The Secrets of Jin-shei

by Alma Alexander

  A small sound made her snap her head around, listening. A footfall. It had been a footfall.

  And there was another.

  There was still a chance, she could shift … the ghost road almost shimmered before her, its shape nearly solid. Nhia! Nhia’s face! Think of Nhia’s face, dammit!

  “Too late,” Qiaan said softly.

  “Those aren’t thugs,” Xaforn said. “Whoever is here is trained. They’re too quiet.”

  “Go,” Qiaan said urgently. “Go, leave me. I am not worth your death.”

  “You underestimate me,” Xaforn said. She let Qiaan back down, very gently, and loosened the sword she wore. “Be quiet, and don’t get in my way.”

  “Insane,” said Qiaan, and choked on what might have been either a laugh or a sob.

  “Selfless to the last,” returned Xaforn, the words double-edged, both a retort in their ancient, time-honored verbal duel and a genuine compliment.

  “Get out,” Qiaan hissed sharply, hunching over her wound. “I will not have you on my conscience too for the rest of my life, however long that might turn out to be.”

  “I leave here with you, or not at all,” said Xaforn.

  “Why, damn you?”

  “Because you’re my cat,” Xaforn said simply.

  She seemed to raise her sword at nothing at all, but a sudden grunt indicated that it had connected with a warm body. After that, things moved too fast for Qiaan to follow, even if she had not been slowed and fogged by her pain. She could sometimes glimpse figures locked in combat, briefly silhouetted against the wash of muted light that still spilled from the house; every now and again, by the shadow of its swinging braid of long hair, she could even identify Xaforn as one of the antagonists. She could hear calls of attack, or grunts of pain, the shuffle or hard stamp of feet, the whining sound of metal rasping against metal or a ringing clash of naked swords. She thought she heard Xaforn call out something, and perhaps another voice reply, but she could not be sure. Everything was a blur of sound and movement, darkness against light, cries of pain and triumph and sublimation of battle-frenzied motion in the night.

  And then there was silence.

  “Is it over?” Qiaan whispered, to nobody in particular, just to hear her own voice.

  “No,” said Xaforn, close beside her.

  “Are you all right? Cahan, there must have been dozens of them.”

  “A handful,” Xaforn said briefly. “They’re Guards.”

  “Guards?” Qiaan gasped. “If they’re Guards, they’re ours … they’re yours. Can’t you just call out, tell them who you are? Why are they fighting you?”

  “Because they have orders to kill you,” Xaforn said, and her voice was very gentle. “And I won’t have it.”

  Qiaan’s breathing was very shallow. “You are fighting your beloved Guard? Over me?”

  “For a long time,” Xaforn said in a voice almost dreamy, “I found you merely annoying. Then the cat happened, and you named me jin-shei, and I started liking you. Then, for a while, I envied you. I might even have fallen in love with you for a time, I don’t know. At some time or another I thought you were aggravating, arrogant, egotistical, supercilious, or conceited. And other times when I realized that you were one of the most gallant, unselfish, valiant, courageous people I knew. And then there were times I realized I didn’t know you at all. And when you vanished, and your name started being dragged out as the banner behind which anyone who stood against the things I had vowed to defend could gather, I did not know what to think—except for one thing: I knew, underneath everything, who you were. Who you are. I will not let you get slaughtered here like a sacrificed pig. I will not. You are my cat, and there is no honor in it.”

  Qiaan was weeping softly. “I do not deserve that sacrifice,” she whispered. “Go, Xaforn, for the love of Cahan, in the name of …”

  “Don’t tell me to go in the name of jin-shei,” said Xaforn, “because I would be forced to do the unthinkable and refuse you.”

  “They are gone,” Qiaan said. “Go, you have a chance. Go. Leave me. I’m probably more than half dead already—don’t waste your life over defending dead meat. It’s not as though you can save my life. Even if you get us both out of here, I’m dead. Liudan will …”

  She felt the tip of Xaforn’s braid brush her cheek, and then Xaforn’s lips gentle on her brow.

  “Hush,” said Xaforn. “They are back. I thnk they have brought reinforcements.”

  She melted away into the night once more, and Qiaan heard her cry out as she leaped at an enemy in the shadows, a battle cry. Qiaan’s throat was closed tight; that was a cry full of knowledge, a deep and full awareness of exactly what Xaforn was, what she had been born to be. She had been trained as a killer, but she was now ready to die in defense of another life, in the name of that honor that she held so dear, in the name of friendship, in the name of the bond of sisterhood with which Qiaan had once, quite unwittingly and with no inkling as to what its price would be, bound her over the shared connection of a black kitten rescued from oblivion.

  The courtyard was full of scurrying, shadowy shapes. They were all converging on single point, aimed at a single beating heart.

  “No!” Qiaan screamed, strength returning to her for one moment, just enough strength to shout with full voice.

  The last thing that lodged in her sight was a glimpse, almost in slow motion, of the silhouette of a long braid swinging across the dim light from the half-open door, and then Xaforn’s face, caught full in that light, as half a dozen men converged on her at once. It should have ended there, but it was as though the Gods themselves wanted to make sure that Qiaan saw, that Qiaan knew. A path opened through the pack of men, just for a moment, and Qiaan saw her lying there—the slight body stretched out by the door of the house, flooded with light, the long black braid snaking on the ground beside her. And then the men closed in again, the shadows swallowed it all, and Qiaan closed her eyes.

  They needed an army to take her, Qiaan thought with bitter pride.

  And then true night descended at last, and she knew no more.

  Six

  When Qiaan woke again, it was to throbbing pain—in her side, behind her eyes, and in the empty hollow place where she knew her heart used to be.

  “Stubborn,” she whispered, throwing the word out as she so often did before to be riposted by something trenchant and witty by Xaforn. But she was met with silence—the silence that she would be met with from now on.

  Xaforn was gone.

  Gone.

  The sheer impossibility of that took her breath away. It took an army. She had faced a small army—an army of trained Guards, at that—and held them at bay, until overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

  “Oh, Cahan,” Qiaan sobbed suddenly. “It should have been me. It should have been me …”

  She blinked away the tears that blurred her vision and looked around, orienting herself. She was in a bed, a reasonably comfortable if rather rudimentary bed, with a warm coverlet over her. The wound in her side had been tended and neatly bandaged, as her exploring fingers became aware of before she discovered, the hard way, that the wound may have been tended but was far from healed. Wincing, she let her eyes travel down the shape of her body under the coverlet. Beside the bed was a rather battered chair, at the foot of the bed a plain scrubbed table which held a bowl, now covered with a piece of clean cloth, and a small untidy pile of what looked like healers’ supplies. The walls were bare, gray stone. There was a window, high up, with three iron bars set in it. Opposite the window, a sturdy wooden door was set flush with the wall. It had no handle on the inside.

  A prison, then.

  Oh, Xaforn. They may kill me fast, or they may leave me in here to rot. And it was for this that you snuffed out the bright flame of your life.

  There was a muffled sound beyond the thick door even as Qiaan was bleakly contemplating it, and it swung open into the room to admit a wizened old woman with wispy white hair and gums so toothless that her chee
ks had fallen inward, giving her face an oddly skull-like quality

  “You’re awake,” the crone said, and her voice was surprisingly rich coming from such a frail and unprepossessing vessel. “That’s good. I was beginning to worry about you.” The door had been closed behind her, but she now turned and banged on it with both fists. It opened a crack, and Qiaan thought she glimpsed a slim form in a Guard uniform just outside. The crone exchanged a few remarks with the guard on duty, too softly for Qiaan to hear, and then turned back to her patient, the door slamming shut again behind her.

  “I’ve asked them to bring some boiling water, and we can try one of my herbal teas,” the crone said. “You’ve been through a rough time, but you’re young, you ought to mend quickly.”

  “Where am I?” Qiaan whispered hopelessly.

  “The Guard Compound holding cells,” the crone said, rummaging through the pile of things on the table. “Bandages, clean bandages, I know I left some in here … ah, here we are. Now let me see. It is time to change your dressing.”

  “Please,” Qiaan began, but the crone tutted at her and turned her expertly so that she could get at the stab wound. “What is your name?” Qiaan persisted as the healer removed the old bandage, cleaned up the wound with water from the bowl that had been on the table, and replaced the bandage with the new poultice she had prepared. “You have to help me. I need to see someone. I need to talk to one of my … I need to speak to Liudan, to the Empress.”

  “Lie still, child,” the crone said.

  “Please,” Qiaan whispered. “What is your name?”

  “Xinma,” the crone said, finishing off and pulling the coverlet back into place. “My name is Xinma and I cannot help you—it is for the Empress to ask to see you if she sees fit to do so, and not the other way around. All you have to do right now is concentrate on healing. Now, that wound aside, is there anything else that you are suffering from?”

  “I have a headache,” Qiaan said. And my heart is broken.

  “We can fix that. The herbal tea will help you sleep. You need to sleep. Sleep heals everything.”

  A knock heralded the arrival of the required hot water; it was passed into the room in a small earthenware pot, through the smallest possible crack in the door.

  Qiaan actually found the strength to laugh. “What do they think I will do, make a break for it?”

  “Unlikely, at least for a while, my dear,” the crone said without looking at her, emptying a packet of herbs into the pot and stirring the contents with a blunt wooden paddle until the brew met with her satisfaction. She decanted some of it carefully into a small cup and returned to the bed. “I’d better help you with this, for now,” she said, lifting Qiaan’s shoulders slightly with one arm and bringing the cup to the patient’s lips with her free hand. “Here, sip. Maybe in a few days I can strap you up and you can actually sit up for a bit—it will be easier to eat, anyway.”

  “What do they mean to do with me?” Qiaan asked, gagging on her first sip of the unexpectedly bitter brew.

  “My task is merely to mend your hurts,” Xinma said. “Beyond that, it is none of my concern.”

  After Qiaan had been patiently held until she had swallowed every last bit of the herbal concoction, the old healer laid her back down on the bed.

  “Sleep now,” she ordered.

  And Qiaan slipped off into an uneasy, unnatural sleep, compelled by the sleeping potion. It was supposed to be a dreamless and a healing sleep, but she woke later with trails of tears still wet on her cheeks. A stony-faced guard who would not respond to anything Qiaan said brought in a hot broth for her lunch, and Xinma returned to feed her and to administer another dose of herbal medicine. That was Qiaan’s routine, with light and shadow displacing one another at her barred window as day turned into night, and then day, and then night again. Qiaan quickly lost count of how many such transitions there had been since she had been incarcerated in her dungeon. If she were to go by Xinma’s precise actions which never varied—tending her wound, feeding her, administering the sleeping drug—she might have been there forever. But she knew, by the way that the thought of Xaforn still lodged in the heart of her like a stabbing sharp pain, that it had not been long. A week, perhaps.

  And then the routine changed.

  “You have a visitor,” Xinma announced, ushering in a tall, grim-faced woman in a Guard’s uniform.

  Qiaan knew her—JeuJeu, who had once had charge of training the up-and-coming cadres of the Imperial Guard in the days when Xaforn had been a child.

  “They tell me you are mending nicely,” JeuJeu said, by way of greeting, when Xinma had left them alone in response to the curt toss of her head.

  “Then they are wiser than me,” Qiaan said. “There are things inside of me that will never mend. Why am I still alive, JeuJeu? I thought by now the Empress would have tried and sentenced me, and there is hardly any doubt as to the verdict. I am already dead—it’s only a matter of time.”

  “I don’t know that,” JeuJeu said. “She has not spoken out on the matter at all.”

  “Is there any chance of seeing her? Of talking to her?”

  “You?” JeuJeu said. “I’m not at all sure that she would come to you. Why would she? What can you possibly have to tell her?”

  “So why are you here?” Qiaan said bitterly.

  “Because you are one of us,” JeuJeu said. “And you have always been. What is it? What did I say?”

  For Qiaan had laughed once, bitterly, while at the same time her eyes filled with tears. “That’s what she said, you know,” Qiaan murmured, covering her face with her hand. “She died for me, JeuJeu.”

  “And killed for you, if you mean Xaforn,” JeuJeu said. “They counted eighteen bodies in that courtyard, afterward. Some identified later as part of the rising—your people—but the rest, all Guards. She killed thirteen trained Guards that night.”

  “She was the best you ever had,” Qiaan whispered. “I never told her that. Not out loud, not like that. I always said, ‘Oh, that will do.’ Even when she performed impossible things. ‘That’s not bad,’ I’d tell her. Tell Xaforn that. Xaforn. Who could stare death in the face and make it look away first.”

  JeuJeu’s face was oddly gray. “You said that’s what she said, a moment ago,” she said. “What do you mean?”

  “I told her her to go, to leave me, that I was dead, that this was a cause already lost and unworthy of offering herself to,” Qiaan said, “and she told me … that she was there because … she said, ‘You are my cat.’ JeuJeu, do you remember …?”

  JeuJeu turned her head away very sharply, so that Qiaan should not see the sudden tears in her eyes. “Yes,” she said.

  “Can you at least,” Qiaan said after a pause, “ask them to kill me cleanly?”

  “I’ll come and see you again,” JeuJeu said, very abruptly, her voice harsher than she had intended—for otherwise she would have wept out loud. She turned to knock on the door to be released.

  “JeuJeu, do me one favor. If not the Empress, can you get one of my other jin-shei-bao in here? Yuet or … no, Xaforn said Yuet too was dead.” She swallowed convulsively. “What has been going on out there? What else don’t I know?”

  “Much,” JeuJeu said. “And a lot of it has been done in your name, although the Empress is not without…” She pressed her lips together, before she said too much. “I will see what I can do.”

  She apparently succeeded in that endeavor, for Tai came to see Qiaan in her cell the very next day. She perched carefully on the convalescent’s bed, careful at first not to disturb the arrangements of bandage and poultice, but soon they were clinging together in a tight hug as both wept on each other’s shoulders. Qiaan listened, appalled, as Tai spoke of the toll of the past year. Xaforn was merely the last, perhaps the highest, price paid in the upheavals that had shaken Syai.

  “I took her yearwood beads to the scribes myself,” Tai said. “They were so few, so pitifully few, when they were piled together in a representation of
a life. She was so young.”

  “She may have been the best of us all,” Qiaan said.

  “We have all been tested,” Tai murmured.

  “What happens next?”

  “Her funeral rites were performed two days ago,” Tai said. “The whole Guard turned out to the pyre.”

  “But JeuJeu said that she killed thirteen of them that night.” Qiaan gasped. “They must have believed she had turned on them, that she had gone to the bad, or to the other side. It isn’t just that she died, Tai, it’s what she sacrificed in the manner of her dying—it is possible that she could have been called traitor, she, who never strayed from her honor.”

  “They knew that,” Tai said quietly. “Every single one of them knows that.”

  “So what does Liudan plan to do with me?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Tai said. “She has said nothing. She sees almost no one these days.”

  “Not even you?”

  “Very rarely. It’s as though she looks on the whole world as her enemy, out for her blood. And I don’t know how to heal that, I don’t know how to get through to her anymore. Sometimes when I am with her it feels like I am talking to a beautiful porcelain doll. There is no human warmth there, only distance, only emptiness. I desperately want to … I don’t know … sometimes she reminds me of my own children, when they were really small, when they were too young to understand anything and merely withdrew when the world became too much. I could take them and hug them and make it all better—but Liudan won’t let me near her anymore. She barely acknowledges I exist.”

  “You’ve always mothered all of us,” said Qiaan with a shadow of a smile.

  “It started when Antian told me to take care of her sister, and at first I thought she meant only Liudan—and then there was Tammary.”

  “And then you had all of us, and were all her sisters, all linked through jin-shei, and you spread yourself thin for us, being there, being you,” Qiaan said.