The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  “But what about you…?” Amais wailed, a child again in that moment, her hands closing reflexively around the leather books that Xuelian had folded her fingers around.

  “My time is done, my life lived,” Xuelian whispered. “My era has been over for a long time. Now go, while you still can.” She touched a carving on a windowsill, and a wall panel beside the window suddenly clicked and sprang a little way open—a secret door, into a secret passage. “Hurry,” Xuelian said, one hand tugging the panel open, the other on Amais’s back, pushing her gently but firmly into the yawning opening. “The stairs are steep and I am afraid it will be dark in there—be very careful—perhaps it would be better to stay very quiet until you are sure that everyone has left. You will come out into the alley behind the Street, and a few sharp turns will take you into the Beggars’ Quarter. Lie low for a while, and then try and get out of the city. I am afraid this madness that is about to take us… it’s only just beginning. Now go.” She drew the girl to her and kissed her on the brow, gently, like a grandmother would have done. “Go, and be careful.”

  Amais stumbled forward, clutching the books, almost blinded by tears.

  Xuelian’s voice stopped her. “Wait. Just a moment.”

  Amais blinked her eyes clear, turned around. The old courtesan had crossed back to her dressing table and had picked up a square of white silk, embroidered with red poppies and a single tiny golden butterfly hovering just above one of the blooms. It was something that Xuelian herself had made when she had been one of the Imperial women, many years ago, and her hands had still been agile enough to ply an artist’s needle and scarlet and gold embroidery silks, now scorned as decadent luxuries, were her accepted due.

  “Take this, too,” Xuelian said, holding out the square of silk. “I would hate to see it… spoiled, or damaged. Take it and… and keep it safe for me. And remember me by it, always.”

  Amais reached for the silk, brushed for an instant the papery, aged skin on the other woman’s hand, and felt her soul crying out with a knowledge that she could not deny. This was farewell.

  “Go,” said Xuelian. “In the name of that jin-shei that you would like to believe binds all of us together, over the centuries. Go—I can hear them coming.”

  She gave Amais a final gentle push, and snicked the panel shut behind her.

  Darkness folded around Amais’s slender body, an apt physical echo of the way a similar darkness had wrapped her mind. Xuelian’s words that kept her frozen in place for a moment after the panel closed—now, in this hour, when everything seemed to be ending, she had been handed the words she had been chasing all across Syai, that she had wanted to hear for nearly all of her life—she had been asked something, as the women of ancient Syai had once been asked, in the name of jin-shei. It was that which paralyzed her, held her perfectly still with the aching wonder of it—that, before the agonizing stabs of fear and pain and loss which laid clawed hands on her and raked across her soul.

  And then she heard a crash, and harsh voices, and knew that she had escaped with barely a breath to spare.

  She also realized that there was a tiny spyhole, a mere pinhole, in the panel. There was little in this world that she would have wanted to witness less willingly than what was unfolding in Xuelian’s room—but it was beyond her not to look. She leaned forward, careful not to make a sound, and put her eye to the spyhole.

  Four of the Golden Wind cadres stood in the room, dressed in identical nondescript high-necked coats and boots that, Amais noted dispassionately, badly needed polishing. They were bristling with weaponry. One of them—by the looks of him the youngest, only barely older than Aylun, perhaps—wore only one knife at his belt. The others had two or even three blades apiece, long serrated butcher knives and paring daggers, mismatched and casually gathered from any available source without regard to possible previous ownership or use, and impersonally lethal. Two of them had rifles; one wore a handgun next to a wickedly gleaming curved knife. One even had a couple of antique throwing stars tucked into the wide sash of his belt.

  Not one of them looked to be over twenty years old.

  Facing the old woman in the room, they looked like dangerously fey children, scions of the future turned viciously on their past, and particularly savage, almost feral, when contrasted with the quiet serenity of their victim.

  Amais had thought they would demand the money of the House, tainted and illicit as it was, gathered by such heinous means—to be redistributed to the more “deserving” in the eyes of the Golden Rising. But that was secondary for these four who were sent; they were here for the woman, and the money that had to be here was merely something that sweetened the pot, it was theirs for the taking and it would still be theirs—poured proudly into the hungry maw of the revolution, but theirs, their own contribution—afterward, after their real work was done.

  And the real work was only just beginning.

  “Look at you,” spat out the oldest of the four, a young man, his eyes two slits of disgust and righteous outrage that Xuelian’s existence had ever even been sanctioned. “Sitting here like an old spider, in your silks and your jewels, while good people starve and die around you.”

  “Nobody has ever starved that I had a chance to help,” Xuelian said, and was rewarded by a stinging slap that snapped her head back. Amais stifled a cry.

  “You don’t speak, you with that voice of honey who has led so many astray into this decadent morass of luxury and indulgence,” Xuelian’s nemesis hissed through clenched teeth. “Do you have any idea how many could be fed and sheltered, using just one of these?”

  He reached out and snatched a jewelled pin from Xuelian’s hair, brandished it as if it was a weapon every bit as lethal as the knives in his belt and in his dusty boot. Amais saw the old woman wince, and a long strand of hair hung from the despoiler’s fingers. He had not been gentle about it.

  His action seemed to be a signal for the others. Hands reached out, poked, prodded, ripped, snatched, pulled. Amais heard silk tear, things drop on the floor as more enticing targets were noticed by the attackers. She did not hear Xuelian cry out, or see her fall.

  When the four men stepped back from Xuelian, breathing hard, Amais had to stuff her hand into her mouth to prevent herself from crying out aloud. Xuelian was still standing, but swaying gently on her feet. Her careful make-up was smeared across her face, which was red and swollen and looked like bruises were ready to bloom on every part of it; there was blood at the corner of her mouth, and on her arms, bare, with the sleeves of the silk gown ripped away at the shoulders and long scratches running from shoulder to wrist. The dress itself was slashed into ribbons, only a proud memory of what it had been only moments before. Xuelian’s hair was mostly down, a cloud of silver white, sometimes streaked with blood; the rest was held up only barely by a few stray pins that had been missed in the assault.

  And one of her assailants was standing a few paces away from her, holding the kingfisher comb in his hand.

  Amais could not quite see Xuelian’s face from where she stood, but from the position of her head, her eyes rested on the comb, not the man who held it.

  “And this pretty?” the comb’s captor was saying rubbing his stubby fingers with their short, dirty nails across the beautiful fragile kingfisher blue.

  “A gift,” Xuelian said, her voice apparently coming from a place full of pain but still filled with a quiet calm that wrenched at Amais’s heart. “I have had it… for many years. It was a gift from the Kingfisher Emperor.”

  “There was never any such emperor,” said the cadre sharply.

  “Perhaps not, in the history books,” Xuelian said. “But that was what I always called him.”

  Amais could see his face, if not Xuelian’s—he was facing directly into the point of view of her peephole. And she saw it in his face—the wash of emotion—the merest dash of envy, followed by anger, a pious righteousness in the face of defiant and unrepentant iniquity, cold fury, contempt, and finally a strange, savage l
ittle flash of triumph.

  She knew what he was going to do the instant before he did it, and closed her eyes so that she did not have to see it. But she heard it, the quiet snap of destruction as he crushed the fragile comb, broke it, rendered it trivial, a piece of garbage, before he tossed it onto the dressing table where it landed with a soft ominous clatter.

  She heard the defiler bark, “Bring her!”—and there were sounds of dragging, a thud as a body met a solid object or two, another soft rip as a piece of silk got in the way… and then silence.

  Amais turned away from the peephole before opening her eyes. Somehow she just could not bear to see that broken comb on the defiled dressing table. No matter what happened to Xuelian after this night, this was the place where at least a part of her had died. Amais knew that, because she knew what the kingfisher comb had meant to Xuelian, a last link with a past now so long gone as to be almost legend even in her own mind. Without that, without the memory to support her, she was empty—a husk that would take the pain or the humiliation that her captors would visit on her, and would barely know it was happening.

  Amais probed yawning darkness in front of her with the toe of her foot, testing the ground. She felt the edge of a step. Shifting her grip on the precious journals, the white silk kerchief folded inside the cover of one of them, she let her free hand trail on the invisible wall at her right and took small, careful, precarious steps into the void.

  Six

  The sun was closer to rising than Amais had realized. That, or the rest of that sleepless night, wandering the back streets of Linh-an wildly swinging between feeling sharply stabbed by pieces of a broken heart every time she drew breath or simply numb with grief, had passed in a gray blur of mindless wandering. She did not know where she was going or what she was going to do next, but it appeared that her subconscious had taken over and had come up with at least a temporary plan. The first light of the summer morning caught Amais in a street that, although it had also been roughly renamed, looked at least vaguely familiar. A street that led round the back of the Great Temple—not one of the three massive gates through which the faithful were expected to enter, but to the wall that stretched out behind the Temple circles, enclosing the gardens and storage sheds and sparse, monastic apartments of those who served its gods.

  Amais knew this place.

  She could not hope to gain entry by herself, a stranger who did not belong to the Temple and knew none of the passwords or protocols required for access into these inner sanctums—but she knew someone who did know them.

  Jinlien… if I could find Jinlien…

  She circled the Temple wall until she reached one of the main Gates, pawing at her pockets, looking for whatever money she had on her so that she might buy her offering and thus her way into the Circles—perhaps, as she had so often done before, she would find Jinlien inside, busy with some housekeeping chore or talking to other seekers in the colonnaded walkways before the niches of the silent Gods. But the pickings were slim—she had a handful of loose change and one very soiled and crumpled small denomination paper note that would not buy much more than a thimbleful of rice wine and perhaps a single incense stick.

  She spared a brief yearning thought for the jar that stood on the dresser in her bedroom, which she kept full of ‘Temple money’ and fed with coins whenever she had any to spare—but if someone had asked Amais barely moments before that if she missed anything that had been left behind in Lixao’s rooms, her home, the place where all her belongings still were, she would have given the questioner a blank look in reply. There had been nothing that she felt bereft without—perhaps, at a push, one or two sentimental items that had belonged to her mother, but even those were afterthoughts.

  In a way, it was a scathing indictment of her life; she was twenty one years old and too many of those years had now been lived from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, waiting for things to happen or to stop happening, swept along by the whims of the adults in her life or by the winds of war.

  The only decision she had ever made for herself had been the spontaneous and imponderable urge to go off in search of a strange Temple on a pilgrimage of redemption for jin-shei and jin-ashu, the women’s vow and the women’s language. Even Iloh, the meeting heavy with yuan that had shaped her life, had been a part of that quest. If she had never gone on that journey, she would never have spoken to an old priestess at the ancient temple, never have come down from the mountain to seek the priestess’s jin-shei-bao, never crossed the threshold of Xinmei’s house. She would have had neither Iloh nor Xuelian.

  Both lost, now—Xuelian swept away by the Golden Wind to the Gods alone knew what fate, and Iloh… Iloh, who might as well have been on a different plane of existence from her own. Amais tried to remember the feel of his skin, the sound of his voice, and all she could call to mind were the rough texture of the newsprint of his photographs and the tinny, crackling voice that carried across the Emperor’s Square at his rallies. There was a glass wall between them—she could see him clearly through it, but could not bring herself to believe that this man had ever been her lover.

  It was very early in the morning, and the stall owners were barely beginning to set up their wares in the First Circle as Amais arrived at one of the three gates and slipped into the Temple. She waited just inside the arch of the doorway, watching, waiting for the merchants to get organized, for the customers to start arriving. But apparently it was a slow day, or else the events of the night before had made most people think it was more prudent not to venture out that day, not even to pray. Only a trickle of people came wandering into the Temple, less than half a dozen of them through the gate by which she stood.

  It was a small child hanging onto a haggard-faced woman’s hand who began to shed some light on the situation.

  “Will the parade pass by here, Mother?” the child asked, skipping a little as it walked, happy in the blissfully ignorant way of the very young. “Will we be able to see?”

  “I hope not,” the mother muttered, just as the pair passed Amais. And then, more loudly, for the benefit of her offspring, added, “Maybe. We will see when we are done here.”

  Made reckless by the night that she had just endured, Amais turned her head as the woman passed. “What parade?”

  The woman paused for a moment, startled, wary, gripping the hand of her child a little tighter. But the child was too young to fear; the world, even this frightening world that they were all living in, was still merely exciting.

  “The whores parade,” the little girl explained eagerly, obviously aping something she had overheard her elders say. Her mother dragged her away with an abrupt tug, sparing Amais another sharp, suspicious glance. But the child, who was loath to lose her audience, turned her head towards Amais as she was being dragged forcefully down the corridor of the First Circle, and repeated her words more loudly, just in case Amais had not heard her properly the first time. “The whores… parade. The whores parade!”

  “Hush!” her mother hissed, giving the child’s arm a rough yank to make her point. The little girl whimpered, stumbled, and then, chastened, fell into step beside her mother.

  The night’s work, it would seem, was not over yet for the Golden Wind.

  Amais bought what offerings she could with her meager hoard of money, keeping only a few coppers in her pockets, and wandered into the curiously empty and echoing Second Circle. The atmosphere was tense, the air almost crackling with it, as though the ancient place itself knew something that it was not yet telling those who walked its hallways and corridors. Nhia’s niche was cold and incenseless when Amais came to it; so were most of the rest of them, the brooding figures of the Holy Sages carved from stone staring into empty air and pondering, perhaps, the fickleness of people caught in the turning wheels of time. Perhaps it would have been better, more expedient, to have sought out some other God—some deity more concerned with lives and fates and with what would happen to her next—but in one sense that would be abandoning h
erself to the ebb and flow of the tides yet again, bonelessly, doing nothing but bobbing in the oceans of history as no more than a piece of flotsam waiting to be deposited at some other transient anchor of her days.

  Nhia—Nhia was an anchor. Nhia was part of the old days that Amais had grown up treasuring, had tried so hard to look for when she had first set foot back in the land in which they had flowered so long ago. Nhia was a Sage, with answers, not just a silent and distant God who would counsel nothing more or less than a blind adherence to faith.

  Nhia was a friend to the woman whose blood, so many generations later, ran in Amais’s own veins. And Amais, now, could use a friend.

  She lit her incense stick from the smoldering head of one of the few that were left alight in this wing, and carried it carefully back to Nhia’s niche, wedging the incense stick in its holder, bowing her head before the statue.