The Secrets of Jin-Shei (55 page)

“Because he took from me more than my sight,” Maxao said bitterly. “I can no longer stand against him. Long before Lihui decided to move against me he had made an elixir with my essence in it and made himself invulnerable to it, and thus to me. I cannot harm him, through spell or
direct action. It would have been pointless, my going down the ghost road to Lihui’s house. I could have done nothing there except die.”

“But I was there,” Khailin said. “I could have helped.”

He turned and fixed her with a blind stare that bored right through the heart of her. “Ah,” he said, “but at the time I did not know that he had another mage living underneath his roof.” He turned away from Khailin, leaving her standing very still, with her hands folded over the hollow of her throat, her eyes wide on him, and turned back to Liudan with a smile which might once have been gracious but which was ghastly in that ruined face. “You see, Empress, I don’t know everything, despite your fears. Now—recall Xaforn and send her for Qiaan. Lihui will follow, because right now she is his passage to every ambition he has ever had. And when he comes back to Linh-an …” His face twisted into a grimace of loathing. “When he comes back to Linh-an, it will be time to settle some old accounts. I will be here to meet him.”

“I thought you just said you could not harm him,” Tai said.

“I can’t. Not on my own.” Maxao turned back to where Khailin still hadn’t moved, and held out his free hand, waiting with a patience at once complacent and haughtily royal until Khailin, almost unwillingly, stepped forward and placed her own slightly trembling fingers there. His huge hand closed around her slender one, engulfing it, and he pulled her forward very gently but inexorably for all that. “But I am not going to be on my own.”

Y
ou are not to fight him. You do not need to go armed to the teeth. You are to go in lightly, and see her, and speak to her, and then you will both leave. Quietly. Do not start a war. Not yet. You don’t need to take the Guard armory with you.

Xaforn had been partly annoyed and partly amused by the injunction she had been given. She was aware that Qiaan’s people all knew exactly who she was, and therefore knew that she
was
a weapon—going in empty-handed would hardly have meant that they would have refrained from harming her. But it had been a condition placed upon her, and Xaforn accepted it. She took no weapon other than the pair of throwing daggers she always carried in her boots.

This was the last chance she—or anyone—would have to talk to Qiaan, to reason with her, to maybe turn the tide of events. There had already been several skirmishes—in Linh-an itself, and in other cities, too. Some of them had been bloody. Things had already been done in Qiaan’s name that Xaforn, who knew her, could not believe that she had sanctioned. Not Qiaan—not the girl who had once patiently taught her
jinashu,
who had worked without grumble or complaint at the most menial of jobs when it came to saving lives in a deadly epidemic, who had dedicated herself to bettering the lives and the prospects of the city’s poor, who had fed the hungry and taught the ignorant. This woman, so dedicated to saving lives, could not now be issuing orders for those lives to be offered for a cause that seemed to be neither more nor less than herself taking on the role which she had often so trenchantly condemned when Liudan was cast in it. She had been the people’s light; she was now the new royalty.

Khailin had said that it was all Lihui’s doing, that he could twist someone’s mind and soul and aspirations so that they believed utterly that they were their own but which only served to further his own goals and ambitions.

“If I should cross his path, I will kill him,” Xaforn had said darkly, but Khailin had laughed.

“If you should cross his path, I have no doubt that you will try,” she said, “but Xaforn, he would burn you to ashes.”

“Maxao said that I had the training,” Xaforn said, stubborn, implacable.

“Enough to stand against an army of mortal men, yes,” Khailin had said. “To stand against Lihui, alone, no. Not even you. Not yet. Not until you have trained for a hundred years, and have long forgotten what it means to be human. Not even Maxao can stand against him alone. Take the old amulet with you, Xaforn, it still has power. At least it will protect you against surprise.”

“But I don’t know how to walk this shadow road of yours!” Xaforn said. “And what if the amulet … ?”

“It traveled safely with Nhia. And it’s the
ghost
road. And you do know how to do it. It’s in you, in your training, in that light you carry within you. Picture her in your mind, picture Qiaan’s face, and then start walking, keep that face in your thoughts, don’t stop for anything until you are sure that you are in a place where your goal is. Remember,
the journey of a thousand years starts with a single step.
”

“That is a Temple platitude,” Xaforn said.

“Sometimes even the Temple stumbles on the truth.”

“How do I come home, Khailin?”

“You can think of me,” Khailin said, laughing. “And if you do, I will be there to meet you at the end of your road. But in truth, all you have to do is walk until you see Linh-an before you. And it is possible to manipulate the stuff of the ghost road, Xaforn, so if you catch sight of a Linh-an sky that you recognize, keep hold of the sky. The city beneath it will change. Wait until it changes to something you know.”

“I’m not sure I want to do that,” said Xaforn, suddenly uneasy. “Cahan alone knows where I would end up.”

“Perhaps even Cahan,” Khailin said irreverently. “Go. And may all the Gods be with you on this mission. I will … I will light an incense stick for you in front of the little ugly God in the Temple. He answered my prayers at least once before.”

“Which little ugly God?”

“When I was a child I once told my mother that there were so many offerings at his feet that nobody ever saw being put there that I thought the little ugly thing simply worshipped itself,” Khailin said. There was an
odd little smile of reminiscence on her mouth. She hadn’t thought of the little ugly God in years. Truth be told, she hardly knew if he was still there, still so extravagantly worshipped.

“Xinxan the Finder?” Xaforn said.

Khailin gave her a startled look. “You know that God?”

“People go to that shrine to ask for help in finding lost things,” Xaforn said, and then added, with a strange little smile of her own, “On the whole, I think I’d prefer that you didn’t light incense there just yet. He might take it into his head that, since I haven’t been exactly lost yet, you might wish me to become lost rather than found. With the Gods, you never know.”

Khailin was shaking her head. “Go,” she said. “And good luck to you.”

So Xaforn had walked out, unarmed except for her small daggers and unarmored, dressed only in a Guard practice smock.

Qiaan. Qiaan’s face.

The face that formed in her mind, strangely enough, was not the woman that Qiaan had become. It was the face of the child she had once been. The face of a child that rarely laughed, the permanently serious and sometimes mournful expression that she habitually wore which had once given her the nickname of Qiaan of the Long Face. Given what she now knew about Qiaan’s true parentage and heritage, the memory was a sudden sharp pain for Xaforn.

“I didn’t understand,” she whispered. “Not then.”

She fought her way past the child’s face, flowing the features through the intervening years, until she had a firm picture of Qiaan’s present-day features in front of her. And then she took her first step.

The buildings on the street she was on blurred beside her, and flowed into smoke; the path at her feet opened up, twisting forward, pale and almost glowing in the mist. Xaforn took a deep breath and, keeping her mind fixed on Qiaan’s face like a talisman and one of her hands tightly wrapped around the amulet at her throat, walked forward on the ghost road.

Glimpses.

Khailin had said she would see things.

Beside her, the mists opened and closed unexpectedly, giving Xaforn hints of other places, other times. A great dog, tied to the end of a chain, snarling and snapping, saliva foaming in his mouth. A girl dancing in a high mountain meadow. Something winged and golden—a dragon—flying across an amber-colored sky. A woman’s hand, wearing a ring with a
blood-red stone. A mother bent over a baby … or it just looked like it … as Xaforn’s step slowed momentarily the ‘mother’ looked up and her yellow eyes bore slitted pupils like a snake’s and her mouth was full of small sharp teeth and of the blood of the child which she had been devouring. Xaforn dropped her eyes, picked up her pace. Beside her, a white waterlily on a dark pond. A city, under snow, with soft flakes falling like a veil. Children’s laughter. The sudden scent of fresh-baked bread. The creak of an old door. A glimpse of steps descending into darkness. A sensation of heat, and the hint of the ruddy glow of a bonfire coloring the mists a translucent ruby. A cherry tree in bloom.

Qiaan’s face. Qiaan’s face!

Xaforn’s own sign, a Lion, lying under a thorn tree, tail twiching. A great carpet, unrolling, its softness a sudden sensation on Xaforn’s fingertips. Music, unfamiliar music played on instruments she could not identify. The glint of sunlight on a moving army of bright spears. Battle, with distant screams echoing in her head, the coppery smell of blood, a body sprawled with one hand almost on the ghost road, dead eyes staring at Xaforn. A child’s bright ball. A full moon in an empty sky, glimpsed through a window, and the silhouettes of two lovers kissing. An old woman, spinning. A boy digging a hole, a dead dog beside him. A black pot hung over a hearth, the sudden taste of mulled wine in Xaforn’s mouth. Tree bark. A desert of stones. An empty city street.

Qiaan’s face. Qiaan’s face …

There was a blur of color, and then things stopped, solidified.

Xaforn found herself in a large room, with a fire crackling on the wide brick hearth whose edges, black with soot, bore mute witness that it had not been cleaned for years. There was a draught from somewhere, through an ill-fitting door or a shutter not fastened properly, and it made the garish, home-dyed silk hangings on the walls shift and tremble with each breath of air. Faded, ancient tapestries covered the rest of the walls, giving the room an illusion of a once vivid and powerful but now vanished opulence. It was what Qiaan’s armies might have thought a queen’s chamber looked like.

In the middle of this stood Qiaan herself, her hair up in an elaborate style held together by ivory pins, dressed in a woolen robe of an improbable purple hue. Another approximation of royalty. She was the Vagabond Queen, poor but proud, waiting to come into her own, and in the meantime making do with makeshift glory. The whole thing was so theatrical,
so unlike the practical, matter-of-fact Qiaan that she had known in the compound, that for a moment Xaforn could do nothing but stare.

Qiaan stared back at her.

“How in the name of Cahan did you get in here?” she demanded.

“I came to talk to you,” Xaforn said carefully.

“So,” said Qiaan warily, after a beat of silence, backing up a step. “You’re here. What did you want to talk about?”

“You,” Xaforn said. “What have they done to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“This.” Xaforn said, waving her arm at the room, at its faded tapetries, at the gaudy silk hangings. “This isn’t you. It has never been you. They’re using you, Qiaan, and you’re letting them use you.”

Qiaan’s head came up. “I am where I can do the most good,” she said. “There were hungry people …”

“There are always hungry people,” Xaforn said. “The poor are always with us—someone is always on the edges of the world and falling through the cracks. You were doing what you could. People knew you as the very spirit of compassion—a somewhat brusque and dogmatic spirit, to be sure, but caring and compassion were all about who you were. Now this? It’s war out there now, and you are at the head of an army, Qiaan.”

“You don’t understand,” Qiaan said quetly “All I was doing I was doing quietly, and on the side, and by myself, and …”

“That isn’t true!” Xaforn said hotly. “You’ve always had your aides and handmaidens! I’ve done your bidding myself on occasion, and you’ve always had people like Yuet on call.”

“By myself,” Qiaan repeated with emphasis, as though she had not been interrupted. “Many of those helpers were doing things not because they shared my beliefs in them but because they were required to do them. Now I am surrounded by people who believe in me and in what I am trying to do. That’s partly why they chose me.”

“And partly it was because by raising your name as the banner they could get the support of the people, those who might have thought the complete overthrow of the Empire and the burning of the throne to be too radical a course of action,” Xaforn said. “So they chose to crown a puppet Empress instead. One whom they would control, who would do their bidding. They are using you, Qiaan. It’s worse than that—they aren’t even using
you,
they are using a false image, an idol, a name behind which
they can rally support for a cause that is neither more nor less than getting themselves into power.”

“Now you’re talking Liudan’s line,” Qiaan said. “You believe in the holy Emperors, as anointed by the Gods?”

“No, but you do, otherwise you wouldn’t have embraced that identity so eagerly,” Xaforn snapped. “You were
Guard,
damn it. You know better than this. It’s dishonorable. It’s betrayal. This isn’t who you are.”

“I am not Guard! I never was! I knew I never belonged in that compound, but I never knew why—not until they told me the truth! I always disliked my aunt for trying to poison my existence, but it was Aric who was lying to me. Sometimes Rochanaa would look at me and I knew she hated me, and I didn’t know why—and it wasn’t even my fault. I was paying for my father’s sins! I was a charity case for her, no more!”

“No,” Xaforn said, after a moment of silence. “It was I who was the charity case. You always had a family. You were always loved, you always belonged. You were taught the traditions by the woman whom you mourned as your mother—you
did,
Qiaan, I know it because I saw you do it—and if you chose not to follow the dreams your father had for you, that doesn’t mean that they weren’t there. I have a message for you from him, by the way.”