The Secrets of Jin-Shei (49 page)

A whimper from the children’s room next door to her bedroom made Tai lift her head, listening. When it was repeated, a little more insistently, she laid down her brush and went to investigate what ailed her baby, her son Baio, three weeks shy of his first birthday He was awake, kicking at his covers, his face scrunched up into what looked like the beginning of a wail; Tai gathered him up, coverlet and all, and whisked him out of the room before he could wake Xanshi, her three-year-old daughter, asleep in her own cot under the window.

“What is it, Baio-
ban?
” she whispered, rocking him on her lap. “Is it too hot to sleep?”

The child squirmed sleepily, happier now that he was in his mother’s arms, and Tai sighed inwardly as she watched Baio’s thumb migrate to his mouth, a relic of his early babyhood. She hummed a soft lullaby over her son’s small curled body, his dark head nestling against her shoulder, his lashes black silk against his cheeks. He was soon asleep. Tai sat motionless with him in her lap for a long time, her hand almost unconsciously smoothing back his hair, and marveled at his perfection, at his fragility, at the miracle of his existence. The future held some dark, inexplicable menace for her that night, and a deep unease fluttered inside of her, the thought that her son belonged to that future and that some day it would be beyond her power to take him in her arms and protect him against some horror as yet nameless and nebulous in her mind.

T
he Sages always had all the answers.

Liudan would probably have been astonished at how forcefully she had brought the Beggars’ Guild and its cryptic leader back to the forefront of Nhia’s mind with that single sentence, uttered when she had come to tell Nhia of Lihui’s inexplicable disappearance from the Court. Nhia had determined then and there that she would go back and seek out the beggars. But events overtook her, and Khailin returned unlooked-for from the dark bearing the news of Lihui’s death. Nhia, at first genuinely distracted from her original intentions, finally had to face the fact that she was shying away from carrying them out. Going back to the lair of the man whom she had begun to think of as the Beggar King, in capitals, would have meant returning to the beginning of a journey that now seemed ended. Khailin swore Lihui was dead, that he was gone; the whole dark episode was buried in Nhia’s past now and it astonished her how badly she wanted it to stay there.

The Beggar King had implied he had “answers”—something that could elucidate the future—but the future was not yet here, and Nhia’s peace of mind in the present seemed to depend on burying the past.

“I am trading what might come for the favor of forgetting what was,” Nhia murmured to herself. “That is not wisdom.”

She was stronger than this. She knew it. Her
jin-shei
sisters were all there for her, and all she needed to do—even if she felt as though she was faltering—was reach out, and the support would be there. But it had been a hard struggle to learn not to spend her life leaning on someone else, depending on someone else. That she had rebuilt her life, that she had succeeded in doing just that, was a fragile victory. Quite simply, Nhia didn’t want to go back.

But then the restlessness and anxiety that had been stalking the city boiled over into action. Sudden fires began flaring up mysteriously in the
city, apparently aimed at the places where the wealthy came to play, and the stations of the city police, and one or two homes with the word “Hoarder” painted on the walls of the targeted house. Nobody had turned against the houses of the Gods yet, but there were
hacha-ashu
daubs on the whitewashed walls of the Great Temple, curses against the Gods who had turned against the people, the unfeeling and arrogant Gods who were withholding rain—who were sending wind and hail onto ripe crops just before harvest and smashing perfect peaches into the ground, flattening fields fat with golden grain.

“Who would do such a thing?” people asked one another in the city.

“Do not ask why the Gods have turned away—shouldn’t you all be asking yourselves if you haven’t turned away from the Gods?” the priests at the Temple asked those who came to the Circles with their offerings.

“Whom do we punish, and how can we prevent?” asked the Guard at the Palace.

The Imperial Sages went into retreat, to ponder the situation.

Questions. Questions swirled around Nhia.

The Imperial Guard was edgy and anxious. She learned that from Xaforn.

Qiaan told her that the people were burning the required incense and carefully avoiding mention of any other kind of burning—but that there was a lot of muttering behind closed doors, the frustration and discontent festering into something harder, more difficult to contain.

Liudan brooded, and stayed silent.

The beggar at the wedding had said to Nhia,
You will know when to come for answers.
It was time.

At an oddly subdued wedding of a merchant’s daughter and an administrator at the Palace, Nhia followed one of the bride’s aunts as she brought the customary purse to the waiting beggars at the gate and lingered behind as the aunt retreated back inside and the beggars gathered themselves together to leave after the traditional notice had been left on the door of the house.

She laid a hand on the sleeve of one of the beggars, a blind man, but not the one who had been present in the Beggar King’s room when she had first set foot there.

“I have a message,” she murmured, “for Brother Number One. Will you carry it for me?”

The others stopped, turning their heads sharply. “And who sends such a message?” said one of the women carefully.

“Tell him the Young Teacher would see him. Tell him I need the answers he has promised.”

“I will pass the message on,” the blind man said after a moment.

But the message that came back to Nhia in response to this one was not what she had wanted to hear. It arrived in the hand of a dirty little girl whose lank hair was a rat’s nest of greasy locks, cobwebs, matted dirt and Cahan alone knew what else—but whose glittering dark eyes were eloquent as she thrust a much folded and exceedingly grubby piece of paper into Nhia’s hand just outside the Temple gates. On it, in crabby and obviously long-unpracticed
jin-ashu
script, straggled a terse message.

Now is not the time. He is ill. We will send word.

The girl had disappeared by the time Nhia had looked up.

There had been no word for a long while, and the city’s mood continued to darken as rumors came flying from all over the beleaguered countryside. Nhia had almost lost heart when another note was slipped into her hand by an old woman with a cane, who never even stopped to meet her eyes.

Tonight. He will be waiting for you. The Street of the Nightwalkers.

Nhia briefly considered taking someone like Xaforn with her, but the invitation didn’t seem to include anyone other than herself, and it would be worse than useless if she failed, through the presence of a companion, to achieve her meeting with the Beggar King at all. So she wrapped a voluminous cloak around her and slipped its cowl forward to conceal her face, and waited at the corner of the Street of the Nightwalkers as twilight faded into darkness and the houses began to wake in the empty street.

A hand on her elbow startled her. She turned, and saw a couple of imps hovering beside her.

“Follow,” one of them said.

She fell in behind him as he turned and scurried away, and sensed his companion slip into place behind her. The leader snaked his way through a bewildering warren of alleys, corridors, and passageways that led to the Beggar King’s house; Nhia was soon quite lost. But the room into which she was finally ushered, as her escort melted away, was one she recognized—the same one where she had met him before.

The man who sat in his thronelike chair before the hearth looked frailer than the figure Nhia remembered, but he had lost none of his regal
bearing for all that he was wrapped in a blanket and his face was pale and gaunt.

He sensed her staring, and said, “Yes, I have been ill. It always leaves me damnably weak in the backwash. I’ve had these fits ever since … I’ve had them for years. It’s best, when they take me, to retire to a quiet place and wait them out. They tell me you wish to see me. What brings you here at last?”

“The city is waiting for something,” Nhia said. “You once told me that I would know when to come to you—well, I need those answers which you said you had. Liudan said the Sages had none.”

“The Sages?” he questioned, and there was an odd note in his voice.

“How much do you know of what’s been happening?” Nhia asked. “I know your network must be good, but I don’t know if it reaches high enough to tell you of the things not yet spoken of on the streets. My old teacher, Lihui, the one whom you called sorcerer, disappeared without trace a while ago. The woman he had married, my
jin-shei-bao
Khailin, returned from the place where he had kept her imprisoned for years, and now tells us that Lihui is dead. For some reason the Sages are more afraid of this than anything else. They have not named a successor for the empty place, which is unusual enough to draw attention.”

“Dead?” murmured the Beggar King. “It is odd that I did not sense that death.”

“Sense it? How could you do that?”

“When it comes to the sorcerer, I have means,” the Beggar King said. “This Khailin, his wife … his pupil, you say? … I wish to speak with her, too. When you return to see me, bring her to me.”

“I have a dreadful feeling of something dark gathering,” Nhia said, “and I don’t know how to turn it. What of the city? What of the country? Have you a sense for any of those?”

“It will begin in betrayal,” the Beggar King said. “It always does. If you remember that and watch for it, things may be prevented, or a hard burden which cannot be wholly avoided may be made lighter.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will,” he said. “You will.”

They had talked then of the city, and of Liudan’s Empire, somehow suddenly so fragile. When Nhia left, another escort detail took her back to half-familiar territory from which she could find her way home, and
murmured, “He said, in three days’ time. Be at the same place as before. And bring the other with you.”

When Nhia had delivered this command, so thinly veiled as invitation, to Khailin, she was met with a look of complete bafflement.

“You want me to go
where?
” Khailin had said. “Why?”

“He knows more than he will tell, and if anyone can understand him it’s probably you,” Nhia said. “I think he is a valuable ally. Help me, Khailin! I can’t do this alone.”

“Does Liudan know you’re hobnobbing with the king of the beggars?” Khailin said. “I have a feeling she would not like it very much. It’s out of her orbit, out of her control.”

“No, and don’t you go telling her. Not until I can bring her something more solid than visions and cryptic remarks. That’s why I need you.”

“I will come,” Khailin grumbled. “But only you could drag me to a place like this, Nhia. You can take pride in that.”

The Beggar King’s head had come up like a hunting dog’s when Khailin had entered the room. Nhia could never read him, but there seemed to be a little of everything in this reaction—anticipation, surprise, recognition, a touch of fear.

“So you are the one who married him,” he murmured.

Khailin glanced at Nhia, her eyebrows raised.

The Beggar King made an imperious motion with his hand. “Come,” he said, “sit with me. And tell me of the death you claim to have given him.”

It was a voice of power, and Khailin felt it tug at her memories, unfolding them like a series of paintings on a scroll of silkpaper. It all seemed to have happened to her a lifetime ago, and at the same time it was fresh and clear as though it had happened yesterday.

Khailin and Lihui’s house had come to an agreement. After she had willingly accepted its brand on her body, she had gained a power of command over the house reared by Lihui’s spells and had made herself quite simply disappear. The house made her presence transparent, effectively removing her from Lihui’s sight. All it had taken was an utterance of a rhyme she had known for years. Long ago, in children’s games of hide-and-seek, Khailin had mouthed the same words that all her peers had done:
Before me day, behind me night, so I may hide in plain sight!
She had not realized, until her paths had crossed Lihui’s, just how old that verse was, and just how much
power the ancient spell on which it had been based still carried when it had the force of real dark magic behind it. The house had understood the childhood rhyme in ways that Khailin had not believed possible, and had moved to make it true.

Khailin haunted Lihui’s rooms. He was often aware of her as a presence which hovered at his elbow, but unless she willed it so, negating the spell, he could not see her. Sometimes she did that, letting him have just enough of a glimpse to ensure that he knew she was still there, but then she veiled herself again and he could not find her. The knowledge of her presence and his inadequacy in countering her actions had driven Lihui into towering rages, and Khailin had laughed as she watched him futilely screaming at the walls of his laboratory and his libraries.

And there were many libraries in that house, whole rooms devoted to different subjects. The rooms that had once been locked against her. But with the house as her ally it had not taken Khailin long to find her way to the treasures in those rooms. She pored over the books and scrolls Lihui had kept hidden away, learning all the things that she could ever have hoped to learn, steeping herself in knowledge, drowning in it. She made careful copies of some scrolls, and Lihui never knew it. She brewed her own elixirs on his apparatus, careful not to leave any strange residues behind for him to notice, and was elated at what she was able to achieve. There was nobody to share her successes with, of course, but she could live with the solitude—at least until she learned all that she could learn from this place.