The Secrets of Jin-Shei (63 page)

Things simmered amid mutters and murmurs for some time. The weeks stretched into months, and even the months began to add up, like beads on a yearwood. But the lull could not last.

The tide turned when Yuet, for once entirely innocently and with no ulterior motives whatsoever, was seen helping an elderly man into a mule-drawn cart in order to transport him back to her own house for treatment. This was something that she had often done for cases which required her constant care and attention. On this particular occasion, however, a woman
passing on the street stopped, and pointed a bony finger at Yuet and the half-loaded patient.

“Look!” the woman screeched. “This is how the witch gets us! This is how she gets the warm bodies she cuts up to seek the juice of immortality for the Ghoul Empress! That one is the witch’s assistant—she takes us and gives our bodies to her, still warm, still breathing! Look where she goes, taking yet another! Old he might be, but he is still one of us!”

“One of us!” shrieked someone else.

“Stop her! Stop her stealing the old man!”

“Stop the witch’s handmaiden! Stop her!”

“We won’t be sliced and studied so that the Empress can live forever on our blood and sinews!”

“Stop her!”

Yuet had no idea where all the people had come from, but a sudden mob had coalesced around her, and they were angry. Their voices were sharp, shrill, furious.

Perhaps the wisest course of action would have been to climb into the back of the cart with her patient and urge the driver of the cart to move on, quickly and without fuss. But Yuet knew the woman who had originally spoken, and others in the neighborhood—many of the faces she could glimpse, now contorted with hate, in the gathering crowd she had healed of sores and fevers and tended in childbirth and old age. These were her people, her patients, her charge. She was fatally moved to stop, to explain, to soothe, to make good.

“Wait, let me tell you …”

She got no further than those few words. She never knew where the first stone came from, but it hit her squarely in the kidneys. Gasping at the sharp pain Yuet staggered, falling to her hands and knees there in the street, shaking her head and trying to catch her breath.

She was never given the chance. A second stone followed, taking her in the jaw; she tasted blood from a split lip, shattered teeth. A third rock came, a fourth, and then a barrage of them.

“The witch’s friend! The witch’s servant!”

The voices swirled around her, as sharp as the stones, wounding her heart and mind as the rocks lacerated her body.
It isn’t fair,
she thought desperately, raising her hands to protect her head and face.
It just isn’t fair. I have so much left to give.

And then one particularly large rock sailed past her defenses and took her on the temple. Yuet uttered a soft cry, the first sound she had made out loud since the barrage began. It was very soft, almost inaudible; the crowd didn’t hear it. The world faded to a soft black around Yuet, her mind blank, no more thoughts. No last words. No more sensation. She never knew that the stones kept coming, long after her body was still, long after it had turned into bloody pulp under the barrage.

The cart driver had whipped his mule as soon as the trouble started, and had taken himself and his passenger, the patient whom Yuet had just loaded into the cart, out of the danger zone as fast as he could. It was he who alerted the Imperial Guard, but by the time a detachment arrived the mob was long gone, and Yuet was dead.

Xaforn arranged for the seemly removal of Yuet’s body, and contacted Tai about making the necessary preparations for her funeral. Xaforn herself quartered the streets where the stoning had happened, questioning people, but nobody had apparently seen a thing, and persisted in their story even when Xaforn threatened to take them into custody for obstructing her investigations.

“We will never know who did it,” she told Tai later, her face drawn with exhaustion and with the tears that she had wept for Yuet. They were both still in shock, broken and raw with the pain and the fury of this death, with the waste of the life of one whom they had loved, who had been part of them. “They
all
did it.”

“Surely the driver saw …”

“Surely he did. He does not remember either,” said Xaforn savagely. “No, nobody knows anything, nobody wants to know anything. I talked to a woman who used to be in the Inner Courts, a widow of a Guard. She was there when Yuet gave her heart and hand to the victims of the epidemic. Even she does not remember seeing anything that can help us. And she knew what Yuet was. She, of all people, knew.”

So it begins, then,
wrote Tai in her journal on the night after she had helped prepare Yuet’s body for her funeral pyre, after Yuet’s ashes had been scattered into the wind. After she had wept herself dry.
Pau-kala is upon us, and the first of my sisters is gone. Oh, but Kito said we were all so young.

In her mind, a bare branch bereft of leaves trembled in the vainly beguiling warmth of spring sunshine.

T
ai had taken it upon herself to bring the news of the death of one the
jin-shei
circle to the rest of
her jin-shei-bao.
She had gone first to Khailin’s house, but although she had been admitted to the reception room by Khailin’s servants no amount of hammering on the locked door of the laboratory or calling to Khailin to open the door seemed to get the attention of the occupant.

“Is she
in
there?” Tai demanded of one of the servants.

“I didn’t see her go out, my lady,” the servant girl said. “And we leave food outside the door every morning, and when we come back it is gone.”

“Khailin!”
Tai shouted, banging on the door again. “Open up! Oh, for the love of Cahan, open up.”

But there was silence.

In the end, Tai scribbled a terse message in
jin-ashu
and left it, sealed, with the servant girl with instructions to introduce it into the laboratory with the next tray of food.

Liudan received Tai, but her reaction to the news was distant, almost emotionless.

“I am sorry. Besides being of my own
jin-shei
circle, Yuet was a good healer, and a caring counselor when she chose to offer counsel.” There was a trace of real regret in Liudan’s voice—but her eyes were dry and gleamed with a strange light as she said the required words.

“Liudan, tell Khailin to stop this. You can, it is within your power. Look where it has led!” Tai said. “One of us is dead already! And if you …”

“I said I regretted that,” Liudan said, a little more ice on the edges of her voice. “But this is not the first time a
jin-shei
sister has died in the cause of a task asked in the name of the sisterhood. Nor will it be the last, I think, for as long as
jin-shei
endures and is what it is. There are some things that are worth …”

“Are worth dying for, Liudan? Killing for?” Tai said.

“When Antian chose you, what would you not have done in the name of that choice?” Liudan said. “You are as selfish as the rest of us. Your goals are just different.”

“But Liudan …”

The ice migrated to Liudan’s eyes as she bent her gaze to Tai, but Tai was undaunted by it.

“What if I were to ask
you …
” she began, but Liudan turned her head away.

“Do not ask,” she said, very quietly. “Do not ask that. You cannot undo
a jin-shei
vow that easily, you cannot withdraw it. I have done what I have done.”

“Then Yuet’s blood is on your own hands,” Tai said, made reckless by her pain.

“That may be,” said Liudan after a short pause. “There is nothing I can do about that now. Have you scheduled her funeral rites?”

“Yes.”

“When is it to be?”

“Tomorrow. Will you come?”

“I cannot,” Liudan said. “But I will send a representative, and an appropriate offering.”

It was a dismissal, and Tai left, hurt, puzzled, disillusioned. Liudan seemed to treat the
jin-shei
bonds with the light touch of the professional juggler, taking from the sisterhood what she needed and abandoning the rest. She had demanded the life, and with it the death, of one of her sisters; but she was not going to risk her own safety by appearing at the funeral. And both of these things were justified in her mind, the right and proper thing to do if it meant holding on to the power of the Empire.

Yuet’s funeral was a strange occasion. At first it looked as though there would be only a handful of mourners—but then, as the pyre was lit, Tai saw more and more people coming to stand silently around the platform on which Yuet’s body, wrapped in a white shroud that hid the ruin that had been made of it, had been laid. There were women carrying children—babes in arms, bleary-eyed toddlers—as though they wished them to see the pyre, to remember. Men on crutches hobbled up and stood with their heads bowed. A growing sense of remorse, of regret, of a debt of gratitude being paid, had settled on the occasion, like smoke from a scented incense stick. Tai watched the mute crowd form, and then watched it dissipate
just as quietly as the pyre died down into embers, shadows slipping away without meeting each other’s eyes, without stopping to exchange a single word.

Tai had wept, for many reasons—not the least of which was the shattered circle in the name of which Yuet had died. Besides Tai herself, Nhia was there, dressed in her Chancellor’s finery, and Xaforn, wearing the full formal dress armor of a Captain of the Imperial Guard. Liudan was present only by proxy. Qiaan was still missing, somewhere in the enemy camp. Tammary was gone. Khailin was simply … absent.

When she did finally emerge from her seclusion, Khailin was thin and wild-eyed, as though she had battled armies and then retreated for waterless weeks through desert country.

It took Tai, to whom she came, some time to get anything coherent out of her. Khailin babbled about succeding in her quest and almost immediately berated herself for failure, wept, raged, lost herself sometimes in long silences during which she would respond to no voice but would simply stare blankly into space, rocking back and forth, her lips moving as though she was mouthing spells. Yuet’s death was still only days past, a fresh and ever-present pain, and the wound was lacerated further by Tai’s immediate instinct to send for the healer and
jin-shei-bao
whose practical wisdom and sometimes priggish but always pertinent advice she would never have again. She sent for Nhia instead, hoping that Nhia’s own knowledge of some of the arcana Khailin had been meddling with might help to get through to her.

Khailin barely acknowledged Nhia’s presence when she arrived at Tai’s house.

“Must find it … must find it … Yuet will know …”

Tai and Nhia exchanged a shocked glance above Khailin’s head.

“Yuet is dead, Khailin,” Nhia said.

Khailin looked up. “Yuet. I need to talk to …” She blinked, and some semblance of sanity seemed to return to her eyes. “What?” she whispered. “What did you say?”

Tears were running unchecked down Tai’s cheeks. “Oh, Cahan, Liudan will have to pay a heavy price for what she has wrought,” she whispered, more to herself than as an offering to the conversation, but Khailin’s hearing seemed to have been sharpened to a fine brittle edge, and she snapped her head around to stare at Tai.

“Yuet…” Khailin began, and Nhia reached for her hand.

“Khailin, Yuet was killed by a raging mob less than a week ago. We tried to reach you. Where were you?”

“Why, for the love of Cahan? What happened?”

“She was trying to transport one of her patients back to her house, and the crowd thought … they believed …”

“
I killed her
,” Khailin gasped suddenly, as though a knife had been plunged into her heart.

Nhia’s hand tightened around hers. “Ah, no. Don’t do this.”

“I did,” Khailin said inconsolably “It was I who got her involved in this. I should never have got anyone else involved.”

Tai was sitting on her other side, her hand on one of Khailin’s shoulders, balancing Nhia’s gentle hand on the other. “What happened, Khailin? You came here like a wraith and I could get no sense out of you at all—and you are still not making any.”

“I failed,” Khailin said, almost inaudibly

Nhia sighed deeply. “Perhaps it’s just as well.”

“And I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams,” Khailin continued, as if Nhia had not spoken. “I made it live.
I made it live
.”

“Khailin. Talk to me. What have you done?”

Khailin raised a trembling hand; a fresh cut, barely scabbed over, ran the length of her palm. “I used myself, in the end. It was all unnecessary, what I made Yuet do—I could only use myself, in the end.”

Her voice trailed away, and for a moment she seemed to withdraw back into herself, into that vivid moment which had finally driven her here. She had trusted no one. What she had said was the absolute truth—she could only trust herself, could only use herself.

She had kneaded clay into the likeness of a woman and baked it hard, like a statue. The skin on her face could still feel the thin layer of clay she had smoothed over her own features; she removed it, once it was dry, with aching slowness and care lest it should crack and be ruined, and filled in the eye-holes with a finer clay, the white one of which porcelain was made. With hands that trembled she laid the mask that was her own face onto the shell of the body she had made. She smeared her own blood in arcane symbols on the lifeless mask’s cheeks and brow. And then, heart pounding, she poured the elixir she had made into the open hole of its mouth, and leaned forward to kiss its cracked clay lips, breathing her own breath and her own life into the figure.

And then she watched the clay tremble with the unspeakable, the
impossible.
Life.
It was life itself, risen at her command, at her word, at her elixir. Within Khailin, pride warred with terror. With one breath she cried to herself,
I did it!
With the next, she cried,
What have I done?