“Wait, let me tell you …”
She got no further than those few words. She never knew where the first stone came from, but it hit her squarely in the kidneys. Gasping at the sharp pain Yuet staggered, falling to her hands and knees there in the street, shaking her head and trying to catch her breath.
She was never given the chance. A second stone followed, taking her in the jaw; she tasted blood from a split lip, shattered teeth. A third rock came, a fourth, and then a barrage of them.
“The witch’s friend! The witch’s servant!”
The voices swirled around her, as sharp as the stones, wounding her heart and mind as the rocks lacerated her body. It isn’t fair, she thought desperately, raising her hands to protect her head and face. It just isn’t fair. I have so much left to give.
And then one particularly large rock sailed past her defenses and took her on the temple. Yuet uttered a soft cry, the first sound she had made out loud since the barrage began. It was very soft, almost inaudible; the crowd didn’t hear it. The world faded to a soft black around Yuet, her mind blank, no more thoughts. No last words. No more sensation. She never knew that the stones kept coming, long after her body was still, long after it had turned into bloody pulp under the barrage.
The cart driver had whipped his mule as soon as the trouble started, and had taken himself and his passenger, the patient whom Yuet had just loaded into the cart, out of the danger zone as fast as he could. It was he who alerted the Imperial Guard, but by the time a detachment arrived the mob was long gone, and Yuet was dead.
Xaforn arranged for the seemly removal of Yuet’s body, and contacted Tai about making the necessary preparations for her funeral. Xaforn herself quartered the streets where the stoning had happened, questioning people, but nobody had apparently seen a thing, and persisted in their story even when Xaforn threatened to take them into custody for obstructing her investigations.
“We will never know who did it,” she told Tai later, her face drawn with exhaustion and with the tears that she had wept for Yuet. They were both still in shock, broken and raw with the pain and the fury of this death, with the waste of the life of one whom they had loved, who had been part of them. “They all did it.”
“Surely the driver saw …”
“Surely he did. He does not remember either,” said Xaforn savagely. “No, nobody knows anything, nobody wants to know anything. I talked to a woman who used to be in the Inner Courts, a widow of a Guard. She was there when Yuet gave her heart and hand to the victims of the epidemic. Even she does not remember seeing anything that can help us. And she knew what Yuet was. She, of all people, knew.”
So it begins, then, wrote Tai in her journal on the night after she had helped prepare Yuet’s body for her funeral pyre, after Yuet’s ashes had been scattered into the wind. After she had wept herself dry. Pau-kala is upon us, and the first of my sisters is gone. Oh, but Kito said we were all so young.
In her mind, a bare branch bereft of leaves trembled in the vainly beguiling warmth of spring sunshine.
Two
Tai had taken it upon herself to bring the news of the death of one the jin-shei circle to the rest of her jin-shei-bao. She had gone first to Khailin’s house, but although she had been admitted to the reception room by Khailin’s servants no amount of hammering on the locked door of the laboratory or calling to Khailin to open the door seemed to get the attention of the occupant.
“Is she in there?” Tai demanded of one of the servants.
“I didn’t see her go out, my lady,” the servant girl said. “And we leave food outside the door every morning, and when we come back it is gone.”
“Khailin!” Tai shouted, banging on the door again. “Open up! Oh, for the love of Cahan, open up.”
But there was silence.
In the end, Tai scribbled a terse message in jin-ashu and left it, sealed, with the servant girl with instructions to introduce it into the laboratory with the next tray of food.
Liudan received Tai, but her reaction to the news was distant, almost emotionless.
“I am sorry. Besides being of my own jin-shei circle, Yuet was a good healer, and a caring counselor when she chose to offer counsel.” There was a trace of real regret in Liudan’s voice—but her eyes were dry and gleamed with a strange light as she said the required words.
“Liudan, tell Khailin to stop this. You can, it is within your power. Look where it has led!” Tai said. “One of us is dead already! And if you …”
“I said I regretted that,” Liudan said, a little more ice on the edges of her voice. “But this is not the first time a jin-shei sister has died in the cause of a task asked in the name of the sisterhood. Nor will it be the last, I think, for as long as jin-shei endures and is what it is. There are some things that are worth …”
“Are worth dying for, Liudan? Killing for?” Tai said.
“When Antian chose you, what would you not have done in the name of that choice?” Liudan said. “You are as selfish as the rest of us. Your goals are just different.”
“But Liudan …”
The ice migrated to Liudan’s eyes as she bent her gaze to Tai, but Tai was undaunted by it.
“What if I were to ask you …” she began, but Liudan turned her head away.
“Do not ask,” she said, very quietly. “Do not ask that. You cannot undo a jin-shei vow that easily, you cannot withdraw it. I have done what I have done.”
“Then Yuet’s blood is on your own hands,” Tai said, made reckless by her pain.
“That may be,” said Liudan after a short pause. “There is nothing I can do about that now. Have you scheduled her funeral rites?”
“Yes.”
“When is it to be?”
“Tomorrow. Will you come?”
“I cannot,” Liudan said. “But I will send a representative, and an appropriate offering.”
It was a dismissal, and Tai left, hurt, puzzled, disillusioned. Liudan seemed to treat the jin-shei bonds with the light touch of the professional juggler, taking from the sisterhood what she needed and abandoning the rest. She had demanded the life, and with it the death, of one of her sisters; but she was not going to risk her own safety by appearing at the funeral. And both of these things were justified in her mind, the right and proper thing to do if it meant holding on to the power of the Empire.
Yuet’s funeral was a strange occasion. At first it looked as though there would be only a handful of mourners—but then, as the pyre was lit, Tai saw more and more people coming to stand silently around the platform on which Yuet’s body, wrapped in a white shroud that hid the ruin that had been made of it, had been laid. There were women carrying children—babes in arms, bleary-eyed toddlers—as though they wished them to see the pyre, to remember. Men on crutches hobbled up and stood with their heads bowed. A growing sense of remorse, of regret, of a debt of gratitude being paid, had settled on the occasion, like smoke from a scented incense stick. Tai watched the mute crowd form, and then watched it dissipate just as quietly as the pyre died down into embers, shadows slipping away without meeting each other’s eyes, without stopping to exchange a single word.
Tai had wept, for many reasons—not the least of which was the shattered circle in the name of which Yuet had died. Besides Tai herself, Nhia was there, dressed in her Chancellor’s finery, and Xaforn, wearing the full formal dress armor of a Captain of the Imperial Guard. Liudan was present only by proxy. Qiaan was still missing, somewhere in the enemy camp. Tammary was gone. Khailin was simply … absent.
When she did finally emerge from her seclusion, Khailin was thin and wild-eyed, as though she had battled armies and then retreated for waterless weeks through desert country.
It took Tai, to whom she came, some time to get anything coherent out of her. Khailin babbled about succeding in her quest and almost immediately berated herself for failure, wept, raged, lost herself sometimes in long silences during which she would respond to no voice but would simply stare blankly into space
, rocking back and forth, her lips moving as though she was mouthing spells. Yuet’s death was still only days past, a fresh and ever-present pain, and the wound was lacerated further by Tai’s immediate instinct to send for the healer and jin-shei-bao whose practical wisdom and sometimes priggish but always pertinent advice she would never have again. She sent for Nhia instead, hoping that Nhia’s own knowledge of some of the arcana Khailin had been meddling with might help to get through to her.
Khailin barely acknowledged Nhia’s presence when she arrived at Tai’s house.
“Must find it … must find it … Yuet will know …”
Tai and Nhia exchanged a shocked glance above Khailin’s head.
“Yuet is dead, Khailin,” Nhia said.
Khailin looked up. “Yuet. I need to talk to …” She blinked, and some semblance of sanity seemed to return to her eyes. “What?” she whispered. “What did you say?”
Tears were running unchecked down Tai’s cheeks. “Oh, Cahan, Liudan will have to pay a heavy price for what she has wrought,” she whispered, more to herself than as an offering to the conversation, but Khailin’s hearing seemed to have been sharpened to a fine brittle edge, and she snapped her head around to stare at Tai.
“Yuet…” Khailin began, and Nhia reached for her hand.
“Khailin, Yuet was killed by a raging mob less than a week ago. We tried to reach you. Where were you?”
“Why, for the love of Cahan? What happened?”
“She was trying to transport one of her patients back to her house, and the crowd thought … they believed …”
“I killed her,” Khailin gasped suddenly, as though a knife had been plunged into her heart.
Nhia’s hand tightened around hers. “Ah, no. Don’t do this.”
“I did,” Khailin said inconsolably “It was I who got her involved in this. I should never have got anyone else involved.”
Tai was sitting on her other side, her hand on one of Khailin’s shoulders, balancing Nhia’s gentle hand on the other. “What happened, Khailin? You came here like a wraith and I could get no sense out of you at all—and you are still not making any.”
“I failed,” Khailin said, almost inaudibly
Nhia sighed deeply. “Perhaps it’s just as well.”
“And I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams,” Khailin continued, as if Nhia had not spoken. “I made it live. I made it live.”
“Khailin. Talk to me. What have you done?”
Khailin raised a trembling hand; a fresh cut, barely scabbed over, ran the length of her palm. “I used myself, in the end. It was all unnecessary, what I made Yuet do—I could only use myself, in the end.”
Her voice trailed away, and for a moment she seemed to withdraw back into herself, into that vivid moment which had finally driven her here. She had trusted no one. What she had said was the absolute truth—she could only trust herself, could only use herself.
She had kneaded clay into the likeness of a woman and baked it hard, like a statue. The skin on her face could still feel the thin layer of clay she had smoothed over her own features; she removed it, once it was dry, with aching slowness and care lest it should crack and be ruined, and filled in the eye-holes with a finer clay, the white one of which porcelain was made. With hands that trembled she laid the mask that was her own face onto the shell of the body she had made. She smeared her own blood in arcane symbols on the lifeless mask’s cheeks and brow. And then, heart pounding, she poured the elixir she had made into the open hole of its mouth, and leaned forward to kiss its cracked clay lips, breathing her own breath and her own life into the figure.
And then she watched the clay tremble with the unspeakable, the impossible. Life. It was life itself, risen at her command, at her word, at her elixir. Within Khailin, pride warred with terror. With one breath she cried to herself, I did it! With the next, she cried, What have I done?
And then, before she could move, before she could speak, she saw the thing that she had made shiver and then fall into dust so fine that it stirred at a breath.
But it had lived. For a brief, shining moment it had lived.
“It was that easy?” Tai breathed. “Making a doll to hold the breath of life? That was all it took? Why could Lihui not do this long before now?”
“Because,” Nhia said, “he did not have that elixir. What was in the potion, Khailin? What did you have to do to make this work?”
Khailin shot her a look at once defiant and terrified. “You don’t want to know, Nhia.”
“Yes, I…” Nhia began, but Khailin shook her head violently.
“No. No. I will not speak of it, not here, not where I can be … I made it live, but it is gone.”
“What do you mean, it is gone? Gone where?” Nhia said, her hand tightening convulsively.
For answer, Khailin reached into the pocket of her tunic and brought out a handful of dust. “Gone,” she said.
“Khailin … Khailin … what have you done?” Nhia gasped, appalled.
Khailin flinched. “I succeeded,” she murmured, her face chalk white. And then she fainted.
“Nhia, what do we …” Tai began, but Nhia, after she helped lay Khailin down on a low couch, straightened with steely purpose in her eyes.
“Cahan, this is beyond me,” Nhia said. “Take care of her, Tai, I’ll be back.”
“Where are you going?” Tai called, her voice trembling on the verge of panic.
Nhia paused, turning back to look at Tai. Her face was grim. “I’m going to get Maxao,” she said. “Whatever he is, or says he has once been, he has knowledge of these things.”
Left alone, Tai darted in and out of the room where Khailin lay, setting cloths wrung out in cool water on her jin-shei-bao’ forehead and her wrists where the pulse beat. It was a while before Khailin came to, but when she did, she was lucid.
“I need to get back to my laboratory,” she said.
“No,” Tai said firmly. “You’re staying right here. Nhia has gone to fetch help.”
“Help? Whose?” Khailin laughed, a bitter, brittle laugh. “Liudan? She can’t do anything.”
“Not Liudan. Maxao.”
Khailin’s eyes narrowed. “Maxao would see me dead for this,” she said flatly.
“Not so,” said the voice of the Sage from the door, where he had apparently just materialized with Nhia at his side. “You may have disappointed me in going on with a project which I told you would come to no good end, but the fact remains that you appear to have wrought something that has eluded many of us for centuries. This is a mystery that has excited the students of the Way since the day the world was born. Did you think that Liudan was the first to crave immortality? Or Lihui? Lihui took what he could get, but what he did with his life was flawed, imperfect. You have succeeded in doing something quite different. And you may have given us the perfect weapon.”
“Weapon? In which war? Against whom?”
“Lihui will learn of this thing that you have made, if he does not know of it already,” Maxao said. “This is the opportunity that I have been waiting for. He will come for the secret of its existence, of this I am certain. With this at his disposal, he can cure his physical disabilities—all he needs is another shell, another body, and this one will be perfectly immortal, with no need for replenishment.”
“But it’s gone,” Khailin said. “It’s no more than a pile of lifeless dust …”
“Oh, he will come.” Maxao smiled grimly. “And when he does, we will be ready for him.”
“We? …”
“You and I will bait the trap for Lihui, Khailin. We had better return to your laboratory. There are things there that we will need.”
Tai stood up, her eyes hot with anger.
“You don’t care how many of us die,” she snapped. “Nhia said you were a good man. I don’t believe that anymore. No good man would glory in this, in what it has brought, in Yuet’s …”
Her voice broke, and Maxao turned his blind eyes inexorably to where she stood. �
��And what,” he said, “is a good man? We work toward a goal, all of us. Are we good when we pursue that goal or are we good when we let circumstances divert us from that pursuit? What would you do if you needed to clear your path toward the light of your destiny, or to correct a past mistake which has blighted all of your life?”
“Not kill,” Tai whispered.
Maxao nodded. “That is good. Then you are better than I am. It is a different kind of good. As for me, if a death clears a way for a good thing, then the death was in a good cause. I am sorry your friend is gone, but that is just the Way—that was where her path led her. Someday her memory may be a bright and holy thing.” His mouth twisted into one of his angry, wolfish smiles. “In the meantime, my young friend, we have an opportunity to rid the world of a fell thing, of a spreading darkness—if you will, of a disease which could kill more than you dream of. Perhaps, in her death, your healer friend has performed the final and glorious act of healing and will be remembered for it for many years to come.”
“You just want your revenge on Lihui,” Tai said.
Maxao raised an eyebrow. “And if I do?”
“You didn’t like what Khailin was trying to do at Liudan’s asking, so you tried to stop her. But she was not the only one involved in that secret endeavor, and because you decided then that it was a bad thing to do and revealed that secret to the world, Yuet paid with her life.” Tai’s eyes filled with tears again. “You are the most arrogant, most heartless, most selfish man that I have ever laid my eyes on.”
“Life is selfish,” Maxao said bluntly. “Selfishness is how we survive. You think the world cares about us, that we should care about it?”
“The world, maybe not,” Tai whispered. “But there are people in that world, people whom we love. You destroy whatever is in your path, and it doesn’t matter to you if you care for it, or used to care for it once. If it stands in your way, it’s doomed.”
The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 49