The Secrets of Jin-shei Read online

  Second Princess Oylian was a gentle, pliant, pleasant girl who drifted through life—she was a stream of water which flowed around obstacles rather than try and shift them.

  “The worst thing that could ever happen to Oylian and to Syai,” Antian had said to Tai once in a low whisper one early morning out on their balcony on the side of the mountain, “would be for her to ever become Empress. Whoever her Emperor proved to be, he could make her do whatever he said and she would do it to keep the peace. She was born to a family, not an Empire.”

  But the Second Princess would smile at Tai, even if she didn’t have much to say to her. Liudan would simply sweep past and ignore her whenever she could. Tai was the danger—Tai was, like Liudan’s own mother had been, of common stock, only one step removed from Liudan’s own now-high station, a reminder of what she could easily have been if she had not been born royal. The Third Princess was a complex mixture of insecurities—left adrift because she was the second spare heiress and therefore less urgently needed than Oylian, left alone because of her mother’s fall from grace for reasons that even Liudan herself did not really understand, afraid of the thin veneer that separated her royalty from the land-grubbing poverty from which her mother’s family had come. Liudan wanted the royalty, needed it as a shield against all kinds of terrors—and it was a thin shield, barely there. She was only Third Princess, after all.

  But this summer, the summer that Antian had invited Tai up to the Summer Palace as her guest, Liudan was mercifully absent, back in Linh-an, suffering the summer heat in the Imperial Palace—and probably doing it with better grace than the other two would ever have done because at least it was a signifier of her status, an indication that she was important enough in the hierarchy to be preserved and sheltered against the potential of disaster. And her absence meant that Antian and Tai could laugh more freely, more often, without waiting for Liudan’s brooding presence to cut the laughter short when they met her eyes.

  In a way, though, Liudan’s hostility was what made Tai aware of her own status in this court—although Liudan’s presence was uncomfortable, she and Tai were two points of the same star, both sisters to Antian after a fashion, balancing one another. Without the unconcealed hostility of that one among all the Imperial women, it was somehow harder for Tai to winnow the genuine from the sycophant in the rest of the Imperial royal women in the Summer Palace. It was as if, with Liudan there, Tai was on her guard against Liudan alone. With her gone, Tai was on her guard against everybody else.

  But she was here, now, in the royal quarters, bent over her journal by candlelight even while the sky lightened in the east. She and Antian were to meet at their balcony that morning, later, but Tai had woken early, uncomfortable about something, not sure what had woken her—until she had picked up her inkwell and her brush and her journal and it had come into focus for her.

  It is very quiet out there tonight.

  She stared at the line she had written down, and became preternaturally aware of the stillness that had broken through the depths of sleep to wake her, the silence that surrounded her, the world holding its breath. She thought she heard, far away in a kennel somewhere, the despondent howl of a trapped dog, but even that was there and gone almost before she had had a chance to identify the sound. The silence was absolute.

  And then the mountain shuddered, and crumbled.

  Two

  In less time than it took to blink, silence was a memory. Masonry groaned; things skittered across the surface of the lacquered table, I or fell to the ground, leaving the floor strewn with debris. Above it all there was an indescribable sound that was half heard and half absorbed directly through bone and muscle—the roar of wounded stone.

  Instinct had taken over in the first moment of terror, and Tai had streaked out of her room and into the garden, out under an open sky. She felt the ground shake under the soles of her bare feet, staggered to keep her balance, lost the battle, fell sideways into a bed of swaying flowers still closed in the pearly predawn gray darkness. Before Tai’s horrified eyes the tiered Summer Palace folded into itself as though it had been made of sticks and leaves, walls falling inward, tiles falling in slow motion and tumbling end over end before shattering into dust, columns snapping in two or falling sideways and knocking out the next column in line, collapsing them in turn like dominoes. Graceful arched windows and doorways became piles of broken brick and crumbs of plaster; wooden window frames snapped like matchsticks. Glass was a precious thing and not often found outside the Imperial Palaces, and even there rare and used sparingly; now, with the wooden frames bending and breaking, the night was alive with the eerie sound of breaking glass, like fairy chimes.

  A tree groaned and began to fall over, in slow motion, pulling its old roots out of the ground.

  Lifting her eyes to the top of the mountain whose peak had always towered above the Summer Palace, Tai became aware with a shock that the peak had vanished. It was partly the huge rocks from the disintegrating mountainside that had helped wreak this havoc—smashing down on top of buildings, flattening structures in their path, rolling onward in destructive fury. One had leveled a fountain in the gardens, and the spilled water, still dark as the night it reflected, saturated the flowerbeds and flowed into the courtyards whose cobbles looked as though they had been ploughed.

  Somewhere in the ruins of the Palace a spark started, then a fire. Then another. And another. Columns of smoke rose into the sky; the air tasted acrid with dust and ashes and fear.

  When the noise of tumbling rocks and crashing buildings had subsided at last, leaving an echo ringing in Tai’s ears, she began hearing another sound—human voices, groaning, screaming, weeping. She became aware that she was herself uttering small whimpering sounds. Curled up in the middle of a once-graceful flower bed, now sodden and blighted out in the shattered gardens, she was barefoot, an almost translucent nightrobe all that she wore—but she was whole, and unharmed, and still clutching the red leather-bound journal that had been Antian’s gift.

  Those who had been deeper into the warren of the Palace and had no way to get out … those who had not woken to the silence before the wrath of the Gods … those who had tried to run but had not made it out fast enough …

  They were all still in there.

  In the wreck of the Summer Palace.

  In the piles of still settling dust and rubble, under the weight of a mountain.

  Antian.

  The sky was lightening in the east, and dawn crept over the ruined Palace, brighter, faster now that the mountainside which had reared up against the eastern sky was gone.

  Dawn. Early morning.

  The balcony on the mountain.

  Her rigid fingers wrapped tightly around the red book that had been Antian’s gift, Tai scrambled to her feet and stood, indecisive, torn, in the shattered garden. Her nightrobe was streaked with mud, her feet and her face smeared with mud and with dust; she had an urgent need to go and do something—help those buried in the rubble, dig with bare hands until she found someone whom she could haul out of the wreckage—and knew that the only one she wanted to find was Antian, the Little Empress, lost somewhere in this chaos. And unable to move—because if she ran to the Palace Antian could be out on the balcony, and if she chose the balcony Antian might die buried under the weight of the broken Palace.

  She saw someone running toward the buildings, a weeping servant, followed by another who clutched an awkwardly bent arm and had a face smeared with blood. It might have been this that decided Tai. There would be others coming to the Palace soon—not everything had collapsed, surely, and there had to be people who could move, who could help—but nobody else knew that Antian was going to the balcony that morning. If she was there, then nobody knew to go to her aid.

  She turned, and ran.

  Somehow the gate that led to the outer balcony was still intact—its capstone in place, the wall surrounding it deceptively innocent and peaceful in the early morning light. But taking a step through it, and loo
king up, Tai realized for the first time the extent of the catastrophe that had touched the Summer Palace that day.

  The mountain above the Palace wore a different shape. Half of it was gone, vanished. The mountain peak had disintegrated, and a lot of it had fallen down into the buildings and the courtyards of the Palace. The rest of the mountainside had sheared off in a layer of stone and mud and simply slid down the slope, taking a large chunk of the Palace with it.

  The lacy pattern of open balconies hanging over the river that flowed golden when the sun was setting was no more. The mountain’s face was a gaping wound of broken ballustrades, platforms teetering over nothing, piles of shattered stone a long way below, all the way down to the river. Some balconies had been ripped off completely, and gaping holes in the walls opened from the Palace courts directly out into the abyss. Others were hanging on by a narrow ledge only a single flagstone wide, or by part of a ballustrade. Yet others were crazy, broken, multileveled wrecks with holes where flagstones had smashed or been ripped in half, looking as though they were being observed with a mirror put together from glass shards, each reflecting a different angle, different aspect.

  Tai stood at the edge of this devastation, eyes wide with shock. If Antian had been out here …

  She tried calling, but her voice seemed to have died in her throat, and all that came out was a soft wail. But the sound seemed to have triggered some response, for the broken stones sighed and whimpered and a familiar but very weak voice replied.

  “Who is there?”

  Tai’s first reaction was a rush of relief, a fierce joy, the sheer euphoria of hearing that voice at all. And then that soft voice dropped, fading into almost a whisper. “Help me.”

  No! screamed Tai’s mind. But she stifled it, tried to cling to the happiness she had felt a bare moment before, batted at the sudden rush of tears with the back of her hand. Almost unwillingly, not wanting to see what lay beyond the ruined balcony, not wanting to know the inevitable, Tai crept carefully forward toward the edge, peering over.

  Just out of arm’s reach, on a ledge of broken flagstone caught on a rocky protrusion on the mountainside, lay Antian, the Little Empress. One of her long braids had curled on her breast in a long black rope, like a living thing that had come to comfort her; the other had slipped down her shoulder and now hung over the edge of her resting place, swinging out into the chasm below her. She held a hand—always graceful, still graceful!—to her side in a fragile kind of way, as though she was trying to staunch a wound with no strength left to do it with, and indeed there was a dark stain that was spreading into her robe underneath her fingers. Her hand was smeared with red; so was her face, with a gash on her forehead oozing a thin stream of blood into the corner of her eye and down her temple and another graze red and bleeding along the line of her jaw. One of her legs seemed bent at an unnatural angle.

  But her eyes were lucid, and she tried to smile when Tai’s face appeared over the edge of the ruin above her.

  “Don’t move,” Tai said, her voice catching a little. “I’ll go get help.”

  “Wait …”

  But Tai was already gone. There had been something about Antian that she could hardly bear to watch—a kind of brightness, an aura that was more than just the first fingers of the dawn’s golden glow, an otherworldly light that told her that Antian had already taken that first irrevocable step into the world beyond, the world of the Immortals.

  Tai skidded into the courtyards, panting, her eyes wild, her feet bleeding from scratches and gashes delivered by the broken cobblestones she had stumbled over in her haste. There were people in the courtyards now, but only a few of them were actually moving about or doing something constructive. Bodies were laid out in the garden, and a handful of bloodied survivors had been taken to a sheltered area where one or two servants, themselves bandaged and bleeding from scratches or hobbling on makeshift crutches, tried to tend to them. Someone was crying weakly for water. Somebody else was weeping, a curiously steady sound, as though she did not know how to stop.

  A young woman in a white robe streaked with dust and blood was leaning over a woman’s body, gently probing with long fingers, but even as Tai watched she straightened with a sigh, closing her eyes. Her expression told it all.

  Her face was familiar, underneath its coating of grime, and Tai fought her own panic and fear to dredge the name from her memory—this was someone who could be useful—who was it—she knew her, it was precisely the person she had come looking for …

  Yuet. The name swam into her mind, followed by another—Szewan—the healer woman who had tended Tai’s mother that spring. Yuet had tagged at Szewan’s heels. Yuet was the healer’s apprentice.

  Szewan was in Linh-an. Yuet was here. Yuet was the healer.

  Tai ran to the older girl and snatched at the sleeve of her robe.

  “Come! Oh, you must come! It’s Antian—it’s the Little Empress—she needs your help.”

  The young healer turned her head, blinked in Tai’s direction for a moment, the words not sinking in. Then, as she parsed the sentence, as she realized what had just been said, she sucked in her breath.

  “Is she alive?”

  “Yes. Yes! Hurry!”

  Yuet drew a shaking hand across her forehead. “The Gods be thanked for that, at least!” She showed no sign of having recognized Tai, although they had met several times during the spring, but right now Yuet would have been hard put to recognize her own mother. All she could see was the death all around her, the death written in the broken women they were scrambling to dig out of the ruins, the despair written in the faces of those who had come to the call for help, themselves bruised, cut, bleeding. The death written in the toppled mountain that had annihilated everything.

  The Emperor and the Empress were both dead. The rescuers digging in the rubble of the Palace knew that much already. Oylian, the Second Princess, they had not found yet—and that could not be a good sign. And now, this …

  “Take me to her,” Yuet said, turning away from the body at her feet and starting out toward the ruined Palace.

  “This way!” Tai, who had not let go of her sleeve, tugged her away and across the gardens.

  Yuet stopped, confused. “Where is the Little Empress?”

  “She was on one of the balconies … out on the mountain.”

  What little color was left in Yuet’s cheeks drained away. “What in the name of Cahan was she doing there? When this was all coming down?”

  “We were supposed to meet at the balcony this morning.” Tai pulled at Yuet’s arm. “Hurry!”

  Yuet followed, frowning, until her eyes suddenly lit briefly with recognition. “You’re from Linh-an, you’re her jin-shei-bao.”

  “Hurry.” Tai seemed to have forgotten every other word she ever knew. All that was beating in her heart, in her blood, in her mind, was hurry. The broken doll on the ledge below the balcony, that was just the shell of Antian—but if they didn’t hurryhurryhurry the shell would melt and shred in the mountain winds like a cloud and disappear forever … and this was Antian, the princess who laughed, who cared, who loved, who would be Empress one day …

  Yuet had the presence of mind to snag a relatively able-bodied male servant on their way to the balcony, surmising—rightly—that Antian would have to be extracted out of some unspeakable wreckage before she could be helped. But that hadn’t prepared her for the devastation of the mountainside when the three of them finally emerged onto what was left of the little balcony. Yuet gasped, her hand going to her throat.

  “She survived this?” Yuet said breathlessly.

  Tai had run to the edge of the chasm. “Antian? Antian, I’m here. I brought help.”

  The manservant reached out and scooped the struggling Tai out of harm’s way, and peered carefully over the edge himself.

  “We would need rope, I think,” he said.

  “There is no time for that now.” Yuet had approached and was gauging the distance between herself and her patient. “I t
hink there is space enough. Lower me down, and then go fetch a rope and another pair of hands to help you. This will need doing gently. Dear sweet Cahan, she is still alive. Princess? I am coming down to you.”

  Antian whispered something, very softly, and Tai thought she heard, No, it is too dangerous. But Yuet had already grasped the manservant’s wrists with her hands, and he had wrapped his own fingers around her wrists and was trying to judge the most stable spot to lower her down on.

  “I don’t think there’s a good place,” Yuet said at last. “There’s no time, there’s no time! Lower me down there and go get help!”

  “Yes, sai’an.” He grasped her wrists firmly and the corded muscles in his arms knotted as he lowered her slowly, gently, down to where Antian lay. Yuet felt her feet touch something solid, then it lurched beneath her heel. She gasped.

  “Wait!”

  “I won’t let go, sai’an,” the servant said, his voice tight with the effort of holding her suspended above the tumbled chaos at her feet. “Not until you tell me.”

  Yuet felt with her foot, found a foothold that felt solid, tested it. It held. She brought the other foot closer, fitted her heel into the arch of the grounded foot like a ballerina, found her balance, stood. The manservant felt one of her long fingers tapping at his wrist.

  “You can let go now. Go, get a rope. Get help. For the love of Cahan, run!”

  “Yes, sai’an, I go!” He released her arms, turned, and ran back the way they had come. Tai could hear him calling out urgently as he ran, but then he was dismissed from her mind and she knelt on the edge of the ruined balcony and craned her neck down to see what Yuet was doing.