The Secrets of Jin-shei Read online

  Now she was going back. Tai picked up her brush again, and sketched a neat line of new jin-ashu characters on a new page.

  Oh, Antian, my heart’s sister. It seems I go on a pilgrimage—keeping my promise to you, in a way, and taking it back to lay at the feet of your ghost. They say that the bones of the earth remember the feet that walk upon them, if those feet belong to a great spirit—I know that the northern mountains recall your quiet step on their marbled stone, and still sing of it in the early mornings, in the time you loved to spend alone on the mountainside. I know that I will hear your footsteps there. I miss you. I still miss you so.

  She paused, her brush poised over the page, aware that her eyes were stinging with tears, and then dipped the point of the brush into the ink again. Often these days her thoughts came out in poetry

  I go to see again

  the spirit that I loved in the summer

  as a winter ghost

  and to lay my sorrows

  at her feet.

  Tai contemplated the verse for a moment, sighed, blotted the latest writings, and closed the book carefully so as not to smudge the pages. Leaving the smaller of the two cloaks Yuet had brought in an untidy pile on the chair on which she had been sitting, she took up the other one and went in search of Nhia.

  Nhia wasn’t at home, and Tai, who could not afford to let the Imperial edict languish in a message which might get delivered too late, left the gift cloak at Nhia’s rooms to await her return there and bent her steps toward the Great Temple. The day was perfectly miserable; she arrived at the Temple soaked, her hair wet and clinging to her face in long damp tendrils, the bones of her shoulder blades outlined precisely beneath a cloak wringing wet and adhering to every line of her body. She dashed into the shelter of the Temple’s gate and paused to shake herself off like a damp puppy. A massive sneeze took her entirely by surprise, closely followed by a second; her eyes watered, and she sniffed experimentally.

  “Oh, wonderful,” she muttered. “All I need is a cold.”

  “Tai?” said a familiar voice.

  She looked up and saw Kito the bead-carver’s son, his mouth twisted into a rueful grin. Tai sniffed again, rubbing at the tickle in her nose with the back of her hand.

  “You always seem to be around when I’m at my worst,” she said, but she was smiling.

  “Tea?” he suggested. “It might serve to ward off pneumonia.”

  She nodded, distracted from her Nhia search, and he escorted her back to the booth where, now, an elderly man with a flowing white beard sat carving a so ji sculpture.

  “Father,” Kito said respectfully, “I bring you Tai, my friend, in need of sustenance. I have invited her to accept a bowl of green tea. May I be excused for a few minutes?”

  The old carver looked up, his eyes glittering dark coals. When he smiled, his entire face disappeared into a sea of wrinkles, and the eyes glimmered from the depths like twin bright sea creatures.

  “Indeed,” he said, and his voice was kind. “It is pleasant to make your acquaintance at last, young Tai. I have been hearing about you.”

  “Sir,” Tai said, bending over the old man’s hand in a gesture of respect. She felt another sneeze rising to tickle her throat, and held her breath to try and stifle it. A sideways glance showed her that Kito had turned a fine shade of pink, but he said nothing, merely bowed to his father in thanks before he escorted her out of the booth.

  The sneeze took her with an explosive force just a couple of steps away, so violent that a couple of people in nearby booths looked up, startled, to see what had just blown up.

  “You’re going to catch your death of a cold,” Kito said. “What was so important that you had to come rushing here today of all days? Look around you, the place is practically deserted—people know better than to …”

  But his words had been ill-advised, if concerned, because they suddenly brought to mind her errand. She stopped dead, sneezed again, and looked up at him in consternation.

  “Nhia! I have to find Nhia! The Empress wants us to leave tomorrow and I have to get her to … to …” Her eyes watered as she fought another sneeze.

  Kito’s eyes were wide with incomprehension, but his expression was firm. “You will do no good to yourself, to Nhia, or to the Empress’s commands if you fall sick. Hot tea. Over here. And I will send a boy to look for Nhia for you.”

  “Thank you,” Tai got out before exploding again.

  The bowl of hot tea Kito thrust into her hands was a welcome warmth, for she had started shivering violently. Kito had removed her outer mantle and replaced it with his own dry one. It was three sizes too large for Tai and all-enveloping, but blessedly warm. After he had collared a passing boy, thrust a copper into his hand and given him instructions, Kito came back to Tai’s side.

  She looked up, smiling. “The Young Teacher?” she said quizzically, having overheard his command to the boy.

  “That’s what they call her around here,” Kito said. “She was ‘The Little Teacher,’ but that was before the Empress laid her hand upon her. Now they are more respectful.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Who doesn’t?” Kito said. “That judgment made the marketplace almost as soon as it was uttered in court. It was a teaching tale, all by itself. When you are done with that, let us return to my father’s booth—that is where I told the boy to tell Nhia to look for you.”

  So-Xan, the bead carver, was not in his seat when they returned, but his tools had not been put away, only laid aside neatly on the bench indicating that the master craftsman would return very shortly. The carving he had been working with was not in evidence.

  “Whose so ji was he working on?” Tai asked, curious.

  “The daughter of the Fourth Prince,” Kito said. “Her kin are planning on offering it to a merchant’s family here in Linh-an later this spring. I am told that the match is a done deal already, that this is just a tradition which needs to be followed in order that the Gods may smile upon them.”

  “It was beautiful,” Tai said. “Have you ever done a so ji yourself?”

  “Twice,” said Kito proudly. “In fact, I am carving one now, for a young woman on XoSau Street. Do you wish to see it?”

  “Please,” Tai said.

  He ducked into the booth and unlocked an inlaid wooden chest at the back, extracting something carefully wrapped in several layers of rough silk. “It is not the pale jade, not the expensive kind,” he said, peeling the wrappings away, “but I love the deeper color of this stone, it’s almost blue in places. See?”

  Kito held the carving out for Tai’s inspection, and she instinctively reached for it, and for a moment both sets of hands were wrapped around it as they bent over the small, exquisite stone. And then they suddenly realized what they were doing, at almost the precise moment that the realization was articulated by Nhia’s voice just outside the booth.

  “Are you two plight-trothed?”

  Tai snatched her hand back, and Kito flung a corner of the silk back over the carving. Tai’s cheeks were a flushed pink when she emerged from the carver’s booth.

  “We have to go back and pack,” she said to Nhia in a low voice, choosing to ignore her comment completely, giving Kito a chance to compose himself and put the carving away. “Yuet came to me only a few hours ago. We leave with the Empress tomorrow, for the retreat.”

  “Now?” Nhia said. “But I’ve a session started with …”

  Tai sneezed. Nhia glared at her. “And you got soaked running after me over here, didn’t you?” she said. “And you’re going to go and shiver up in the mountains tomorrow, at a time when most sane people are still going south to escape the snows. You don’t even have the …”

  “If you’re going to tell me I haven’t anything warm to wear, you’re wrong,” Tai said. “Liudan sent us both warm winter cloaks. Your session will have to wait on the Empress’s pleasure.”

  Nhia’s eyes softened. “She has not been gone long,” Nhia said, and she was not speaking
of Liudan. “And you haven’t seen that place since you left it to bring her body back to Linh-an, have you? Liudan has a cruel streak.”

  Tai dropped her eyes. “Perhaps I need to go,” she whispered. “To lay her ghost. To make my peace.”

  Kito had composed himself sufficiently to emerge from the shadows of the booth, all adolescent dignity. Tai turned to him, still faintly pink-cheeked, and shrugged out of his cloak, handing it back to him with a bow. “My thanks,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” he said. “I do not know what the Empress has commanded, but I hope it goes well, for her, and for you. And I hope to see you again when you return to the city.”

  “So,” said Nhia as the two girls hesitated in the gate of the Great Temple, watching the still-driving rain in the streets outside and steeling themselves to throw their shivering bodies out into it, “are you?”

  “Am I what?” Tai said, with coolly deliberate incomprehension.

  “Plight-trothed,” Nhia said wickedly. “I saw it, you know. Witnessed, it’s a concluded thing, done, all that it needs is a formal contract. When’s the wedding?”

  “I haven’t even had my Xat-Wau yet,” Tai retorted, blushing furiously again. “He was showing me his work, there was nothing …” She paused, held her breath, and then sneezed again with a force that threw her back against the doorway.

  “That’s it,” said Nhia, dropping the teasing for the time being and instinctively lowering her voice. “Whatever it costs, we need a sedan chair to get us back. Wait here; I will arrange it. If we have to follow Liudan on this little ruse of hers, at least let us leave the city healthy enough to face the mountain winter.”

  “Ruse?” Tai said, turning to follow Nhia with her eyes as the older girl turned back into the Temple.

  Nhia paused, throwing a startled glance back at Tai. “Liudan was right, you are an innocent sometimes,” she said. “Of course it’s a ruse. She’s buying herself time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Time to choose a man of her own desire, and not one the Court thrusts upon her,” Nhia said. “I’m afraid our Empress is unlikely to be ruled by anyone other than herself.”

  “Antian would not have been so obstinate,” Tai whispered.

  “Antian was more subtle,” Nhia said. “From what I know, from what you told me of her, the Little Empress would have done what she needed to do, but from within the cover of dignity and decorum and tradition. With Liudan, it is anyone’s guess.”

  “I do miss her,” Tai said.

  “I think we will all miss her before long. Miss what she was, what she could have been. Liudan is a wild thing, and wild things are unpredictable and dangerous, and not held by a word of command or of restraint. Liudan has the eyes of a lion. Wait there, I’ll be right back with the chair.” She paused, casting around a wary glance. The gate and the corridor nearby were deserted except for the two of them at that moment, but Nhia was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that they had been discussing the Empress of Syai in very frank and familiar terms while out in public. It was, to say the least, a breach of protocol. “We’d better talk about this later,” she said. “We’d better get back home and get ready.” Ready to follow the lioness into her mountain lair, she thought to herself. But that was not a thought she would have uttered out loud on the doorstep of the Great Temple. Not even to Tai.

  Four

  They did not, after all, stay at the Summer Palace.

  They could not have done. The place was a shattered wreck, and it was still shrouded in drifts of snow at this time of year. It was full of wind-whispers, and the winter-bare branches of the trees creaked and groaned eerily in the empty gardens, but other than this Tai found it remarkably free of ghosts when she walked up to the ruins, alone, on the day after they arrived at their nearby lodgings. There was nothing of Antian here anymore, not even a memory. Antian belonged to the summer—bright flowers nodding in the warm sunlight, butterflies, summer stars hanging in the heavens in the long, lazy dusk of hot days. Tai had found it hard going to force her way up the winding road into what was left of the Palace courtyards. No carts had gone that way for a long time, and the snow was set hard and deep on the path—but there had been tracks in the fresh powder on the top of the old packed snow, as if someone else had been there recently. As though someone else went there often.

  Tai had not expected to see the one who had made the tracks—the footprints were of booted feet, but small, a child’s or a young woman’s, perhaps—and had been considerably startled to catch a glimpse of a darting and oddly furtive form scuttling into concealment as she made her way into the gardens. She could not see much, and when she called nobody answered, but the one thing that she did notice, when the creature’s wrap had slipped down over her shoulders as she ran, was that the other visitor was a girl whose hair was an improbable and unusual shade of golden chestnut which hung in wild, burnished red-gold curls around a pale, narrow face.

  She looked like no one Tai had ever seen before, a spirit of the mountains, maybe—slight, lithe, moving with an athlete’s grace and a fawn’s light-footed speed. Tai tried looking for her, peering into the shadows of the ruined Palace into which she looked like she had vanished, but there was no sign of her. Not even tracks showed where she had disappeared to, as though she really had been an immortal sprite out of Cahan, out to play with a mortal seeker’s eyes.

  Whoever she was, it had not been Antian, not even an echo of her spirit.

  Tai didn’t spend long at the ruins. They were empty for her.

  When she returned to the mountain inn where they were staying, Liudan, sitting by the fire in a simple plaited willow chair which her presence managed to make into a throne, stopped her as she walked past the open door to the inn’s common room.

  “So. Did you find her?”

  Tai paused. “I do not have to seek her here, Liudan. She is always with me.”

  “But the first thing you did was go back,” Liudan said. “To her. To the ghost.”

  “She is gone. You are here,” Tai said.

  Liudan’s eyes sparked with something—a touch of jealousy, annoyance, regret, maybe even understanding—but she did not speak.

  She would never have admitted it, not even to her own jin-shei-bao or perhaps particularly not to her, but Liudan’s own first instinct had been to return to the ruins of the old Palace. Tai had had no more than a brace of magical summers there, but Liudan had grown up with the beauty of the Summer Palace gardens, with its wicker cricket cages and the brightness of its flowers … and with the presence of the vanished Princess who was at once a bond and a sundering between the two jin-shei-bao who survived her. Liudan could remember the times that she spent playing knucklebones in the garden with Antian when she was very little, or Antian reading to her from a slim volume of old legends penned in elegant jin-ashu script by some long-gone Imperial ancestress. The Summer Palace gardens held the echo of the only laughter Liudan had shared in her lonely and isolated existence in the Imperial household. And she could also remember, vividly, the stab of jealous rage which had accompanied her first glimpse of Antian and Tai walking together among the fountains of the Inner Court.

  “But I have not abandoned you, my sister,” Antian had told her, later, sitting beside her on her bed just before they had all retired that night.

  Liudan had been mutinously silent, her head turned away so that she would not be betrayed by the glint of a too-bright eye, and Antian had finally sighed and leaned over and kissed her on the brow and had said quietly, “It is your own silence that keeps you alone. You know, I think, that I will always be there for you.”

  For a moment, there in the sitting room of the mountain inn, Antian’s presence had been very real, her face almost shaped by the air that shimmered between Liudan and Tai. But Liudan had said nothing in response to Tai’s words, and finally Tai, respecting that silence, made her obeisance to the Empress and retreated into the room that she shared with Nhia.

  Nhia was there, lean
ing over Yuet’s shoulder as she pored over an old leather-bound volume thickly and neatly inscribed with jin-ashu script. The book looked damaged, its edges eaten by what looked like charring, some of the script partly obliterated by damp which had smeared the ink across the pages.

  “Look at this,” Nhia said. “They showed it to Yuet this morning; apparently someone lugged it all the way down from the wreck of the Palace during the summer.”

  “When the scavengers were there,” Tai said, sniffling, trying to stifle one of her explosive sneezes. She had brought those with her from the city, legacy of that mad dash to the Temple to retrieve Nhia for the mountain retreat. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Yuet said. “I’m still trying to decipher it, but it looks like Szewan’s hand to me, nobody else could do jin-ashu in a manner quite this small and crabbed—until her hands gave out, that is, and I started keeping the books. But this looks like it’s ten, maybe twenty years old; she was still writing up her own cases then. So far it’s pretty ordinary, but it looks remarkably like a copy of the Blackmail Book.”

  “The what?” Tai said, astonished.

  Yuet laughed. “That’s what I always called it. Her secret patients. The ones that were exotic, or unusual, or suffered from diseases or conditions too embarrassing, delicate, or dangerous to keep open records of.”

  “There is such a book? Did she really use it to blackmail people?” Tai asked.

  “Hardly,” said Yuet, but after a small pause. She could see where arcane knowledge, judiciously applied, could be useful … but this was not something she would discuss with her two nonhealer companions. She had handled Szewan’s book even while the old healer had still been alive, and had riffled through it after her death while she had been going through the rest of her papers. But she had not, in fact, had time yet to go through the Blackmail Book properly. She had every intention of doing so soon.