Читать книгу Under Heaven - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 14

“Where are they? These horses.”

It was the right question, of course. The commander had gone pale, was clearly thinking hard, fighting agitation. Experience could only take you so far in dealing with some kinds of information. Two deep, horizontal lines etched his forehead now. Lin Fong looked afraid. Tai didn’t entirely understand that, but it was there to be seen. The Kanlin woman, by contrast, seemed to have withdrawn into repose, attentive but unperturbed.

Tai had been on Stone Drum Mountain, however. He recognized this as a posture, a way of trying to make herself tranquil in the act of seeming so. Which meant she wasn’t. She was very young, Wei Song, he realized suddenly. Younger than the assassin had been, probably the same age as his sister.

“I don’t have them,” he said simply.

Lin Fong’s eyes flashed. “I did see you come in. I know that much.”

Irritation for some men was their response to strain.

“You’ll never get to court alive with Sardian horses, unless you have an army escort,” the woman said. “And then you’ll be indebted to the army.”

Young, but a quick brain working.

The commander glared. “You are all indebted to the army. You would do well to remember it, Kanlin.”

It begins, Tai thought.

The old, old tale of the Kitan people and their rivalries. Petty kingdoms warring with each other, once; ambitious men and women at the imperial court, now. Military governors, prefects, mandarins rising through their nine ranks, religious orders, palace eunuchs, legal advisers, empresses and concubines, and on, and on…all of them striving for eminence around the emperor, who was the sun.

He had been back in the empire for part of a morning, no more.

Tai said, “The horses will be held at a fort across the border, near Hsien. I have letters to be sent to court with the military post, explaining this.”

“Held by whom?” The commander, working it through.

“By the Taguran captain from the pass above Kuala Nor. He’s the one who brought me word of the gift.”

“But then they can take them back! Keep them!”

Tai shook his head. “Only if I die.”

He reached into his tunic pocket and drew out the original letter from Rygyal. He had a sudden memory of reading it by the lake, hearing the squabble of birds. He could almost feel the wind. “Princess Cheng-wan signed this herself, commander. We must be careful not to insult her, by suggesting they’d take them back.”

Lin Fong cleared his throat nervously. He almost reached for the letter but did not; it would have been demeaning to Tai if he’d checked. He was an irritable, rigid man, but not unaware of due courtesy, even out here in the wilderness.

Tai glanced across at the woman. She was smiling a little at Lin Fong’s discomfiture, not bothering to hide it.

He added, “They will keep them, unless I come myself.” It was what he’d worked out with Bytsan sri Nespo at the end of a long night in the cabin.

“Ah,” said Wei Song, looking up. “That is how you stay alive?”

“How I try.”

Her gaze was thoughtful. “A difficult gift, that puts your life at risk.”

The commander’s turn to shake his head. His mood seemed to have changed. “Difficult? It is more than that! This is…this is a tail-star burning across the sky. A good omen or a bad one, depending on what it traverses.”

“And depending on who reads the signs,” Tai said quietly. He didn’t like alchemists or astrologers, as it happened.

Commander Lin nodded. “These horses should be glorious—for you, for all of us. But these are challenging times to which you are returning. Xinan is a dangerous place.”

“It always has been,” Tai said.

“More so now,” said the commander. “Everyone will want your horses. They might tear you apart for them.” He sipped his tea. “I do have a thought.”

He was clearly thinking very hard. Tai almost felt sorry for the man: you were posted to a quiet border fort, sought to do well there, maintain order, efficiency, move onwards in due course.

Then two hundred and fifty Heavenly Horses arrived, more or less.

A tail-star, indeed. A comet streaking from the west.

“I will be grateful to learn any thoughts you have,” he said. He felt formality reasserting within himself, a way of dealing with unease. It had been so long since he’d been part of this intricate world. Of any world beyond lake and meadow and graves. He did think he knew what was coming. Some moves in a game could be anticipated.

“Your father was a great leader, mourned by all of us, in the west, especially. You have the army in your blood, son of General Shen. Accept these dragon steeds in the name of the Second Military District! The one nearest Kuala Nor itself! Our military governor is at Chenyao. I will give you an escort, an honour guard. Present yourself to Governor Xu, offer the Heavenly Horses. Can you imagine the rank you will be given? The honour and glory!”

As expected.

And it did explain the man’s fear. Lin Fong was obviously aware that if he didn’t at least try to keep the horses for the army here it would be a mark against his own record, fairly or not. Tai looked at him. In some ways the idea was tempting, an immediate resolution. In others…

He shook his head. “And I do this, Commander Lin, before appearing at court? Before relating to our serene and glorious emperor or his advisers how the princess, his daughter, has so honoured me? Before also telling the first minister? I do imagine Prime Minister Chin Hai will have views on this.”

“And before letting any other military governors know of these horses?” The Kanlin woman spoke softly, but very clearly. “The army is not undivided, commander. Do you not think, for example, that Roshan in the northeast will have thoughts as to where they belong? He commands the Imperial Stables now, does he not? Do you think his views could matter? Is it possible that Master Shen, coming from two years of isolation, needs to learn a little more before surrendering such a gift to the first man who asks for it?”

The look the commander shot her was venomous.

“You,” he snapped, “have no status in this room! You are here only to be questioned about the assassin, and that will come.”

“It will, I hope,” Tai agreed. He took a breath. “But I would like to give her status, if she will accept. I wish to hire her as my guard, going forward from here.”

“I accept,” the woman said quickly.

Her gaze met his. She didn’t smile.

“But you thought she was here to kill you!” the commander protested.

“I did. Now I believe otherwise.”

“Why?”

Tai looked across at the woman again. She sat gracefully, eyes lowered again, seemingly composed. He didn’t think she was.

He considered his answer. Then he allowed himself a smile. Chou Yan would have enjoyed this moment, he thought, would have absolutely savoured it, then told the tale endlessly, embellishing it differently each time. Thinking of his friend, Tai’s smile faded. He said, “Because she bound up her hair before coming here.”

The commander’s expression was diverting.

“She…because…?”

Tai kept his voice grave. This remained an important man for him for the next little while. Lin Fong’s dignity had to be protected.

“Her hands and feet are free, and she has at least two weapons in her hair. The Kanlin are trained to kill with those. If she wanted me dead I would be, already. So would you. If she were another rogue, she wouldn’t care about the consequences to Stone Mountain of killing you. She might even manage to escape.”

“Three weapons,” Wei Song said. She pulled one of her hairpins out and laid it down. It rested, gleaming, on the platform. “And escape is considered preferable, but is not expected with certain assignments.”

“I know that,” said Tai.

He was watching the commander, and he saw a change.

It was as if the man settled into himself, accepted that he had done what he could, would be able to absorb and deflect whatever criticism came from superiors. This was beyond him, larger by far than a border fortress. The court had been invoked.

Lin Fong sipped his tea, calmly poured more from the dark-green ceramic pot on the lacquered tray at his side. Tai did the same thing from his own. He looked at the woman. The hairpin rested in front of her, long as a knife. The head of it was silver, in the shape of a phoenix.

“You will, at least, attend upon Xu Bihai, the governor, in Chenyao?”

Lin Fong’s expression was earnest. This was a request, no more. On the other hand, the commander did not suggest he visit the prefect in Chenyao. Army against civil service, endlessly. Some things never changed, year over year, season after season.

There was no need to comment. And if he also went to see the prefect, that was his own affair. Tai said simply, “Of course I will, if Governor Xu is gracious enough to receive me. I know that he knew my father. I will hope to receive counsel from him.”

The commander nodded. “I will send my own letter. As to counsel…you have been much removed, have you not?”

“Very much,” said Tai.

Moons above a mountain bowl, waxing and waning, silver light upon a cold lake. Snow and ice, wildflowers, thunderstorms. The voices of the dead on the wind.

Lin Fong looked unhappy again. Tai found himself beginning to like the man, unexpectedly. “We live in difficult days, Shen Tai. The borders are peaceful, the empire is expanding, Xinan is the glory of the world. But sometimes such glory…”

The woman remained very still, listening.

“My father used to say that times are always difficult,” Tai murmured, “for those living through them.”

The commander considered this. “There are degrees, polarities. The stars find alignments, or they do not.” This was rote, from a Third Dynasty text. Tai had studied it for the examinations. Lin Fong hesitated. “For one thing, the first thing, the honoured empress is no longer in the Ta-Ming Palace. She has withdrawn to a temple west of Xinan.”

Tai drew a breath. It was important news, though not unexpected.

“And the lady Wen Jian?” he asked softly.

“She has been proclaimed as Precious Consort, and installed in the empress’s wing of the palace.”

“I see,” said Tai. And then, because it was important to him, “And the ladies attending upon the empress? What of them?”

The commander shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I’d assume they went with her, at least some of them.”

Tai’s sister had gone to Xinan three years before, to serve the empress as a lady-in-attendance. A privilege granted to Shen Gao’s daughter. He needed to find out what had happened to Li-Mei. His older brother would know.

His older brother was an issue.

“That is indeed a change, as you said. What else must I know?”

Lin Fong reached for his tea cup, put it down. He said, gravely, “You named the prime minister. That was an error. Alas, First Minister Chin Hai died last autumn.”

Tai blinked, shaken. He hadn’t been ready for this, at all. It felt for a moment as if the world rocked, as if some tree of colossal size had fallen and the fort was shaking with the reverberation.

Wei Song spoke up. “It is generally believed, though we have heard it suggested otherwise, that he died of an illness contracted with an autumn chill.”

The commander looked narrowly at her.

We have heard it suggested otherwise.

These could be called words of treason.

Commander Lin said nothing, however. It could never have been said that the army held any love for Emperor Taizu’s brilliant, allcontrolling first minister.

Chin Hai, tall, thin-bearded, thin-shouldered, famously suspicious, had governed under the emperor through a quarter-century of growing Kitan wealth and fabulous expansion. Autocratic, ferociously loyal to Taizu and the Celestial Throne, he’d had spies everywhere, could exile—or execute—a man for saying something too loudly in a wine shop, overheard by the wrong person.

A man hated and terribly feared, and possibly indispensable.

Tai waited, looking at the commander. Another name was coming now. Had to be coming.

Commander Lin sipped from his tea. He said, “The new first minister, appointed by the emperor in his wisdom, is Wen Zhou, of…of distinguished lineage.” The pause was deliberate, of course. “Is his a name you might know?”

It was. Of course it was. Wen Zhou was the Precious Consort’s cousin.

But that wasn’t the thing. Tai closed his eyes. He was remembering a scent, green eyes, yellow hair, a voice.

“And if someone should ask me…should propose to make me his personal courtesan, or even a concubine?”

He opened his eyes. They were both looking at him curiously.

“I know the man,” he said.

Commander Lin Fong of Iron Gate Fortress would not have named himself a philosopher. He was a career soldier, and had made that choice early in life, following older brothers into the army.

Still, over the years, he had come to realize (with proper humility) that he was more inclined to certain ways of thinking, and perhaps to an appreciation of beauty that went deeper in him than in most of his fellow soldiers—and then fellow officers—as he rose (somewhat) through the ranks from humble beginnings.

He enjoyed, among other things, civilized conversation so much. Sipping wine alone in his chamber late at night, Lin Fong acknowledged that a disturbing measure of what had to be called excitement was keeping him awake.

Shen Tai, the son of the late General Shen, was the sort of person Lin Fong would have wished to keep at Iron Gate for days or even weeks, such was the spark of the man’s thinking and the unusual pattern of his life.

Their conversation over dinner had forced him to acknowledge, ruefully, how impoverished his daily routines and company were here.

He’d asked the man an obvious (to him) question. “You have now gone twice beyond the borders for extended periods. The ancient masters teach that danger to the soul lies in doing that.” He had offered a smile, to take any sting or offence from the words.

“Some teach that. Not all.”

“That is so,” Lin Fong had murmured, gesturing to a servant to pour more wine. He was a little out of his depth when it came to variant teachings of the ancient masters. A soldier did not have time to learn these things.

Shen Tai had looked thoughtful, however, the oddly deep-set eyes revealing a mind working on the question. Courteously, he’d said, “The first time, commander, I was a very young officer. I went north among the Bogü because I was ordered there, that’s all. I doubt, respectfully, you would have chosen to come to Iron Gate, had your wishes been considered.”

So he had noticed! Fong had laughed a little self-consciously. “It is an honourable posting,” he’d protested.

“Of course it is.”

After a short silence, Fong had said, “I take your point, of course. Still, having been beyond the empire once without any choice of your own, the second time…?”

Unhurried, unruffled, a man of obvious breeding: “The second time I was honouring my father. That is why I went to Kuala Nor.”

“There were no other ways to honour him?”

“I’m sure there were,” was all Shen Tai said.

Fong had cleared his throat, embarrassed. He was too hungry for such exchanges, he’d realized, too starved for intelligent talk. It could make you cross social boundaries. He’d bowed.

This Shen Tai was a complex man, but he was leaving in the morning to pursue a life that was unlikely ever to bring the two of them into contact again. With reluctance, but an awareness of what was proper, the commander had turned the conversation to the matter of the Tagurans and their fortress north of the lake, what Shen Tai could tell him of that.

The Tagurans, after all, were within his present sphere of responsibility, and would be until he was posted elsewhere.

Some men seemed able to slide in and out of society. This man appeared to be one of them. Lin Fong knew that he himself was not, and never would be; he had too great a need for security, routines, for such uncertainty. But Shen Tai did make him aware that there were, or might be, alternative ways to live. It probably did help, he thought, to have had a Left Side Commander for a father.

Alone in his chamber later that night, he sipped his wine. He wondered if the other man had even noticed that they’d been drinking tea earlier, how unusual that was out here. It was a new luxury, just beginning to be taken up in Xinan, imported from the far southwest: yet another consequence of peace and trade under Emperor Taizu.

He had heard about the drink from correspondents and asked for some to be sent. He very much doubted the new custom had been adopted by many other commanders in their fortresses. He’d even ordered special cups and trays, paid for them himself.

He wasn’t sure he liked the taste of the drink, even sweetened with mountain honey, but he did enjoy the idea of himself as a man in tune with court and city culture, even here on a desolate border where it was almost impossible to find a man worth talking to.

What did you do when faced with this as your life? You reminded yourself, over and again, that you were a civilized man in the most civilized empire the world had ever known.

Times were changing. The prime minister’s death, the new first minister, even the nature and composition of the army—all these foreign troops now, so different from when Lin Fong had first enlisted. There were great and growing tensions among military governors. And the emperor himself, aging, withdrawing, with who knew what to follow? Commander Lin did not like change. It was a flaw in his nature, perhaps, but a man could cling to basic certainties to survive such a flaw, couldn’t he? Didn’t you have to do that?

There was only one private chamber for guests at Iron Gate.

The fort wasn’t a place where distinguished visitors came. The trade routes were to the north. Jade Gate Pass, aptly named, guarded those and the wealth that passed through. That was the glamour posting in this part of the world.

The guest room was small, an interior chamber on the second level of the main building, no windows, no courtyard below. Tai regretted not having chosen to share a communal room where there might at least be air. On reflection, however, it hadn’t been an option: you needed to make choices that reflected your status or you confused those dealing with you.

He’d had to take the private chamber. He was an important man.

He had blown out his candle some time ago. The chamber was hot, airless, black. He was having trouble falling asleep. His thoughts were of Chou Yan, who was dead.

There were no ghost-voices in the darkness here, only the night watch on the walls, faintly calling. There hadn’t been ghosts in the canyon, either, the two nights he’d spent coming this way. He hadn’t been used to that: stillness after sunset. He wasn’t used to not seeing the moon or stars.

Or, if it came to that, to having a young woman just the other side of his door, on guard—at her absolute insistence—in the corridor.

He didn’t need a guard here, Tai had told her. She hadn’t even bothered to reply. Her expression suggested that she was of the view she’d been retained by a fool.

They hadn’t talked about her fee. Tai knew the usual Kanlin rates, but had a feeling he also knew what she would say when that came up: something to do with her failure to be at Kuala Nor in time to save him, being required by honour to serve him now. He needed to learn more about that first woman at the lake: most importantly, who had sent her, and why.

He had a name—Yan had named their scholar friend Xin Lun—and Tai also had a growing apprehension about another.

The fee for Wei Song hardly mattered, in any case. He could afford a guard now. Or twenty. He could hire a private dui of fifty cavalry and dress them in chosen colours. He could borrow any sum he needed against the Sardian horses.

He was—no other way to shape the thought, no avoiding it—a wealthy man now. If he survived to deal with the horses in Xinan. If he sorted out how to deal with the horses.

His family had always been comfortable, but Shen Gao had been a fighting officer commanding in the field, not an ambitious one at court straining towards recognition and the prizes that came with it. Tai’s older brother was different, but he wasn’t ready to start thinking about Liu tonight.

His mind drifted back to the woman outside his door. That didn’t lead him towards sleep, either. They’d put a pallet in the corridor for her. They’d be used to doing that. Guests of any stature would have servants outside or even inside this chamber. It just wasn’t how he thought of himself. A guest of stature.

The other Kanlin—the rogue, according to Wei Song—had likely slept out there when Yan was in this same bed a few nights earlier.

You could look at that as symmetry, two well-balanced lines in a verse, or as something darker. This was life, not a poem, and Yan, loyal, gentle, almost always laughing, lay in a grave three days’ ride back through the ravine.

West of Iron Gate, west of Jade Gate Pass,

There’ll be no old friends.

For Tai, there would be one there forever now.

He listened, but heard nothing from the corridor. He couldn’t remember if he’d barred the door. It hadn’t been a habit for some time.

It had also been more than two years since he’d been close to a woman, let alone in the stillness after dark.

Against his will, he found himself picturing her: oval face, wide mouth, alert eyes, amusement in them under arching eyebrows. The eyebrows her own, not painted in the Xinan fashion. Or what had been the fashion two years ago. It had likely changed. It always changed. Wei Song was slender, with quick movements, long black hair. It had been unbound when first seen this morning.

Too much, that last recollection, for a man who’d been alone as long as he had.

His mind seemed to be sailing down moonlit river channels, pulled towards memory as to the sea. Unsurprisingly, he found himself thinking of Spring Rain’s golden hair, also unbound, and then—unexpectedly—there was an image of a different woman entirely.

It was because of what he’d been told this afternoon, he suspected, that he found himself with a clear memory of the Precious Consort, the emperor’s own dearly beloved concubine.

Wen Jian, the one time he’d seen her close: a jade-and-gold enchantment on a springtime afternoon in Long Lake Park. Laughing on horseback (a ripple in air, like birdsong), a shimmer about her, an aura. Appallingly desirable. Unattainable. Not even safe for dreaming about or reveries.

And her handsome, silken-smooth cousin, he had learned today, was now first minister of the empire. Had been since autumn.

Not a good man to have as a rival for a woman.

If Tai was even halfway intelligent, in possession of the most basic self-preservation instincts, he told himself, he would stop thinking about Spring Rain and her scent and skin and voice right now, long before he came anywhere near to Xinan.

Not easily done.

She was from Sardia, as the horses were. Objects of desire, coming as so many precious things seemed to do, from the west.

It was another existence entirely, this world of men and women and desire, Tai thought, lying in darkness at the empire’s edge. That truth was beginning to come back, along with so much else. One more aspect of what he was returning to.

It was unsettling, pushed away sleep, twisting with all the other disturbances in his mind like silkworm threads inattentively spooled. And he was still on the border, in a back-of-beyond fortress. What was going to happen as he rode east on his bay-coloured Sardian to the brilliant, deadly world of the court?

He turned restlessly, hearing the mattress and bedposts creak. He wished there were a window. He could stand there, draw breaths of clear air, look up at summer stars, seek order and answers in the sky. As above, so below, we are a mirror in our lives of the nine heavens.

He felt confined in here, fought an apprehension of permanent enclosure, restraint, death. Someone had tried to kill him, before they’d known about the horses. Why? Why would he have been important enough to kill?

Abruptly he sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed. Sleep was vanishingly far away.

“I can bring you water, or wine.”

Her hearing had to be extremely good, and she couldn’t have been asleep.

“You are a guard, not a servant,” he said, through the closed door.

He heard her laughter. “I have been retained by people who saw little distinction.”

“I am not one of those.”

“Ah. I shall light an ancestor candle in gratitude.”

Gods above! He wasn’t ready for this.

“Go to sleep,” Tai said. “We start early.”

Laughter again. “I’ll be awake,” she said. “But if you can’t sleep because of fears tonight, you’ll slow us down tomorrow.”

He really wasn’t ready for this.

There was a silence. Tai was acutely aware of her presence out there. After a moment he heard her say, “Forgive me, that was presumptuous. Accept that I am bowing to you. Respectfully, however, might you have declined the princess’s gift?”

He had been thinking the same thing for three days. That didn’t make it easier to hear someone else ask it.

“I couldn’t,” he said.

It was odd, talking through door and wall. Someone could be listening, easily enough. He doubted it, however. Not here. “They were offered to me by royalty. You can’t refuse.”

“I wouldn’t know. Her gift will probably kill you.”

“I am aware of that,” Tai said.

“It is a terrible thing to do to someone.”

Youth in the voice now, in that aggrieved sense of injustice, but her words were true, after a fashion. The princess would not have meant for that to happen. It would not even have occurred to her that it might.

“They know nothing of balance,” Wei Song said from the corridor. She was Kanlin: balance was the essence of their teaching.

“The Tagurans, you mean?”

“No. Royalty. Everywhere.”

He thought about it. “I think being royal means you need not think that way.”

Another silence. He had a sense of her working it through. She said, “We are taught that the emperor in Xinan echoes heaven, rules with its mandate. Balance above echoed below, or the empire falls. No?”

His own thought, from moments before.

There were women in the North District—not many, but a few—who could talk this way over wine or after lovemaking. He hadn’t expected it here, in a Kanlin guard.

He said, “I mean it differently. About how they think. Why should our princess in Rygyal, or any prince, have an idea what might happen to a common man if he is given a gift this extravagant? What in their lives allows them to imagine that?”

“Oh. Yes.”

He found himself waiting. She said, “Well, for one thing, that means the gift is about them, not you.”

He nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see him.

“Go to sleep,” he said again, a bit abruptly.

He heard her laugh, a richness in the dark.

He pictured her as he’d first seen her, hair down her back in the morning courtyard, just risen from her bed. Pushed that image away. There would be women and music in Chenyao, he thought. Five days from now.

Perhaps four? If they went quickly?

He lay down again on the hard pillow.

The door opened.

Tai sat up, much more abruptly than the first time. He gathered the bed linens to cover his nakedness, though it was dark in the room. No light came in with her from the corridor. He sensed rather than saw her bowing. That was proper, nothing else about this was.

“You should bar your door,” she said quietly.

Her voice seemed to have altered, or was that his imagination?

“I’m out of the habit.” He cleared his throat. “What is this? A guard’s sweep of the chamber? Am I to expect it every night?”

She didn’t laugh. “No. I…have something to tell you.”

“We were talking.”

“This is private.”

“You think someone is listening? Here? In the middle of the night?”

“I don’t know. The army does use spies. You need not fear for your virtue, Master Shen.” A hint of asperity, tartness returning.

“You don’t fear for yours?”

“I’m the one with a blade.”

He knew what bawdy jokes would have been made in the North District as an immediate response to that. He could almost hear Yan’s voice. He kept silent, waiting. He was aroused, distracted by that.

She said, softly, “You haven’t asked who paid me to follow the assassin.”

Suddenly he wasn’t distracted any more.

“Kanlins don’t tell who pays them.”

“We will if instructed when hired. You know that.”

He didn’t, actually. He hadn’t reached that level in twenty months with them. He cleared his throat again. He heard her move nearer the bed, a shape against darkness, the sound of her breathing and a scent in the room now that she was closer. He wondered if her hair was down. He wished there were a candle, then decided it was better that there wasn’t.

She said, “I was to catch up to the two of them and kill her, then bring your friend to you. I followed their path to your home. We didn’t know where you were, or I’d have come directly on the imperial road and waited for them here.”

“You went to my father’s house?”

“Yes, but I was too many days behind.”

Tai heard the words falling in the black, like drops of water from broad leaves after rain. He felt a very odd tingling at his fingertips, imagined he heard a different sound: a far-off temple bell among pines.

He said slowly, “No one in Xinan knew where I was. Who told you?”

“Your mother, and your younger brother.”

“Not Liu?”

“He wasn’t there,” she said.

The bell seemed to have become a clear sound in his head; he wondered if she could hear it. A childish thought.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said.

He thought of his older brother. It was time to begin doing that.

“It can’t be Liu,” he said, a little desperately. “If he was behind this, he knew where I’d gone. He could have had the assassin and Yan go straight to Kuala Nor.”

“Not if he didn’t want it known he was behind this.” She’d had more time to sort this through, he realized. “And in any case…” She hesitated.

“Yes?” His voice really did sound strange now.

“I am to tell you that it isn’t certain your brother hired the assassin. He may have only given information, others acting upon it.”

I am to tell you.

“Very well. Who hired you, then? I am asking. Who told you all of this?”

And so, speaking formally now, almost invisible in the room, a voice in blackness, she said, “I was instructed to convey to you the respect and the humble greetings of the newest concubine in the household of the illustrious Wen Zhou, first minister of Kitai.”

He closed his eyes. Spring Rain.

It had happened. She had thought it might. She had talked to him about it. If Zhou offered the demanded price to her owner, whatever it was, Rain would have had essentially no choice. A courtesan could refuse to be bought by someone privately, but her life in the North District would be ruined if she cost an owner that much money, and this was the first minister.

The sum offered, Tai was quite certain, would have been more than Rain could have earned from years of nights spent playing music for or slipping upstairs with candidates for the examinations.

Or slipping towards loving them.

He was breathing carefully. It still didn’t make sense. Neither his brother nor the first minister had had any reason to want—let alone need—Tai dead. He didn’t matter enough. You could dislike a man, a brother, see him as a rival—in various ways—but murder was extreme, and a risk.

There had to be something more.

“There is more,” she said.

He waited. He saw only an outline, the shape of her as she bowed again.

“Your brother is in Xinan. Has been since autumn.”

Tai shook his head, as if to clear it.

“He can’t be. Our mourning isn’t over yet.”

Liu was a civil servant at court, high-ranking, but he would still be whipped with the heavy rod and exiled from the capital if anyone reported him for breaching ancestor worship, and his rivals would do that.

“For army officers mourning is only ninety days. You know it.”

“My brother isn’t…”

Tai stopped. He drew a breath.

Was all of this his own fault? Going away for two years, sending no word back, receiving no tidings. Concentrating on mourning and solitude and private action shaped to his father’s long grief.

Or perhaps he’d really been concentrating on avoiding a too-complex world in Xinan, of court, and of men and women, dust and noise, where he hadn’t been ready to decide what he was or would be.

Autumn? She’d said autumn. What had happened in the fall? He had just been told today that…

There it was. It fit. Slid into place like the rhyme in a couplet.

“He’s advising Wen Zhou,” he said flatly. “He’s with the first minister.”

He could see her only as a form in the dark. “Yes. Your brother is his principal adviser. First Minister Wen appointed Shen Liu as a commander of one thousand in the Flying Dragon Army in Xinan.”

Symbolic rank, symbolic soldiers. An honorary palace guard, sons of aristocrats or senior mandarins, or their cousins. On display, gorgeously dressed, at parades and polo matches, ceremonies and festivals, famously inept in real combat. But as a way to shorten mourning with military rank, to bring a man you wanted to the capital…

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

Tai realized he’d been silent a long time.

He shook his head. He said, “It is a great honour for our family. I am still not worth killing. Wen Zhou has power, and Spring Rain is his now. My brother has his position with him, and his rank, whatever it is. There’s nothing I could do—or would do—about any of this. There is another piece here. There has to be. Do you…did Rain know anything more?”

Carefully, she said, “Lady Lin Chang said you would ask me that. I was to tell you that she agrees, but did not know what this might be when she learned of the plot to have you killed, and sent for a Kanlin.”

Lin Chang?

She wouldn’t have a North District name any more. Not as a concubine in the city mansion of the first minister of the empire. You weren’t called Spring Rain there. He wondered how many women there were. What her life was like.

She’d taken a tremendous risk for him. Hiring her own Kanlin: he had no idea how she’d done it. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to figure out who might have sent this woman after the other if…

“Perhaps it is best you didn’t reach me in time,” he said. “There’s no easy way to trace you back to her now. I found and hired you on the road. The assassin was killed by Taguran soldiers.”

“I thought that, as well,” she said. “Although it is a mark against my name that I failed.”

“You didn’t fail,” he said impatiently.

“I could have somehow found out, come straight here.”

“And given her away? You just said that. Kanlin honour is one thing, foolishness is another.”

He heard her shift her feet. “I see. And you will decide which is which? Your friend might be alive if I’d been quicker.”

It was true. It was unhappily true. But then Rain’s life would be at risk.

“I don’t think you are meant to talk to me that way.”

“My most humble apologies,” she said, in a tone that belied them.

“Accepted,” Tai murmured, ignoring the voice. It was suddenly enough. “I have much to think about. You may go.”

She didn’t move for a moment. He could almost feel her looking towards him.

“We will be in Chenyao in four or five days. You will be able to have a woman there. That will help, I’m sure.”

The tone was too knowing for words, a Kanlin trait he remembered. Wei Song bowed—he saw that much—and went out, a creaking of the floorboards.

He heard the door shut behind her. He was still holding the bed linens to cover his nakedness. He realized that his mouth was open. He closed it.

The ghosts, he thought, a little desperately, had been simpler.