“I didn’t understand,” she whispered. “Not then.”
She fought her way past the child’s face, flowing the features through the intervening years, until she had a firm picture of Qiaan’s present-day features in front of her. And then she took her first step.
The buildings on the street she was on blurred beside her, and flowed into smoke; the path at her feet opened up, twisting forward, pale and almost glowing in the mist. Xaforn took a deep breath and, keeping her mind fixed on Qiaan’s face like a talisman and one of her hands tightly wrapped around the amulet at her throat, walked forward on the ghost road.
Glimpses.
Khailin had said she would see things.
Beside her, the mists opened and closed unexpectedly, giving Xaforn hints of other places, other times. A great dog, tied to the end of a chain, snarling and snapping, saliva foaming in his mouth. A girl dancing in a high mountain meadow. Something winged and golden—a dragon—flying across an amber-colored sky. A woman’s hand, wearing a ring with a blood-red stone. A mother bent over a baby … or it just looked like it … as Xaforn’s step slowed momentarily the ‘mother’ looked up and her yellow eyes bore slitted pupils like a snake’s and her mouth was full of small sharp teeth and of the blood of the child which she had been devouring. Xaforn dropped her eyes, picked up her pace. Beside her, a white waterlily on a dark pond. A city, under snow, with soft flakes falling like a veil. Children’s laughter. The sudden scent of fresh-baked bread. The creak of an old door. A glimpse of steps descending into darkness. A sensation of heat, and the hint of the ruddy glow of a bonfire coloring the mists a translucent ruby. A cherry tree in bloom.
Qiaan’s face. Qiaan’s face!
Xaforn’s own sign, a Lion, lying under a thorn tree, tail twiching. A great carpet, unrolling, its softness a sudden sensation on Xaforn’s fingertips. Music, unfamiliar music played on instruments she could not identify. The glint of sunlight on a moving army of bright spears. Battle, with distant screams echoing in her head, the coppery smell of blood, a body sprawled with one hand almost on the ghost road, dead eyes staring at Xaforn. A child’s bright ball. A full moon in an empty sky, glimpsed through a window, and the silhouettes of two lovers kissing. An old woman, spinning. A boy digging a hole, a dead dog beside him. A black pot hung over a hearth, the sudden taste of mulled wine in Xaforn’s mouth. Tree bark. A desert of stones. An empty city street.
Qiaan’s face. Qiaan’s face …
There was a blur of color, and then things stopped, solidified.
Xaforn found herself in a large room, with a fire crackling on the wide brick hearth whose edges, black with soot, bore mute witness that it had not been cleaned for years. There was a draught from somewhere, through an ill-fitting door or a shutter not fastened properly, and it made the garish, home-dyed silk hangings on the walls shift and tremble with each breath of air. Faded, ancient tapestries covered the rest of the walls, giving the room an illusion of a once vivid and powerful but now vanished opulence. It was what Qiaan’s armies might have thought a queen’s chamber looked like.
In the middle of this stood Qiaan herself, her hair up in an elaborate style held together by ivory pins, dressed in a woolen robe of an improbable purple hue. Another approximation of royalty. She was the Vagabond Queen, poor but proud, waiting to come into her own, and in the meantime making do with makeshift glory. The whole thing was so theatrical, so unlike the practical, matter-of-fact Qiaan that she had known in the compound, that for a moment Xaforn could do nothing but stare.
Qiaan stared back at her.
“How in the name of Cahan did you get in here?” she demanded.
“I came to talk to you,” Xaforn said carefully.
“So,” said Qiaan warily, after a beat of silence, backing up a step. “You’re here. What did you want to talk about?”
“You,” Xaforn said. “What have they done to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“This.” Xaforn said, waving her arm at the room, at its faded tapetries, at the gaudy silk hangings. “This isn’t you. It has never been you. They’re using you, Qiaan, and you’re letting them use you.”
Qiaan’s head came up. “I am where I can do the most good,” she said. “There were hungry people …”
“There are always hungry people,” Xaforn said. “The poor are always with us—someone is always on the edges of the world and falling through the cracks. You were doing what you could. People knew you as the very spirit of compassion—a somewhat brusque and dogmatic spirit, to be sure, but caring and compassion were all about who you were. Now this? It’s war out there now, and you are at the head of an army, Qiaan.”
“You don’t understand,” Qiaan said quetly “All I was doing I was doing quietly, and on the side, and by myself, and …”
“That isn’t true!” Xaforn said hotly. “You’ve always had your aides and handmaidens! I’ve done your bidding myself on occasion, and you’ve always had people like Yuet on call.”
“By myself,” Qiaan repeated with emphasis, as though she had not been interrupted. “Many of those helpers were doing things not because they shared my beliefs in them but because they were required to do them. Now I am surrounded by people who believe in me and in what I am trying to do. That’s partly why they chose me.”
“And partly it was because by raising your name as the banner they could get the support of the people, those who might have thought the complete overthrow of the Empire and the burning of the throne to be too radical a course of action,” Xaforn said. “So they chose to crown a puppet Empress instead. One whom they would control, who would do their bidding. They are using you, Qiaan. It’s worse than that—they aren’t even using you, they are using a false image, an idol, a name behind which they can rally support for a cause that is neither more nor less than getting themselves into power.”
“Now you’re talking Liudan’s line,” Qiaan said. “You believe in the holy Emperors, as anointed by the Gods?”
“No, but you do, otherwise you wouldn’t have embraced that identity so eagerly,” Xaforn snapped. “You were Guard, damn it. You know better than this. It’s dishonorable. It’s betrayal. This isn’t who you are.”
“I am not Guard! I never was! I knew I never belonged in that compound, but I never knew why—not until they told me the truth! I always disliked my aunt for trying to poison my existence, but it was Aric who was lying to me. Sometimes Rochanaa would look at me and I knew she hated me, and I didn’t know why—and it wasn’t even my fault. I was paying for my father’s sins! I was a charity case for her, no more!”
“No,” Xaforn said, after a moment of silence. “It was I who was the charity case. You always had a family. You were always loved, you always belonged. You were taught the traditions by the woman whom you mourned as your mother—you did, Qiaan, I know it because I saw you do it—and if you chose not to follow the dreams your father had for you, that doesn’t mean that they weren’t there. I have a message for you from him, by the way.”
“My father is dead,” Qiaan said.
Xaforn’s lips thinned into a hard line. “They may fill your head with whatever rubbish they want to on that score, Qiaan, but although I do not doubt that your mother was Liudan’s mother too, you were never begotten on her by the Emperor.”
Qiaan recoiled. “I was born in the Palace!”
“Yes,” Xaforn said, “but not royal.”
“My mother was the Emperor’s own concubine,” Qiaan said doggedly. “By rights and by tradition the children that she bore belonged to the Empress, and the Empire.”
“Only when those children were the Emperor’s seed. Your mother might have been one of the Imperial women, but your father was a captain of the Imperial Guard, an honorable man but one of humble lineage. He wanted you to know that he was sorry, that he had sworn to Szewan not to tell you the truth. The reasons she gave him were quite plausible at the time. He did his best to protect you and shelter you—he was proud of you, of the
work you were doing, of the woman you were becoming, of who he had raised you to be. You were the child of a woman he had loved, but he was proud of you, of who you were.”
“Aric never knew who I was!” Qiaan snapped. “All he saw was what he wanted to see, and what he wanted to shape! He owed me the truth, at least—they all owed it to me!”
“I can’t argue with you on that one,” Xaforn said. “If anyone knew who my own parents had been, I would have wanted to know. It is my right, and it was your right. But Qiaan, you had a family. You’ve always had a family.”
“I had a lie,” Qiaan whispered.
“And what about me?” Xaforn said quietly.
“Well, what about you?”
“Qiaan, when you took me as jin-shei I was a child who knew nothing else except a dream to learn to kill.”
“You are no longer a child,” Qiaan said, “but that is still your dream.”
Xaforn winced. “I had hoped you thought better of me than that. And it is partly your doing that I was better than that, that I learned all the things I had disdained to learn before, because they interfered with my ambition or I deemed them unnecessary for it. You called yourself a charity case—I was left at the doorstep of the compound in a basket, for the love of Cahan, and all I ever had was a fierce desire to be one of the Guard, to justify my entire existence. That’s why they chose me for the special training, because they knew it would ‘take’ best in me, that I already had something to prove. But you, you softened that into something else, something greater, something they never expected. They wanted a killing machine; they got a human being. One who may be far too good at death dealing, granted, but a human being. You and that first jin-shei gave me a soul. I owe you for that.”
“You owe the cat,” Qiaan said, with a quirk on the side of her mouth that she could not quite suppress.
“You take yourself too lightly,” Xaforn retorted, but her mouth had softened, too.
“Flatterer,” Qiaan said, and there was a real smile there now.
“Fool,” Xaforn said gently.
The smile stayed on Qiaan’s face, as though painted, but faded from her eyes. “You say that as though you meant it,” she said.
“We meant every one of those insults when we started trading them, Qiaan.”
“Did we?” Qiaan whispered, her eyes clouding. “I don’t remember.”
“Come back with me,” Xaforn said urgently. “Don’t let them …”
Qiaan snapped back to attention, her eyes a hard glitter again. “For what?” she said sharply. “Don’t you think I know that Liudan has already condemned me? Is that why you came—to deliver me to her?”
Xaforn flinched, but held the other’s gaze. “If you believed that, you would never have trusted me enough to have this conversation,” she said. “The only reason Liudan wants you dead is because those whom you supposedly lead want her dead. It seems that there’s already been at least one attempt on her life. Or don’t you know that they tried to kill her? And if you don’t,” Xaforn said, seeing a flicker in Qiaan’s eyes and pressing her advantage, “what else aren’t they telling you? If you stop acting as figurehead, they will have to start from scratch, and we can deal with it, we can stop it.”
“You’re her creature,” Qiaan said. “Body and soul. How could I ever hope that you would understand?”
“Because I am your friend!” Xaforn said, tears standing in her eyes. “Because I am your sister! Because you armed me for my first real outing as a Guard, because you have always understood me. Qiaan, look at me! I haven’t changed, I am still the Xaforn that I always was, whom you taught to believe in love as well as in honor! Come home. Come to your sisters. Come to your father. This is not the way to honor your mother’s memory.”
It had been the wrong thing to say. Qiaan squared her shoulders, lifted her chin. “My father is dead, and his ashes scattered across Syai, his image in the Emperor’s Gallery in the Great Temple; my mother is, just as you say, a memory, destroyed by the one who trained one of the very sisters to whom you now wish me to return. There is nothing for me to go back to.” Her eyes glittered, as though in a fever, as if she was in the throes of passion, but her voice was flat, inflectionless, as though she was repeating a catechism she had been carefully taught and now delivered in what might have been some sort of final exam. “I have only the people, the people who have chosen me.”
“That is Lihui speaking, not you,” Xaforn said.
As if she had conjured him up with her words, he was suddenly there, Khailin’s husband, Nhia’s enemy, almost as though he had stepped out of the flames on the hearth or from one of the tapestries on the walls. Because of the amulet she wore underneath her dark tunic, Xaforn saw him with true sight, and gasped at it, for he was hideous now.
There was nothing left of the handsome man who had turned Khailin’s head with a smile, whose aristocratic, long-fingered hands had once reached out to support Nhia when her withered foot had led her to stumble at his feet. His eyes were a ghastly, uniform shade of blue-white underneath burned-away lids, his eyelashes and eyebrows gone, his face a mass of puckered scar tissue; the hands were gnarled and ridged with similar scars. Only the voice remained, the quiet, kind, reasonable, treasonous voice.
“Indeed,” he said. “She is an apt pupil.”
He reached out a hand, and Qiaan laid hers into it. “She is to marry me,” Lihui said calmly. “She has already consented to do so. After all, an Empress needs an Emperor by her side.”
“You are already married,” Xaforn said, refusing to allow her fear to show. “If you ever ascend the throne of Syai, it is Khailin who will be queen.”
“Details,” Lihui said. “They will be dealt with in time.”
Qiaan was smiling at him, in a strange, dreamy way, as if she had suddenly forgotten that Xaforn was there at all.
“And now,” Lihui said, his free hand rising in an obvious summons, “perhaps it’s time to clear at least one obstacle from my path. The men who are on their way here believe that you came here to try and kill my bride, the woman who will be queen. They will deal with you on that assumption.”
“I did not come to harm her, I came to save her, with honor,” Xaforn said.
“Honor,” Lihui said, “is for the weak, when they know they have no other way out. The reality is, when you have an enemy in hand, that is the time to destroy him. How you got him to bare his throat is not important when the final stroke is delivered.”
Xaforn wasted no more time in fruitless conversation. The shutters on the room’s windows had been latched tight, but she reached them in two bounds and was already lifting the latch as she heard the door open behind her and the tread of heavy booted feet on the floor. She threw the shutter open and climbed on the ledge, balancing on the windowsill, turning to steal a final glimpse into the room, now filling with armed men, Lihui drawing Qiaan gently out of their way and she following him docilely, as though hypnotized.
“It’s a long way down, Guard girl,” said Lihui languidly as Xaforn jumped from the second-storey window into the courtyard below. She heard something heavy and massive—a mace, maybe—thud into the window where she had been a moment ago.
She landed on a sloping pagoda roof projecting into her path, fought to regain her balance, and then ran lightly and carefully along the rain-slick roof edge toward a higher concatenation of rooftops to her right, skirted them along the lower layers while keeping an eye on a covered roof-walk on which a number of men seemed to be milling as if in anticipation of something, and leapt over a narrow alley to gain another set of rooftops, dropping down at last into a quiet courtyard with concealing niches in the walls. She flattened herself into one of these and waited, her Guard training stilling her racing heart, focusing her mind. She was aware of a commotion on the rooftops above her, saw shadows passing across the courtyard, heard running footsteps in the alley behind the wall against which she was crouched, but she remained undetected and presently the courtyard sank into silence
again. After a cautions while Xaforn emerged, looking around. Everything was quiet.
She ran across the courtyard in the high, light steps she had been taught, using momentum to carry her up a wall, back onto a roof. For a brief moment she was aware of an elderly servant with a lantern who had just entered the courtyard from which she had escaped, an expression of complete astonishment on his face, and then she was over the house, across the next alley, down into the one beyond that, landing lightly on her feet. She looked around warily before she paused to orient herself, and then melted into the shadows. She conjured Khailin’s face in her mind now, and stepped out onto the pale ribbon of the ghost road, almost running. She looked neither left nor right, gathering no glimpses into the ghost road’s treasury of dreams and memories and nightmares.
If the light of the winter stars glinted on a shadow of tears on her cheeks, there was nobody to see.
Seven
When Xaforn returned without Qiaan, Liudan withdrew even further into her own glittering prison of the Palace and no longer seemed to trust anyone. Even her jin-shei sisters were admitted into her presence less frequently and their visits were made shorter. The Empress watched her borders, watched her city, gave orders in the mornings that were sometimes contradicted by those she gave in the afternoons, and waited for Lihui to make his move.
As though he knew that his best weapon was making her insane with waiting, Lihui kept the unrest in the cities at a low boil, with just enough skirmishes and propaganda to keep the spirit alive and remain just under the threshold of massive Imperial retaliation. There was no further word on Qiaan. Maxao, sometimes consulting Khailin whom he had openly named “mage,” was working on other plans to draw Lihui out—but as long as Qiaan was with him it was Lihui who had the upper hand.
Tammary had no illusions that the more pressing troubles had taken the problem of her own vexatious existence from Liudan’s mind. Tammary’s life had shrunk almost overnight from a carnival ride of wine, music, and laughter in the city’s teahouses into a confined genteel cage where she tried to keep her head down and not draw Liudan’s attention. These days one could not be sure who was safe to talk to, and Tammary did not want herself condemned over an unguarded conversation or a misdirected laugh at a jest that could have been misinterpreted.
The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 43