The Secrets of Jin-Shei (48 page)

Xaforn cut through the knot. “Start at the beginning,” she said. Her sword had dropped down, pointing to the floor, but she was still standing a slice away from Khailin, watching her.

“The beginning?” Khailin whispered. “You really want to hear of the journey of a fool? Ah, but I learned that it is true that you should be careful what you ask of the Gods, because you will receive it in abundance.”

“You were never a fool, Khailin,” Nhia said.

Khailin laughed, her laugh brittle, bitter. “Oh, yes I was. A perfect, naive, arrogant, petty little fool. And in a way, you pushed me into it.”

Xaforn’s sword trembled, ever so slightly.

Nhia recoiled. “
I
did?” she whispered. “What did I have to do with it?

“Do you remember the Court at which we had our quarrel?” Khailin said.

“Yes. I have often thought of it. For a long time I believed that you no longer wished to even speak to me—and I thought I had overreacted to things, and I was sorry, but you were gone, and you were right about
jin-shei
—it does not disappear, whatever its origin or motivation. You were my
jin-shei-bao
then; you remain one today; you will always be one.”

Khailin’s eyes sparkled briefly with what looked like tears. “Yes,” she said softly, “I was almost lost. I had seen how easily it all seemed to come to you, how you would turn and Lihui would be at your side … and I was to have been married to a mewling princeling soon, and whatever power I would have would be as Princess Consort—Zhu-Khailin, locked away in the women’s quarters, enduring other wives and concubines beside me, bearing children who would inherit nothing but a title rooted in an obsolete Imperial bureaucracy. Then I saw one of the other Sages, and he had a woman on his arm, and they were all bowing to her—and she looked like such a perfect, pathetic, tradition-bound little doll. And it was so unfair, Nhia, so
unfair,
that I had the mind for it all and the passion and I had had to beg my father to give me the few meager pieces of
hacha-ashu
that he did and then learn the rest painstakingly, through deciphering it out myself, to read the astronomers and the alchemists whose works I wanted to understand. That woman, that Sage’s Lady, would make the perfect princeling’s wife. And I …” She laughed again, mirthlessly. “I would make a perfect Sage’s wife, you see. And he would teach me the things I wished to know. And I would never be trammeled by the silken cords of useless tradition. And there he was, Nhia, and he was young, and he was unmarried. So I haunted the Temple for the next few days, waiting for him, because I knew he came there. And when I saw him, I went to him and humbly begged for a moment of his time.”

“Certainly,” Lihui said, when the raven-haired young woman threw herself on her knees at his feet asking if she could speak to him. “You are, I think, the young lady from the Court of a few days ago? Khailin, I think? Well, Khailin,” he said, when she nodded at the name, “how may I be of assistance to you?”

“Marry me,” Khailin said, her eyes still downcast, but her voice absolutely steady

After a moment, Lihui laughed. “Well, that is something I don’t hear every day from beautiful young women,” he remarked conversationally. “Walk with me, if you will, and as we walk you may tell me why you think that we should be wed.”

He had helped her rise to her feet as he spoke, and now tucked her arm under his own, laying her fingers on his forearm and covering them with his free hand.

At first she had been quiet, and then incoherent—but he paid her the compliment of listening to everything she said as though she were speaking pearls of wisdom instead of babbling, uttering every platitude she could think of. In the silence that broke between them when she finally wound down, Khailin was aware that Lihui was smiling slightly, that nothing she had said had been either convincing or reasonable. His question still hung before her, tantalizing:
Why do you think we should be wed?

“Because,” she said at last, lifting her eyes to his, “I want to know everything I can never know as the wife of a junior prince in the Imperial Palace. And I believe you can teach me.”

“You want to learn the Way?” Lihui said, raising an eyebrow. But his fingers had begun stroking hers, very gently, and Khailin suddenly felt queasy and breathless, as though she had walked onto unsteady ground.

“Yes,” she whispered, “I do.”

“Very well,” Lihui said. “Do you wish to have the ceremony right away?”

Khailin blinked. “Did you just say … ?”

“We are here, in the Temple,” Lihui pointed out reasonably. “As you yourself have said, you are technically betrothed to another. This would cause a great many complications if you were to pursue the traditional path, and it would end up costing a lot of people their reputations, including, probably, yourself. As a married woman, however, you may count on
your husband to cut through some of the awkwardness. You expressed a wish to wed—I agree. You are here, I am here, we are both willing, the place is here, the time is now.” He cocked an eyebrow at her, demanding an answer, placing her in a position of standing behind her request or withdrawing it for ever more.

“All right,” she heard herself saying.

He nodded, and led her away into the Inner Circles of the Temple. He had found a priest at liberty to perform the ceremony and the priest had been too cowed by the personage and the occasion to ask questions. A minion had been sent to purchase a set of thumb rings for Khailin in the First Circle—“I may not wear any rings but my Sage’s ring, my dear,” Lihui had explained affectionately, when Khailin’s mute glance asked the question of why just one set of rings. The rings had been procured, the priest had said the words, and Khailin, still in a daze, found herself married, walking out of the Temple with her new rings circles of fire upon her thumbs. She had spared a thought for her family, for her friends, but she had been allowed to contact nobody—“Let me deal with all that, my dear,” Lihui had said—and had been bundled instead into a sedan chair and taken at a fast trot in an unknown direction. To a place Lihui called “home.”

To the house at the end of the ghost road, and the hell that waited there.

Khailin had, incredibly, fallen asleep in the sedan chair, and had been woozy and only half awake when she had been handed out of the chair and into her new home by a silent servant. She would find out very quickly that no servant in this house would speak to her. All were silent and empty-faced, as if they were not alive, as if they had had their souls drunk from them and left to wander the earth as abandoned bodies, corporeal ghosts. Khailin would discover later how close to the truth her initial impressions had been.

She had been left to herself for a long time; she explored the house, going from room to room, quickly discovering that there were many locked doors that would not open to her touch—too many locked doors, too many mysteries. The doors to the outside were locked too, when Khailin tried them. And she began to be afraid.

And then the day faded, and evening came, and she discovered that she had still not touched bottom—because it was then that Lihui, his dark
hair loose over his shoulders, came to her room, and to her bed. He had never stopped smiling at her, but his eyes were hot, and his hands were not gentle. Khailin was Khailin, after all—she did not scream, or cry, or even fight him—she had married him, and this was the marriage bed she had made. But her initiation into that world of which she had once read erotic and romanticized accounts in her mother’s secret
jin-ashu
letters had been hard, and fast, and brutal. Lihui had taken his bride with no gentleness, in the fullness of power, and gave her no softness or joy to cling to. When he was done he rose from her bed, donned the robe he had slipped out of in order to take possession of his property, and took up the taper he had brought in and laid aside on her bedside cabinet as he had climbed into bed.

“Your first lesson,” he said. “Your work requires lead and mercury. You can dig both out of the ground, or you can extract them slowly and painfully from plants like oak, nettle, wolfberry, or reed rushes. You will not try to leave this house.”

And then he was gone, taking the light with him, leaving Khailin alone and turned to stone in the darkness.

“That was how it was,” Khailin said to Nhia and Xaforn in the summer twilight of Nhia’s room. “He would come to me, he would plunge himself between my legs, he would get up, and before he left me he would offer me a sentence’s worth of alchemical wisdom and lore. It was the bargain I had asked for—exactly and precisely the bargain I had asked for. He would teach me. On his terms. And otherwise, he owned me.”

“So how
did
you leave the house?” Xaforn asked, practical as always, although the account had not left her unmoved.

For answer, Khailin lifted her arms and allowed her wide sleeves to fall back down her arms. Nhia gasped; along the length of both Khailin’s forearms were two puckered dragon-shaped brands.

“What did you do?” Nhia gasped.

“I was afraid of pain,” Khailin whispered. “And until I conquered that, the house held me. But it took me until well after you had escaped, Nhia, to face this. What I did was take the black heart of that house into myself. It burned me whenever I touched it thinking of leaving it—on this day I laid my arms against the dragons on the front door, and kept them there while the house burned me,
burned
me …” She stopped, drawing a ragged
breath. “But afterward, it hid me from him. He never knew where I was again. And by that stage I had found the keys to his locked doors, I had unraveled the spells, I had read his books and I knew his secrets. I knew what he did, to himself, to the people he took. He is ancient, Nhia, and he feeds on new souls—he has to,” she spat out, “he has none of his own. That was how he was immortal—and he knew how to make the elixir that would let him live forever.”

“But you said he was dead!” Xaforn gasped.

Khailin laughed. “Oh yes. I watched the house burn around him.” She looked up, and her eyes were full of real tears now, and they spilled down her cheeks. “I killed him. And in order to kill him, I became him.
I
am the alchemist now.”

Tai lifted the brush from the journal page and nibbled on the end of it. The lanterns in the courtyard cast a muted golden glow through the pleated wax paper painted with the signs for good health and prosperity, and moths fluttered uselessly against them, beating their wings against the shield that hid the true light from them. Tai watched them for a moment, and then dipped her brush into the inkwell and wrote again.