, it is one of you who must go to her. One of her own jin-shei.”
Nhia blanched, recoiling. “I cannot go back. Not to that …”
Maxao turned his head again, leaning forward heavily on his staff. “Nor would I ask it of you, my dear. Your fear makes you a target. It makes you immune to Lihui’s voice, to be sure, because you already know the truth about him—but your fear would make you his prisoner before you begin, and then we would have lost two of you. No, not you.”
“The only other one who knows how to walk this road, Sage Maxao, is I,” said Khailin. “Is this why you have summoned me?”
“No. Not you either. You do not fear him, but you hate him. Your hate would blind you to too much, and you cannot yet face him alone—and it is alone that the one who goes must enter his stronghold.”
“I will go,” said Tai in a small voice, “if someone would tell me how.”
“No!” The word was torn from three throats at once—Nhia’s, Tammary’s and, surprisingly, Liudan’s.
“No,” Maxao agreed in a voice as tranquil as if he were refusing a glass of water. “Not you. Not the one who holds it together.”
“I don’t …” Tai began, astonished, but Tammary took hold of her hand and Tai saw that tears were standing in the Traveler girl’s eyes.
“No, not you,” Tammary said. “You with your quiet and joyous life where we all come to seek comfort. You have always been the one who showed me that happiness was possible. I would not risk that for anything. I will go in your place, even though I never knew Qiaan well.”
“That is why you are not the one, either,” Maxao said. “She will not come for the wrong person, or to the wrong call.”
“She would come to me,” Yuet said softly. “I think she would. I think I grew to love her and respect her and even try to begin understanding her during the time of the illness. She deserves the chance. I will go.”
“You cannot use the ghost road, healer,” Maxao said implacably. “You are simply not compatible with it. You have the compassion, but you don’t have the imagination.” Yuet flinched, as though she had been physically struck. Ignoring her reaction, Maxao continued talking without missing a beat. “You would see nothing that you would recognize, and too much that would attract you to turn aside from the path, and you would be lost.”
“I don’t understand,” Yuet said.
“Precisely,” said Maxao, nodding. “And before you, too, volunteer, dear Empress, I would think it obvious that you yourself cannot go, for reasons that do not require further elaborating, and should not go, because Qiaan is standing in opposition to you and would hardly return to Linh-an on your say-so, knowing that you would probably bring her back to try her for treason.”
“But that leaves nobody,” Tai whispered.
“It leaves one. The one whom she trusts, and who has already been trained to follow her to wherever Lihui is hiding her.” Maxao turned back to where Liudan was still standing, not having moved since he entered the room. “Bring Xaforn back from the border. Now.”
“What do you mean, trained?” Liudan said.
“Call it precognition,” Maxao said. “Call it luck. Call it the will of the Lord of Heaven, if you want to. But when Xaforn came into the Guards she shone out like a diamond among the glass chips of the others of her level. She proved again and again that she was more gifted, more focused, more dedicated, better. She had nothing but the Guard, and the Guard was everything to her. She was perfect.”
“Perfect for what?”
“There is a Guard in the ranks, a veteran, whose name I don’t think I should divulge here,” Maxao said, with a wolfish grin. “He was a disciple of the Way, in his time, before he chose the path of the warrior, not the sage. He took on the training of the young ones, always having been a teacher by nature. When he chanced upon the young Xaforn, so hungry, so eager to learn … so talented in ways that few are talented … he taught her things the rest of her class never learned. How to center into a white light inside herself when she gathers her energies for a kill. How to make herself faster, deadlier, how to become an extension of her weapon, how to become her weapon. Lihui e
ncountered her once, in that power, and was turned by it—and knows she is dangerous. She, in turn, has encountered Lihui at least once, and knows that he backed off from the fight at that time. And she has one other qualification for this job, one that none of the rest of you possess.”
“And what is that?” Liudan said, her face grim. She had lost control of this situation the moment the Beggar King walked into the room, and she was not happy about it.
“She grew up in the Guard, and so did Qiaan. She knew her when they were both little children. She and Qiaan made a connection long before either of them met any of the rest of this circle. If Qiaan will trust anybody, it will be Xaforn. And Xaforn knows how to go to her. And, more important, knows how to get back.”
“And how to die defending them both if the situation turns deadly,” Tai said.
“She is a warrior, yes,” Maxao said sternly “That is her calling. That is who she is.”
“What of that war on the borders?”
“It will probably come,” Maxao said. “It would be precisely the kind of thing that Lihui would want—something to distract you, to keep your attention elsewhere, far from the city, while he brings Qiaan back here and strikes at the heart of it all. He doubtless already has something in place with the riders of Magalipt. They might get the pass, or even Sei-lin. It depends on how hard a bargain they drove with him to be his decoys. It will come, but it will not come this spring.”
“But the letter that the scribe was copying in the office …” Nhia began.
“Did you stop to wonder why they did such copying in your office, Chancellor of Syai? Right underneath your nose where anyone could have tripped on it?”
“Because the best place to hide something is in plain sight?” Khailin said, grinning a small feral smile.
“There is that, too,” Maxao said, nodding. “But in this instance, probably because he wanted you to find out, because he needed you to go and hit Liudan with it, because he knew that you would, because he needed attention focused over there. He all but sent you a copy of that letter.”
“He couldn’t know that Khailin would be there, and that she can …”
“That she can read hacha-ashu?” Maxao said. “I know you can, my dear. You would have to be able to, to have learned what you did at Lihui’s house. He did not teach you what you know willingly or directly—you would have had to read it all, in his library. Which once was mine. The loss of which I do mourn.” He sighed. “Could you not have found another way out than to burn that house?”
“But if you could use someone else’s eyes and go to his house,” Khailin said, clenching her jaw, “why could you not have come there, and destroyed him?”
“Because he took from me more than my sight,” Maxao said bitterly. “I can no longer stand against him. Long before Lihui decided to move against me he had made an elixir with my essence in it and made himself invulnerable to it, and thus to me. I cannot harm him, through spell or direct action. It would have been pointless, my going down the ghost road to Lihui’s house. I could have done nothing there except die.”
“But I was there,” Khailin said. “I could have helped.”
He turned and fixed her with a blind stare that bored right through the heart of her. “Ah,” he said, “but at the time I did not know that he had another mage living underneath his roof.” He turned away from Khailin, leaving her standing very still, with her hands folded over the hollow of her throat, her eyes wide on him, and turned back to Liudan with a smile which might once have been gracious but which was ghastly in that ruined face. “You see, Empress, I don’t know everything, despite your fears. Now—recall Xaforn and send her for Qiaan. Lihui will follow, because right now she is his passage to every ambition he has ever had. And when he comes back to Linh-an …” His face twisted into a grimace of loathing. “When he comes back to Linh-an, it will be time to settle some old accounts. I will be here to meet him.”
“I thought you just said you could not harm him,” Tai said.
“I can’t. Not on my own.” Maxao turned back to where Khailin still hadn’t moved, and held out his free hand, waiting with a patience at once complacent and haughtily royal until Khailin, almost unwillingly, stepped forward and placed her own slightly trembling fingers there. His huge hand closed around her slender one, engulfing it, and he pulled her forward very gently but inexorably for all that. “But I am not going to be on my own.”
Six
You are not to fight him. You do not need to go armed to the teeth. You are to go in lightly, and see her, and speak to her, and then you will both leave. Quietly. Do not start a war. Not yet. You don’t need to take the Guard armory with you.
Xaforn had been partly annoyed and partly amused by the injunction she had been given. She was aware that Qiaan’s people all knew exactly who she was, and therefore knew that she was a weapon—going in empty-handed would hardly have meant that they would have refrained from harming her. But it had been a condition placed upon her, and Xaforn accepted it. She took no weapon other than the pair of throwing daggers she always carried in her boots.
This was the last chance she—or anyone—would have to talk to Qiaan, to reason with her, to maybe turn the tide of events. There had already been several skirmishes—in Linh-an itself, and in other cities, too. Some of them had been bloody. Things had already been done in Qiaan’s name that Xaforn, who knew her, could not believe that she had sanctioned. Not Qiaan—not the girl who had once patiently taught her jinashu, who had worked without grumble or complaint at the most menial of jobs when it came to saving lives in a deadly epidemic, who had dedicated herself to bettering the lives and the prospects of the city’s poor, who had fed the hungry and taught the ignorant. This woman, so dedicated to saving lives, could not now be issuing orders for those lives to be offered for a cause that seemed to be neither more nor less than herself taking on the role which she had often so trenchantly condemned when Liudan was cast in it. She had been the people’s light; she was now the new royalty.
Khailin had said that it was all Lihui’s doing, that he could twist someone’s mind and soul and aspirations so that they believed utterly that they were their own but which only served to further his own goals and ambitions.
“If I should cross his path, I will kill him,” Xaforn had said darkly, but Khailin had laughed.
“If you should cross his path, I have no doubt that you will try,” she said, “but Xaforn, he would burn you to ashes.”
“Maxao said that I had the training,” Xaforn said, stubborn, implacable.
“Enough to stand against an army of mortal men, yes,” Khailin had said. “To stand against Lihui, alone, no. Not even you. Not yet. Not until you have trained for a hundred years, and have long forgotten what it means to be human. Not even Maxao can stand against him alone. Take the old amulet with you, Xaforn, it still has power. At least it will protect you against surprise.”
“But I don’t know how to walk this shadow road of yours!” Xaforn said. “And what if the amulet … ?”
“It traveled safely with Nhia. And it’s the ghost road. And you do know how to do it. It’s in you, in your training, in that light you carry within you. Picture her in your mind, picture Qiaan’s face, and then start walking, keep that face in your thoughts, don’t stop for anything until you are sure that you are in a place where your goal is. Remember, the journey of a thousand years starts with a single step.”
“That is a Temple platitude,” Xaforn said.
“Sometimes even the Temple stumbles on the truth.”
“How do I come home, Khailin?”
“You can think of me,” Khailin said, laughing. “And if you do, I will be there to meet you at the end of your road. But in truth, all you have to do is walk until you see Linh-an before you. And it is possible to manipulate the stuff of the ghost road, Xaforn, so if you catch sight of a Linh-an sky that you recognize, keep hold of the sky. The city beneath it will change. Wait until it changes to something you know.”
“I’m not sure I want to do that,” said Xaforn, suddenly uneasy. “Cahan alone knows where I would end up.”
“Perhaps even Cahan,” Khailin said irreverently. “Go. And may all the Gods be with you on this mission. I will … I will light an incense stick for you in front of the little ugly God in the Temple. He answered my prayers at least once before.”
“Which little ugly God?”
“When I was a child I once told my mother that there were so many offerings at his feet that nobody ever saw being put there that I thought the little ugly thing simply worshipped itself,” Khailin said. There was an odd little smile of reminiscence on her mouth. She hadn’t thought of the little ugly God in years. Truth be told, she hardly knew if he was still there, still so extravagantly worshipped.
“Xinxan the Finder?” Xaforn said.
Khailin gave her a startled look. “You know that God?”
“People go to that shrine to ask for help in finding lost things,” Xaforn said, and then added, with a strange little smile of her own, “On the whole, I think I’d prefer that you didn’t light incense there just yet. He might take it into his head that, since I haven’t been exactly lost yet, you might wish me to become lost rather than found. With the Gods, you never know.”
Khailin was shaking her head. “Go,” she said. “And good luck to you.”
So Xaforn had walked out, unarmed except for her small daggers and unarmored, dressed only in a Guard practice smock.
Qiaan. Qiaan’s face.
The face that formed in her mind, strangely enough, was not the woman that Qiaan had become. It was the face of the child she had once been. The face of a child that rarely laughed, the permanently serious and sometimes mournful expression that she habitually wore which had once given her the nickname of Qiaan of the Long Face. Given what she now knew about Qiaan’s true parentage and heritage, the memory was a sudden sharp pain for Xaforn.
The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 42