Читать книгу Under Heaven - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 13

The armies of the empire had changed over the past fifty years, and changes were continuing. The old fupei system of a peasant militia summoned for part of the year then returning to their farms for the harvest had grown more and more inadequate to the needs of an expanding empire.

The borders had been pushed west and north and northeast and even south past the Great River through the disease-ridden tropics to the pearl-diver seas. Collisions with Tagurans to the west and the various Bogü tribal factions north had increased, as did the need to protect the flow of luxuries that came on the Silk Roads. The emergence of border forts and garrisons farther and farther out had ended the militia system with its back-and-forth of farmer-soldiers.

Soldiers were professionals now, or they were supposed to be. More and more often they and their officers were drawn from nomads beyond the Long Wall, subdued and co-opted by the Kitan. Even the military governors were often foreigners now. Certainly the most powerful one was.

It marked a change. A large one.

The soldiers served year-round and, for years now, were paid from the imperial treasury and supported by a virtual army of peasants and labourers building forts and walls, supplying food and weapons and clothing and entertainment of any and all kinds.

It made for better-trained fighters familiar with their terrain, but a standing army of this size did not come without costs—and increased taxes were only the most obvious consequence.

In years and regions of relative peace, without drought or flood, with wealth now flowing at an almost unimaginable rate into Xinan and Yenling and the other great cities, the cost of the new armies was bearable. In hard years it became a problem. And other issues, less readily seen, were growing. At the lowest ebb, of a person or a nation, the first seeds of later glory may sometimes be seen, looking back with a careful eye. At the absolute summit of accomplishment the insects chewing from within at the most extravagant sandalwood may be heard, if the nights are quiet enough.

A QUIET-ENOUGH NIGHT. Wolves had been howling in the canyon earlier, but had stopped. The darkness was giving way, for those on watch on the ramparts of Iron Gate Fort, to a nearly-summer sunrise. Pale light pulling a curtain of shadows back—as in a puppet show at a town market—from the narrow space between ravine walls.

Though that, thought Wujen Ning, from his post on the ramparts, was not quite right. Street theatre curtains were pulled to the side—he’d seen them in Chenyao.

Ning was one of the native-born Kitan here, having followed his father and older brothers into the army. There was no family farm for him to rely upon for an income, or return to visit. He wasn’t married.

He spent his half-year leave time in the town between Iron Gate and Chenyao. There were wine shops and food sellers and women to take his strings of cash. Once, given two weeks’ leave, he’d gone to Chenyao itself, five days away. Home was too far.

Chenyao had been, by a great deal, the biggest city he’d ever seen. It had frightened him, and he’d never gone back. He didn’t believe the others when they said it wasn’t that large, as cities went.

Here in the pass, in the quiet of it, the dawn light was filtering downwards. It struck the tops of the cliffs first, pulling them from shadow, and worked its way towards the still-dark valley floor as the sun rose over the mighty empire behind them.

Wujen Ning had never seen the sea, but it pleased him to imagine the vast lands of Kitai stretching east to the ocean and the islands in it where immortals dwelled.

He glanced down at the dark, dusty courtyard. He adjusted his helmet. They had a commander now who was obsessed with helmets and properly worn uniforms, as if a screaming horde of Tagurans might come storming down the valley at any moment and sweep over the fortress walls if someone’s tunic or sword belt was awry.

As if, Ning thought. He spat over the wall through his missing front tooth. As if the might of the Kitan Empire in this resplendent Ninth Dynasty, and the three hundred soldiers in this fort that commanded the pass, were a nuisance like mosquitoes.

He slapped at one of those on his neck. They were worse to the south, but this pre-dawn hour brought out enough of the bloodsuckers to make for annoyance. He looked up. Scattered clouds, a west wind in his face. The last stars nearly gone. He’d be off duty at the next drum, could go down to breakfast and sleep.

He scanned the empty ravine, and realized it wasn’t empty.

What he saw, in the mist slowly dispersing, made him shout for a runner to go to the commander.

A lone man approaching before sunrise wasn’t a threat, but it was unusual enough to get an officer up on the wall.

Then, as he came nearer, the rider lifted a hand, gesturing for the gates to be opened for him. At first Ning was astonished at the arrogance of that, and then he saw the horse the man was riding.

He watched them come on, horse and rider taking clearer form, like spirits entering the real world through fog. That was a strange thought. Ning spat again, between his fingers this time for protection.

He wanted the horse the moment he saw it. Every man in Iron Gate would want that horse. By the bones of his honoured ancestors, Wujen Ning thought, every man in the empire would.

“Why you so sure that one didn’t bring her to you?” Bytsan had asked.

“He did bring her. Or she brought him.”

“Stop being clever, Kitan. You know what I mean.”

Some irritation, understandable. They’d been on their eighth or ninth cup of wine, at least—it had been considered ill-bred among the students in Xinan to keep count.

Night outside by then, but moonlit, so silver in the cabin.

Tai had also lit candles, thinking light would help the other man. The ghosts were out there, as always. You could hear their voices, as always. Tai was used to it, but felt unsettled to realize this was his last night. He wondered if they might know it, somehow.

Bytsan wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—accustomed to any of this.

The voices of the dead offered anger and sorrow, sometimes dark, hard pain, as if trapped forever in the moment of their dying. The sounds swirled from outside the cabin windows, gliding along the rooftop. Some came from farther off, towards the lake or the trees.

Tai tried to remember the dry-mouthed terror he’d lived with on his first nights two years ago. It was hard to reclaim those feelings after so long, but he remembered sweating and shivering, clutching a sword hilt in bed.

If cups of warmed rice wine were going to help the Taguran deal with a hundred thousand ghosts, less the ones buried by Shen Tai in two years…that was the way it was. That was all right.

They’d buried Yan and the assassin in the pit Tai had begun that afternoon. It wasn’t nearly deep enough yet for the bones he’d planned, which made it good for two Kitan just slain, one by sword, one by arrows, sent over to the night.

They’d wrapped them in winter sheepskin he wasn’t using (and would never use again) and carried them down the row of mounds in the last of the day’s light.

Tai had jumped into the pit and the Taguran had handed down Yan’s body and he’d laid his friend in the ground and climbed out of the grave.

Then they’d dropped the assassin in beside Yan and shovelled the earth from next to the open pit back in and pounded it hard on top and all around with the flat sides of the shovels, against the animals that might come, and Tai had spoken a prayer from the teachings of the Path, and poured a libation over the grave, while the Taguran stood by, facing south towards his gods.

It had been nearly dark by then and they’d made their way hastily back to the cabin as the evening star, the one the Kitan people called Great White, appeared in the west, following the sun down. Poets’ star at evening, soldiers’ in the morning.

There hadn’t been anything in the way of fresh food. On a normal day, Tai would have caught a fish, gathered eggs, shot a bird and plucked it for cooking at day’s end, but there had been no time for that today.

They’d boiled dried, salted pork and eaten it with kale and hazelnuts in bowls of rice. The Tagurans had brought early peaches, which were good. And they’d had the new rice wine. They drank as they ate, and continued when the meal was done.

The ghosts had begun with the starlight.

“You know what I mean,” Bytsan repeated, a little too loudly. “Why’re you so sure of him? Chou Yan? You trust everyone who names himself a friend?”

Tai shook his head. “Isn’t in my nature to be trusting. But Yan was too proud of himself when he saw me, and too astonished when she drew her swords.”

“A Kitan can’t deceive?”

Tai shook his head again. “I knew him.” He sipped his wine. “But someone knew me, if they told her not to fight. She said she’d have preferred to kill me in a combat. And she knew I was here. Yan didn’t know. She let him go first to my father’s house. Didn’t give away where I was—he’d have suspected something. Maybe. He wasn’t a suspicious man.”

Bytsan looked at Tai narrowly, considering all this. “Why would a Kanlin Warrior fear you?”

He wasn’t so drunk, after all. Tai couldn’t see how it would hurt to answer.

“I trained with them. At Stone Drum Mountain, nearly two years.” He watched the other man react. “It would take me time to get my skills back, but someone may not have wanted to chance it.”

The Taguran was staring. Tai poured more wine for him from the flask on the brazier. He drank from his own cup, then filled it. A friend had died here today. There was blood on the bedding. There was a new hole in the world where sorrow could enter.

“Everyone knew this about you? The time with the Kanlins?”

Tai shook his head. “No.”

“You trained to be an assassin?”

The usual, irritating mistake. “I trained to learn how they think, their disciplines, and how they handle weapons. They are usually guards, or guarantors of a truce, not assassins. I left, fairly abruptly. Some of my teachers may still feel kindly towards me. Others might not. It was years ago. We leave things behind us.”

“Well, that’s true enough.”

Tai drank his wine.

“They think you used them? Tricked them?”

Tai was beginning to regret mentioning it. “I just understand them a little now.”

“And they don’t like that?”

“No. I’m not a Kanlin.”

“What are you?”

“Right now? I’m between worlds, serving the dead.”

“Oh, good. Be Kitan-clever again. Are you a soldier or a court mandarin, fuck it all?”

Tai managed a grin. “Neither. Fuck it all.”

Bytsan looked away quickly, but Tai saw him suppress a smile. It was hard not to like this man.

He added, more quietly, “It is only truth, captain. I left the army years ago, have not taken the civil service exams. I’m not being clever.”

Bytsan held out his again-empty cup before answering. Tai filled it, topped up his own. This was beginning to remind him of nights in the North District. Soldiers or poets—who could drink more? A question for the ages, or sages.

After a moment, the Taguran said, also softly, “You didn’t need us to save you.”

Outside, something screamed.

It wasn’t a sound you could pretend was an animal, or wind. Tai knew that particular voice. Heard it every night. He found himself wishing he’d been able to find and bury that one before leaving. But there was no way to know where any given bones might lie. That much he’d learned in two years. Two years that were ending tonight. He had to leave. Someone had been sent to kill him, this far away. He needed to learn why. He drained his cup again.

He said, “I didn’t know they would attack her. Neither did you, coming back.”

“Well, of course, or we wouldn’t have come.”

Tai shook his head. “No, that means your courage deserves honour.”

Something occurred to him. Sometimes wine sent your thoughts along channels you’d not otherwise have found, as when river reeds hide and then reveal a tributary stream in marshland.

“Is that why you let the young one shoot both arrows?”

Bytsan’s gaze in mingled light was unsettlingly direct. Tai was beginning to feel his wine. The Taguran said, “She was flat against the cabin. They were going to crush the life from her. Why waste an arrow?”

Half an answer at best. Tai said wryly, “Why waste a chance to give a soldier a tattoo, and a boast?”

The other man shrugged. “That, too. He did come back with me.”

Tai nodded.

Bytsan said, “You ran outside knowing they’d help you?” An edge to his voice. And why not? They were listening to the cries outside right now. And screams.

Tai cast his mind back to the desperate moments after Yan died. “I was running for the shovel.”

Bytsan sri Nespo laughed, a quick, startling sound. “Against Kanlin swords?”

Tai found himself laughing too. The wine was part of it. And the aftermath of fear remembered. He’d expected to die.

He’d have become one of the ghosts of Kuala Nor.

They drank again. The screaming voice had stopped. Another bad one was beginning, one of those that seemed to still be dying, unbearably, somewhere in the night. It hurt your heart, listening, frayed the edges of your mind.

Tai said, “Do you think about death?”

The other man looked at him. “Every soldier does.”

It was an unfair question. This was a stranger, of an enemy people not so long ago, and likely again in years to come. A blue-tattooed barbarian living beyond the civilized world.

Tai drank. Taguran wine was not going to replace the spiced or scented grape wine of the best houses in the North District, but it was good enough for tonight.

Bytsan murmured suddenly, “I said we had to talk. Told Gnam that, remember?”

“We aren’t talking enough? A shame…a shame Yan’s buried out there. He’d have talked you to sleep, if only to find a respite from his voice.”

Buried out there.

Such a wrong place for a gentle, garrulous man to lie. And Yan had come so far. Carrying what tidings? Tai didn’t know. He didn’t even know, he realized, if his friend had passed the exams.

Bytsan looked away. Gazing out a window at moonlight, he said, “If someone sent an assassin they can send another—when you get back or while you are on the way. You know that.”

He knew that.

Bytsan said, “Iron Gate saw them come through. They will ask where the two of them are.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“And they will send word to Xinan.”

Tai nodded. Of course they would. A Kanlin Warrior coming this far west as an assassin? That had significance. Not empire-shaking, Tai wasn’t important enough, but certainly worth a dispatch from a sleepy border fort. It would go with the military post, which was very fast.

Bytsan said, “Your mourning’s over, then?”

“It will almost be, time I get to Xinan.”

“That where you’ll go?”

“Have to.”

“Because you do know who sent her?”

He hadn’t expected that.

It was Xin Lun who suggested it to me. Yan’s last words on earth, in life, under nine heavens.

“I might know how to start finding out.”

He might know more than that, but he wasn’t ready to think about it tonight.

“I have another suggestion, then,” said the Taguran. “Two of them. Trying to keep you alive.” He laughed briefly, drained another cup. “My future seems to be bound up with yours, Shen Tai, and the gift you’ve been given. You need to stay alive long enough to send for your horses.”

Tai considered that. It made sense, from Bytsan’s point of view—you didn’t have to think hard to see the truth of it.

Both of the Taguran’s suggestions had been good ones.

Tai would not have thought of either. He would need to get his subtlety back before he reached Xinan, where you could be exiled for bowing one time too many or too few or to the wrong person first. He accepted both of the other man’s ideas, with one addition that seemed proper.

They’d finished the last of the flask, put out the lights, and had gone to bed.

Towards what would soon enough be morning, the moon over west, the Taguran had said softly from where he lay on the floor, “If I’d spent two years here, I would think about death.”

“Yes,” said Tai.

Starlight. The voices outside, rising and falling. The star of the Weaver Maid had been visible earlier, shining in a window. Far side of the Sky River from her love.

“They are mostly about sorrow out there, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“They would have killed her, though.”

“Yes.”

Tai recognized the guard above the gate; he’d come to the lake at least twice with the supplies they sent. He didn’t remember his name. The commander was named Lin Fong, he knew that. A small, crisp man with a round face and a manner that suggested that the fort at Iron Gate Pass was only a way station, an interlude in his career.

On the other hand, the commander had come to Kuala Nor a few weeks after arriving at the fort last autumn, in order to see for himself the strange man burying the dead there.

He had bowed twice to Tai when he’d left with the soldiers and cart, and the supplies being sent had remained completely reliable. An ambitious man, Lin Fong, and obviously aware, during that visit to the lake, of who Tai’s father had been. Traces of arrogance, but there was honour in him, Tai judged, and a sense that the commander was aware of the history of this battleground among mountains.

Not someone you’d likely choose as a friend, but that wasn’t what he was here to be at Iron Gate.

He was standing, impeccable in his uniform, just inside the gate as it swung open. It was just after dawn. Tai had slept through the first night travelling but had been awakened by wolves on the second. Not dangerously near, or hungry, as best he could judge, but he had chosen to offer his prayers for his father in the darkness and ride on under stars instead of lying on high, hard ground awake. None of the Kitan were easy with wolves, in legend, in life, and Tai was no exception. He felt safer on horseback, and he was already in love with Bytsan sri Nespo’s bay-coloured Sardian.

They didn’t sweat blood, the Heavenly Horses—that was legend, a poet’s image—but if anyone had wanted to recite some of the elaborate verses about them, Tai would have been entirely happy to listen and approve. He’d ridden recklessly fast in the night, the moon behind him, borne by an illusion that the big horse could not put a hoof wrong, that there was only joy in speed, no danger in the canyon’s dark.

You could get yourself killed thinking that way, of course. He hadn’t cared, the pace was too purely intoxicating. He was riding a Sardian horse towards home in the night and his heart had been soaring, if only for that time. He had kept the Taguran name—Dynlal meant “spirit” in their tongue—which suited, in many ways.

Exchanging horses had been Bytsan’s first proposal. Tai was going to need some mark of favour, he’d pointed out, something that identified him, alerted people to the truth of what he’d been given. One horse, as a symbol of two hundred and fifty to come.

Dynlal would also get him where he was going faster.

The promise of Sardian horses, to be claimed only by him, was what might keep him alive, induce others to join in tracking down those who obviously did not wish him to remain alive—and help Tai determine why this was so.

It had made sense. So also, for Tai, did his modification of the suggestion.

He’d written it out before they parted in the morning: a document conveying to Bytsan sri Nespo, captain in the Taguran army, his free choice of any three horses among the two hundred and fifty, in exchange for his own mount surrendered at need and at request, and in grateful recognition of courage shown against treachery at Kuala Nor, arriving from Kitai.

That last phrase would help the captain with his own commanders; they both knew it. Nor had the Taguran argued. He was clearly relinquishing something that mattered a great deal to him with the big bay horse. Moments after starting into the sunrise, running with the wind, Tai had begun to understand why this was so.

Bytsan’s second suggestion had involved making explicit what might otherwise be dangerously unclear. The Taguran had taken his own turn with ink and paper at Tai’s desk, writing in Kitan, his calligraphy slow and emphatic.

“The below-named captain in the army of Tagur has been entrusted with ensuring that the gift of Sardian horses from the honoured and beloved Princess Cheng-wan, offered by her own grace and with the lordly blessing of the Lion, Sangrama, in Rygyal, be transferred to the Kitan, Shen Tai, son of General Shen Gao, to him and to no one else. The horses, which presently number two hundred fifty, will be pastured and maintained…”

There had been more, stipulating location—in Taguran lands near the border, close to the town of Hsien in Kitai, some distance south of where they were—and detailing the precise circumstances under which the horses would be handed over.

These conditions were designed to ensure that no one could compel Tai to sign instructions against his will. There were, in Xinan, men trained and often gifted in methods of inducing such signatures. There were others equally skilled in fabricating them.

This letter would go with Tai, be handed to the commander at Iron Gate to be copied, and the copy would proceed ahead of him by military post to the court.

It might make a difference. Might not, of course, but losing the empire those horses would very possibly cause any new assassin (and those who paid him, or her) to be hunted down, tortured for information, and creatively disembowelled before being permitted to die.

Tai had been aware, even as he rode east, and certainly now as he cantered Dynlal through the open gate of the fort and reined up before Lin Fong in the main courtyard, that a second assassin might be sent when word came back that the first one had failed.

What he had not expected was to see one waiting here at Iron Gate Pass, walking up behind the commander, clad in black and bearing crossed Kanlin swords in scabbards on her back.

She was smaller than the first woman had been, but with the same lithe movements. That walk almost marked someone as Kanlin. You learned those movements, even a way of standing, at Stone Drum Mountain. They made you dance there balanced on a ball.

Tai stared at the woman. Her black hair was unbound, falling to her waist. She had just risen from sleep, he realized.

Didn’t make her less dangerous. He pulled his bow from the saddle sheath and nocked an arrow. You kept arrows and bow ready in the mountains, for wolves or the cats. He didn’t dismount. He knew how to shoot from the saddle. Had been in the northern cavalry beyond the Long Wall, and had trained at Stone Drum after. You could find irony in that last, if you were in a certain state of mind. Kanlins were being sent after him. By someone.

The commander said, “What are you doing?”

The woman stopped, fifteen paces away. She had wide-set eyes and a full mouth. Given what she was, fifteen paces might be too close if she had a dagger. Tai danced his horse backwards.

“She’s here to kill me,” he said, calmly enough. “Another Kanlin tried, by the lake.”

“We know about that,” Commander Lin said.

Tai blinked, but never took his eyes from the woman. Moving slowly, she shrugged her leather straps off one shoulder and then the other, keeping her hands visible all the time. The swords dropped behind her into the dust. She smiled. He didn’t trust that smile.

A crowd of soldiers had gathered in the courtyard. A morning adventure. There weren’t many of those here at the edge of the world.

“How do you know about it?” Tai asked.

The commander glanced briefly at the woman behind him. He shrugged. “This one told us last night. She came pursuing the other. Arrived at sunset. Would have ridden on by night towards you. I told her to wait until this morning, that if something unpleasant had happened at Kuala Nor it would have done so already, since the others were days ahead of her.” He paused. “Did something happen?”

“Yes.”

The commander was expressionless. “They are dead? The fat scholar and the woman?”

“Yes.”

“Both of them?” The woman spoke for the first time. Her voice was low but clear in the dawn courtyard. “I regret to hear it.”

“You grieve for your companion?” Tai was holding in anger.

She shook her head. The smile had gone. She had a clever, alert face, high cheekbones; the unbound hair remained a distraction. “I was sent to kill her. I grieve for the other one.”

“The fat scholar,” Lin Fong repeated.

“The scholar was my friend,” said Tai. “Chou Yan came a long way from the world he knew to tell me something that mattered.”

“Did he?” The woman again. “Did he tell you?”

She stepped closer. Tai lifted a quick hand as he held the bow with the other. She stopped. Smiled again with that wide mouth. A smile from a Kanlin Warrior could be unsettling in and of itself, Tai thought.

She shook her head. “If I were here to kill you, you’d be dead by now. I wouldn’t have walked up like this. You must know that.”

“You might want questions answered first,” he said coldly. “And you know that.”

Her turn to hesitate. It pleased him. She’d been too sure of herself. At Stone Drum you were taught how to disarm a person with words, confuse or placate them. It wasn’t all blades and bows and spinning leaps that ended with a kick to the chest or head and, often as not, a death.

His friend was dead, killed by one of these Warriors. He held that within himself, a hard fury.

Her gaze was appraising now, but not in the way the other woman’s had been. She wasn’t sizing him up for a fight. Either she was biding her time, at a momentary disadvantage, or she was telling the truth about why she was here. He needed to decide. He could just shoot her, he thought.

“Why would you be sent to kill another Kanlin?”

“Because she isn’t Kanlin.”

The fortress commander turned and looked at her.

The woman said, “She went rogue half a year ago. Left her assigned sanctuary near Xinan, disappeared into the city. Started killing for a fee, then was hired by someone, we learned, to travel here to do the same.”

“Who hired her?”

The girl shook her head. “I wasn’t told.”

He said, “She was a Kanlin. She wanted to fight me, said the only reason she didn’t was strict orders.”

“And you think those orders could have been given to someone still serving the Mountain, Master Shen Tai? Really? You were at Stone Drum. You know better.”

He looked from her to Lin Fong. The commander’s expression was alert. This was all news to him, of course, and news was bright coinage this far west.

Tai really didn’t want his life discussed in an open courtyard. She probably knew that, he thought. She had ignored his question about why she’d been sent here. That could be discretion, or a way to get him into a smaller space.

His life had been very simple, just a few days ago.

“The commander can have someone search me,” she said in that low, crisp voice. It was as if she’d read his thoughts.

She added, “I have a dagger in my right boot. Nothing else. They can also tie my wrists so we can talk in a private place, with the commander present or not, as you wish.”

“No,” said Lin Fong, glaring. He wouldn’t like a woman being so decisive. No military officer would. “I will be present. You do not set conditions here. You are both under my jurisdiction, and it seems people have been killed. I have questions of my own, there are reports to be filed.”

There were always reports to be filed. The empire could drown in the reports that were filed, Tai thought.

The woman shrugged. Tai had the feeling she’d anticipated or even intended this. He needed to make a decision.

He sheathed his arrow and bow. Looked up to his right. The gap-toothed, balding guard was still on the wall, looking down. Tai gestured. “That one to look to my horse. Walk, water, feed him. I remember that he knows horses.”

The man’s expression of joy would have been gratifying, at any easier time.

HE HAD A FEW MOMENTS ALONE to wash and change his clothes. He switched from riding boots to brocaded slippers they provided. A servant—one of the border people serving the soldiers—took his clothing and boots to clean them.

It had occurred to Tai many years ago that one usually expected important decisions in life to emerge after long and complex thought. Sometimes this was so. But on other occasions one might wake in the morning (or finish drying one’s hands and face in a dusty border fort) with the abrupt, intense realization that a choice had already been made. All that was left was putting it into effect.

Tai could see no clear pattern in his own life as to this. Nor was he able to say, that morning, why he was suddenly so sure of something.

A waiting soldier escorted him through two courtyards to the commander’s reception pavilion at the eastern end of the compound. He announced Tai’s presence and drew back a canvas flap that covered the doorway, blocking the wind. Tai walked in.

Lin Fong and the Kanlin woman were already there. Tai bowed, then sat with them on a raised platform in the centre of the room. He settled himself on a mat, crossing his legs. There was tea, unexpectedly, at his elbow, on a blue, lacquered tray decorated with a painting of willow branches and two lines from a poem by Chan Du about willow trees. The pavilion was sparely decorated.

It was also more beautiful than any space Tai had entered in two years. There was a pale-green vase on a low side table behind the commander. Tai stared at it for a long time. Too long, probably. His expression, he thought wryly, was probably something like the soldier’s on the wall had been, looking down at the horse.

“That is a very fine piece of work,” he said.

Lin Fong smiled, pleased and unable to hide it.

Tai cleared his throat and bowed at the waist without rising. “Untie her, please. Or don’t bind her on my account.”

Folly, on the face of it. He was alarmingly certain it wasn’t.

He looked at the woman, who had been carefully trussed at both ankles and wrists. She was sitting placidly on the other side of the platform.

“Why?” Commander Lin, however happy with a compliment to his taste, evidently didn’t like making adjustments.

“She isn’t about to attack me with you here.” He’d realized this while washing his face. “The Kanlins exist because they can be trusted, by both court and army. They have lasted six hundred years because of that. But that trust is badly damaged if one of them kills the commander of a military fort, or someone under his protection. Their sanctuaries, their immunity, could be destroyed. And besides, I think she’s telling the truth.”

The woman smiled again, large eyes downcast, as if the amusement was private.

“The commander could be part of my plot,” she said, looking down.

In the intimacy of the room, out of the courtyard wind, her low voice was unsettling. It had been two years since he’d heard this sort of voice, Tai thought.

“But he isn’t,” he said, before Commander Lin could express outrage. “I’m not important enough. Or I wasn’t, before.”

“Before what?” the other man said, distracted from whatever he’d been about to say.

Tai waited. Lin Fong looked at him a moment, then nodded brusquely at a soldier. The man stepped forward and began untying the woman. He was careful not to step on the platform; discipline was good here.

Tai watched until the man was done, and then continued to wait politely. After a moment, the commander took the hint and dismissed the two soldiers.

The woman crossed her legs neatly and rested her hands upon her knees. She wore a hooded black tunic and black leggings for riding, both of common hemp. She had used the interval to pin up her hair. She didn’t rub her wrists, though the ropes had been tight, would have chafed. Her hands were small, he noted; you wouldn’t have thought she could be a Warrior. He knew better.

“Your name is?” he asked.

“Wei Song,” she said, bowing slightly.

“You are at Stone Drum Mountain?”

She shook her head impatiently. “Hardly, or I could not have been here so soon. I am from the sanctuary near Ma-wai. The same as the rogue was, before she left.”

A short ride from Xinan, near a posting station inn and a celebrated hot springs retreat with its pavilions and pools and gardens, for the emperor and his favourites.

Tai had said something stupid. Stone Drum, one of the Five Holy Mountains, was far to the northeast.

“Before what, please, Master Shen?” the commander repeated. “You have not answered me.”

He made some effort to keep irritation out of his voice, but it was there. A brisk, fussy man. An important person for Tai just now. Tai turned to him.

It was time, evidently.

He had a vivid sense of roads forking, rivers branching, one of those moments where the life that follows cannot be as it might otherwise have been.

“I have been given a gift by the Tagurans,” he said. “From their court, our own princess.”

“Princess Cheng-wan has given you a personal gift?” Astonishment, barely controlled.

“Yes, commander.”

Lin Fong was clearly thinking hard. “Because you were burying their dead?”

The man might be in a dismal posting, but he wasn’t a fool.

Tai nodded. “They have done me too much honour in Rygyal.”

“Too much honour? They are barbarians,” Commander Lin said bluntly. He lifted his porcelain bowl and sipped the hot, spiced tea. “They have no understanding of honour.”

“Perhaps,” said Tai, his voice carefully neutral.

Then he told them about the horses and watched them both react.