Under Heaven

CHAPTER I

Amid the ten thousand noises and the jade-and-gold and the whirling dust of Xinan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends, drinking spiced wine in the North District with the courtesans.

They would listen to flute or pipa music and declaim poetry, test each other with jibes and quotes, sometimes find a private room with a scented, silken woman, before weaving unsteadily home after the dawn drums sounded curfew's end, to sleep away the day instead of studying.

Here in the mountains, alone in hard, clear air by the waters of Kuala Nor, far to the west of the imperial city, beyond the borders of the empire, even, Tai was in a narrow bed by darkfall, under the first brilliant stars, and awake at sunrise.

In spring and summer the birds woke him. This was a place where thousands upon thousands nested noisily: fishhawks and cormorants, wild geese and cranes. The geese made him think of friends far away. Wild geese were a symbol of absence: in poetry, in life. Cranes were fidelity, another matter.

In winter the cold was savage, it could take the breath away. The north wind when it blew was an assault, outdoors, and even through the cabin walls. He slept under layers of fur and sheepskin, and no birds woke him at dawn from the icebound nesting grounds on the far side of the lake.

The ghosts were outside in all seasons, moonlit nights and dark, as soon as the sun went down.

Tai knew some of their voices now, the angry ones and the lost ones, and those in whose thin, stretched crying there was only pain.

They didn't frighten him, not any more. He'd thought he might die of terror in the beginning, alone in those first nights here with the dead.

He would look out through an unshuttered window on a spring or summer or autumn night, but he never went outside. Under moon or stars the world by the lake belonged to the ghosts, or so he had come to understand.

He had set himself a routine from the start, to deal with solitude and fear, and the enormity of where he was. Some holy men and hermits in their mountains and forests might deliberately act otherwise, going through days like leaves blown, defined by the absence of will or desire, but his was a different nature, and he wasn't holy.

He did begin each morning with the prayers for his father. He was still in the formal mourning period and his self-imposed task by this distant lake had everything to do with respect for his father's memory.

After the invocations, which he assumed his brothers were also performing in the home where they'd all been born, Tai would go out into the mountain meadow (shades of green dotted with wildflowers, or crunching underfoot with ice and snow) and—unless there was a storm—he would do his Kanlin exercises. No sword, then one sword, then both.

He would look at the cold waters of the lake, with the small isle in the middle of it, then up at the surrounding, snow-draped, stupefying mountains piled upon each other. Beyond the northern peaks the land sloped downwards for hundreds of li towards the long dunes of the killing deserts, with the Silk Roads running around either side of them, bringing so much wealth to the court, to the empire of Kitai. To his people.

In winter he fed and watered his small, shaggy horse in the shed built against his cabin. When the weather turned and the grass returned, he'd let the horse graze during the day. It was placid, wasn't about to run away. There was nowhere to run.

After his exercises, he would try to let stillness enter into him, a shedding of the chaos of life, ambition and aspiration: to make himself worthy of this chosen labour.

And then he would set to work burying the dead.

He'd never, from first arrival here, made any effort to separate Kitan from Taguran soldiers. They were tangled together, strewn or piled, skulls and white bones. Flesh gone to earth or to animals and carrion birds long since, or—for those of the most recent campaign—not so very long ago.

It had been a triumph, that last conflict, though bitterly hard-won. Forty thousand dead in one battle, almost as many Kitan as Taguran.

His father had been in that war, a general, honoured afterwards with a proud title, Left Side Commander of the Pacified West. Rewarded handsomely by the Son of Heaven for victory: a personal audience in the Hall of Brilliance in the Ta-Ming Palace when he returned back east, the purple sash presented, words of commendation spoken directly, a jade gift extended from the emperor's hand, only one intermediary.

His family were undeniably beneficiaries of what had happened by this lake. Tai's mother and Second Mother had burnt incense together, lit candles of thanksgiving to ancestors and gods.

But for General Shen Gao, the memory of the fighting here had been, until he'd died two years ago, a source of pride and sorrow intermingled, marking him forever after.

Too many men had lost their lives for a lake on the border of nowhere, one that would not, in the event, be held by either empire.

The treaty that had followed—affirmed with elaborate exchanges and rituals and, for the first time, a Kitan princess for the Taguran king—had established as much.

Hearing the number from that battle—forty thousand dead—Tai, when young, had been unable to even picture what it must have been like. That wasn't the case any more.

The lake and meadow lay between lonely forts, watched by both empires from days away—to the south for Tagur, east for Kitai. It was always silent here now, save for the sound of wind, the crying of birds in season, and the ghosts.

General Shen had spoken of sorrow and guilt only to his younger sons (never to the oldest). Such feelings in a commander could be seen as shameful, even treasonous, a denial of the emperor's wisdom, ruling with the mandate of heaven, unfailing, unable to fail or his throne and the empire would be at risk.

But the thoughts had been spoken, more than once, after Shen Gao's retirement to the family property on their south-flowing stream near the Wai River, usually after wine on a quiet day, with leaves or lotus blossoms falling in the water to drift downstream. And the memory of those words was the principal reason his second son was here for the mourning period, instead of at home.

You could argue that the general's quiet sadness had been wrong, misplaced. That the battle here had been in necessary defence of the empire. It was important to remember that it hadn't always been the armies of Kitai triumphing over the Tagurans. The kings of Tagur, on their distant, completely defended plateau, were hugely ambitious. Victory and savagery had gone both ways through a hundred and fifty years of fighting by Kuala Nor beyond Iron Gate Pass, which was, in itself, as isolated a fortress as the empire knew.

"A thousand miles of moonlight falling, east of Iron," Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, had written. It wasn't literally true, but anyone who had ever been at Iron Gate Fortress knew what the poet meant.

And Tai was several days' ride west of the fort, beyond that last outpost of empire, with the dead: with the lost crying at night and the bones of over a hundred thousand soldiers, lying white in falling moonlight or under the sun. Sometimes, in bed in the mountain dark, he would belatedly realize that a voice whose cadences he knew had fallen silent, and he would understand that he'd laid those bones to rest.

There were too many. It was beyond hope to ever finish this: it was a task for gods descending from the nine heavens, not for one man. But if you couldn't do everything, did that mean you did nothing?

For two years now, Shen Tai had offered what passed for his own answer to that, in memory of his father's voice asking quietly for another cup of wine, watching large, slow goldfish and drifting flowers in the pond.

The dead were everywhere here, even on the isle. There had been a fort there, a small one, rubble now. He'd tried to imagine the fighting sweeping that way. Boats swiftly built on the pebbled shore with wood from the slopes, the desperate, trapped defenders of one army or the other, depending on the year, firing last arrows at implacable enemies bringing death across the lake to them.

He had chosen to begin there two years ago, rowing the small craft he'd found and repaired; a spring day when the lake mirrored blue heaven and the mountains. The isle was a defined ground, limited, less overwhelming. In the mainland meadow and far into the pine woods the dead lay strewn as far as he could walk in a long day.

For a little more than half the year under this high, fierce sky he was able to dig, bury broken, rusted weapons with the bones. It was brutally hard work. He grew leathery, muscled, callused, ached at night, fell wearily into bed after washing in water warmed at his fire.

From late fall, through the winter, into early spring, the ground was frozen, impossible. You could break your heart trying to dig a grave.

In his first year the lake froze, he could walk across to the isle for a few weeks. The second winter was milder and it did not freeze over. Muffled in furs then, hooded and gloved in a white, hollow stillness, seeing the puffs of his mortal breath, feeling small against the towering, hostile vastness all around, Tai took the boat out on days when waves and weather allowed. He offered the dead to the dark waters with a prayer, that they might not lie lost any longer, unconsecrated, on wind-scoured ground here by Kuala Nor's cold shore, among the wild animals and far from any home.

War had not been continuous. It never was, anywhere, and particularly not in a mountain bowl so remote, so difficult for sustained supply lines from either country, however belligerent or ambitious kings and emperors might be.

As a consequence, there had been cabins built by fishermen or by the herders who grazed sheep and goats in these high meadows, in the intervals when soldiers weren't dying here. Most of the cabins had been destroyed, a few had not. Tai lived in one of them, set north against a pine-treed slope—shelter from the worst winds. The cabin was almost a hundred years old. He had set about repairing it as best he could when he'd first come: roof, door and window frames, shutters, the stone chimney for the fire.

Then he'd had help, unexpected, unsolicited. The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was. Someone he knew had written a poem around that thought.

He was lying awake now, middle of a spring night. There was a full moon shining, which meant that the Tagurans would be with him by late morning, a half dozen of them bringing supplies in a bullock cart down a slope from the south and around the lake's level shore to his cabin. The morning after the new moon was when his own people came from the east, through the ravine from Iron Gate.

It had taken a little time in the period after he'd arrived, but a routine had been arranged that let them each come to him without having to see the other. It was not part of his purpose to have men die because he was here. There was a peace now, signed, with gifts exchanged, and a princess, but such truths didn't always prevail when young, aggressive soldiers met in far-away places—and young men could start wars.

The two forts treated Tai like a holy hermit or a fool, choosing to live among the ghosts. They conducted a tacit, almost an amusing warfare with each other through him, vying to offer more generosity every month, to be of greater aid.

Tai's own people had laid flooring in his cabin in the first summer, bringing cut and sanded planks in a cart. The Tagurans had taken over the chimney repair. Ink and pens and paper (requested) came from Iron Gate; wine had first come from the south. Both fortresses had men chop wood whenever they were here. Winter fur and sheepskin had been brought for his bedding, for clothes. He'd been given a goat for milk, and then a second one from the other side, and an eccentric-looking but very warm Taguran hat with flaps for the ears and a tie for knotting under his chin, the first autumn. The Iron Gate soldiers had built a small shed for his small horse.

He'd tried to stop this, but hadn't come close to persuading anyone, and eventually he'd understood: it wasn't about kindness to the madman, or even entirely about besting each other. The less time he spent on food, firewood, maintaining the cabin, the more he could devote to his task, which no one had ever done before, and which seemed—once they'd accepted why he was here—to matter to the Tagurans as much as to his own people.

You could find irony in this, Tai often thought. They might goad and kill each other, even now, if they chanced to arrive at the same time, and only a genuine fool would think the battles in the west were over for good, but the two empires would honour his laying the dead to rest—until there were newer ones.

In bed on a mild night he listened to the wind and the ghosts, awakened not by either of them (not any more) but by the brilliant white of the moon shining. He couldn't see the star of the Weaver Maid now, exiled from her mortal lover on the far side of the Sky River. It had been bright enough to show clearly in the window before, even with a full moon. He remembered a poem he'd liked when he was younger, built around an image of the moon carrying messages between the lovers across the River.

If he considered it now it seemed contrived, a showy conceit. Many celebrated verses from early in this Ninth Dynasty were like that if you looked closely at their elaborate verbal brocades. There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?

It was very bright in the room. Almost enough to pull him from bed to window to look out on the tall grass, at what silver did to green, but he was tired. He was always tired at the end of a day, and he never went out from the cabin at night. He didn't fear the ghosts any more—they saw him as an emissary by now, he'd decided, not an intruder from the living—but he left them the world after the sun went down.

In winter he had to swing the rebuilt shutters closed, block chinks in the walls as best he could with cloth and sheepskin against the winds and snow. The cabin would become smoky, lit by the fire and candles, or one of his two lamps if he was struggling to write poetry. He warmed wine on a brazier (this, also, from the Tagurans).

When spring came he opened the shutters, let in the sun, or starlight and the moon, and then the sound of birds at dawn.

On first awakening tonight he had been disoriented, confused, tangled in a last dream. He'd thought it was still winter, that the brilliant silver he saw was ice or frost gleaming. He had smiled after a moment, returning to awareness, wry and amused. He had a friend in Xinan who would have cherished this moment. It wasn't often that you lived the imagery of well-known lines.

But maybe he was wrong. Maybe if a poem was true enough then sooner or later some of those who read it would live the image just as he was living it now. Or maybe some readers had the image before they even came to the poem and found it waiting for them there, an affirmation? The poet offering words for thoughts they'd held already.

And sometimes poetry gave you new, dangerous ideas. Sometimes men were exiled, or killed, for what they wrote. You could mask a dangerous comment by setting a poem in the First or Third Dynasty, hundreds of years ago. Sometimes that convention worked, but not always. The senior mandarins of the civil service were not fools.

Lying back down I think of home. Home was the property near the Wai, where his father was buried in their orchard with both his parents and the three children who had not survived to adulthood. Where Tai's mother and Shen Gao's concubine, the woman they called Second Mother, still lived, where his two brothers were also nearing the end of mourning—the older one would be returning to the capital soon.

He wasn't sure where his sister was. Women had only ninety days of mourning. Li-Mei was probably back with the empress, wherever she was. The empress might not be at court. Her time in the Ta-Ming had been rumoured to be ending, even two years ago. Someone else was in the palace now with Emperor Taizu. Someone shining like a gem.

There were many who disapproved. There was no one, as far as Tai knew, who had said as much, openly, before Tai had left to go home and then come here.

He found his thoughts drifting back to Xinan, from memories of the family compound by the stream, where the paulownia leaves fell along the path from the front gate all at once, in one autumn night each year. Where peaches and plums and apricots grew in the orchard (flowers red in spring), and you could smell the charcoal burning at the forest's edge, see smoke from village hearths beyond the chestnut and mulberry trees.

No, now he was remembering the capital instead: all glitter and colour and noise, where violent life, in all its world-dust and world-fury, was happening, unfolding, would be erupting, even now, in the middle of night, assaulting the senses moment by moment. Two million people. The centre of the world, under heaven.

It wouldn't be dark there. Not in Xinan. The lights of men could almost hide moonlight. There would be torches and lanterns, fixed, or carried in bamboo frames, or suspended from the litters borne through the streets, carrying the high-born and the powerful. There'd be red candles in upper windows, and lamps hanging from flower-decked balconies in the North District. White lights in the palace and wide, shallow oil lamps on pillars twice the height of a man in courtyards there, burning all night long.

There would be music and glory, heartbreak and heart's ease, and knives or swords drawn sometimes in the lanes and alleys. And come morning, power and passion and death all over again, jostling each other in the two great, deafening markets, in wine shops and study halls, twisted streets (shaped for furtive love, or murder) and stunningly wide ones. In bedrooms and courtyards, elaborate private gardens and flower-filled public parks where willows drooped over streams and the deep-dredged artificial lakes.

He remembered Long Lake Park, south of the rammed-earth city walls, remembered with whom he'd been there last, in peach-blossom time, before his father died, on one of the three days each month she was allowed out of the North District. Eighth, eighteenth, twenty-eighth. She was a long way off.

Wild geese were the emblems of separation.

He thought of the Ta-Ming, the whole palace complex north of the city walls, of the Son of Heaven, no longer young, and of those with him and around him there: eunuchs, and nine ranks of mandarins, Tai's older brother one of them, princes and alchemists and army leaders, and the one almost surely lying with him tonight under this moon, who was young, and almost unbearably beautiful, and had changed the empire.

Tai had aspired to be one of those civil servants with access to palace and court, swimming "within the current," as the phrase went. He had studied a full year in the capital (between encounters with courtesans and wine-cup friends), had been on the brink of writing the three-day exams for the imperial service, the test that determined your future.

Then his father had died by their quiet stream, and two and a half years of official mourning came, and went from you like a rainwind down a river.

A man was lashed—twenty with the heavy rod—for failing to perform the withdrawal and rituals due to parents when they died.

You could say (some would say) he had failed in the rites by being here in the mountains and not at home, but he'd spoken with the sub-prefect before riding this long way west, and had received permission. He was also—overwhelmingly—still withdrawn from society, from anything that could be called ambition or worldliness.

There was some risk in what he'd done. There was always danger when it came to what might be whispered at the Ministry of Rites, which supervised the examinations. Eliminating a rival, one way or another, was as basic a tactic as there was, but Tai thought he had protected himself.

You could never truly know, of course. Not in Xinan. Ministers were appointed and exiled, generals and military governors promoted, then demoted or ordered to kill themselves, and the court had been changing swiftly in the time before he'd left. But Tai hadn't had a position yet. It wasn't as if he'd risked anything in the way of office or rank. And he thought he could survive the whipping rod, if it came to that.

He tried to decide now, in a moonlit cabin, wrapped in solitude like a silkworm during its fourth sleep, how much he really missed the capital. If he was ready to go back, resume all as before. Or if it was time for yet another change.

He knew what people would say if he did make a change, what was already said about General Shen's second son. First Son Liu was known and understood, his ambition and achievement fitting a pattern. The third son was still young, little more than a child. It was Tai, the second, who raised more questions than anything else.

Mourning would be formally over at the seventh month's full moon. He would have completed the rites, in his own fashion. He could resume his studies, prepare for the next set of examinations. That was what men did. Scholars wrote the civil service tests five times, ten, more. Some died without ever passing them. Forty to sixty men succeeded each year, of the thousands who began the process with the preliminary tests in their own prefectures. The final examination was begun in the presence of the emperor himself, in his white robe and black hat and the yellow belt of highest ceremony: an elaborate passage of initiation—with bribery and corruption in the process, as always in Xinan. How could it be otherwise?

The capital seemed to have entered his silvered cabin now, driving sleep farther away with memories of a brawling, buffeting tumult that never wholly stopped at any hour. Vendors and buyers shouting in the markets, beggars and tumblers and fortune tellers, hired mourners following a funeral with their hair unbound, horses and carts rumbling through dark and day, the muscled bearers of sedan chairs screaming at pedestrians to make way, whipping them aside with bamboo rods. The Gold Bird Guards with their own whipping rods at every major intersection, clearing the streets when darkfall came.

Small shops in each ward, open all night long. The Night Soil Gatherers passing with their plaintive warning cry. Logs bumping and rolling through Xinan's outer walls into the huge pond by the East Market where they were bought and sold at sunrise. Morning beatings and executions in the two market squares. More street performers after the decapitations, while good crowds were still gathered. Bells tolling the watch-hours by day and through the night, and the long roll of drums that locked the walls and all the ward gates at sundown and opened them at dawn. Spring flowers in the parks, summer fruit, autumn leaves, the yellow dust that was everywhere, blowing down from the steppes. The dust of the world. Jade-and-gold. Xinan.

He heard and saw and almost caught the smells of it, as a remembered chaos and cacophony of the soul, then he pushed it back and away in the moonlight, listening again to the ghosts outside, the crying he'd had to learn to live with here, or go mad.

In silver light he looked over at his low writing table, the ink-block and paper, the woven mat in front of it. His swords were against the wall beside it. The scent of the pine trees came through the open windows with the night wind. Cicadas whirring, a duet with the dead.

He had come to Kuala Nor on impulse, to honour his father's sorrow. He had stayed for himself just as much, working every day to offer what release he could to however small a number of those unburied here. One man's labour, not an immortal, not holy.

Two years had passed, seasons wheeling, and the stars. He didn't know how he would feel when he returned to the crash and tumble of the capital. That was the honest thought.

He did know which people he had missed. He saw one of them in the eye of his mind, could almost hear her voice, too vividly to allow sleep to return, remembering the last time he'd lain with her.

"And if someone should take me from here when you are gone? If someone should ask me... should propose to make me his personal courtesan, or even a concubine?"

He'd known who someone was, of course.

He had taken her hand, with its long, gold-painted fingernails and jewelled rings, and placed it on his bare chest, so she could feel his heart.

She'd laughed, a little bitterly. "No! You always do this, Tai. Your heart never changes its beating. It tells me nothing."

In the North District where they were—an upstairs room in the Pavilion of Moonlight Pleasure House—she was called Spring Rain. He didn't know her real name. You never asked the real names. It was considered ill-bred.

Speaking slowly, because this was difficult, he'd said, "Two years is a long time, Rain. I know it. Much happens in the life of a man, or a woman. It is—"

She had moved her hand to cover his mouth, not gently. She wasn't always gentle with him. "No, again. Listen to me. If you begin to speak of the Path, or the balanced wisdom of life's long flowing, Tai, I will take a fruit knife to your manhood. I thought you might wish to know this before you went on."

He remembered the silk of her voice, the devastating sweetness with which she could say such things. He had kissed the palm held against his mouth, then said, softly, as she moved it a little away, "You must do what seems best to you, for your life. I do not want you to be one of those women waiting at a window above jade stairs in the night. Let someone else live those poems. My intention is to go back to my family's estate, observe the rites for my father, then return. I can tell you that."

He had not lied. It had been his intention.

Things had fallen out otherwise. What man would dare believe that all he planned might come to pass? Not even the emperor, with the mandate of heaven, could make that so.

He had no idea what had happened to her, if someone had indeed taken her from the courtesans' quarter, claimed her for his own behind the stone walls of an aristocrat's city mansion in what was almost certainly a better life. No letters came west of Iron Gate Pass, because he had not written any.

It didn't have to be a case of one extreme or the other, he finally thought: not Xinan set against this beyond-all-borders solitude. The Path's long tale of wisdom taught balancing, did it not? The two halves of a man's soul, of his inward life. You balanced couplets in a formal verse, elements in a painting—river, cliff, heron, fishing boat—thick and thin brush strokes in calligraphy, stones and trees and water in a garden, shifting patterns in your own days.

He could go back home to their stream, for example, instead of to the capital, when he left here. Could live there and write, marry someone his mother and Second Mother chose for him, cultivate their garden, the orchard—spring flowers, summer fruit—receive visitors and pay visits, grow old and white-bearded in calm but not solitude. Watch the paulownia leaves when they fell, the goldfish in the pond. Remember his father doing so. He might even, one day, be thought a sage. The idea made him smile, in moonlight.

He could travel, east down the Wai, or on the Great River itself through the gorges to the sea and then back: the boatmen poling against the current, or towing the boats west with thick ropes along slippery paths cut into the cliffs when they came to the wild gorges again.

He might go even farther south, where the empire became different and strange: lands where rice was grown in water and there were elephants and gibbons, mandrills, rosewood forests, camphor trees, pearls in the sea for those who could dive for them, and where tigers with yellow eyes killed men in the jungles of the dark.

He had an honoured lineage. His father's name offered a doorway through which Tai could walk and find a welcome among prefects and taxation officers and even military governors throughout Kitai. In truth, First Brother's name might be even more useful by now, though that had its own complexities.

But all of this was possible. He could travel and think, visit temples and pavilions, pagodas in misty hills, mountain shrines, write as he travelled. He could do it just as the master poet whose lines he had awakened with had done, was probably still doing somewhere. Though honesty (and irony) compelled the additional thought that Sima Zian seemed to have done as much drinking as anything else through his years on the boats and roads, in the mountains and temples and bamboo groves.

There was that, too, wasn't there? Good wine, late-night fellowship. Music. Not to be dismissed or despised.

Tai fell asleep on that thought, and with the sudden, fervent hope that the Tagurans had remembered to bring wine. He had almost finished what his own people had delivered two weeks ago. The long summer twilight gave a man more time to drink before going to bed with the sun.

He slept, and dreamed of the woman with her hand on his heart that last night, then over his mouth, her shaped and painted moth-eyebrows, green eyes, red mouth, candlelight, jade pins pulled slowly one by one from golden hair, and the scent she wore.

The birds woke him from the far end of the lake.

He had attempted a formal six-line poem several nights ago, their strident morning noise compared to opening hour at the two markets in Xinan, but hadn't been able to make the parallel construction hold in the final couplet. His technical skills as a poet were probably above average, good enough for the verse component of the examinations, but not likely, in his own judgment, to produce something enduring.

One of the results of two years alone had been his coming to think this, most of the time.

He dressed and built a fire, washed himself and tied back his hair while boiling water for tea. He glanced in the bronze mirror he'd been given and thought about taking a blade to his cheeks and chin, but decided against such self-abuse this morning. The Tagurans could deal with him unshaven. There was no real reason to even tie his hair but he felt like a steppes barbarian when he left it on his shoulders. He had memories of that, of them.

Before drinking or eating, while the tea leaves were steeping, he stood at the eastern window and spoke the prayer to his father's spirit in the direction of sunrise.

Whenever he did this, he summoned and held a memory of Shen Gao feeding bread to the wild ducks in their stream. He didn't know why that was his remembrance-image, but it was. Perhaps the tranquility of it, in a life that had not been tranquil.

He prepared and drank his tea, ate some salt-dried meat and milled grain in hot water sweetened with clover honey, then he claimed his peasant-farmer straw hat from a nail by the door and pulled on his boots. The summer boots were almost new, a gift from Iron Gate, replacing the worn-out pair he'd had.

They had noticed that. They observed him closely whenever they came, Tai had come to understand. He had also realized, during the first hard winter, that he'd almost certainly have died here without the help of the two forts. You could live entirely alone in some mountains in some seasons—it was a legend-dream of the hermit-poet—but not at Kuala Nor in winter, not this high up and remote when the snows come and the north wind blew.

The supplies, at new and full moon without fail, had kept him alive—and had arrived only through extreme effort several times, when wild storms had bowled down to blast the frozen meadow and lake.

He milked the two goats, took the pail inside and covered it for later. He claimed his two swords and went back out and did his Kanlin routines.

He put the swords away and then, outside again, stood a moment in almost-summer sunshine listening to the shrieking racket of birds, watching them wheel and cry above the lake, which was blue and beautiful in morning light and gave no least hint at all of winter ice, or of how many dead men were here around its shores.

Until you looked away from birds and water to the tall grass of the meadow, and then you saw the bones in the clear light, everywhere. Tai could see his mounds, where he was burying them, west of the cabin, north against the pines. Three long rows of deep graves now.

He turned to claim his shovel and go to work. It was why he was here.

His eye was caught by a glint to the south: sunlight catching armour halfway along the last turning of the last slope down. Looking more narrowly he saw that the Tagurans were early today, or—he checked the sun again—that he was moving slowly himself, after a moon-white, waking night.

He watched them descend with the bullock and the heavy-wheeled cart. He wondered if Bytsan was leading the supply party himself this morning. He found himself hoping so.

Was it wrong to anticipate the arrival of a man whose soldiers would rape his sister and both mothers and joyfully sack and burn the family compound during any incursion into Kitai?

Men changed during wars or conflict, sometimes beyond recognition. Tai had seen it in himself, on the steppes beyond the Long Wall among the nomads. Men changed, not always in ways you liked to recall, though courage seen was worth remembering.

He didn't think Bytsan would grow savage, but he didn't know. And he could easily imagine the opposite about some of the Tagurans who had come here through two years, arriving armoured and armed, as if to the stern drums of a battlefield, not bringing supplies to a solitary fool.

They were not simple, easily sorted encounters, the ones he had with the warriors of the Empire of the Plateau when they came down to him.

It was Bytsan he saw, as the Tagurans reached the meadow and began circling the lake. The captain trotted his bay-coloured Sardian horse forward. The animal was magnificent, breathtaking. They all were, those far-western horses. The captain had the only one in his company. Heavenly Horses they called them in Tai's own land. Legends said that they sweated blood.

The Tagurans traded for them with Sardia, beyond where the divided Silk Roads became one again in the west, after the deserts. There, through yet more harsh mountain passes, lay the deep, lush breeding grounds of these horses, and Tai's people longed for them with a passion that had influenced imperial policy, warfare, and poetry for centuries.

Horses mattered, a great deal. They were why the emperor, Serene Lord of the Five Directions and the Five Holy Mountains, was steadily engaged with the Bogu nomads, supporting chosen leaders among the kumiss-drinking yurt-dwellers north of the Wall, in exchange for a supply of their horses, however inferior they might be to the ones from Sardia. Neither the loess-laden soil in northern Kitai nor the jungles and rice-lands of the south would permit the grazing and breeding of horses of any real quality.

It was a Kitan tragedy, had been for a thousand years.

Many things came to Xinan along the guarded Silk Roads in this Ninth Dynasty, making it wealthy beyond description, but horses from Sardia were not among them. They could not endure that long desert journey. Women came east, musicians and dancers. Jade and alabaster and gems came, amber, aromatics, powdered rhinoceros horn for the alchemists. Talking birds, spices and food, swords and ivory and so much else, but not the Heavenly Horses.

So Kitai had had to find other ways to get the best mounts they could—because you could win a war with cavalry, all else being equal, and when the Tagurans had too many of these horses (being at peace with the Sardians now, trading with them) all else was not equal.

Tai bowed twice in greeting as Bytsan reined up—right fist in left palm. He had acquaintances—and an older brother—who would have judged it a humiliation had they seen him bow so formally to a Taguran. On the other hand, they hadn't had their lives guarded and preserved by this man and the steady arrival of supplies every full moon for almost two years.

Bytsan's blue tattoos showed in the sunlight, on both cheeks and the left side of his neck above the collar of his tunic. He dismounted, bowed, also twice, closed fist in palm, adopting the Kitan gesture.

He smiled briefly. "Before you ask, yes, I brought wine."

He spoke Kitan, most Tagurans did. It was the language of trade in all directions now, when men were not killing each other. It was believed, in Kitai, that the gods spoke Kitan in the nine heavens, had taught it to the original Father of Emperors as he stood, head bowed on Dragon Mountain in the past-that-lay-behind.

"You knew I would ask?" Tai felt rueful, a little exposed.

"Longer twilights. What else can a man do? The cup is a companion, we sing. It goes well?"

"It goes well. The moonlight kept me awake, I am slow to begin this morning."

They knew his routine, the query had not been idle.

"Just the moon?"

Tai's own people asked variants of that question every time they came. Curiosity—and fear. Very brave men, including this one, had told him directly they could not have done what he was doing here, with the dead unburied, and angry.

Tai nodded. "The moon. And some memories."

He glanced past the captain and saw a young, fully armoured soldier ride up. Not one of the ones he knew. This man did not dismount, stared down at Tai. He had only one tattoo, wore an unnecessary helmet, did not smile.

"Gnam, take an axe from by the cabin, help Adar chop firewood."

"Why?"

Tai blinked. He looked at the Taguran captain.

Bytsan's expression did not change, nor did he glance back at the soldier on the horse behind him. "Because that is what we do here. And because if you do not I will take your horse and weapons, remove your boots, and let you walk back through all the passes alone among the mountain cats."

It was said quietly. There was a silence. Tai realized, with a kind of dismay, how unaccustomed he'd become to such exchanges, a sudden tension rising. This is the way the world is, he told himself. Learn it again. Start now. This is what you will find when you return.

Casually, so as not to shame the captain or the young soldier, he turned and looked across the lake towards the birds. Grey herons, terns, a golden eagle very high.

The young man—he was big, well-made—was still on his horse. He said, "This one cannot chop wood?"

"I believe he can, since he has been digging graves for our dead for two years now."

"Ours, or his own? While he despoils our soldiers' bones?"

Bytsan laughed.

Tai turned quickly back, he couldn't help himself. He felt something returning after a long time. He knew it for what it was: anger had been a part of him, too readily, as far back as he could remember. A second brother's portion? Some might say that was it.

He said, as levelly as he could, "I should be grateful if you'd look around and tell me which of the bones here is one of yours, if I should feel inclined to despoil it."

A different silence. There were many kinds of stillness, Tai thought, inconsequentially.

"Gnam, you are a great fool. Get the axe and chop wood. Do it now."

This time Bytsan did look at his soldier, and this time the other man swung himself down—not hurrying, but not disobeying, either. The bullock had pulled the cart up. There were four other men. Tai knew three of them, exchanged nods with those.

The one called Adar, wearing a belted, dark-red tunic over loose brown trousers, no armour, walked with Gnam towards the cabin, leading their horses. The others, knowing their routine here, guided the cart forward and began unloading supplies into the cabin. They moved briskly, they always did. Unload, stack, do whatever else, including cleaning out the small stable, get back up the slope and away.

The fear of being here after dark.

"Careful with his wine!" Bytsan called. "I don't want to hear a Kitan weeping. The sound's too unpleasant."

Tai smiled crookedly, the soldiers laughed.

The chunk of axes came from the side of the cabin, carrying in mountain air. Bytsan gestured. Tai walked off with him. They stepped through tall grass, over bones and around them. Tai avoided a skull, instinct by now.

Butterflies were everywhere, all colours, and grasshoppers startled at their feet, springing high and away in all directions. They heard the drone of bees among the meadow flowers. Here and there the metal of a rusted blade could be seen, even on the grey sand at the water's edge. You needed to be careful where you stepped. There were pink stones in the sand. The birds were raucous, wheeling and swooping, breaking the surface of the lake for fish.

"Water's still cold?" Bytsan asked after a moment.

They stood by the lake. The air was very clear, they could see crags on the mountains, cranes on the isle, in the ruined fortress there.

"Always."

"A storm in the pass five nights ago. You get it down here?"

Tai shook his head. "Some rain. Must have blown off east."

Bytsan bent and picked up a handful of stones. He began throwing them at birds.

"Sun's hot," he said eventually. "I can see why you wear that thing on your head, though it makes you look like an old man and a peasant."

"Both?"

The Taguran grinned. "Both." He threw another stone. He said, "You'll be leaving?"

"Soon. Midsummer moon ends our mourning period."

Bytsan nodded. "That's what I wrote them."

"Wrote them?"

"Court. In Rygyal."

Tai stared at him. "They know about me?"

Bytsan nodded again. "They know from me. Of course they do."

Tai thought about it. "I don't think Iron Gate's sending messages back that someone's burying the dead at Kuala Nor, but I may be wrong."

The other man shrugged. "You probably are. Everything's tracked and weighed these days. Peacetime's for the calculating ones at any court. There were some at Rygyal who saw your coming here as Kitan arrogance. They wanted you killed."

That, Tai hadn't known either. "Like that fellow back there?"

The two axes were chopping steadily, each one a thin, clean sound in the distance. "Gnam? He's just young. Wants to make a name."

"Kill an enemy right away?"

"Get it over with. Like your first woman."

The two of them exchanged a brief smile. Both were relatively young men, still. Neither felt that way.

Bytsan said, after a moment, "I was instructed that you were not to be killed."

Tai snorted. "I am grateful to hear it."

Bytsan cleared his throat. He seemed awkward suddenly. "There is a gift, instead, a recognition."

Tai stared again. "A gift? From the Taguran court?"

"No, from the rabbit in the moon." Bytsan grimaced. "Yes, of course, from the court. Well, from one person there, with permission."

"Permission?"

The grimace became a grin. The Taguran was sunburned, square-jawed, had one missing lower tooth. "You are slow this morning."

Tai said, "This is unexpected, that's all. What person?"

"See for yourself. I have a letter."

Bytsan reached into a pocket in his tunic and retrieved a pale-yellow scroll. Tai saw the Taguran royal seal: a lion's head, in red.

He broke the wax, unrolled the letter, read the contents, which were not lengthy, and so learned what they were giving to him and doing to him, for his time here among the dead.

It became something of an exercise to breathe.

Thoughts began arriving too swiftly, uncontrolled, disconnected, a swirling like a sandstorm. This could define his life—or have him killed before he ever got home to the family estate, let alone to Xinan.

He swallowed hard. Looked away at the mountains ranged and piled around them, rising up and farther up, the blue lake ringed in majesty. In the teachings of the Path, mountains meant compassion, water was wisdom. The peaks didn't alter, Tai thought.

What men did beneath their gaze could change more swiftly than one could ever hope to understand.

He said it. "I don't understand."

Bytsan made no reply. Tai looked down at the letter and read the name at the bottom again.

One person there, with permission.

One person. The White Jade Princess Cheng-wan: seventeenth daughter of the revered and exalted Emperor Taizu. Sent west to a foreign land twenty years ago from her own bright, glittering world. Sent with her pipa and flute, a handful of attendants and escorts, and a Taguran honour guard, to become the first imperial bride ever granted by Kitai to Tagur, to be one of the wives of Sangrama the Lion, in his high, holy city of Rygyal.

She had been part of the treaty that followed the last campaign here at Kuala Nor. An emblem in her young person (she'd been fourteen that year) of how savage—and inconclusive—the fighting had been, and how important it was that it end. A slender, graceful token of peace enduring between two empires. As if it would endure, as if it ever had, as if one girl's body and life could ensure such a thing.

There had been a fall of poems like flower petals in Kitai that autumn, pitying her in parallel lines and rhyme: married to a distant horizon, fallen from heaven, lost to the civilized world (of parallel lines and rhyme) beyond snowbound mountain barriers, among barbarians on their harsh plateau.

It had been the literary fashion for that time, an easy theme, until one poet was arrested and beaten with the heavy rod in the square before the palace—and nearly died of it—for a verse suggesting this was not only lamentable, but a wrong done to her.

You didn't say that.

Sorrow was one thing—polite, cultured regret for a young life changing as she left the glory of the world—but you never offered the view that anything the Ta-Ming Palace did, ever, might be mistaken. That was a denial of the rightly fulfilled, fully compassed mandate of heaven. Princesses were coinage in the world, what else could they be? How else serve the empire, justify their birth?

Tai was still staring at the words on the pale-yellow paper, struggling to bring spiralling thoughts to what one might call order. Bytsan was quiet, allowing him to deal with this, or try.

You gave a man one of the Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You gave him four or five of those glories to exalt him above his fellows, propel him towards rank—and earn him the jealousy, possibly mortal, of those who rode the smaller horses of the steppes.

The Princess Cheng-wan, a royal consort of Tagur now through twenty years of peace, had just bestowed upon him, with permission, two hundred and fifty of the dragon horses.

That was the number. Tai read it one more time.

It was in the scroll he held, recorded in Kitan, in a Taguran scribe's thin but careful calligraphy. Two hundred and fifty Heavenly Horses. Given him in his own right, and to no one else. Not a gift for the Ta-Ming Palace, the emperor. Not that. Presented to Shen Tai, second son of the General Shen Gao, once Left Side Commander of the Pacified West.

His own, to use or dispose of as he judged best, the letter read, in royal recognition from Rygyal of courage and piety, and honour done the dead of Kuala Nor.

"You know what this says?" His own voice sounded odd to Tai.

The captain nodded.

"They will kill me for these," Tai said. "They will tear me apart to claim those horses before I get near the court."

"I know," said Bytsan calmly.

Tai looked at him. The other man's dark-brown eyes were impossible to read. "You know?"

"Well, it seems likely enough. It is a large gift."

A large gift.

Tai laughed, a little breathlessly. He shook his head in disbelief. "In the name of all nine heavens, I can't just ride through Iron Gate Pass with two hundred and fifty—"

"I know," the Taguran interrupted. "I know you can't. I made some suggestions when they told me what they wished to do."

"You did?"

Bytsan nodded. "Hardly a gift if you're... accidentally killed on the way east and the horses are dispersed, or claimed by someone else."

"No, it isn't, is it? Hardly a gift!" Tai heard his voice rising. Such a simple life he'd been living, until moments ago. "And the Ta-Ming was a brawl of factions when I left. I am sure it is worse now!"

"I am sure you are right."

"Oh? Really? What do you know about it?" The other man, he decided, seemed irritatingly at ease.

Bytsan gave him a glance. "Little enough, in the small fort I am honoured to command for my king. I was only agreeing with you." He paused. "Do you want to hear what I suggested, or not?"

Tai looked down. He felt embarrassed. He nodded his head. For no reason he knew, he took off his straw hat, standing in the high, bright sun. The axes continued in the distance.

Bytsan told him what he'd written to his own court, and what had been decreed in response to that. It seemed to have cost the other man his position at the fortress in the pass above, in order to implement his own proposal. Tai didn't know if that meant a promotion or not.

It might, Tai understood, keep him alive. For a time, at least. He cleared his throat, trying to think what to say.

"You realize," Bytsan spoke with a pride he could not conceal, "that this is Sangrama's gift. The king's generosity. Our Kitan princess might have asked him for it, it is her name on that letter, but it is the Lion who sends you this."

Tai looked at him. He said, quietly, "I understand. It is an honour that the Lion of Rygyal even knows my name."

Bytsan flushed. After the briefest hesitation, he bowed.

Two hundred and fifty Sardian horses, Tai was thinking, from within the sandstorm of his forever-altered life. Being brought by him to a court, an empire, that gloried in every single dragon steed that had ever reached them from the west. That dreamed of those horses with so fierce a longing, shaping porcelain and jade and ivory in their image, linking poets' words to the thunder of mythic hooves.

The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was.

CHAPTER II

Bytsan sri Nespo was furious with himself, to the point of humiliation. He knew what his father would have said, and in what tone, had he witnessed this shame.

He had just bowed—far too deferentially—when the Kitan, having removed his stupid hat for some reason, said he was honoured that the Lion knew his name in Rygyal, so far away in glory.

But it was a gracious thing to say, and Bytsan had found himself bowing, hand wrapped around fist in their fashion (not that of his own people), before he was able to stop himself. Perhaps it had been the hat, after all, the deliberate self-exposure of that gesture.

The Kitan could do such things to you, or this one could.

Just when you'd decided, one more time, that they were all about their centre-of-the-world arrogance, they could say and do something like this from within the breeding and courtesy they donned like a cloak—while clutching a completely ridiculous straw hat.

What did you do when that happened? Ignore it? Treat it as decadence, softness, a false courtesy, unworthy of note on ground where Taguran soldiers had fought and died?

Bytsan wasn't able to do that. A softness of his own, perhaps. It might even affect his career. Although what defined military promotion these days—with warfare limited to occasional skirmishes—was more about whom you knew in higher ranks, had gotten drunk with once or twice, or had allowed to seduce you when you were too young to know better, or could pretend as much.

In order to be judged on courage, on how you fought, there had to be fighting, didn't there?

Peacetime was good for Tagur, for borders and trade and roads and raising new temples, for harvests and full granaries and seeing sons grow up instead of learning they were lying in mounds of corpses, as here by Kuala Nor.

But that same peace played havoc with an ambitious soldier's hopes of using courage and initiative as his methods of advancement.

Not that he was going to talk about that with a Kitan. There were limits: inward borders in addition to the ones with fortresses defending them.

But if he was going to be honest about it, the court in Rygyal knew his name now, as well, because of this Shen Tai, this unprepossessing figure with the courteous voice and the deep-set eyes.

Bytsan stole an appraising glance. The Kitan couldn't be called a soft city-scholar any more: two years of punishing labour in a mountain meadow had dealt with that. He was lean and hard, his skin weathered, hands scratched and callused. And Bytsan knew the man had been a soldier for a time. It had occurred to him—more than a year ago—that this one might even know how to fight. There were two swords in his cabin.

It didn't matter. The Kitan would be leaving soon, his life entirely changed by the letter he was holding.

Bytsan's life as well. He was to be given leave from his post when this Kitan left for home. He was reassigned to Dosmad Fortress, south and east, on the border, with the sole and specific responsibility—in the name of the Princess Cheng-wan—of implementing his own suggestion regarding her gift.

Initiative, he had decided, could involve more than leading a flanking attack in a cavalry fight. There were other sorts of flanking manoeuvres: the kind that might even get you out of a backwater fort in a mountain pass above a hundred thousand ghosts.

That last was another thing he didn't like, and this he'd even admitted to the Kitan once: the ghosts terrified him as much as they did every soldier who came with him bringing the wagon and supplies.

Shen Tai had been quick to say that his own people from Iron Gate Pass were exactly the same: stopping for the night safely east of here when they came up the valley, timing their arrival for late morning just as Bytsan did, working hastily to unload his supplies and do whatever tasks they'd assigned themselves—and then gone. Gone from the lake and the white bones before darkfall, even in winter when night came swiftly. Even in a snowstorm once, Shen Tai had said. Refusing shelter in his cabin.

Bytsan had done that, too. Better ice and snow in a mountain pass than the howling presence of the bitter, unburied dead who could poison your soul, blight the life of any child you fathered, drive you mad.

The Kitan beside him didn't appear to be a madman, but that was the prevailing explanation among Bytsan's soldiers at the fort. Probably at Iron Gate, too. Something two outpost armies could agree upon? Or was that just an easy way of dealing with someone being more courageous than you were?

You could fight him to test that, of course. Gnam wanted to, had been spoiling for it even before they'd come down from the pass. Bytsan had briefly harboured the unworthy thought that he'd like to see that challenge. Only briefly: if the Kitan died, there went his own flanking move away from here.

Shen Tai put his absurd hat back on as Bytsan told him what they were going to do in an effort to keep him alive long enough to get to Xinan and decide how to deal with his horses.

Because the man was right—of course he was right—he'd be killed ten times over for that many Sardian horses if he simply tried to herd them back east openly.

It was an absurd, wildly extravagant gift, but being absurd and extravagant was the privilege of royalty, wasn't it?

He thought about saying that to the other man, but refrained. He wasn't sure why, but it might have been that Shen Tai really did look shaken, rereading the scroll again, visibly unsettled for the first time since Bytsan had been coming here.

They walked back to the cabin. Bytsan supervised the unpacking and storing of supplies—metal chests and tight wooden boxes for the food, to defeat the rats. He made another joke about wine and the long evenings. Gnam and Adar had begun stacking firewood, against the cabin wall. Gnam worked fiercely, sweating in his unnecessary armour, channelling fury—which was perfectly all right with his captain. Anger in a soldier could be used.

It was soon enough done, the sun still high, just starting west. Summer's approach made the run down to the lake easier in obvious ways. Bytsan lingered long enough for a cup of wine (warmed in the Kitan fashion) with Shen Tai, then bade him a brisk farewell. The soldiers were already restless. The other man was still distracted, uneasy. It showed, behind the eternal mask of courtesy.

Bytsan could hardly blame him.

Two hundred and fifty horses, the White Jade Princess had decreed. The sort of overwrought conceit only someone living in a palace all her life could devise. The king had approved it, however.

It was never wise, Bytsan had decided on his way here from the fort, to underestimate the influence of women at a court.

He'd considered saying that, too, over the cup of wine, but had elected not to.

There would be one last supply trip in a month's time, then life would change for both of them. They might never see each other again. Probably would not. Better not to do anything so foolish as confide in the other man, or acknowledge more than curiosity and a rationed measure of respect.

The cart was lighter on the way back, of course, the bullock quicker heading home. So were the soldiers, putting the lake and the dead behind them.

Three of his men started a song as they left the meadow and began to wind their way up. Bytsan paused in the afternoon light at the switchback where he always did, and looked down. You might call Kuala Nor beautiful in late spring—if you knew nothing about it.

His gaze swept across the blue water to the nesting birds—an absurd number of them. You could fire an arrow in the air over that way and kill three with one shot. If the arrow had room to fall. He allowed himself a smile. He was glad to be leaving, too, no denying it.

He looked across the meadow bowl, north towards the far, framing mountains, range beyond range. The tale of his people was that blue-faced demons, gigantic and malevolent, had dwelled in those distant peaks from the beginning of the world and had only been barred from the Tagur plateau by the gods, who had thrown up other mountains against them, wrapped in magic. The range they were re-entering now, where their small fortress sat, was one of these.

The gods themselves, dazzling and violent, lived much farther south, beyond Rygyal, above the transcendent peaks that touched the foothills of heaven, and no man had ever climbed them.

Bytsan's gaze fell upon the burial mounds across the lake, on the far side of the meadow. They lay against the pine woods, west of the Kitan's cabin, three long rows of them now, two years' worth of bone-graves in hard ground.

Shen Tai was digging already, he saw, working beyond the last of them in the third row. He hadn't waited for the Tagurans to leave the meadow. Bytsan watched him, small in the distance: bend and shovel, bend and shovel.

He looked at the cabin set against that same northern slope, saw the pen they'd built for the two goats, the freshly stacked firewood against one wall. He finished his sweep by turning east, to the valley through which this strange, solitary Kitan had come to Kuala Nor, and along which he would return.

"Something's moving there," Gnam said beside him, looking the same way. He pointed. Bytsan stared, narrowing his eyes, and then he saw it, too.

He'd gone back to digging the pit he'd started two days ago, end of the third row in from the trees, because that was what he did here. And because he felt that if he didn't keep himself moving, working to exhaustion today, the chaos of his thoughts—almost feverish, after so long a quiet time—would overwhelm him.

There was always the wine Bytsan had brought, another access, like a crooked, lamplit laneway in the North District of Xinan, to the blurred borders of oblivion. The wine would be there at day's end, waiting. No one else was coming to drink it.

Or so he'd thought, carrying his shovel to work, but the world today was simply not fitting itself to a steady two-year routine.

Standing up, stretching his back, and removing the maligned hat to mop at his forehead, Tai saw figures coming from the east over the tall green grass.

They were already out of the canyon, in the open on the meadow. That meant they had to have been visible for some time, he just hadn't noticed. Why should he notice? Why even look? No one came here but the two sets of troops from the forts, full moon, new moon.

There were two of them, he saw, on small horses, a third horse carrying their gear behind. They moved slowly, not hurrying. Perhaps tired. The sun was starting west, its light fell upon them, making them vivid in the late-day's glowing.

It wasn't time for supplies from Iron Gate. He'd just said farewell to Bytsan and the Taguran soldiers. And when men did arrive, it wasn't just a pair of them with no cart. And—most certainly—they did not reach the lake in the later part of the day, when they'd have to stay with him overnight or be outside among the dead after dark.

This, clearly, was a day marked for change in his stars.

They were still some distance away, the travellers. Tai stared for another moment, then shouldered his shovel, picked up his quiver and bow—carried against wolves and for shots at a bird for dinner—and started towards his cabin, to be waiting for them there.

A matter of simple courtesy, respect shown visitors to one's home, wherever it might be in the world, even here beyond borders. He felt his pulse quickening as he walked, beating to meet the world's pulse, coming back to him.

Chou Yan had expected his friend to be changed, in both appearance and manner, if he was even alive after two years out here. He'd been preparing for terrible tidings, had talked about it with his travelling companion, not that she ever replied.

Then at Iron Gate Pass—that wretched fortress here at the world's end—they'd told him Tai was still among the living, or had been a little while ago when they'd taken supplies to him by the lake. Yan had immediately drunk several cups of Salmon River wine (he had been carrying it for Tai, more or less) to celebrate.

He hadn't known, until then.

No one had known. He'd assumed when he left Xinan that he would be journeying ten days or so along the imperial road and then down through civilized country to his friend's family home with what he had to tell him. It wasn't so. At the estate near the Wai River, where he'd managed to remain uncharacteristically discreet about his tidings, the third brother, young Shen Chao—the only child still at home—had told him where Tai had gone, two full years ago.

Yan couldn't believe it at first, and then, thinking about his friend, he did believe it.

Tai had always had something different about him, too many strands in one nature: an uneasy mingling of soldier and scholar, ascetic and drinking companion among the singing girls. Along with a temper. It was no wonder, their friend Xin Lun had once said, that Tai was always going on about the need for balance after too many cups of wine. Lun had joked about how hard keeping one's balance could be on muddy laneways, weaving home after that many cups.

It was a very long way, where Tai had journeyed. His family had not heard from him since he'd gone. He could be dead. No one could reasonably expect Chou Yan to follow him, beyond the borders of the empire.

Yan had spent two nights among the Shen women and youngest boy, sharing their ancestor rites and meals (very good food, no wine in the house during mourning, alas). He'd slept in a comfortable mosquito-netted bed. He'd poured his own libation over General Shen Gao's grave, admired his monument and inscription, strolled with young Chao in the orchard and along the stream. He was unhappily trying to decide what to do.

How far did friendship carry one? Literally, how far?

In the event, he did what he'd been afraid he'd do from the time they'd told him of Tai's departure. He bade farewell to the family and continued west towards the border, with only the single guard he'd been advised to take with him, back in Xinan.

She had told him it was an easy enough journey, when he mentioned where his friend had gone. Yan didn't believe her, but the indifferent manner was oddly reassuring.

As long as he paid her, Yan thought, she wouldn't care. You hired a Kanlin Warrior and they stayed with you until you paid them off. Or didn't pay them: though that was, invariably, an extremely bad idea.

Wan-si was hopeless as a companion, truth be told, especially for a sociable man who liked to talk, laugh, argue, who enjoyed the sound of his voice declaiming poetry—his own verses or anyone else's. Yan kept reminding himself that she was simply protection for the road, and skilled hands to assemble their camp at night when they slept outdoors—rather more necessary now than he'd expected at the outset. She was not a friend or an intimate of any kind.

Most certainly not someone to think about bedding at night. He had little doubt what she'd say if he raised that matter, and less doubt she'd break a bone or two if he tried to give effect to the desire that had begun to assail him, aware of her lithe body lying near him under stars, or curving and stretching in her exercise rituals—those elegant, slow movements at sunrise. The Kanlin were fabled for discipline, and for how efficiently they killed when need arose.

Need hadn't arisen as they'd journeyed down the river road to Shen Tai's family home. One twilight encounter in light rain with three rough-looking men who might have had theft in mind had they not seen a black-clad Kanlin with two swords and a bow. They'd absented themselves quickly down a path into dripping undergrowth.

Once they started west, however, everything began to feel different for Yan. He was at pains to light candles or burn incense and leave donations at any and all temples to any and all gods from the morning they left the Shen estate and began following a dusty track northwest, and then farther west, towards emptiness.

North of them, parallel to their route, lay the imperial road through the prefecture city of Chenyao, and beyond that was the easternmost section of the Silk Roads, leading from Xinan to Jade Gate and the garrisons in the Kanshu Corridor.

The imperial highway had lively villages and comfortable inns at postal stations all the way along. There would have been good wine, and pretty women. Maybe even some of the yellow-haired dancing girls from Sardia, working in pleasure houses, perhaps on their way to the capital. The ones who could arch their bodies backwards and touch the ground with feet and hands at once—and so elicit arresting images in the mind of an imaginative man.

But Shen Tai wasn't up there, was he? Nothing so sensible. And it didn't make sense to go five or six days north to meet the highway, when their own path was to Iron Gate by Kuala Nor, not Jade Gate Pass.

That left his friend Yan, his loyal friend, feeling every hard-boned movement of his small, shaggy horse towards the end of a day's silent ride through late-spring countryside. He wasn't going to drink that wine or hear music in those inns, or teach fragrant women how he very much liked to be touched.

It was Wan-si who decided how far they'd ride each day, whether they'd reach a village and negotiate a roof under which to sleep, or camp outside. Yan ached like a grandfather each morning when he woke on dew-damp ground, and the village beds were hardly better.

For anything less than the tidings he was bearing he wouldn't have done this, he told himself. He simply wouldn't have, however dear his friend might be to him, whatever parting verses and last embraces they'd exchanged at the Willow Inn by the western gate of Xinan, when Tai had left for home to mourn his father. Yan and Lun and the others had given him broken willow twigs in farewell and to ensure a safe return.

The others? There had been half a dozen of them at the Willow Inn, fabled for the partings it had witnessed. None of the others were with Yan on the road, were they? They'd been happy enough to get drunk when Tai left, and then praise Yan and improvise poems and give out more willow twigs at that same inn yard when he set out two years later, but no one had volunteered to go with him, had they? Not even when the expected journey was only ten days or so, to Tai's family home.

Hah, thought Chou Yan, many hard days west of that estate. At this point, he decided, he himself could fairly be called heroic, a testament to the depth and virtue of friendship in the glorious Ninth Dynasty. They would have to admit it when he returned, all of them: no more wine-cup jests about softness and indolence. It was too pleasing a thought to keep to himself. He offered it to Wan-si as they rode.

As idle an expenditure of mortal breath and words as there had ever been. Black clothing, black eyes, a stillness like no one he'd ever known, this warrior-woman. It was irritating. A tongue was wasted on her. So was beauty, come to think of it. He couldn't remember if he'd ever seen her smile.

That night she killed a tiger.

He didn't even know it until morning when he saw the animal's body, two arrows in it, at the green edge of a bamboo grove, twenty paces from where they'd slept.

He gaped. Stammered, "Why didn't...? I didn't even..."

He was in a sweat, hands shaking. He kept looking at the slain beast and quickly away. The dreadful size of it. Fear made him dizzy. He sat down, on the ground. He saw her walk over and reclaim her arrows. A booted foot on the tiger's flank, twisting the shafts free.

She'd already packed their bedding and gear on the third horse. Now she mounted up and waited impatiently for him, holding his horse's reins out for him. He managed to stand, to get up on the horse.

"You never even told me last night!" he said, unable to take his eyes off the tiger now.

"You complain less when you've slept a night," she said, which counted as a long sentence. She started off, the sun rising behind them.

They reached the fort at Iron Gate Pass two evenings later.

The commander fed them for two nights (mutton stew and mutton stew), let Chou Yan entertain with gossip from the capital, and sent them west, with advice as to where to spend three nights on the way to Kuala Nor, so as to arrive at the lake in the morning.

Yan was entirely content with this counsel, having no interest at all in encountering ghosts of any kind, let alone angry ones and in the numbers (improbably) reported by the soldiers at the fort. But Wan-si disdained belief in such matters and did not want to spend an unnecessary night in the canyon among mountain cats, she said bluntly. If his friend was alive by the lake, and had been there for two years...

They pushed on through two long, light-headed days (Yan was finding it difficult to deal with the air this high), past the commander's suggested stopping places. On the third afternoon, with the sun ahead of them, they ascended a last defile between cliffs and came suddenly out of shadows to the edge of a meadow bowl, of a beauty that could break the heart.

And moving forward through tall grass, Chou Yan had finally seen his dear friend standing at the doorway of a small cabin, waiting to greet him, and his soul had been glad beyond any poet's words, and the long journey came to seem as nothing, in the way of such trials when they are over.

Weary but content, he brought his small horse to a halt in front of the cabin. Shen Tai was in a white tunic for mourning, but his loose trousers and the tunic were sweat- and dirt-stained. He was unshaven, darkened, rough-skinned like a peasant, but he was staring at Yan in flattering disbelief.

Yan felt like a hero. He was a hero. He'd had a nosebleed earlier, from the altitude, but you didn't have to talk about that. He only wished his tidings weren't so grave. But then he wouldn't be here, would he, if they weren't?

Tai bowed twice, formally, hand in fist. His courtesy was as remembered: impeccable, almost exaggeratedly so, when he wasn't in a fury about something.

Yan, still on horseback, smiled happily down at him. He said what he'd planned to say for a long time, words he'd fallen asleep each night thinking about. "West of Iron Gate, west of Jade Gate Pass / There'll be no old friends."

Tai smiled back. "I see. You have come this long distance to tell me poets can be wrong? This is meant to dazzle and confound me?"

Hearing the wry, remembered voice, Yan's heart was suddenly full. "Ah, well. I suppose not. Greetings, old friend."

He swung down stiffly. His eyes filled with tears as he embraced the other man.

Tai's expression when they stepped back and looked at each other was strange, as if Yan were a ghost of some kind himself.

"I would not ever, ever have thought..." he began.

"That I would be one to come to you? I am sure you didn't. Everyone underestimates me. That is supposed to confound you."

Tai did not smile. "It does, my friend. How did you even know where...?"

Yan made a face. "I didn't think I was coming this far. I thought you were at home. We all did. They told me there where you had gone."

"And you carried on? All the way here?"

"It looks as though I did, doesn't it?" Yan said happily. "I even carried two small casks of Salmon River wine for you, given me by Chong himself there, but I drank one with your brother and the other at Iron Gate, I'm afraid. We did drink to your name and honour."

The ironical smile. "I thank you for that, then. I do have wine," Tai said. "You will be very tired, and your companion. Will you both honour me and come inside?"

Yan looked at him, wanting to be happy, but his heart sank. He was here for a reason, after all.

"I have something to tell you," he said.

"I thought that must be so," his friend said gravely. "But let me offer water to wash yourselves, and a cup of wine first. You have come a long way."

"Beyond the last margins of the empire," Yan quoted.

He loved the sound of that. No one was going to be allowed to forget this journey of his, he decided. Soft? A plump, would-be mandarin? Not Chou Yan, not any more. The others, studying for the examinations, or in the North District laughing with dancing girls as a spring day waned, listening to pipa music, drinking from lacquered cups... they were the soft ones now.

"Beyond the last margins," Tai agreed. All around them, mountains were piled upon each other, snow-clad. Yan saw a ruined fort on an isle in the middle of the lake.

He followed his friend into the cabin. The shutters were open to the air and the clear light. The one room was small, trimly kept. He remembered that about Tai. He saw a fireplace and a narrow bed, the low writing table, wooden ink-block, ink, paper, brushes, the mat in front of them. He smiled.

He heard Wan-si enter behind him. "This is my guard," he said. "My Kanlin Warrior. She killed a tiger."

He turned to gesture by way of proper introduction, and saw that she had her swords drawn, and levelled at the two of them.

His instincts had been dulled by solitude, two years away from anything remotely like blades pointed towards him. Keeping an eye out for wolves or mountain cats, making sure the goats were penned at night, did nothing to make you ready for an assassin.

But he'd felt something wrong about the guard even as Yan had ridden up with her. He couldn't have said what that feeling was; it was normal, prudent, for a traveller to arrange protection, and Yan was sufficiently unused to journeying (and had enough family wealth) to have gone all the way to hiring a Kanlin, even if he'd only intended to go west a little and then down towards the Wai.

That wasn't it. It had been something in her eyes and posture, Tai decided, staring at the swords. Both were towards him, in fact, not at Yan: she would know which of them was a danger.

Riding up, reining her horse before the cabin door, she ought not to have seemed quite so alert, staring at him. She had been hired to get a man somewhere, and they'd come to that place. A task done, or the outbound stage of it. Payment partly earned. But her glance at Tai had been appraising, as much as anything else.

The sort of look you gave a man you expected to fight.

Or simply kill, since Tai's own swords were where they always were, against the wall, and there was no hope of notching arrow to bowstring before she cut him in two.

Everyone knew what Kanlin blades in Kanlin hands could do.

Yan's face had gone pale with horror. His mouth gaped, fish-like. Poor man. The drawn sword of betrayal was not a part of the world he knew. He'd done something immensely courageous coming here, had reached beyond himself in the name of friendship... and found only this for reward. Tai wondered what his tidings were, what had caused him to do this. He might never know, he realized.

That angered and disturbed him, equally. He said, setting the world in motion again, "I must assume I am your named target. That my friend knows nothing of why you really came here. There is no need for him to die."

"But there is," she said softly. Her eyes stayed on him, weighing every movement he made, or might make.

"What? Because he'll name you? You think it will not be known who killed me when they come here from Iron Gate? You will have been recorded when you arrived at the fortress. What can he add to that?"

The swords did not waver. She smiled thinly. A beautiful, cold face. Like the lake, Tai thought, death within it.

"Not that," she said. "He insulted me with his eyes. On the journey."

"He saw you as a woman? That would have taken some effort," Tai said deliberately.

"Have a care," she said.

"Why? Or you'll kill me?" Anger within him more than anything now. He was a man helped by rage, though, steered towards thought, decisiveness. He was trying to see what it did to her. "The Kanlin are taught proportion and restraint. In movement, in deeds. You would kill a man because he admired your face and body? A disgrace to your mentors on the mountain, if so."

"You will tell me what Kanlin teachings are?"

"If I must," Tai said coolly. "Are you going to do this with honour, and allow me my swords?"

She shook her head. His heart sank. "I would prefer that, but my instructions were precise. I was not to allow you to fight me when we came here. This is not to be a combat." A hint of regret, some explanation for the appraising look: Who is this one? What sort of man, that she was told to fear him?

Tai registered something else, however. "When you came here? You knew I was at Kuala Nor? Not at home? How?"

She said nothing. Had made an error, he realized. Not that it was likely to matter. He needed to keep talking. Silence would be death, he was certain of it. "They thought I would kill you, if we fought. Who decided this? Who is protecting you from me?"

"You are very sure of yourself," the assassin murmured.

He had a thought. A poor one, almost hopeless, but nothing better seemed to be arriving in the swirling of these moments.

"I am sure only of the uncertainty of life," he said. "If I am to end here by Kuala Nor and you will not fight me, will you kill me outside? I would offer my last prayer to the water and sky and lie among those I have been burying. It is not a great request."

"No," she said, and he didn't know what she meant, until she added, "It is not." She paused. It would be wrong to call it a hesitation. "I would have fought you, had my orders not been precise."

Orders. Precise orders. Who would do that? He needed to shape time, create it, find some way to his swords. The earlier thought really was a useless one, he decided.

He had to make her move, shift her footing, look away from him.

"Yan, who suggested you hire a Kanlin?"

"Silence!" the woman snapped, before Chou Yan could speak.

"Does it matter?" Tai said. "You are about to kill us without a fight, like a frightened child who fears her lack of skill." It was possible—just—that goaded enough she might make another mistake.

His sheathed blades were behind the assassin, by his writing table. The room was small, the distance trivial—unless you wanted to be alive when you reached them.

"No. Like a Warrior accepting orders given," the woman amended calmly.

She seemed serene again, as if his taunting had, instead of provoking, imposed a remembrance of discipline. Tai knew how that could happen. It didn't help him.

"It was Xin Lun who suggested it to me," Yan said bravely.

Tai heard the words, saw the woman's hard eyes, knew what was coming. He cried a warning.

Yan took her right-hand sword, a backhanded stroke, in his side, angled upwards to cut between ribs.

The slash-and-withdraw was precise, elegant, her wrist flexed, the blade swiftly returned—to be levelled towards where Tai had been. No time seeming to have passed: time held and controlled. The Kanlin were taught that way.

As it happened, he knew this, and time had passed, time that could be used. Timelessness was an illusion, and he wasn't where he'd been before.

His heart crying, knowing there was nothing he could have done to stop that stroke, he had leaped towards the doorway even as she'd turned to Yan—to kill him for speaking a name.

Tai shouted again, fury more than fear, though he expected to die now, himself.

A hundred thousand dead here, and two more.

He ignored his sheathed swords, they were too far. He whipped out the open door and to his right, towards the firewood by the goat pen. He had leaned his shovel on that wall. A gravedigger's shovel against two Kanlin swords. He got there. Claimed it, wheeled to face her.

The woman was running behind him. And then she wasn't.

Because the faint, foolish, desperate idea he'd had before entered into the sunlit world, became real.

The wind that rose in that moment conjured itself out of nothing at all, without warning. From within a spring afternoon's placidity, a terrifying force erupted.

There came a screaming sound: high, fierce, unnatural.

Not his voice, not the woman's, not anyone actually alive.

The wind didn't ruffle the meadow grass at all, or stir the pine trees. It didn't move the waters of the lake. It didn't touch Tai, though he heard what howled within it.

The wind poured around him, curving to either side like a pair of bows, as he faced the woman. It took the assassin bodily, lifted her up, and hurled her through the air as if she were a twig, a child's kite, an uprooted flower stalk in a gale. She was slammed against the wall of his cabin, pinned, unable to move.

It was as if she were nailed to the wood. Her eyes were wide with horror. She was trying to scream, her mouth was open, but whatever was blasting her, claiming her, didn't allow that either.

One sword was still in her hand, flattened against the cabin. The other had been ripped from her grasp. She had been lifted clean off the ground, he saw, her feet were dangling in air. She was suspended, hair and clothing splayed against the dark wood of the wall.

The illusion, again, of a moment outside of time. Then Tai saw two arrows hit her, one and then the other.

They struck from the side, fired from the far end of the cabin, beyond the door. And the wild ghost-wind did nothing to mar their flight, only held her pinned to be killed like a victim for sacrifice. The first arrow took her in the throat, a flowering of crimson, the second went in as deep, below her left breast.

In the instant of her dying the wind, too, died.

The screaming left the meadow.

In the bruised stillness that followed, the woman slid slowly down the wall, crumpled to one side, and lay upon the trampled grass beside his cabin door.

Tai drew a ragged, harrowed breath. His hands were shaking. He looked towards the far side of the cabin.

Bytsan and the young soldier called Gnam were standing there, fear in their eyes. Both arrows had been fired by the younger man.

And though the wild wind-sound was gone, Tai was still hearing it in his mind, that screaming, still seeing the woman pinned flat like some black-robed butterfly, by what it had been.

The dead of Kuala Nor had come to him. For him. To his aid.

But so had two men, mortal and desperately frightened, riding back down from their safe path away, even though the sun was over west now, with twilight soon to fall, and in the darkness here the world did not belong to living men.

Tai understood something else then, looking down at the woman where she lay: that even by daylight—morning and afternoon, summer and winter, doing his work—he had been living at sufferance, all this time.

He looked the other way, towards the blue of the lake and the low sun, and he knelt on the dark green grass. He touched his forehead to the earth in full obeisance, three times.

It had been written by one teacher in the time of the First Dynasty, more than nine hundred years ago, that when a man was brought back alive from the tall doors of death, from the brink of crossing over to the dark, he had a burden laid upon him ever after: to conduct his granted life in such a manner as to be worthy of that return.

Others had taught otherwise over the centuries: that survival in such a fashion meant that you had not yet learned what you had been sent to discover in a single, given life. Though that, really, could be seen as another kind of burden, Tai thought, on his knees in meadow grass. He had a sudden image of his father feeding ducks in their stream. He looked out over the lake, a darker blue in the mountain air.

He stood up. He turned to the Tagurans. Gnam had gone to the dead woman, he saw. He dragged her away from the wall, ripped his arrows out of her body, tossing them carelessly behind himself. Her hair had come free of its binding in that wind, spilling loose, pins scattered. Gnam bent down, spread her legs, arranging them.

He began removing his armour.

Tai blinked in disbelief.

"What are you doing?" The sound of his own voice frightened him. "She's still warm," the soldier said. "Do me as a prize."

Tai stared at Bytsan. The other man turned away. "Do not claim your own soldiers never do this," the Taguran captain said, but he was staring at the mountains, not meeting Tai's gaze.

"None of mine ever did," said Tai. "And no one else will while I stand by."

He took three strides, and picked up the nearest Kanlin sword.

It had been a long time since he'd held one of these. The balance was flawless, a weight without weight. He pointed it at the young soldier.

Gnam's hands stopped working his armour straps. He actually looked surprised. "She came here to kill you. I just saved your life."

It wasn't wholly true, but close enough.

"You have my gratitude. And a hope I can repay you one day. But that will be prevented if I kill you now, and I will do that if you touch her. Unless you want to fight me."

Gnam shrugged. "I can do that." He began tightening his straps again.

"You'll die," said Tai quietly. "You need to know it."

The young Taguran was brave, had to be, to have come back down.

Tai struggled to find words to lead them out, a way to save face for the younger man. "Think about it," he said. "The wind that came. That was the dead. They are... with me here."

He looked at Bytsan again, who seemed strangely passive suddenly. Tai went on, urgently, "I have spent two years here trying to honour the dead. Dishonouring this one makes a mockery of that."

"She came to kill you," Gnam repeated, as if Tai were slowwitted.

"Every dead man in this meadow came to kill someone!" Tai shouted.

His words drifted away in the thin air. It was cooler now, the sun low.

"Gnam," said Bytsan, finally, "there is no time for a fight if we want to be away before dark, and, trust me, after what just happened, I do. Mount up. We're going."

He walked around the side of the cabin. He came back a moment later, on his magnificent Sardian, leading the soldier's horse. Gnam was still staring at Tai. He hadn't moved, the desire to fight written in his face.

"You've just won your second tattoo," Tai said quietly.

He looked briefly at Bytsan, then back to the soldier in front of him. "Enjoy the moment. Don't hurry to the afterworld. Accept my admiration, and my thanks."

Gnam stared at him another moment, then turned deliberately and spat thickly into the grass, very near the body of the dead woman. He stalked over and seized his horse's reins and mounted. He wheeled to ride away.

"Soldier!" Tai spoke before he was aware he'd intended to.

The other man turned again.

Tai took a breath. Some things were hard to do. "Take her swords," he said. "Kanlin-forged. I doubt any soldier in Tagur carries their equal."

Gnam did not move.

Bytsan laughed shortly. "I'll take them if he does not."

Tai smiled wearily at the captain. "I've no doubt."

"It is a generous gift."

"It carries my gratitude."

He waited, didn't move. There were limits to how far one would go to assuage a young man's pride.

And behind him, through that open cabin door, a friend was lying dead.

After a long moment, Gnam moved his horse and extended a hand. Tai turned, bent, unslung the shoulder scabbards from the dead woman's body, and sheathed the two blades. Her blood was on one sheath. He handed them up to the Taguran. Bent again and retrieved the two arrows, gave them to the young man, as well.

"Don't hurry to the afterworld," he repeated.

Gnam's face was expressionless. Then, "My thanks," he said.

He did say it. There was that much. Even here, beyond borders and boundaries, you could live a certain way, Tai thought, remembering his father. You could try, at least. He looked west, past the wheeling birds, at the red sun in low clouds, then back to Bytsan.

"You'll need to ride fast."

"I know it. The man inside...?"

"Is dead."

"You killed him?"

"She did."

"But he was with her."

"He was my friend. It is a grief."

Bytsan shook his head. "Is it possible to understand the Kitan?"

"Perhaps not."

He was tired, suddenly. And it occurred to him that he'd have two bodies to bury quickly now—because he'd be leaving in the morning.

"He led an assassin to you."

"He was a friend," Tai repeated. "He was deceived. He came to bring me tidings. She, or whoever paid her, didn't want me to hear them or live to do anything about it."

"A friend," Bytsan sri Nespo repeated. His tone betrayed nothing. He turned to go.

"Captain!"

Bytsan looked back, didn't turn his horse.

"So are you, I believe. My thanks." Tai closed fist in hand.

The other man stared at him for a long time, then nodded.

He was about to spur his horse away, Tai saw. But he did something else, instead. You could see a thought striking him, could read it in the square-chinned features.

"Did he tell you? Whatever it was he came to say?"

Tai shook his head.

Gnam had danced his horse farther south. He was ready to leave now. Had the two swords across his back.

Bytsan's face clouded over. "You will leave now? To find out what it was?"

He was clever, this Taguran. Tai nodded again. "In the morning. Someone died to bring me tidings. Someone died to stop me from learning them."

Bytsan nodded. He looked west himself this time, the sinking sun, darkness coming. Birds in the air, restless on the far side of the lake. Hardly any wind. Now.

The Taguran drew a deep breath. "Gnam, go on ahead. I'll stay the night with the Kitan. If he's leaving in the morning there are matters he and I must talk about. I'll test my fate inside with him. It seems that whatever spirits are here mean him no harm. Tell the others I'll catch you up tomorrow. You can wait for me in the middle pass."

Gnam's turn to stare. "You are staying here?"

"I just said that."

"Captain! That is—"

"I know it is. Go."

The younger man hesitated still. His mouth opened and closed. Bytsan's tattooed face was hard, nothing vaguely close to a yielding there.

Gnam shrugged. He spurred his horse and rode away. They stood there, the two of them, and watched him go in the waning of the light, saw him gallop very fast around the near side of the lake as if spirits were pursuing him, tracking his breath and blood.

CHAPTER III

The armies of the empire had changed over the past fifty years, and changes were continuing. The old fupei system of a peasant militia summoned for part of the year then returning to their farms for the harvest had grown more and more inadequate to the needs of an expanding empire.

The borders had been pushed west and north and northeast and even south past the Great River through the disease-ridden tropics to the pearl-diver seas. Collisions with Tagurans to the west and the various Bogu tribal factions north had increased, as did the need to protect the flow of luxuries that came on the Silk Roads. The emergence of border forts and garrisons farther and farther out had ended the militia system with its back-and-forth of farmer-soldiers.

Soldiers were professionals now, or they were supposed to be. More and more often they and their officers were drawn from nomads beyond the Long Wall, subdued and co-opted by the Kitan. Even the military governors were often foreigners now. Certainly the most powerful one was.

It marked a change. A large one.

The soldiers served year-round and, for years now, were paid from the imperial treasury and supported by a virtual army of peasants and labourers building forts and walls, supplying food and weapons and clothing and entertainment of any and all kinds.

It made for better-trained fighters familiar with their terrain, but a standing army of this size did not come without costs—and increased taxes were only the most obvious consequence.

In years and regions of relative peace, without drought or flood, with wealth now flowing at an almost unimaginable rate into Xinan and Yenling and the other great cities, the cost of the new armies was bearable. In hard years it became a problem. And other issues, less readily seen, were growing. At the lowest ebb, of a person or a nation, the first seeds of later glory may sometimes be seen, looking back with a careful eye. At the absolute summit of accomplishment the insects chewing from within at the most extravagant sandalwood may be heard, if the nights are quiet enough.

A quiet-enough night. Wolves had been howling in the canyon earlier, but had stopped. The darkness was giving way, for those on watch on the ramparts of Iron Gate Fort, to a nearly-summer sunrise. Pale light pulling a curtain of shadows back—as in a puppet show at a town market—from the narrow space between ravine walls.

Though that, thought Wujen Ning, from his post on the ramparts, was not quite right. Street theatre curtains were pulled to the side—he'd seen them in Chenyao.

Ning was one of the native-born Kitan here, having followed his father and older brothers into the army. There was no family farm for him to rely upon for an income, or return to visit. He wasn't married.

He spent his half-year leave time in the town between Iron Gate and Chenyao. There were wine shops and food sellers and women to take his strings of cash. Once, given two weeks' leave, he'd gone to Chenyao itself, five days away. Home was too far.

Chenyao had been, by a great deal, the biggest city he'd ever seen. It had frightened him, and he'd never gone back. He didn't believe the others when they said it wasn't that large, as cities went.

Here in the pass, in the quiet of it, the dawn light was filtering downwards. It struck the tops of the cliffs first, pulling them from shadow, and worked its way towards the still-dark valley floor as the sun rose over the mighty empire behind them.

Wujen Ning had never seen the sea, but it pleased him to imagine the vast lands of Kitai stretching east to the ocean and the islands in it where immortals dwelled.

He glanced down at the dark, dusty courtyard. He adjusted his helmet. They had a commander now who was obsessed with helmets and properly worn uniforms, as if a screaming horde of Tagurans might come storming down the valley at any moment and sweep over the fortress walls if someone's tunic or sword belt was awry.

As if, Ning thought. He spat over the wall through his missing front tooth. As if the might of the Kitan Empire in this resplendent Ninth Dynasty, and the three hundred soldiers in this fort that commanded the pass, were a nuisance like mosquitoes.

He slapped at one of those on his neck. They were worse to the south, but this pre-dawn hour brought out enough of the bloodsuckers to make for annoyance. He looked up. Scattered clouds, a west wind in his face. The last stars nearly gone. He'd be off duty at the next drum, could go down to breakfast and sleep.

He scanned the empty ravine, and realized it wasn't empty.

What he saw, in the mist slowly dispersing, made him shout for a runner to go to the commander.

A lone man approaching before sunrise wasn't a threat, but it was unusual enough to get an officer up on the wall.

Then, as he came nearer, the rider lifted a hand, gesturing for the gates to be opened for him. At first Ning was astonished at the arrogance of that, and then he saw the horse the man was riding.

He watched them come on, horse and rider taking clearer form, like spirits entering the real world through fog. That was a strange thought. Ning spat again, between his fingers this time for protection.

He wanted the horse the moment he saw it. Every man in Iron Gate would want that horse. By the bones of his honoured ancestors, Wujen Ning thought, every man in the empire would.

"Why you so sure that one didn't bring her to you?" Bytsan had asked.

"He did bring her. Or she brought him."

"Stop being clever, Kitan. You know what I mean."

Some irritation, understandable. They'd been on their eighth or ninth cup of wine, at least—it had been considered ill-bred among the students in Xinan to keep count.

Night outside by then, but moonlit, so silver in the cabin.

Tai had also lit candles, thinking light would help the other man. The ghosts were out there, as always. You could hear their voices, as always. Tai was used to it, but felt unsettled to realize this was his last night. He wondered if they might know it, somehow.

Bytsan wouldn't be—couldn't be—accustomed to any of this.

The voices of the dead offered anger and sorrow, sometimes dark, hard pain, as if trapped forever in the moment of their dying. The sounds swirled from outside the cabin windows, gliding along the rooftop. Some came from farther off, towards the lake or the trees.

Tai tried to remember the dry-mouthed terror he'd lived with on his first nights two years ago. It was hard to reclaim those feelings after so long, but he remembered sweating and shivering, clutching a sword hilt in bed.

If cups of warmed rice wine were going to help the Taguran deal with a hundred thousand ghosts, less the ones buried by Shen Tai in two years... that was the way it was. That was all right.

They'd buried Yan and the assassin in the pit Tai had begun that afternoon. It wasn't nearly deep enough yet for the bones he'd planned, which made it good for two Kitan just slain, one by sword, one by arrows, sent over to the night.

They'd wrapped them in winter sheepskin he wasn't using (and would never use again) and carried them down the row of mounds in the last of the day's light.

Tai had jumped into the pit and the Taguran had handed down Yan's body and he'd laid his friend in the ground and climbed out of the grave.

Then they'd dropped the assassin in beside Yan and shovelled the earth from next to the open pit back in and pounded it hard on top and all around with the flat sides of the shovels, against the animals that might come, and Tai had spoken a prayer from the teachings of the Path, and poured a libation over the grave, while the Taguran stood by, facing south towards his gods.

It had been nearly dark by then and they'd made their way hastily back to the cabin as the evening star, the one the Kitan people called Great White, appeared in the west, following the sun down. Poets' star at evening, soldiers' in the morning.

There hadn't been anything in the way of fresh food. On a normal day, Tai would have caught a fish, gathered eggs, shot a bird and plucked it for cooking at day's end, but there had been no time for that today.

They'd boiled dried, salted pork and eaten it with kale and hazelnuts in bowls of rice. The Tagurans had brought early peaches, which were good. And they'd had the new rice wine. They drank as they ate, and continued when the meal was done.

The ghosts had begun with the starlight.

"You know what I mean," Bytsan repeated, a little too loudly. "Why're you so sure of him? Chou Yan? You trust everyone who names himself a friend?"

Tai shook his head. "Isn't in my nature to be trusting. But Yan was too proud of himself when he saw me, and too astonished when she drew her swords."

"A Kitan can't deceive?"

Tai shook his head again. "I knew him." He sipped his wine. "But someone knew me, if they told her not to fight. She said she'd have preferred to kill me in a combat. And she knew I was here. Yan didn't know. She let him go first to my father's house. Didn't give away where I was—he'd have suspected something. Maybe. He wasn't a suspicious man."

Bytsan looked at Tai narrowly, considering all this. "Why would a Kanlin Warrior fear you?"

He wasn't so drunk, after all. Tai couldn't see how it would hurt to answer.

"I trained with them. At Stone Drum Mountain, nearly two years." He watched the other man react. "It would take me time to get my skills back, but someone may not have wanted to chance it."

The Taguran was staring. Tai poured more wine for him from the flask on the brazier. He drank from his own cup, then filled it. A friend had died here today. There was blood on the bedding. There was a new hole in the world where sorrow could enter.

"Everyone knew this about you? The time with the Kanlins?"

Tai shook his head. "No."

"You trained to be an assassin?"

The usual, irritating mistake. "I trained to learn how they think, their disciplines, and how they handle weapons. They are usually guards, or guarantors of a truce, not assassins. I left, fairly abruptly. Some of my teachers may still feel kindly towards me. Others might not. It was years ago. We leave things behind us."

"Well, that's true enough."

Tai drank his wine.

"They think you used them? Tricked them?"

Tai was beginning to regret mentioning it. "I just understand them a little now."

"And they don't like that?"

"No. I'm not a Kanlin."

"What are you?"

"Right now? I'm between worlds, serving the dead."

"Oh, good. Be Kitan-clever again. Are you a soldier or a court mandarin, fuck it all?"

Tai managed a grin. "Neither. Fuck it all."

Bytsan looked away quickly, but Tai saw him suppress a smile. It was hard not to like this man.

He added, more quietly, "It is only truth, captain. I left the army years ago, have not taken the civil service exams. I'm not being clever."

Bytsan held out his again-empty cup before answering. Tai filled it, topped up his own. This was beginning to remind him of nights in the North District. Soldiers or poets—who could drink more? A question for the ages, or sages.

After a moment, the Taguran said, also softly, "You didn't need us to save you."

Outside, something screamed.

It wasn't a sound you could pretend was an animal, or wind. Tai knew that particular voice. Heard it every night. He found himself wishing he'd been able to find and bury that one before leaving. But there was no way to know where any given bones might lie. That much he'd learned in two years. Two years that were ending tonight. He had to leave. Someone had been sent to kill him, this far away. He needed to learn why. He drained his cup again.

He said, "I didn't know they would attack her. Neither did you, coming back."

"Well, of course, or we wouldn't have come."

Tai shook his head. "No, that means your courage deserves honour."

Something occurred to him. Sometimes wine sent your thoughts along channels you'd not otherwise have found, as when river reeds hide and then reveal a tributary stream in marshland.

"Is that why you let the young one shoot both arrows?"

Bytsan's gaze in mingled light was unsettlingly direct. Tai was beginning to feel his wine. The Taguran said, "She was flat against the cabin. They were going to crush the life from her. Why waste an arrow?"

Half an answer at best. Tai said wryly, "Why waste a chance to give a soldier a tattoo, and a boast?"

The other man shrugged. "That, too. He did come back with me."

Tai nodded.

Bytsan said, "You ran outside knowing they'd help you?" An edge to his voice. And why not? They were listening to the cries outside right now. And screams.

Tai cast his mind back to the desperate moments after Yan died. "I was running for the shovel."

Bytsan sri Nespo laughed, a quick, startling sound. "Against Kanlin swords?"

Tai found himself laughing too. The wine was part of it. And the aftermath of fear remembered. He'd expected to die.

He'd have become one of the ghosts of Kuala Nor.

They drank again. The screaming voice had stopped. Another bad one was beginning, one of those that seemed to still be dying, unbearably, somewhere in the night. It hurt your heart, listening, frayed the edges of your mind.

Tai said, "Do you think about death?"

The other man looked at him. "Every soldier does."

It was an unfair question. This was a stranger, of an enemy people not so long ago, and likely again in years to come. A blue-tattooed barbarian living beyond the civilized world.

Tai drank. Taguran wine was not going to replace the spiced or scented grape wine of the best houses in the North District, but it was good enough for tonight.

Bytsan murmured suddenly, "I said we had to talk. Told Gnam that, remember?"

"We aren't talking enough? A shame... a shame Yan's buried out there. He'd have talked you to sleep, if only to find a respite from his voice."

Buried out there.

Such a wrong place for a gentle, garrulous man to lie. And Yan had come so far. Carrying what tidings? Tai didn't know. He didn't even know, he realized, if his friend had passed the exams.

Bytsan looked away. Gazing out a window at moonlight, he said, "If someone sent an assassin they can send another—when you get back or while you are on the way. You know that."

He knew that.

Bytsan said, "Iron Gate saw them come through. They will ask where the two of them are."

"I'll tell them."

"And they will send word to Xinan."

Tai nodded. Of course they would. A Kanlin Warrior coming this far west as an assassin? That had significance. Not empire-shaking, Tai wasn't important enough, but certainly worth a dispatch from a sleepy border fort. It would go with the military post, which was very fast.

Bytsan said, "Your mourning's over, then?"

"It will almost be, time I get to Xinan."

"That where you'll go?"

"Have to."

"Because you do know who sent her?"

He hadn't expected that.

It was Xin Lun who suggested it to me. Yan's last words on earth, in life, under nine heavens.

"I might know how to start finding out."

He might know more than that, but he wasn't ready to think about it tonight.

"I have another suggestion, then," said the Taguran. "Two of them. Trying to keep you alive." He laughed briefly, drained another cup. "My future seems to be bound up with yours, Shen Tai, and the gift you've been given. You need to stay alive long enough to send for your horses."

Tai considered that. It made sense, from Bytsan's point of view—you didn't have to think hard to see the truth of it.

Both of the Taguran's suggestions had been good ones.

Tai would not have thought of either. He would need to get his subtlety back before he reached Xinan, where you could be exiled for bowing one time too many or too few or to the wrong person first. He accepted both of the other man's ideas, with one addition that seemed proper.

They'd finished the last of the flask, put out the lights, and had gone to bed.

Towards what would soon enough be morning, the moon over west, the Taguran had said softly from where he lay on the floor, "If I'd spent two years here, I would think about death."

"Yes," said Tai.

Starlight. The voices outside, rising and falling. The star of the Weaver Maid had been visible earlier, shining in a window. Far side of the Sky River from her love.

"They are mostly about sorrow out there, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"They would have killed her, though."

"Yes."

Tai recognized the guard above the gate; he'd come to the lake at least twice with the supplies they sent. He didn't remember his name. The commander was named Lin Fong, he knew that. A small, crisp man with a round face and a manner that suggested that the fort at Iron Gate Pass was only a way station, an interlude in his career.

On the other hand, the commander had come to Kuala Nor a few weeks after arriving at the fort last autumn, in order to see for himself the strange man burying the dead there.

He had bowed twice to Tai when he'd left with the soldiers and cart, and the supplies being sent had remained completely reliable. An ambitious man, Lin Fong, and obviously aware, during that visit to the lake, of who Tai's father had been. Traces of arrogance, but there was honour in him, Tai judged, and a sense that the commander was aware of the history of this battleground among mountains.

Not someone you'd likely choose as a friend, but that wasn't what he was here to be at Iron Gate.

He was standing, impeccable in his uniform, just inside the gate as it swung open. It was just after dawn. Tai had slept through the first night travelling but had been awakened by wolves on the second. Not dangerously near, or hungry, as best he could judge, but he had chosen to offer his prayers for his father in the darkness and ride on under stars instead of lying on high, hard ground awake. None of the Kitan were easy with wolves, in legend, in life, and Tai was no exception. He felt safer on horseback, and he was already in love with Bytsan sri Nespo's bay-coloured Sardian.

They didn't sweat blood, the Heavenly Horses—that was legend, a poet's image—but if anyone had wanted to recite some of the elaborate verses about them, Tai would have been entirely happy to listen and approve. He'd ridden recklessly fast in the night, the moon behind him, borne by an illusion that the big horse could not put a hoof wrong, that there was only joy in speed, no danger in the canyon's dark.

You could get yourself killed thinking that way, of course. He hadn't cared, the pace was too purely intoxicating. He was riding a Sardian horse towards home in the night and his heart had been soaring, if only for that time. He had kept the Taguran name—Dynlal meant "spirit" in their tongue—which suited, in many ways.

Exchanging horses had been Bytsan's first proposal. Tai was going to need some mark of favour, he'd pointed out, something that identified him, alerted people to the truth of what he'd been given. One horse, as a symbol of two hundred and fifty to come.

Dynlal would also get him where he was going faster.

The promise of Sardian horses, to be claimed only by him, was what might keep him alive, induce others to join in tracking down those who obviously did not wish him to remain alive—and help Tai determine why this was so.

It had made sense. So also, for Tai, did his modification of the suggestion.

He'd written it out before they parted in the morning: a document conveying to Bytsan sri Nespo, captain in the Taguran army, his free choice of any three horses among the two hundred and fifty, in exchange for his own mount surrendered at need and at request, and in grateful recognition of courage shown against treachery at Kuala Nor, arriving from Kitai.

That last phrase would help the captain with his own commanders; they both knew it. Nor had the Taguran argued. He was clearly relinquishing something that mattered a great deal to him with the big bay horse. Moments after starting into the sunrise, running with the wind, Tai had begun to understand why this was so.

Bytsan's second suggestion had involved making explicit what might otherwise be dangerously unclear. The Taguran had taken his own turn with ink and paper at Tai's desk, writing in Kitan, his calligraphy slow and emphatic.

"The below-named captain in the army of Tagur has been entrusted with ensuring that the gift of Sardian horses from the honoured and beloved Princess Cheng-wan, offered by her own grace and with the lordly blessing of the Lion, Sangrama, in Rygyal, be transferred to the Kitan, Shen Tai, son of General Shen Gao, to him and to no one else. The horses, which presently number two hundred fifty, will be pastured and maintained..."

There had been more, stipulating location—in Taguran lands near the border, close to the town of Hsien in Kitai, some distance south of where they were—and detailing the precise circumstances under which the horses would be handed over.

These conditions were designed to ensure that no one could compel Tai to sign instructions against his will. There were, in Xinan, men trained and often gifted in methods of inducing such signatures. There were others equally skilled in fabricating them.

This letter would go with Tai, be handed to the commander at Iron Gate to be copied, and the copy would proceed ahead of him by military post to the court.

It might make a difference. Might not, of course, but losing the empire those horses would very possibly cause any new assassin (and those who paid him, or her) to be hunted down, tortured for information, and creatively disembowelled before being permitted to die.

Tai had been aware, even as he rode east, and certainly now as he cantered Dynlal through the open gate of the fort and reined up before Lin Fong in the main courtyard, that a second assassin might be sent when word came back that the first one had failed.

What he had not expected was to see one waiting here at Iron Gate Pass, walking up behind the commander, clad in black and bearing crossed Kanlin swords in scabbards on her back.

She was smaller than the first woman had been, but with the same lithe movements. That walk almost marked someone as Kanlin. You learned those movements, even a way of standing, at Stone Drum Mountain. They made you dance there balanced on a ball.

Tai stared at the woman. Her black hair was unbound, falling to her waist. She had just risen from sleep, he realized.

Didn't make her less dangerous. He pulled his bow from the saddle sheath and nocked an arrow. You kept arrows and bow ready in the mountains, for wolves or the cats. He didn't dismount. He knew how to shoot from the saddle. Had been in the northern cavalry beyond the Long Wall, and had trained at Stone Drum after. You could find irony in that last, if you were in a certain state of mind. Kanlins were being sent after him. By someone.

The commander said, "What are you doing?"

The woman stopped, fifteen paces away. She had wide-set eyes and a full mouth. Given what she was, fifteen paces might be too close if she had a dagger. Tai danced his horse backwards.

"She's here to kill me," he said, calmly enough. "Another Kanlin tried, by the lake."

"We know about that," Commander Lin said.

Tai blinked, but never took his eyes from the woman. Moving slowly, she shrugged her leather straps off one shoulder and then the other, keeping her hands visible all the time. The swords dropped behind her into the dust. She smiled. He didn't trust that smile.

A crowd of soldiers had gathered in the courtyard. A morning adventure. There weren't many of those here at the edge of the world.

"How do you know about it?" Tai asked.

The commander glanced briefly at the woman behind him. He shrugged. "This one told us last night. She came pursuing the other. Arrived at sunset. Would have ridden on by night towards you. I told her to wait until this morning, that if something unpleasant had happened at Kuala Nor it would have done so already, since the others were days ahead of her." He paused. "Did something happen?"

"Yes."

The commander was expressionless. "They are dead? The fat scholar and the woman?"

"Yes."

"Both of them?" The woman spoke for the first time. Her voice was low but clear in the dawn courtyard. "I regret to hear it."

"You grieve for your companion?" Tai was holding in anger.

She shook her head. The smile had gone. She had a clever, alert face, high cheekbones; the unbound hair remained a distraction. "I was sent to kill her. I grieve for the other one."

"The fat scholar," Lin Fong repeated.

"The scholar was my friend," said Tai. "Chou Yan came a long way from the world he knew to tell me something that mattered."

"Did he?" The woman again. "Did he tell you?"

She stepped closer. Tai lifted a quick hand as he held the bow with the other. She stopped. Smiled again with that wide mouth. A smile from a Kanlin Warrior could be unsettling in and of itself, Tai thought.

She shook her head. "If I were here to kill you, you'd be dead by now. I wouldn't have walked up like this. You must know that."

"You might want questions answered first," he said coldly. "And you know that."

Her turn to hesitate. It pleased him. She'd been too sure of herself. At Stone Drum you were taught how to disarm a person with words, confuse or placate them. It wasn't all blades and bows and spinning leaps that ended with a kick to the chest or head and, often as not, a death.

His friend was dead, killed by one of these Warriors. He held that within himself, a hard fury.

Her gaze was appraising now, but not in the way the other woman's had been. She wasn't sizing him up for a fight. Either she was biding her time, at a momentary disadvantage, or she was telling the truth about why she was here. He needed to decide. He could just shoot her, he thought.

"Why would you be sent to kill another Kanlin?"

"Because she isn't Kanlin."

The fortress commander turned and looked at her.

The woman said, "She went rogue half a year ago. Left her assigned sanctuary near Xinan, disappeared into the city. Started killing for a fee, then was hired by someone, we learned, to travel here to do the same."

"Who hired her?"

The girl shook her head. "I wasn't told."

He said, "She was a Kanlin. She wanted to fight me, said the only reason she didn't was strict orders."

"And you think those orders could have been given to someone still serving the Mountain, Master Shen Tai? Really? You were at Stone Drum. You know better."

He looked from her to Lin Fong. The commander's expression was alert. This was all news to him, of course, and news was bright coinage this far west.

Tai really didn't want his life discussed in an open courtyard. She probably knew that, he thought. She had ignored his question about why she'd been sent here. That could be discretion, or a way to get him into a smaller space.

His life had been very simple, just a few days ago.

"The commander can have someone search me," she said in that low, crisp voice. It was as if she'd read his thoughts.

She added, "I have a dagger in my right boot. Nothing else. They can also tie my wrists so we can talk in a private place, with the commander present or not, as you wish."

"No," said Lin Fong, glaring. He wouldn't like a woman being so decisive. No military officer would. "I will be present. You do not set conditions here. You are both under my jurisdiction, and it seems people have been killed. I have questions of my own, there are reports to be filed."

There were always reports to be filed. The empire could drown in the reports that were filed, Tai thought.

The woman shrugged. Tai had the feeling she'd anticipated or even intended this. He needed to make a decision.

He sheathed his arrow and bow. Looked up to his right. The gap-toothed, balding guard was still on the wall, looking down. Tai gestured. "That one to look to my horse. Walk, water, feed him. I remember that he knows horses."

The man's expression of joy would have been gratifying, at any easier time.

HE HAD A FEW MOMENTS ALONE to wash and change his clothes. He switched from riding boots to brocaded slippers they provided. A servant—one of the border people serving the soldiers—took his clothing and boots to clean them.

It had occurred to Tai many years ago that one usually expected important decisions in life to emerge after long and complex thought. Sometimes this was so. But on other occasions one might wake in the morning (or finish drying one's hands and face in a dusty border fort) with the abrupt, intense realization that a choice had already been made. All that was left was putting it into effect.

Tai could see no clear pattern in his own life as to this. Nor was he able to say, that morning, why he was suddenly so sure of something.

A waiting soldier escorted him through two courtyards to the commander's reception pavilion at the eastern end of the compound. He announced Tai's presence and drew back a canvas flap that covered the doorway, blocking the wind. Tai walked in.

Lin Fong and the Kanlin woman were already there. Tai bowed, then sat with them on a raised platform in the centre of the room. He settled himself on a mat, crossing his legs. There was tea, unexpectedly, at his elbow, on a blue, lacquered tray decorated with a painting of willow branches and two lines from a poem by Chan Du about willow trees. The pavilion was sparely decorated.

It was also more beautiful than any space Tai had entered in two years. There was a pale-green vase on a low side table behind the commander. Tai stared at it for a long time. Too long, probably. His expression, he thought wryly, was probably something like the soldier's on the wall had been, looking down at the horse.

"That is a very fine piece of work," he said.

Lin Fong smiled, pleased and unable to hide it.

Tai cleared his throat and bowed at the waist without rising. "Untie her, please. Or don't bind her on my account."

Folly, on the face of it. He was alarmingly certain it wasn't.

He looked at the woman, who had been carefully trussed at both ankles and wrists. She was sitting placidly on the other side of the platform.

"Why?" Commander Lin, however happy with a compliment to his taste, evidently didn't like making adjustments.

"She isn't about to attack me with you here." He'd realized this while washing his face. "The Kanlins exist because they can be trusted, by both court and army. They have lasted six hundred years because of that. But that trust is badly damaged if one of them kills the commander of a military fort, or someone under his protection. Their sanctuaries, their immunity, could be destroyed. And besides, I think she's telling the truth."

The woman smiled again, large eyes downcast, as if the amusement was private.

"The commander could be part of my plot," she said, looking down.

In the intimacy of the room, out of the courtyard wind, her low voice was unsettling. It had been two years since he'd heard this sort of voice, Tai thought.

"But he isn't," he said, before Commander Lin could express outrage. "I'm not important enough. Or I wasn't, before."

"Before what?" the other man said, distracted from whatever he'd been about to say.

Tai waited. Lin Fong looked at him a moment, then nodded brusquely at a soldier. The man stepped forward and began untying the woman. He was careful not to step on the platform; discipline was good here.

Tai watched until the man was done, and then continued to wait politely. After a moment, the commander took the hint and dismissed the two soldiers.

The woman crossed her legs neatly and rested her hands upon her knees. She wore a hooded black tunic and black leggings for riding, both of common hemp. She had used the interval to pin up her hair. She didn't rub her wrists, though the ropes had been tight, would have chafed. Her hands were small, he noted; you wouldn't have thought she could be a Warrior. He knew better.

"Your name is?" he asked.

"Wei Song," she said, bowing slightly.

"You are at Stone Drum Mountain?"

She shook her head impatiently. "Hardly, or I could not have been here so soon. I am from the sanctuary near Ma-wai. The same as the rogue was, before she left."

A short ride from Xinan, near a posting station inn and a celebrated hot springs retreat with its pavilions and pools and gardens, for the emperor and his favourites.

Tai had said something stupid. Stone Drum, one of the Five Holy Mountains, was far to the northeast.

"Before what, please, Master Shen?" the commander repeated. "You have not answered me."

He made some effort to keep irritation out of his voice, but it was there. A brisk, fussy man. An important person for Tai just now. Tai turned to him.

It was time, evidently.

He had a vivid sense of roads forking, rivers branching, one of those moments where the life that follows cannot be as it might otherwise have been.

"I have been given a gift by the Tagurans," he said. "From their court, our own princess."

"Princess Cheng-wan has given you a personal gift?" Astonishment, barely controlled.

"Yes, commander."

Lin Fong was clearly thinking hard. "Because you were burying their dead?"

The man might be in a dismal posting, but he wasn't a fool.

Tai nodded. "They have done me too much honour in Rygyal."

"Too much honour? They are barbarians," Commander Lin said bluntly. He lifted his porcelain bowl and sipped the hot, spiced tea. "They have no understanding of honour."

"Perhaps," said Tai, his voice carefully neutral.

Then he told them about the horses and watched them both react.

CHAPTER IV

"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, all-controlling 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 Bogu 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.

CHAPTER V

Some decisions, for an officer accustomed to making them, were not difficult, especially with a night to consider the situation.

The commander of Iron Gate Fort made clear to his guest from Kuala Nor that the five guards being assigned to him were not to be seen as discretionary. His premature death, should it occur, would be blamed—without any doubt—on the incompetent fortress commander who permitted him to ride east with only a single (small, female) Kanlin guard.

In the courtyard, immediately after the morning meal, the commander indicated, courteous but unsmiling, that he was not yet ready to commit an ordered suicide and destroy the prospects of his children, should a tragic event overtake Shen Tai on the road. Master Shen would be properly escorted, military staging posts would be made available to him so that he might spend his nights there on the way to the prefecture city of Chenyao, and word of the horses—as discussed—would precede him to Xinan.

It was possible that the military governor would wish to assign further soldiers as escorts when Shen Tai reached Chenyao. He was, naturally, free to make his own decision about sending the five horsemen back to Iron Gate at that time, but Commander Lin presumed to express the hope he would retain them, having come to see their loyalty and competence.

The unspoken thought was that their presence, entering into the capital, might be some reminder of the priority of Iron Gate in the matter of the horses and their eventual safe arrival, one day in the future.

It was obvious that their guest was unhappy with all of this. He showed signs of a temper.

It might have to do, Commander Lin thought, with his having been solitary for so long, but if that was it, the man was going to have to get out of that state of mind, and the quicker the better. This morning was a good time to start.

And when the Kanlin guard also made clear that she could not be held accountable for guarding Shen Tai alone, especially since the Sardian horse he himself was riding was so obvious an incitement to theft and murder, the late general's son acceded. He did so with—it had to be admitted—grace and courtesy.

He remained an odd, difficult fellow to pin down.

Lin Fong could see why the man had left the army years ago. The military preferred—invariably—those who could be readily defined, assigned roles, understood, and controlled.

This one, intense and observant, more arresting than conventionally attractive in appearance, had had a brief military service, with a cavalry posting beyond the Long Wall. And then there had been a period among the Kanlin on Stone Drum Mountain (there had to be a story to that). He had been studying for the civil service examinations in Xinan when his father died. More than a sufficiency of careers, already, for a still-young man, Lin Fong would have thought. It spoke to something erratic in him, perhaps.

Shen Tai also—and this signified—had evidently had dealings with the new first minister, not necessarily cordial. That was problematic, or it might be. I know the man did not offer much, but the tone in which it had been spoken did, for someone inclined to listen for nuance.

Considering all of this, Commander Lin had, sometime in the night, made his decisions.

These included offering a considerable sum from his own funds to the other man. He named it a loan—a face-saving gesture—making clear that he expected reimbursement at some point, but stressing that a man travelling with the tidings Shen Tai carried could hardly undertake such a journey, or arrive at court, without access to money.

It would be undignified, and perplexing to others. A discord would emerge between his present circumstance and the future's promise that would unsettle those he met. In challenging times it was important to avoid such imbalances.

The solution was obvious. Shen Tai needed funds for the moment and Lin Fong was honoured to be in a position to assist. What was left to discuss between civilized men? Whatever the future would bring, it would bring, the commander said.

Men made wagers with their judgment, their allegiances, their resources. Commander Lin was making one this morning. If Shen Tai died on the road or in Xinan (distinctly possible), there was still a distinguished family to approach for the return of his money.

That didn't need to be said, of course. One of the pleasures of dealing with intelligent men, Lin Fong decided, watching seven people ride out the eastern gate in early-morning sunlight, was how much did not have to be spoken.

The five soldiers represented protection for Shen Tai and for the Second District's interests. The strings of cash were Fong's own investment. It was frustrating, had been from the beginning, to be tied down in this impossibly isolated place, but when that was the case and there was nothing to be done about it, a man cast his lines like a fisherman in a stream, and waited to see if anything chanced to bite.

He had done one other thing, was quietly pleased with himself for thinking of it. Shen Tai now carried documents, and so did the couriers who had already ridden out, establishing that the commander of Iron Gate Fort had made him an officer of cavalry in the Second Military District, currently on leave to attend to personal affairs.

If he was an officer, Shen Tai's mourning period was now over. He was free to return to Xinan. This was, Commander Lin had pointed out, not trivial. If there had been people willing to kill him even before the horses, they would hardly hesitate to invoke failure to honour ancestral rites to discredit him. Or even smooth the way towards confiscating his possessions, which might include...

You could say a great deal, Lin Fong had always believed, with properly chosen silences.

Shen Tai had hesitated. He had prominent cheekbones, those unusually deep-set eyes (a suggestion of foreign blood?), a way of pressing his lips together when in thought. Eventually, he had bowed, and expressed his thanks.

An intelligent man, no doubting it.

The commander stood in the easternmost courtyard to see them leave. The gates swung closed, were barred with the heavy wooden beam. They didn't need to do that, no one came this way, no dangers loomed, but it was the proper thing to do and Lin Fong believed in acting properly. Rituals and regulations were what kept life from spinning towards chaos.

As he walked back to deal with paperwork (there was always paperwork) he heard a soldier on the wall begin to sing, and then others joined him:

The air felt unnervingly still all the rest of that day. Towards evening a thunderstorm finally came, surging from the south, sheets of lightning shattering the sky. A heavy, percussive rain fell, filling the cisterns and wells, making muddy lakes in the courtyards, while thunder rolled and boomed. It passed, as storms always passed.

This one continued north, boiling away as quickly as it had come. A low, late-day sun returned, shining red down the wet ravine that led to Kuala Nor. The storm explained his day-long feeling of brittle tension, Commander Lin decided. He felt better for the realization. He preferred when there were explanations for what occurred—in the sky, on earth, within the loneliness of the self.

Their path trended downwards out of the mountain foothills, to grain fields and hamlets, and eventually through a low-lying marshland south of the river. This was tiger country. They posted guards the one night they chose to camp between posting stations, heard the creatures roaring, but never saw one.

There was some tension between the soldiers and the woman, but no more than might be expected. Wei Song kept mostly to herself, riding at the front. That was part of the problem—her taking the lead—but once Tai realized that, he turned it into an order he gave her, and the men from the fort accepted it that way.

She kept her hair tightly coiled, her posture alert. Her head was always moving as she scanned the road ahead and the land to either side. She said almost nothing at night, at campfire or the inns. There were enough of them—seven, well armed—that they hadn't feared to light a fire when they camped, though there would be bandits in this countryside, too.

As they descended, riding east, the air felt heavier to Tai. He had been in the mountains for so long. One morning he caught up to the woman, rode beside her. She gave him a glance, then looked ahead again.

"Be patient," she murmured. "Chenyao tonight, or early tomorrow at the latest. The soldiers can surely tell you the best house for girls."

He saw—couldn't miss—the amusement in her face.

This did need to be dealt with. At least it felt that way to him.

"But how would it satisfy you," he asked earnestly, "if I slake my passion with a courtesan, leaving you to weep, unassuaged, on some marble stair?"

She did flush. It made him feel pleased, then slightly contrite, but only slightly. She had started this, in his room back at the fort. He knew who had to be behind what this one had said then, about women. Was it normal for Rain to have confided in a hired bodyguard the intimate nature of the person she'd be protecting?

He didn't think so.

"I will manage to control my longing," the woman said, looking straight ahead.

"I'm sure you will. You seem well-enough trained. We could have the others wait, take a short ride together past those trees..."

She didn't flush again. "You'll do better in Chenyao," she said.

They had entered more densely populated country. Tai saw mulberry trees and a path leading south towards a silk farm—the buildings were hidden behind the trees but a banner was visible.

He had spent three weeks on one of those, years ago, obscurely curious. Or without direction, more accurately. There had been a period in his life when he was like that. After his time in the north, beyond the Long Wall. Some things had happened to him there.

He remembered the sound in the room where the silkworms were kept on stacked trays and fed, day and night, hour by hour, on white mulberry leaves: a noise like rain on a roof, endlessly.

While that happened, in that time of needful, important perfection, the temperature was controlled, all smells were prevented from entering the room, all drafts of wind. Even lovemaking in chambers nearby was done without sound, lest the silkworms be frightened or disturbed.

He wondered if this Kanlin woman knew this. He wondered why he cared.

Shortly after that, a fox appeared at the edge of the trees, alongside the road to their right.

Wei Song stopped, throwing up a quick hand. She turned in the saddle, eyed the animal. One of the men laughed, but another made a gesture averting danger.

Tai looked at the woman.

"Surely not!" he exclaimed. "You think it a daiji?"

"Hush! It is beyond foolish to name them," she said. "And which of us do you think a fox-woman would be here for?"

"I don't think she'd be here at all," Tai said. "I don't think every animal seen by the woods is a spirit-world creature."

"Not every animal," she said.

"What next, the Fifth Dragon appears in a red sky and the Ninth Heaven falls?"

"No," she said, looking away.

It was unexpected, that this crisp, composed Kanlin Warrior would so obviously believe in fox-woman legends. She was still watching the fox, a stab of colour by the woods. It was looking back at them, Tai saw, but that was normal. Riders were a possible threat, needed to be observed.

"You should not be so careless, speaking of spirits, naming their names," Wei Song said softly, so that only Tai heard. "We cannot understand everything about the world."

And that last phrase took him hard, sent him spinning back a long way.

The fox withdrew into the woods. They rode on.

The only other time he'd been in command of cavalry had been north of the Wall, on campaign among the nomads. He'd led fifty soldiers, not just five riders, as now.

Command of a dui had been more than he deserved, but Tai had been young enough to feel that his father's fame and rank had simply opened a doorway for him to show what he could do, what he honestly merited. He'd welcomed the chance to prove himself.

He didn't want to dwell on it now, all these years after, but being among soldiers again, riding in open country towards a changed life seemed to make it inevitable that his thoughts would drift.

That time among the Bogu had begun the changes in his life. Before that, he'd thought he knew what his course would be. After, he was shaken, unsure. Adrift for a long time.

He'd told what had happened, how it had ended, as best he could. First to his superior officers, and then to his father when they were both home. (Not his brothers: one was too young, the other not a confidant.)

He'd been permitted to honourably resign rank and post, leave the army. It was unusual. Going to Stone Drum Mountain some time later had been a useful, perhaps even an appropriate next stage, though he doubted the Kanlin masters on the mountain saw it that way, since he'd left them, too.

But after what had happened on the northern steppes that autumn, it had not been considered unexpected that a young man would want to spend time searching for spiritual guidance, discipline, austerity.

Tai remembered being surprised that his military superiors had believed his northern tale, and even more at the hint of understanding among them. Understanding was not seen as a strength, let alone a virtue, in the higher ranks of the Kitan army.

Only later did he realize that he and his men might not have been the first or the only ones to encounter some terrifying strangeness among the Bogu. He'd wondered over the years about other stories; no one ever told him names, or what had happened.

He was not blamed for what had happened.

That had also surprised him. It still did. Military rank carried responsibilities, consequences. But it seemed the official view was that some encounters between civilized men and savagery in barbarian lands were not to be anticipated or controlled by any officer. Ordinary soldiers' conduct could break down in such places.

The Kitan felt a defining superiority and contempt for those beyond their borders, but also fear whenever they left home, even if that was denied. It made for a dangerous intermingling.

For a long time their armies had been going among the nomads to ensure the succession of the chieftain—the kaghan—they favoured. Once you went north of the Wall and its watchtowers you were living in the open or in isolated garrison forts among the Bogu or the Shuoki, fighting beside or against the barely human. It was unreasonable to expect men to conduct themselves as if they were doing domestic duty on the Great Canal or among summer rice fields, guarding peasants against bandits or tigers.

Manipulating the Bogu succession was important. The Ta-Ming Palace had a considerable interest in who ruled the nomads and how willing they were to offer docility along the border and their thick-maned horses in exchange for empty, honorary titles, lengths of lesser silk, and the promise of support against the next usurper.

Unless, of course, the next usurper made more attractive overtures.

The nomads' grazing lands, fractured among rival tribes, stretched from the Wall all the way to the bone-cold north among birch and pine forests, beyond which the sun was said to disappear all winter and never go down in summer.

Those farthest ice-lands didn't matter, except as a source of fur and amber. What mattered was that on their nearer margins the nomads' lands bordered Kitai itself—and ran alongside the Silk Roads—all the way from the deserts to the eastern sea. The Long Wall kept the nomads out, most of the time.

But the northern fork of the great trade routes curved up through the steppes, and so the lucrative flow of luxuries into the glorious Kitan empire depended to a great degree on camel-trains being safe from harassment.

The Taguran empire in the west was another threat, of course, and required different solutions, but for some time the Tagurans had been quiet, trading for themselves with those taking the southern branch of the route, exacting tolls and duties in far-off fortresses they controlled. Acquiring Sardian horses.

Xinan wasn't happy about this, but could live with it, or so it had been decided. Tagur and its king had been bought off from worse with, among other things, a slender Kitan princess, in the aftermath of wars that had drained both empires.

Peace on his various borders might reduce an emperor's chances of glory, but Emperor Taizu had reigned for a long time and had won battles enough. Wealth and comfort, the building of his own magnificent tomb-to-be north of Xinan (colossal beyond words, overshadowing his father's), languid days and nights with his Precious Consort and the music she made... for an aging emperor these appeared to be adequate compensation.

Let Wen Jian's sleek, clever cousin Zhou be first minister if he wished (and if she wished it). Let him be the one to sort through, after a forty-year reign, the complexities of court and army and barbarians. One could grow weary of these.

The emperor had a woman for the ages making music for him, dancing for him. He had rituals to follow and carefully measured powders to consume—with her—in pursuit of longed-for immortality. He might never even need his tomb if the three stars of the Hunter's Belt, the asterism of this Ninth Dynasty, could be aligned by alchemists with the emperor's merit and his desire.

As for ambitious younger men in the empire? Well, there had been steady fighting among the Bogu against their eastern rivals, the Shuoki, and in their own internal tribal wars, and these continued.

Military officers and youthful aristocrats (and brave men of no particular birth) had always been able to assuage a hunger for blood and sword-glory somewhere. For this time it was in the north, where the emptiness of the grasslands could dwarf a man, or change his soul.

For Shen Tai, second son of General Shen Gao, that last had been what had happened, years ago, during an autumn among the nomads.

It was explained to them that evil spirits, sent by tribal enemies, had afflicted the soul of Meshag, the son of Hurok.

Hurok had been the Ta-Ming's chosen kaghan, the man they were in the steppe lands to support.

His eldest son, a man in the prime of health, had fallen suddenly, gravely ill—unresponsive, barely breathing—in the midst of a campaign. It was determined that shamans of the enemy had invoked dark spirits against him: so the nomads told the Kitan soldiers among them.

The imperial officers did not know how that understanding had been arrived at, or why the alleged magic was directed at the son and not the father (though some of them had views, by then, as to which was the better man). This business of Bogu magic—shamans, animal totems, spirit journeys from the body—was simply too alien, too barbaric, for words.

It was only reported to them as a courtesy, along with what apparently was going to be done in a desperate effort to make the sick man well. This last information had compelled some hard thinking among the army leaders sent north from Kitai.

Hurok was important and, therefore, so was his son. The father had sent private earnests of allegiance and offerings to the Long Wall in the spring—good horses and wolf pelts and two young women—his own daughters, apparently—to join the emperor's ten thousand concubines in their palace wing.

Hurok, it emerged, was willing to contemplate a revolt against the ruling kaghan, his brother-in-law, Dulan.

Dulan had not sent as many horses or furs.

Instead, his envoys had brought weak, small-boned horses, some with colic, to the wide northern loop of the Golden River where the exchange was done each spring.

The kaghan's emissaries had shrugged and grimaced, spat and gestured, when the Kitan pointed out these deficiencies. They claimed the grasses had been poor that year, too many gazelles and rabbits, sickness among the herds.

Their own mounts had looked sturdy and healthy.

It seemed to the senior mandarins charged with evaluating such information for the celestial emperor that Dulan Kaghan might have grown a little too secure, perhaps even resentful of his annual commitment to far-off Xinan.

It had been decided that a reminder of the power of Kitai was past due. Patience had been abused. The emperor had, once again, been too generous, too indulgent of lesser peoples and their insolence.

Hurok had been quietly invited to contemplate a more lofty future. He had done so, happily.

Fifteen thousand Kitan soldiers had gone north late that summer beyond the loop of the river, beyond the Wall.

Dulan Kaghan, with his own forces and followers, had been in strategic retreat ever since, maddeningly hard to pin down in the vast grasslands, waiting for allies from north and west, and for winter.

There were no cities to pillage and burn on the steppe, no enemy fortresses to besiege and starve into submission, no crops to ravage or seize, and they were acting for the man who needed to claim the trust of the nomads afterwards. It was a different sort of warfare.

The key was, clearly, to find and engage Dulan's forces. Or just kill the man, one way or another. Hurok, however, in the growing opinion of the Kitan expeditionary army's officers, was emerging as a feeble figure: a weak piece of pottery containing nothing but ambition.

He drank kumiss from first light, was drunk most of the day, sloppily hunting wolves, or lolling in his yurt. There was nothing wrong with a man drinking, but not on campaign. His eldest son, Meshag, was a better-fired vessel, so they reported back.

In the event, Meshag, in turn privately approached, did not appear to have any great aversion to the suggestion that he might aspire to more than merely being the strongest son of a propped-up kaghan.

They were not an especially subtle people, these nomads of the steppe, and the empire of the Kitan, amongst everything else, had had close to a thousand years and nine dynasties to perfect the arts of political manipulation.

There were books about this, any competent civil servant had them memorized. They were a part of the examinations.

"Consider and evaluate the competing doctrines emerging from Third Dynasty writings as to the proper conduct of succession issues among tribute-bearing states. It is expected that you will cite passages from the texts. Apply your preferred doctrine to resolving current issues pertaining to the southwest and the peoples along the margins of the Pearl Sea. Conclude with a six-line regulated-verse poem summarizing your proposals. Include a reference to the five sacred birds in this poem."

Of course, the appraisal of this work also included judging the quality of the candidate's calligraphy. Formal hand, not running hand.

With whom did these ignorant, fat-smeared barbarians, bare-chested as often as not, hair greasy and to their waists, smelling of sour, fermented milk, sheep dung, and their horses, think they were dealing?

But before this newer plan for the Bogu succession could be implemented, young Meshag had fallen ill, precisely at sundown, in his camp one windy autumn day.

He had been standing by an open fire, a cup of kumiss in one hand, laughing at a jest, a graceful man—then his cup had fallen into trampled grass, his knees had buckled, and he'd toppled to one side, barely missing the fire.

His eyes had closed and had not opened again.

His women and followers, extravagantly distressed, made it clear that this had to have been done by sinister powers—there were unmistakable signs. Their own shaman, small and quavering, said as much but admitted, in the morning, after a night spent chanting and drumming at Meshag's side, that he was unequal to shaping a response capable of driving malign spirits from the unconscious man.

Only someone he named as the white shaman of the lake could overmaster the darkness sent to claim Meshag's soul and bear it away.

This lake was, it appeared, many weeks' journey north. They would set out the next morning, the Bogu said, bearing Meshag in a covered litter. They did not know if they could keep his soul near his body for so long but there was no alternative course. The little shaman would travel with them, do all he could.

Whatever the Kitan expeditionary force thought about this, there wasn't much they could do. Two army physicians, summoned to take the man's pulses and measure auras, were at a loss. He breathed, his heart beat, he never opened his eyes. When the eyelids were lifted, the eyes were black, disturbingly so.

Meshag was, for good or ill, a component of imperial strategy now. If he died, adjustments would have to be made. Again. It was decided that a number of their own cavalry would go north with his party, to maintain a Kitan presence and report back immediately if the man died.

His death was what they expected. Advance word would go to Xinan immediately. The assigned cavalry officer riding north with the Bogu was to exercise his best judgment in all matters that arose. He and his men would be desperately far away, cut off from all others.

Shen Tai, son of Shen Gao, was selected to lead this contingent.

If that decision carried an element of unspoken punishment for the young man having a rank he hadn't earned, no one could possibly be faulted later for giving him the assignment.

It was an honour, wasn't it? To be sent into danger? What else could a young officer want? This was a chance to claim glory. Why else were they here? You didn't join the army to pursue a meditative life. Go be a hermit of the Path, eat acorns and berries in a cave on some mountainside, if that was what you wanted.

They worshipped the Horse God and the Lord of the Sky.

The Son of the Sky was the God of Death. His mother dwelled in the Bottomless Lake, far to the north. It froze in winter.

No, this was not the lake of their journey now, it was much farther north, guarded by demons.

In the afterworld, everything was reversed. Rivers ran from the sea, the sun rose west, winter was green. The dead were laid to rest on open grass, unburied, to be consumed by wolves and so returned to the Sky. Dishes and pottery were laid upside down or shattered by the body, food was spilled, weapons broken—so the dead could recognize and lay claim to these things in the backwards world.

The skulls of sacrificed horses (horned reindeer in the north) were split with an axe or sword. The animals would be reconstituted, whole and running, in the other place, though the white ones would be black and the dark ones light.

A woman and a man were cut to pieces at midsummer in rites only the shamans were allowed to share, though thousands and thousands of the nomads gathered for them from all across the steppe under the high sky.

Shamans engaged in their tasks wore metal mirrors about their bodies, and bells, so demons would be frightened by the sounds or by their own hideous reflection. Each shaman had a drum he or she had made after fasting alone upon the grass. The drums were also used to frighten demons away. They were made from bearskin, horsehide, reindeer. Tiger skin, though that was rare and spoke to a mighty power. Never wolf pelts. The relationship with wolves was complex.

Some would-be shamans died during that fast. Some were slain in their out-of-body journeys among the spirits. The demons could triumph, take any man's soul, carry it off as a prize to their own red kingdom. That was what the shamans were all about: to defend ordinary men and women, intervene when spirits from the other side came malevolently near, whether of their own dark desire, or summoned.

Yes, they could be summoned. Yes, the riders believed that was what had happened here.

Moving slowly north with thirty of his own dui and fifteen of the nomads, accompanying the carried, curtained litter of Meshag, Tai couldn't have explained why he asked so many questions, or hungered so deeply for the answers.

He told himself it was the length of the journey through an expanse of emptiness. Day after day they rode, and the grasslands hardly changed. But it was more than tedium and Tai knew it. The thrill he derived from the crystals of information the riders vouchsafed went beyond easing boredom.

They saw gazelles, great herds of them, almost unimaginably vast. They watched cranes and geese flying south, wave after wave as autumn came, bringing red and amber colours to the leaves. There were more trees now and more rolling hills as they moved out of the grasslands. One evening they saw swans alight on a small lake. One of Tai's archers pointed, grinned, drew his bow. The Bogu stopped him with shouts of menace and alarm.

They never killed swans.

Swans carried the souls of the dead to the other world, and the carried soul, denied his destination, could haunt the killer—and his companions—to the end of their own days.

How could Tai explain how hearing this quickened his heartbeat, set his mind spinning with the strangeness of it all?

It was almost undignified: the Kitan were famously dismissive, never allowing themselves to be more than languidly amused by the primitive beliefs of the barbarians on their borders. Beliefs that confirmed their barely human nature, the appropriateness, in a world rightly ordered, of Kitan pre-eminence. Really: a people that left their dead to be devoured by wolves?

He told himself he was gathering information for his report, that it would be useful to have a fuller understanding of the Bogu, make it easier to guide and control them. It might even be true, but it didn't explain how he felt when they told him, riding past crimson-and golden-leaved birch woods, of three-eyed demons in the north among sheets of ice, of how the men there grew autumn pelts like bears and slept the snowbound winter away. Or—again—of midsummer's Red Sun Festival, when all wars stopped on the grassland for the rites of the Death God, performed by shamans of all tribes with bells and pounding drums.

The shamans. The bogi lay behind or at the heart of so many of the tales. They were taking Meshag to one of them. If he lived so long. This one was a mighty shaman, Tai was told. She dwelled on the shore of a lake, remote and mysterious. If sufficiently rewarded, and ardently beseeched, she might intervene.

She. That was interesting, as well.

The journey was taking them into territory controlled by the current kaghan, Dulan, their enemy. That was another reason why Tai and thirty of his cavalry were with this party, riding through an increasingly up-and-down russet-coloured autumn land, past jewel-bright stands of larch and birch, into a growing cold. They had an interest in what happened to Meshag, in his survival, however less likely that seemed every day.

He was still breathing. Tai looked in on his litter to confirm it each morning, at midday, and at sunset, enduring tired, hostile glares from the little shaman who never left Meshag's side. The patient lay on his back under a horsehair blanket, breathing shallowly, never moving. If he died the Bogu would leave him under this sky and turn back.

Tai could see his own breath puffs when they mounted up at first light now. The day warmed as the sun climbed, but mornings and the nights were cold. They were so far from the empire, from any civilized place, in unnervingly strange lands. He had grown used to the howling of wolves by now, though all Kitan—a farming people—hated them with an ancient intensity.

Some of the big cats that roared at night were tigers, which they knew about, but some were not. These had a different sound, louder. Tai watched his men grow more uneasy with every li they rode away from all they knew.

They were not travellers, the Kitan. The occasional exception, a far-farer who returned, was celebrated as a hero, his written record of the journey widely copied and read, pondered with fascination and disbelief. He was often regarded, privately, as more than slightly mad. Why would a sane man choose to leave the civilized world?

The Silk Roads were for merchants and wealth to come to them, not so that they could go—or ever wished to go—to the far west themselves.

Or the far north, for that matter.

Heavier forests now, brilliant and alarming with autumn colour under the sun. A scatter of lakes strung like necklace ornaments. The sky itself too far away. As if, Tai thought, heaven was not as close to mankind here.

One of the Bogu told him, around a night fire under stars, that as winter approached, so did darker spirits. That, the nomad added, was why the magic that had assaulted Meshag this season had been harder for him to resist and required a powerful shaman to redress.

The shamans were divided into white and black. The division turned on whether they cajoled demons in the spirit world they left their bodies to enter, or tried to battle and coerce them. Yes, some were women. Yes, the one they were approaching was. No, none of the riders here had ever seen her, or been so far north themselves. (This did not reassure.)

She was known by reputation, had never allied herself with any kaghan or tribe. She was one hundred and thirty years old. Yes, they were afraid. No living creature or man frightened a Bogu rider, the thought was laughable, but spirits did. Only a fool said otherwise. A man did not let fear stop him, or he was not a man. Was this not also so among the Kitan?

The creature roaring the night before? That was a lion. They were the size of tigers, but they hunted with others of their kind, not alone. There were different bears in these woods, too, twice the height of a man when they reared up, and the northern wolves were the largest—but men of other tribes were still the greatest threat this far from home.

They saw riders the next morning, for the first time.

Ahead of them on a rise against the horizon, about fifteen or so. Not enough to fear. The horsemen fled their own approach, galloping west and out of sight. Tai considered pursuit, but there was no real point. The riders had come from the north. Tai didn't know what that meant, he didn't really know what anything meant. The leaves of the trees were crimson and amber and gold and beginning to fall.

They saw arrows of geese overhead all the time now, countless multitudes, as if they were fleeing something that lay where the riders were headed, the way animals fled a forest fire. They saw two more swans on another lake at dusk, floating strange and white on darkening water as the moon rose. None of Tai's men threatened these.

A fear of ongoing transgression had grown in the Kitan riders, as if they had crossed some inward border. Tai heard his men snapping and quarrelling with each other as they broke camp in the morning, as they rode through the day. He did what he could to control it, was unsure how successful he was.

It was difficult to feel superior here, he thought. That, in itself, was disturbing for the Kitan, altering the way they dealt with the world, intersected it. He wanted to call the forest colours and the autumn landscape beautiful, but the word, the idea, didn't rise easily through the apprehension within him.

He'd finally admitted that fear, acknowledged it, the night before they came to the shaman's lake.

There was a cottage, he saw, as they halted on the slope above and looked down in afternoon light: unexpectedly large timbers, well fitted, with an outbuilding and a fenced yard and firewood stacked against winter. This was not a yurt. Houses changed with the climate and they had left behind the grazing lands for something else.

Meshag was still alive.

He had not moved all the way north. It was unnatural. They had shifted his body at intervals, to prevent sores, but he'd done nothing but breathe, shallowly.

Someone came out from the cabin, stood by the door staring up at them.

"Her servant," the little shaman said. "Come!"

He started quickly down, with the litter-bearers carrying Meshag, four of the Bogu riders flanking them.

A gesture was made, rather too emphatically: the Kitan escort were being told to remain on the ridge. Tai hesitated (he remembered that moment), then shook his head.

He spoke to his next-in-command, a quiet order to stay for now and watch, then flicked his reins and moved down the slope alone, following the unconscious man and his escort. The nomads glared at him, but said nothing.

He was here to observe. His people had an interest in this man, in the Bogu succession. It was not the place of barbaric herdsmen to deny them the right to go anywhere they wanted. Not when fifteen thousand Kitan were assisting Hurok in his rising. That many soldiers gave you rights.

One way of looking at this. Considered another way, they had no proper place here among nomads' spell-battles, no business being this far away from home at all: alien sky, bright, green-blue lake, leaf-dazzle forest behind and beyond in sunlight, and the first hint in a far blue distance of mountains to the north.

He wondered if any of his people had ever seen those mountains. Or the cold jewel of this lake. That possibility should have excited him. At the moment, easing his horse down the slope, it didn't. It made him feel terribly far away.

The riders reined up before the doorway. Those carrying the litter also stopped. There was no fence in front of the cottage, only around the back where the outbuilding was. Tai assumed it was a barn or animal shed. Or maybe this servant slept there? Were there others? There was no sign of the shaman herself, or any life within. The door had been carefully closed when the one man came out.

The nomads' leader dismounted, he and the shaman approached the servant, spoke quietly, with unwonted deference. Tai couldn't make out the words, too quick and soft for his limited grasp of their tongue. The servant said something brisk in reply.

The Bogu leader turned and gestured to the slope. Two more riders detached from the company. They started down, leading two horses, these carrying the gifts they'd brought all this way.

Magic and healing did not come without cost.

It was the same back home, Tai thought wryly, and that realization somehow calmed him. You paid for healing, whether or not it worked. It was a transaction, an exchange.

This one would be appallingly strange, but elements of what was to come would be exactly the same as going to an alchemist in Xinan or Yenling to cure a morning-after head, or summoning the plump, white-haired physician from the village to their home by the stream when Second Mother couldn't sleep at night, or Third Son had a dry cough.

A memory of home, with that. Very sharp. Scent of autumn fires, smoke drifting. The ripple of the stream like the sound of time passing. The paulownia leaves would have fallen by now, Tai thought. He could see them on the path from their gate, almost hear the noise they made underfoot.

The shaman's servant spoke again as the horses approached with their gifts. It wasn't a suitable tone, even Tai could tell that, but he did know that shamans carried enormous honour among the Bogu, and that the one here was of particular significance—and power. They'd come a long way to her, after all.

The riders unloaded the gifts. The servant went inside with some of them, came out, carried another armful back in. It took him four trips. Each time, he closed the door behind him. He didn't hurry.

After he went in for the last time, they waited in the sunlight. The horses shuffled and snorted. The men were silent, tense and apprehensive. Their anxiety reached into Tai, a disturbance. Was it possible they could come all this way and be rejected, sent back? He wondered what his own role should be if that looked to be happening. Would it be his task to try to coerce the shaman into seeing Meshag? Would he be sparing the Bogu riders from doing that, if the Kitan took it on themselves? Or would he be performing a gross impiety that endangered all future relationships?

It occurred to him—belatedly—that he might have a serious decision to make in a few moments and he hadn't given it any thought at all. He had considered that Meshag might die before they came here, or that whatever the shaman tried to do would fail. He had never contemplated being refused treatment.

He looked around. There was smoke rising from the cabin chimney. Little wind today, the smoke went straight up before drifting and thinning towards the lake. From where he was, a little to one side, he saw two she-goats in the yard behind, huddled against the back fence, bleating softly. They hadn't been milked yet. It didn't make him any more impressed with this servant. Perhaps there were others, it was not his task?

The man came out again, finally, left the door open behind him for the first time. He nodded, gestured at the litter. Tai drew a breath. One decision he wouldn't have to make. He was angry with himself; he ought to have anticipated possibilities, worked them out ahead of time.

Their own shaman looked desperately relieved, on the edge of tears. His face working, he quickly drew the litter curtain back. Two of the men reached in and eased Meshag out. One cradled him like a sleeping child and carried him into the cabin.

Their shaman made to follow. The servant shook his head decisively, making a peremptory, stiff-armed gesture. The little shaman opened his mouth to protest, then closed it. He stayed where he was, head down, looking at no one. Humiliated, Tai thought.

The servant went into the cabin, reappeared an instant later escorting the man who'd carried Meshag. The servant went back in. Closed the door. They still hadn't seen the old woman, the shaman of the lake. They were left outside, in front of the cabin, in the bright, clear stillness of an autumn afternoon.

Someone coughed nervously. Someone glared at him, as if the sound might undermine whatever was happening inside. Their shaman was still staring at the ground before the door, as if unwilling to meet anyone's gaze. Tai wanted to be inside, then realized that, no, he actually didn't. He did not want to see whatever was taking place in there.

The nomads clustered before the cabin, looking more uncertain than Tai had ever seen them. The rest of the riders, including Tai's own men, remained above on the slope. The lake glittered. Birds were overhead, as always now, streaming south. Some were on the water. No swans that he could see.

Restless, edgy, he dismounted, left his horse to graze the sparse grass and walked around to the back where the outbuilding was and the yard with the two goats. He had a thought of milking them if he could find a pail. Something to do. A task. He slipped the gate latch and went in, closing it behind him.

The fenced yard was good-sized. Two fruit trees, a tall birch for shade. An herb garden at the far, eastern end. He could see the lake beyond it, across the fence. The goats huddled against the shed at the back, clearly unhappy.

No pail to be seen. Probably inside, but he wasn't about to knock on the rear door of the cabin and ask for one.

He crossed the yard towards the garden and the birch. He stood under the tree, gazing across the fence at the small lake, the brightness of it in sunshine. It was very quiet except for the soft, distressed bleating of the two animals. He could milk them without a pail, he thought. Let the servant suffer for his laziness if the shaman had no milk today.

He was actually turning to do that, irritated, when he noticed the freshly dug mound of earth at the back of the garden.

A single thump of the heart.

He could still remember, years after.

He stared, unmoving, for a long moment. Then he stepped carefully to the edge of the neatly ordered garden space, the order undermined—he saw it now—by boot marks and that narrow, sinister mound at the back, right against the fence. The goats had fallen silent for the moment. Tai felt a stir of wind, and fear. It was not a shape, that mound, you could confuse for something else.

He stepped into the garden, fatuously careful not to tread on anything growing there. He approached the mound. He saw, just the other side of the fence, an object that had been thrown over, discarded.

Saw it was a drum.

He swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly dry. Too much silence now. Trembling, he knelt and, drawing a steadying breath, began digging at the earth of the mound with his hands.

But he already knew by then. One of the goats bleated suddenly, making Tai's heart jump in fear. He looked quickly over his shoulder at the rear door of the cabin. It remained closed. He kept digging, scooping, his fingers shifting the black, freshly turned soil.

He felt something hard. A low cry escaped him, he couldn't help it. He looked at his fingers. Saw blood. Looked at the earth he'd moved.

A head in the soil, emerging as from some desperate nightmare into hard sunlight, or from the other world, where the dead went.

There was a single deep, downward gash in it, almost splitting the face in half—and the blood from that blow lay thick in the soil of the garden, and on his own hands now.

Tai swallowed again. Made himself move more earth, wishing so much he had a tool, didn't have to do this with shaking fingers.

He did, however, he did do it. And in a few moments he'd exposed the blade-ruined face of a woman. A very old woman, her eyes still open, staring upon nothingness or into the sun.

He closed his own eyes. Then opened them again and, pushing and digging more quickly now, uncovered her body farther down. She was clothed, wearing tangled bone necklaces and a strange, glinting collection of metal polished to be... to be mirrors on her body, he realized.

Mirrors to frighten demons away. His fingers, clawing at the soil, shifted her a little, inadvertently. He heard muted bells in the blood-wet earth.

Tai stood up. A very old woman. Drum, mirrors, bells.

He looked at the heavy cabin door that opened on the yard.

He ran, sunlight overhead, darkness behind him and before.

CHAPTER VI

In Xinan, some years later, after he had found Spring Rain among the singing girls in the North District (or, more accurately, once she had noticed and chosen him among the student-scholars) and they had begun to talk frankly when alone, before or after music, before or after love, she asked him one night why he never spoke about his time north of the Wall.

"It didn't last very long," he said.

"I know that. Everyone knows that. That's what makes it talked about."

"It is talked about?"

She shook her golden hair and gave him a look he knew well by then. I am enamoured of an idiot who will never amount to anything was, more or less, the import of the glance.

Tai found it amusing, sometimes said so. She found his saying so a cause of more extreme irritation. This, too, amused him, and she knew it.

She was a glory and a wonder, and he worked hard at not thinking about how many men he shared her with in the North District—one, in particular.

"You were permitted to withdraw from the cavalry. With honour and distinction—during a campaign. That doesn't happen, no matter who your father is. Then you go to Stone Drum Mountain, but leave there not a Kanlin... and then you show up in Xinan, having decided to study for the examinations. It is all... mysterious, Tai."

"I need to clear up the mystery?"

"No!" She put down her pipa and, leaning forward, tugged hard at his hair, which he'd left unbound. He pretended to be in pain, she ignored that.

"Don't you see... being mysterious is good. It is a way of being noticed. That is what you want!"

"I do? It is?"

She made to seize his hair again and he lifted his hands to forestall her. She settled back on the couch and poured more rice wine from the flask upon the brazier at her elbow—pouring for him first. Her training and manners were flawless, except when she was attacking him, or when they were making love.

"If you pass the examinations this spring, and you hope for a position that means something—that doesn't leave you sending little begging poems to senior mandarins for their help—yes, it is what you want. You are trying for rank in the palace, Tai. To swim within the current. At this court, you need to know how the game plays or you will be lost."

He had taught her to use his given name. He insisted on it when they were alone.

"If I am lost, will you come find me?"

She glared at him.

He grinned, at ease. "I've been lucky, if you're correct. I've managed to become noticed without even trying. Rain, I just prefer not to discuss that time above the Wall. It isn't a good memory. I never thought about any of the things you are saying."

"You need to think about these things."

"I could let you keep doing it for me?"

She stiffened, shifted. He regretted his words as soon as he'd spoken them.

"I am," Spring Rain said, "a humble singing girl of the North District, hired by the hour or the night, owned by the proprietor of this house. It is inappropriate that one such as I be offered such a role. It is cruel to say so, even in jest. You will need to master these subtleties for yourself. It is your life we are talking about."

"Is it? Just my life?" he asked. Which was a little cruel, but her self-description had wounded him—and he knew at least one man who could afford to buy her from the Pavilion of Moonlight, for the impossible sum she'd command, if he chose to do so.

She flushed, a curse of the fair-skinned from the northwest, which was what she was.

She said levelly, after a moment, "If you pass the examinations you will enter among the most ambitious men on earth. You can decide to leave Xinan—leave yet another life—but if you stay here, at court, those are the people you will be among. They will eat you for breakfast, throw your bones to the dogs, and not know they dined."

Her green eyes—her celebrated jade-green eyes—were hard and cold.

He laughed, a little nervously, he remembered. "That's not poetic language."

"No," she said. "But I'm not a poet. Would you prefer a girl who is, Master Shen? There are some downstairs, and in other houses. I can make suggestions, sir."

A revenge, of sorts, for his own remark a moment before. But this was about her life, too. Of course it was...

Tai shook his head. He remembered looking at her beside him on the low couch, wanting simply to enjoy beauty and intelligence and nearness, but wrestling with what she'd said.

He murmured, "Women have usually been better at this than men, haven't they? Pursuing these subtleties?"

"Women have no choice but to be this way if we want any kind of influence, or simply a little control of our own lives."

"That's what I meant," Tai said. He tried a smile. "Do I get credit for subtlety?"

She didn't respond to the smile. "A child can know that much. You will be, if you ever decide to study enough to pass the examinations, among grown men who use words like blades and are in mortal combat with each other for position every day and night."

And to that he remembered saying, quietly, "Men like my brother, you mean?"

She'd just looked at him.

Sprinting across the autumn grass from the shaman's grave, Tai thought about screaming a warning, then about running around the front to summon the others. He didn't do either. He couldn't have said, after, that he'd been thinking with clarity. This was an utterly remote, terrifying place. He'd unearthed a murder, and he was very young.

Those truths didn't entirely address why he broke into the cabin alone.

When pressed—and he was, by his officers later—he'd say that if they were going to save Meshag, which was their reason for being where they were, it was unlikely to happen if he alerted those inside by shouting, and he didn't think he had enough time to go around the front.

It sounded true. It was true, if you considered it. He didn't remember considering anything at the time, however. You could say his instincts had been at work. Tai didn't have any idea if that was so.

His sword was on his saddle, so was his bow. There was a shovel leaning against the back cabin wall. He had a fair guess by then how that had been used.

Without pausing to think, plan, to do anything coherent at all, he seized it, grabbed the door latch, and pushed, with no idea what he'd find, what he would actually do in there.

Or what they were doing, whoever these people were who had killed the shaman, buried her in earth to deny her soul access to the sky, and deceived them out in front.

It wasn't locked, the back door. He stepped inside.

It was dark in the cabin. It had been very bright outdoors, he was nearly blind. He stopped. And just made out the shape of someone turning towards him from within the room.

Tai stepped forward and swung the shovel as hard as he could.

He felt it bite—the sharp spade edge—into flesh, and sink. The figure, still only half seen, threw up an empty hand as if in entreaty or placation, and slumped to the earthen floor.

Soundlessly. Which was good.

Tai had never killed anyone at that point in his life. He didn't have time to consider what had just happened, what it meant, if it meant anything. He blinked rapidly, willing his eyes to adjust to shadow and dark.

Heart pounding, he made out an interior archway, a curtain over it, no actual door. A two-room cabin. He stepped over the fallen man, then—tardily—turned back and exchanged the shovel for the man's sword.

He did kneel and check, cautiously, he was aware enough to do that. The man was dead. Another brief disturbance: how swiftly, smoothly, silently life could be present, pulsing, and then be gone.

That thought pushed him forward, treading lightly, towards the fabric curtain. He shifted a corner of it.

There were candles burning in the other room, for which Tai gave thanks. Three men. Two near the front door, whispering fiercely to each other. Tai saw that the door was barred. They wouldn't have been able to crash in that way. Not without giving a great deal of warning.

Meshag lay on a pallet near the hearth. Tai saw that his tunic had been cut open, exposing his chest. His eyes were still closed. He looked terribly vulnerable. The third figure, tall and bulky, with animal horns attached to his head, was standing over him.

This one wore mirrors and bells and was softly beating a drum and chanting, rocking from side to side, occasionally spinning completely around. A kind of dance. There was a sickly-sweet smell in the room, something burning on a brazier. Tai had no idea what it was.

But he did not believe for a moment that this third man—it was a man, the woman was dead in the garden—was doing anything benevolent for the unconscious figure. They had killed the shaman who dwelled here. They weren't trying to help Meshag.

They hadn't killed him yet. Tai didn't know why. Why should he understand any of this? But, watching through the slightly lifted curtain, breathing carefully, Tai had a disturbing sense that what was happening here was intended to be worse than killing.

He was a long way from home.

That was his last clear thought before he screamed at the top of his voice and exploded through the curtain into the front room.

He went straight for the shaman, not necessarily what an experienced soldier would have done (take out the guards!) but he wasn't experienced, and surely his task was to try to stop whatever was being done with drum and chant and gathered powers to the man on the pallet.

He had not yet been on Stone Drum Mountain—his time among the Kanlin was a result of what happened that autumn day in the north—but he was the son of a soldier. He had been trained from earliest memory in ways and means of fighting, the more so since his older brother, soft and slightly plump even as a child, had made clear that his own inclinations and path in life did not involve swords or spinning, twisting manoeuvres against other armed men.

The dead nomad's sword was slightly curved, shorter than Tai's own, heavier as well, meant for downward blows from horseback. No matter. You used what you had. He had time to see the shaman turn, see fevered eyes open wide, blazing surprise and rage, before he struck a slashing blow above the metal mirrors draping the shaman's body, protecting it.

A part of Tai, his bearings lost so far away from everything he'd ever thought he knew, enmeshed in sorcery, was surprised when the sword bit the way it should.

He felt it grind on bone, saw blood, heard the shaman cry out and fall (a sound of bells), dropping drum and mallet on the hard-packed floor. He shouldn't have been startled: they'd killed a shaman woman, hadn't they? These mirror-and-drum people, they were holy and feared, but they weren't immortal.

Of course it was also possible that killing one put a curse on you for life. Not a matter Tai was in a position to address just then.

He wheeled and dropped, fear giving him urgency. He saw the nearer of the guards—the one who'd pretended to be a servant outside—rushing to where a bow lay against a wall. Tai sprang after him, twisting to dodge a knife thrown by the other man. He heard shouts outside.

He screamed again, words this time: "Treachery! Get in here!"

The false servant scrabbled for his bow, for an arrow, turned, dodging to avoid Tai's thrust sword—or trying to avoid it.

Tai caught him in the shoulder instead of the chest, heard the man shriek in pain. Tai jerked free his blade and—instinctively—dropped and rolled again, careful of the sword he held. He banged against objects scattered on the floor (their offered gifts) but the second enemy's sword sweep whistled over his head.

First time in his life for that sound: the sound of death averted, passing close. He heard thudding outside, and wild cries as his companions tried to get in, pounding against the barred front door.

"Around the back!" he screamed. "It's open!"

But in the same moment he took another chance, hurtling to the door. He flung the heavy wooden bar back. Just in time he dodged again, avoiding a downward slash that bit past him into wood.

He was sent staggering as the door flew open, hitting him in the back, but something—pride and anger and fear interwoven like threads in silk—made him step towards the man left standing. Tai slashed at him, parried a hard return as the others spilled into the room behind him.

"They killed the shaman!" he cried over his shoulder. "She's dead out back! Meshag's over there! Watch the one on the ground! I only wounded him!"

The one on the ground was seized by three men and dragged upright, off the ground, held like a child's doll. He received a bone-splintering blow to the side of his head. They didn't kill him, however. Tai noticed that. And in the same moment he heard one of the Bogu say, "Leave the last one, too. We will use him."

At those words, the man facing Tai abruptly changed his expression. Tai would remember that look, as well. He could sometimes see it when he closed his eyes in years of nights to come.

The man moved back towards the curtain. He reversed his sword, fumbling for the grip with both hands. He was trying to stab himself, Tai realized. But before that could happen, two carefully placed arrows took him one in each shoulder. The sword fell to the ground.

The man screamed then. A terrible sound, beyond any possible pain of his wounds, Tai thought.

A little later he would begin to understand.

He'd have screamed like that, he found himself thinking on the ride back south (they had left that same evening, unwilling to remain by the lake, needing as much distance from it as possible).

He'd have tried to kill himself, too, if he'd had any idea what was to come before he was allowed to die. And the man had clearly known. In some ways, that was the most horrific thing.

The Kitan cavalry—Tai's own men—had come rushing down the slope when the shouts and screaming had begun, but it was all over within the cabin before they were near enough to do anything.

Tai had walked across the grass to join them when he came out. It had been disorienting, to be back in mild sunshine with so little time having passed. The world could change too swiftly.

The thirty Kitan riders had remained apart, together, to see what the nomads would do. Watching in impassive silence at first, then with increasingly intense, shattering revulsion.

The Bogu began by claiming the body of the old shaman from out back and burning it on a pyre they built between cabin and lake. They did this respectfully, with chants and prayer. She had been defiled by murder and burial under ground, it seemed. She had to be returned to the sky—left in the open to be devoured by wolves and other animals—or she could be consumed by flame and rise with the smoke.

They chose fire, because they were beginning a greater burning. They set the outbuildings alight, and then the cabin itself, but not before they brought out Meshag upon his pallet and laid him down in the yard. They dragged out the two men Tai had killed, the guard and the shaman, and finally they brought forth the two who were still alive. They were drinking by then, the Bogu: there had been kumiss in the cabin.

The shaman's bells chimed as they pulled his body across the trampled grass. His mirrors glinted, splintering sunlight. Tai had wondered if he'd transgressed in killing this man. It was not so, he understood now. He had done something, in the nomads' eyes, that marked him as a hero. He was to be honoured, it seemed.

They invited him to join in what was now to follow, with the two dead men and the two left deliberately alive. He declined. Stayed with his men, his own people, from a civilized place.

He was physically sick, wrackingly so, when he saw what came next. What he had been invited to share. Many of the Kitan cavalry became violently ill, stumbling or riding away, retching into the grass.

The empire of Kitai had not been shaped through nine dynasties by a placid, pacifist people. Theirs was a violent, conquering grandeur, built upon slaughter through nearly a thousand years, in their own civil wars, or carrying warfare beyond shifting borders, or defending those borders. Such was their history: fires such as these, or greater burnings by far, blood and blades.

There were texts and teachings as far back as the First Dynasty about the tactical utility of massacre, killing children, mutilation, rape. The useful fear all these could spread in foes, the overcrowding of besieged cities as terrified refugees fled before advancing armies. These things were a part of what men did in warfare, and warfare was a part of what men did in life.

But the Kitan did not roast dead enemies over fires and eat their flesh with invocations to the sky. Or cut off slices from men still living, staked out naked upon the ground, and let them watch, screaming, as their own body parts were consumed, cooked or raw.

There was a great deal of smoke, spilling thickly upwards, hiding the sun. A stench of burning in a once-serene space beside a northern lake. The crackling of several fires, howls (humans, not wolves), ritual chants, and someone's desperate, slowly fading plea for death replaced the sound of birds and wind in leaves. The ugliness of men erasing solitude and autumnal beauty.

It went on for some time.

One of the nomads eventually approached the Kitan where they waited, gentling their nervous horses a distance apart. He was bare-chested, grinning widely, and he was waving the severed forearm of a man. Blood dripped from it, and from his chin.

Unsteady on his feet, he extended the human flesh towards Tai, as to a hero worthy to partake of this great bounty. Giving the Kitan, the stranger, one more chance.

He took an arrow in the chest as he stood before them. He died instantly.

Tai could not, for a moment, believe what had happened. It was entirely wrong, shockingly so. He stood in numbed disbelief. Which was, however brief, too long an interval for a commander of men in a place such as this one had become.

His soldiers, as if released by that single arrow to their own demons, their frenzied response to the horror they were being made to witness, mounted up suddenly, all of them, with smooth, trained efficiency, as if an order had been given.

Seizing bows and swords from saddles, they swept forward—avenging spirits, in and of themselves—into the fires and smoke, infused with a clawing fury, with the sense that this hideous savagery could only be expunged, erased, with savagery of their own.

This understanding of events came to Tai only afterwards. He wasn't thinking clearly at the time.

His cavalry knifed into and among the outnumbered, on-foot, drunk-on-kumiss nomads, the stumbling, blood-soaked men they'd come north to aid—and they slaughtered them between the fires.

And when it was done, when none of the Bogu were left alive amid the black smoke and the red burning, the blurred sun setting west now, the lake a dark, cold blue, the next thing happened.

Meshag, son of Hurok, stood up.

He looked around the unholy scene created by men in that place. He had been a graceful man. He wasn't any more. He had changed, had been changed. He moved awkwardly now, as if oddly jointed, had to shift his whole body to turn his gaze, moving stiffly through a full circle. Black smoke drifted between him and where Tai stood rooted to the ground with a gaping horror. He was seeing this, and refusing to believe what he saw.

Meshag stared towards the Kitan riders for a long moment. The last men alive here. Then, shifting his shoulders as if trying to throw back his head, he laughed. A low, distorted sound.

He had not moved or opened his eyes since falling unconscious by another fire to the south weeks before.

It was not his remembered laughter. The way he stood and moved was appallingly different, this shambling, slack-limbed, unnatural posture. The Kitan soldiers, in an alien place among burning and the dead, stopped wheeling their horses about, stopped shouting. They clustered together, close to Tai again as if for protection, keeping their distance from Meshag.

Looking at this man—if he was still a man—Tai understood that the evils of this day had not ended.

He heard sounds beside him, arrows clicking from sheaths, nocked to strings. He stirred, he rasped an order—and was not sure if what he did was right. He might die not knowing, he would decide on the ride back south.

"Hold!" he cried. "No man shoots an arrow!"

What was left of Meshag, or what had become of him, turned, cumbersome and slow, to look at Tai, tracking the sound of his voice.

Their gazes locked through smoke. Tai shivered. He saw a blankness in those eyes, something unfathomable. Cold as the end of all life. It occurred to him, in that same moment, that his task, his duty to what had once been a man, might be to grant him the arrows' release.

He did not. He knew—he could not deny knowing—that something evil had been happening in that cabin (still burning, a red, roaring chaos) before he burst in and killed the shaman. It might have been interrupted, incomplete, but what that meant, what it implied for the figure standing stiffly before him, holding his gaze, as if committing Tai to memory, he couldn't hope to grasp.

"Like the swans," he said loudly to his cavalry. "Killing it might curse us all. This is not our affair. Let it... let him go. He will find his fate without us."

He said that last as clearly as he could, staring at the soul-wracking figure of Meshag. If the creature moved towards them the soldiers would panic, Tai knew. He'd have to allow the arrows to fly, and live with that.

He didn't believe his own swan comparison. He hadn't even believed killing a swan would curse them... that was Bogu fear. The Kitan had their own animal legends and fears. But the words might offer something to his men, a reason to listen to him. They didn't normally need reasons: soldiers followed orders, as simple as that. But this northward journey and today's ending to it were so remote in all ways from their normal lives and world that it seemed necessary to offer one.

As for why, in his own mind, it felt proper to give this dead-eyed, impossibly reawakened figure the chance to leave this place and live—if living was what it was—Tai could only call it pity, then and after.

He wondered if that came through in his voice, in the look they exchanged. He wouldn't have said it was an entirely human gaze, Meshag's, but neither would he have said it wasn't, that there was some demon in there. Meshag was altered, and it seemed to Tai he might well be lost, but he didn't know.

Killing him might have been the truest answer to what had been done to him, offering the kindness of release, but Tai didn't do it, and didn't allow his soldiers to do it. He wasn't even sure this figure could be killed, and he really didn't want to test that.

After a long stillness, barely breathing, he saw Meshag—or what had been Meshag—move one hand, in a gesture he could not interpret. The figure turned away from him, from all of them, living and dead and burning. Meshag didn't laugh again, and he never did speak. He loped away, around the burning cabin and then along the shore of the lake, towards the fire-coloured autumn trees and the distant, almost-hidden mountains.

Tai and his men stayed together, watching him through the smoke until he passed from sight, and then they started the other way, towards home.

They had left the silk farm and the orange flare of the fox far behind.

The sun was going down, also orange now. Tai realized he'd been wrapped in reverie for a long time, tracing memory, the paths that had led him here.

Or, one particular path, that journey north: past Wall, past river's loop, beyond the steppes to the edge of winter's land.

In the eye of his mind, riding now with six companions on a glorious Sardian horse, he still saw Meshag, son of Hurok—or whatever he had become—shambling away alone. It occurred to him that, having seen this, having been a part of that day, he ought not to be so quickly dismissive of someone else's belief in fox-women.

Or, perhaps, because of his own history, that was why he needed to be dismissive? There were only two people in the world with whom he could even have imagined talking about this feeling. One of them was in Xian and it was very likely he would never be able to speak with her again. The other was Chou Yan, who was dead.

Wei Song was still up front. The stream they were following was on their left, a wide valley stretching from it, fertile lands, both banks. The forest that had flanked them to the south had receded. This was farming land. They could see peasant huts clustering into hamlets and villages, men and women in the fields, charcoal burners' fires against the darkening trees.

Tai had come this way heading west, approaching Kuala Nor two years ago, but he'd been in a strange state of mind then—grieving, withdrawn—and he hadn't paid attention to the land through which he rode. Looking back, he couldn't say he'd begun to think clearly about what he was doing, what he intended to do, until he'd ridden beyond Iron Gate Fort up the long ravine and come out and seen the lake.

He needed to become a different man now.

Spring Rain had warned him so many times about the dangers of the Ta-Ming Palace, the world of court and mandarin—and now he had the army, the military governors to consider as well.

Someone wanted him dead, had wanted that before he'd received the horses. He couldn't keep them, he knew he couldn't keep them.

Not in the world as it was. The issue was what he did with them, and—before that—how he could live long enough to claim them back at the Taguran border.

He twitched Dynlal's reins and the big horse moved effortlessly forward to catch up to the Kanlin woman. The sun was behind them, shining along the plain. It was almost time to stop for the night. They could camp out again, or approach one of these villages. He wasn't sure where the next posting station was.

She didn't turn her head as he pulled up beside her. She said, "I'd be happier inside walls, unless you object."

It was the fox, he guessed. This time he didn't make a jest. He still carried the long day's dark remembering, a smell of burning in his mind from a northern lake.

"Whatever you say."

This time she did look over, he saw anger in her eyes. "You are indulging me!"

Tai shook his head. "I am listening to you. I retained you to protect me. Why hire a guard dog and bark yourself?"

Not calculated to appease her, but he didn't exactly feel like doing that. It did occur to him to mildly regret hiring her. The soldiers from the fort would surely have been enough protection. But he hadn't known that he'd be given a military escort.

There was more... person in her than he'd expected. She'd been chosen by Spring Rain, he needed to think about that. He had many things to think about, it seemed.

He said, "You never did tell me that night if Rain knows anything, or told you, about why someone sent a Kanlin to kill me."

A weak question... he'd have been informed by now, if she knew. He expected a remark to that effect, didn't get one. "A false Kanlin," she reminded him, reflexively. Then added, "If the Lady Lin Chang knew, I do not. I don't believe she did know. Your friend was bringing you tidings, and it seemed you weren't to know them."

"No." Tai shook his head. "It is more than that. Or they'd have killed Yan before he reached me. It would have been easy to have him die along the way. They were alone."

She looked at him. "I never thought of that."

"They didn't want me alive to act on whatever he was coming to tell me, if I found it out some other way."

She was still staring. Tai grinned suddenly. "What? You are astonished I can think of something you didn't?"

She shook her head, looked away. Watching her, Tai felt his mood darken. The joking felt shallow. He said, not sure why he was confiding, "He was a dear friend. Never harmed a soul in life that I know of. I am going to want to know why he died, and do something about it."

She turned again to look at him. "You may not be able to do anything, depending on what you discover."

Tai cleared his throat. "We had better choose a village soon, if you want to negotiate for shelter."

Her turn to smile, as if to herself. "Look ahead."

Tai did so. "Oh," he said.

The land rose slightly before them. He saw that the road widened, three lanes now, the middle one reserved for imperial riders. In the distance, caught by the setting sun, he could just make out the walls of a fair-sized city, with banners flying.

Chenyao. They had arrived. And closer to them, beside the road, obviously waiting, Tai noticed a small group of men. They had horses but had dismounted, respectfully. One of them, formally dressed, lifted a hand in salute.

"You are being met outside the walls," Wei Song murmured. "It is an honour. Iron Gate sent word of your coming, with the courier."

"The horses," Tai said.

"Well, of course," Song replied. "You will probably have to meet with the military governor and the prefect, both, before you can go find a woman. So very sorry."

He couldn't think of a rejoinder.

He lifted a hand in a return salute to those waiting. They immediately bowed, all of them, as if pulled downwards by his gesture, like puppets in a street theatre.

Tai drew a breath and let it out. It was beginning.

CHAPTER VII

It might have been thought that the most beautiful and talented of the singing girls, the courtesans who could break a man's heart or bring him to a climax in ways he had never imagined, would all be in Xinan, with its world-dazzling wealth and the palace by the northern walls.

That would have been a fair assumption, but not an accurate one. Market and canal-side towns could emerge as celebrated or notorious for a variety of reasons, and the grace and skill of their women was one. The south had its own traditions in the matter of lovemaking, as far back as the Fourth Dynasty, some of these sufficiently subversive to be discussed only in whispers or after too much wine.

The northeast was a wasteland in this regard, of course: soldiers and camp followers in the wind-scoured fortresses by the Long Wall, repressive cities (also wind-scoured) dominated by an ascetic aristocracy that saw the last three imperial dynasties as new arrivals, barely worth acknowledging.

Chenyao, however, was at the other end of the empire, and the Silk Road passed through it, becoming the imperial highway, bringing traders and trade goods into the market square and pleasure district of a prosperous, lively city.

Lying so far west, Chenyao also had a reputation for Sardian girls—the fair-haired, blue- or green-eyed goddesses from beyond the deserts, so very appealing in Ninth Dynasty Kitai.

One such woman was called Spring Rain, who was in Xinan, and whose name now appeared to be Lin Chang, and who belonged as a personal concubine to the new first minister of the empire.

There were a number of reasons, Tai decided, that it was past time for him to become extremely drunk.

One was a friend's death. He kept reclaiming images of Yan: laughing until he spluttered and choked in a wine-cup game in the North District, or studying on a bench next to Tai, in ferocious concentration, chanting under his breath to memorize a passage, or the two of them climbing a tower outside the walls during the Festival of Chrysanthemums, which was about friendship. And now this friend was lying in a lakeside grave beside the assassin who had killed him. The second reason for needing wine (good wine, one might hope) was that someone had tried to kill him and he didn't know who, or why.

The third was Rain.

She had foreseen her departure from the North District more than two years ago, had warned Tai about it. He hadn't believed it could happen—or had denied it to himself. Not the same thing.

Against his will, he found himself remembering a night in the Pavilion of Moonlight, Rain and three other girls entertaining the students, laughter and music in the largest room.

A silence had fallen. Tai's back had been to the doors.

He'd seen Rain glance over, and then—without the slightest hesitation—stand up and, carrying her pipa, walk away from them towards the man Tai saw in the doorway as he turned to watch her go.

Wen Zhou had not been first minister then. But he was wealthy, well-born... and a favourite cousin of the emperor's favoured concubine, which mattered most of all. He was a big man, handsome and knowing it, elegantly dressed.

He could have had any woman in Xinan sent to him. He'd wanted Rain. It amused him to come to her in the city, and there was no question of scholars claiming any kind of priority once such a man arrived—the idea was laughable.

Tai remembered that night, though it wasn't the only time. Zhou's gaze had flicked over the party of students before turning to Rain, accepting her graceful homage. She'd led him out, towards a private room.

Tai tried to sort out why that memory was the one that had returned, and decided it was because Zhou's gaze had actually held his a moment, a too-long moment, before looking away.

There was a poem by Chan Du about powerful men and women of the court enjoying a feast in Long Lake Park, suggesting that with certain men it was better if they never noticed you.

He'd been noticed that night.

He didn't want a yellow-haired girl in Chenyao.

He did need a woman, after so much time alone. And, he decided, assorted ghosts and malign spirits could choose amongst themselves which would torment the smug Kanlin Warrior he'd mistakenly hired at Iron Gate.

He'd arranged with the escort waiting outside the walls that he would call upon the prefect and the military governor—in that order—in the morning. They both wanted him tonight. He declined, politely.

Tonight was his own.

They were inside a city patrolled by soldiers, safe from roaming bandits—or spirit-world fox-women. He'd had Wei Song book the best available inn for the seven of them.

He'd also decided to keep the cavalrymen from Iron Gate. It was a small enough gesture of acknowledgement to Commander Lin, who had given him cash for the road, including the inn here, and what turned out to be a handsome room with a good-sized bed and sliding doors leading out to a garden.

Five guards from a border fortress were not going to link him too closely to the Second Military District when he got to the capital, but their presence with Tai might be of use to the commander who had assigned them.

There had been competing invitations from the welcoming party on the way into the city, to be the honoured house guest of both the men in power here: a competition that made it easier for Tai to take his own lodging. The governor was more powerful (they always were, these days) but the prefect had the title that signified in protocol, and Tai had studied in Xinan long enough to know how this matter needed to be dealt with, come morning.

THERE WERE GIRLS at his inn, of course, in a pavilion behind the first building, red lanterns hanging from the eaves there. One of the women, he noticed, when he strolled across the courtyard and looked in, was charming—or could that be due to his not having been close to a silk-clad woman in two years?

There was a pipa being played, and another girl with wide red sleeves was dancing. He stayed a few moments to watch in the doorway. But this was a comfortable inn, not the entertainment district, and Tai had been cheerfully advised by the escort sent out to meet him which of the courtesan houses was most likely to please a man of taste with some reserves of cash.

He left the inn to make his way there.

The night streets of Chenyao were crowded, lit by hanging lanterns on walls and carried by torches. That was something else he hadn't experienced for a long time: men pushing the darkness back, so the nights might hold more than fear. He wouldn't have denied feeling a measure of aroused anticipation.

In Xinan, nightfall marked the curfew, the city gates and those of each ward locked until the dawn drums, but this was a market town on the merchants' road and rules were slack here, of necessity. Men, many of them foreigners, emerging from the hardship of the long passage around the deserts, would not readily submit to limits on their movements when they finally arrived at a civilized place, knowing their journey was over.

They'd pay their duties and taxes, submit to inspection of goods, bribe clerks—and the prefect—as required, but they wouldn't stay in one place after dark.

There were enough soldiers in Chenyao, this close to the Taguran border, to ensure relative good order even if travellers were abroad at night. Tai saw clusters of soldiers here and there, but they looked relaxed, not oppressive. Moonlit carousing was encouraged here: men feasting and drinking spent money, left it in the city.

Tai was prepared to be one of those.

Music, graceful women dancing, good food and wine, and then a chosen girl, eyes dark with promise, the nearly forgotten scent of a woman, legs that could wrap themselves around him, a mouth and fingers skilled in provoking, in exploring... and a candlelit private room where he could begin to feel his way back into the world he'd left behind at Kuala Nor.

He was distracted, he would later decide, his thoughts running too far ahead through the noisy streets, or else he'd not have been so easily trapped.

He ought to have been alerted when the short laneway he turned down, following directions given, was suddenly not noisy, or thronged. He was alone, he realized.

Figures appeared at the head of the lane, blocking it.

There was no lantern at that end, it was hard to be sure of their number. Tai stopped, swearing under his breath. He looked quickly behind him. Was unsurprised to see more men at the lower end now, where he'd entered. Eight of them in all, he guessed. He was in the middle of an empty street. The doors of shops and houses on either side were, naturally, barred.

He had only one of his own swords. It was considered bad manners to carry double blades into a courtesan house, but it was also regarded as foolish to go unarmed through night streets in any city.

He might have been foolish just now. He drew his sword.

There were tactics prescribed on Stone Drum Mountain, early levels of teaching, for dealing with a challenge such as this. It was set as a formal lesson. One was unlikely to defeat or break free of eight men. Four was possible.

Tai drew two quick breaths and then sprinted forward, shouting at the top of his voice for the city guards. He heard a yell behind him, but he'd have a few moments with half of these men, whomever they were.

And he did, as it happened, know how to fight.

He hadn't had much use for those skills in years, but the second son of General Shen Gao, trained by the Kanlin on their holy mountain, ran towards this new set of assassins with a rising, useful anger—he recognized it, let it surge, channelled it.

Sword extended, he whipped through a full, running circle as he neared them, to confuse, cause hesitation. He leaped at the last house wall on his right, driving himself with three or four short steps, running up the wall, and then he sprang back from it, flying above the heads of the men—three only, not four, which was good—and he stabbed one and slashed another with his first two airborne passes, the good blade cutting deep, both times.

He landed behind the one who remained. That man whipped around, lifting his sword to parry.

It was at that point Tai saw that the man wore a uniform—the colours of the army of the Second District. The same as his own five cavalrymen. These were the military guards he'd been shouting for. Tai froze, blade levelled.

"What is this?" he cried. "I am one of your officers! The commander at Iron Gate sent word of me!"

The second man he'd wounded moaned, lying in the muddy street.

The one still on his feet spoke rapidly, through shock and fear. "This is known! Your presence is required! It was judged you might decline to come. We were sent to ensure it happened." He bowed, jerkily.

Tai heard a rustling sound. He looked up quickly, saw someone hurtling down from a rooftop, behind the four other soldiers who had rushed up from the far end of the lane. He made as urgent a decision as he had in a long time.

"Song, no! Wait! Leave them!"

Wei Song landed, rolled, and stood up. She hadn't been going to a courtesan house: issues of courtesy had not applied. She drew both her swords from the scabbards behind her and extended them.

"Why?" was all she said.

Tai drew a steadying breath.

"Because there are twenty more soldiers here, not all of them incompetent, some with bows, and you are in a city I control."

The voice was assured, and amused. It came from the square behind Tai. He turned, slowly.

There were half a dozen torches by a curtained sedan chair. The small square was otherwise empty, kept that way by soldiers at the edges, blocking each street. At least twenty men. The curtains of the litter were drawn back on this side, so that the man within might see what was happening—and be seen in the cast torchlight.

Tai still felt anger within himself, a hot stone. He was dealing with the sick sensation that could follow violence. The two men on the ground were silent now. He didn't know if he'd killed them. The first one, probably, he thought. He walked slowly over to the sedan chair and the torches.

"Why have you done this?" he asked, his voice demanding, too arrogant. He was aware of the tone. He didn't care. He was fairly sure who this was.

"You look like your father," said the thin, very tall man in the litter, stepping out to stand gazing at Tai. He used a stick, a heavy one, to support himself.

And that made it certain. A city I control.

Tai bowed. It was necessary, whatever anger he felt. He cleared his throat. "Sir, I told your officers outside the walls that I would be honoured to call upon you in the morning."

"And I have no doubt you would have done so. But I am an impatient man, and disinclined to follow the prefect in a matter such as this. You would have had to attend upon him first."

A matter such as this.

It would always be the horses now, Tai thought.

Governor Xu Bihai, commanding both the Second and the Third Military Districts, smiled at him. It was a cold smile.

Tai sheathed his sword.

"The Kanlin," the governor said, in a paper-thin voice. "She is retained by you?"

No time wasted. Tai nodded. "She is, my lord."

"And was assigned to guard you tonight?"

"Assigned to do so always." He knew what this was about. He was afraid again, suddenly.

"She was not walking with you."

"Kanlin are conspicuous, sir. I chose to remain otherwise. She was not far away. As you see."

The cold smile again. The military governor had to be sixty years old, his long chin-beard and hair were white, but his posture and manner were commanding, notwithstanding the stick he held.

"In that case, she will be permitted to live. You do not object if she is beaten? Twenty strokes?"

"I do object. I would take it as an insult and an injury to me."

A raised eyebrow. The torches flickered in a flare of wind. "She drew weapons on soldiers in my city, Master Shen."

"She drew blades on men in darkness who appeared to be attacking me, Governor Xu. I say this with respect. I would have had cause to dismiss her, or worse, had she not done so."

A silence.

"I will indulge you in this," Xu Bihai said finally. "In memory of your father, whom I knew. I served under him in the west."

"I know that. He spoke of you often," Tai said. Not quite a lie. He did know how the governor's leg had been injured. "Thank you," he added. He bowed again.

It was entirely the governor's right, even a duty, to have Song executed or beaten to crippled incapacity. This was a market town, thronged with drunken foreigners and transients. Hard men from the long roads. The soldiers were charged with keeping order. Certain rules followed upon that.

"Wei Song, sheathe weapons, please," Tai called. He didn't look back. He heard, with relief, the doubled snick as she obeyed.

"Thank you," he said again, to her this time. She was Kanlin. They weren't servants, to be ordered about as such.

Neither was he. He said, "I am honoured, of course, beyond my worth, that the governor has taken himself abroad in the night to hold converse with me. I had been greatly looking forward to your counsel and tidings in the morning. I still am. What hour would be convenient?"

"This one," said Xu Bihai. "You weren't listening. I said I was disinclined to see you after the prefect."

"I was listening, sir. I do not decree the protocols of our glorious Ninth Dynasty, governor. And I am disinclined to have my appointments for a day—or a night—decided by others, however greatly I honour them."

The white-bearded governor appeared to be considering this. Distant sounds drifted, music and laughter, one voice briefly lifted in anger, but they were alone in this square with the soldiers and Wei Song.

"I don't see that you have a choice," Xu Bihai said, at length, "though I note your disinclination. I will not apologize for protecting the interests of this military district, but I can offer you mare's teat grape wine at my residence and an escort to the entertainment district afterwards."

Tai drew a breath. He needed to decide, swiftly, how far he would take this—and how far the governor would.

He was still angry. His father had liked this man. Elements to be balanced. Inwardly, he shrugged. A princess in Rygyal had changed his life. A moment such as this was part of that change. It was unlikely to be the last.

"I have not tasted mare's teat wine in more than two years," he said. "I should be honoured to be your guest. Shall we invite the prefect to join us?"

For a moment, the governor's lean face betrayed astonishment, then he threw back his head and laughed. Tai allowed himself to smile.

"I think not," said Xu Bihai.

In the event, Tai came to understand, the governor wished to say only one thing to him, but he wanted quite urgently to say it. And to do so before anyone else spoke to the young man who now controlled enough Sardian horses to play a role in the balance of power towards the end of a long reign.

The wine was luxuriously good. It was spiced with saffron. Tai honestly couldn't remember the last time he'd tasted that.

The two young women who served them were Xu's daughters, unmarried. Each wore flawless silk, one in pale green, the other in blue, low-cut in a fashion that had evidently emerged, so to speak, since Tai had left Xinan.

Their perfume was intoxicating, each different from the other's. They both had painted moth-eyebrows, tinted blue-green, and a side-falling hairstyle with extravagant hairpins. They wore jewelled, closed-toe slippers, gold rings and jade earrings, and had amused, confident eyes.

It was, he thought, unfair.

The governor, cross-legged on a platform couch opposite, clad in doubled black robes, with a black hat and a red belt, seemed oblivious to the effect his daughters were having on his guest, but Tai was entirely certain that the wine and lamplit room, and the two exquisite, scented women had been carefully orchestrated.

Wei Song was in the courtyard with the soldiers. The two men Tai had wounded were expected to live. He'd asked, on arrival here. This was good, of course, but reminded him that his skills were not what they'd once been: he had been trying to kill.

They ate five-spice dried river-fish in three sauces, and early fruits served in ivory bowls by the daughters, not servants. They drank the saffron wine, cups steadily refilled. Talked of spring crops outside the city walls and along the river, of thunderstorms and a tail-star apparently seen in the east earlier that month, what it might presage. The two women brought water and hand cloths for them to wash and dry their fingers as they ate. Curving towards Tai, offering a lacquered bowl of scented water, the one in green allowed her hair (in strategic disarray to one side) to brush his hands. This was the "waterfall" hairstyle made popular by the Precious Consort, Wen Jian herself, in Xinan.

It was unfair.

Xu's daughter smiled very slightly as she straightened, as if sensing, and enjoying, his response. Her father said, briskly, "Commander Lin writes that he proposed to you a position of high rank in the cavalry of the Second Army, a number of the Sardian horses to remain as yours, and your selection of officers to serve under you."

So much for polite discussion of stars, or millet and its ripening time and best-suited soil.

Tai set down his cup. "Fortress Commander Lin was generous beyond my merits, and behaved with impeccable courtesy to his guest, on behalf of his military district."

"He's ambitious, and clever enough. He would," said Xu Bihai. "I imagine he will serve the district well if promoted." Tai thought he owed the commander that much.

"Perhaps," said Xu indifferently. "He isn't well liked and he isn't feared. Makes it harder for him to rise. Your father would have agreed."

"Indeed," said Tai noncommittally.

He received a glance from the other couch. The two daughters had withdrawn to the door, either side of it, decorative beyond words. He very much liked the one in green. Her eyes, that knowing half-smile.

"Perhaps further persuasion from me will be of use in causing you to reconsider his offer?"

"I am honoured you would even consider me worthy of persuading," murmured Tai. "But I told Commander Lin—a man I liked, incidentally—that it would be folly for me to contemplate a course of action before I consult with those at court."

"First Minister Wen Zhou?"

"Indeed," Tai repeated.

"Your elder brother, advising him?"

Tai nodded, uneasy suddenly.

"Two men I understand you have reason to dislike."

"I should regret if you continued in such an understanding," Tai said carefully. His pulse had quickened. "My duty to the Son of Heaven, may he rule a thousand years, surely requires that I take counsel in Xinan with his advisers."

There was a silence. It was not a statement that could be challenged, and both men knew it. Governor Xu lifted his cup, sipped thoughtfully. He put it down. Looking at Tai, his expression changed. "I can almost pity you," he said.

"I should regret that, as well," Tai said.

"You do know what I mean?"

Tai met his gaze. "I might have chosen a simpler life, had it been my own decision, but if we accept the teachings of the Sacred Path, then we also accept—"

"Do you? Do you follow those teachings?"

The discussion had become uncomfortably intimate. Tai said, "I try. The balancing. Male and female, hot and cold, awareness of all five directions. Stillness and motion, polarities. The flow between such things suits my nature more than the Cho Master's certainties, however wise he was."

"You learned this on Stone Drum Mountain?"

It was curious how many people seemed to know of his time there. He remembered Rain telling him that—and what else she'd said. How it might be useful. Shaping a mystery about him...

He shook his head. "From before. My own readings. It was a reason I went there." He saw no reason not to be honest, to a point. It had been one reason.

Xu Bihai nodded, as if a thought had been confirmed.

He stared at Tai another long moment, then, as if speaking only of cultivated fields again, or early-summer rainfall, said quietly, "I understand you must consult at the palace before acting, but I would sooner kill you tonight and lose all the horses for the empire and be exiled to the pestilent south, or ordered to commit suicide, than have you give them to Roshan. This, Master Shen Tai, you need to know."

The promised escort took him in the governor's sedan chair to the entertainment district. He hadn't been in one of those for a long time. The cushions were soft, there was a scent of aloeswood. He was slightly drunk, he realized.

The bearers stopped. Tai opened the curtains to reveal the quite handsome entrance of the White Phoenix Pleasure Pavilion, which had a new roof, a covered portico, lanterns hanging by the entrance, wide steps going up, and doors open to the mild night.

The leader of Tai's escort went up and spoke to an older woman at the entrance. Tai knew—and there was nothing he could, in courtesy, do about it—that he was not going to be permitted to pay for anything here tonight.

The soldiers indicated that they would wait for him. He wanted to dismiss them, but that wasn't possible if they had orders from the governor, and he knew they did. They would take him back to the inn eventually. If he spent the night here they'd remain outside until morning with the sedan chair. This was the way things were going to be now. Men were investing in him. He could try to find it amusing, but it was difficult.

I would sooner kill you tonight. This, you need to know.

Murder as an alternative to investment, he thought wryly. And given consequences so sure and so severe, even for a governor—since word had gone ahead to Xinan and they would know about the horses very soon—Governor Xu's statement carried its own uncompromising message.

Roshan was not to be allowed to claim these.

Roshan was a nickname, given by soldiers long ago, adopted by the court. The man's real name was An Li. He was a one-time barbarian cavalryman, then an officer, a general, now a military governor himself commanding the Seventh, the Eighth, and most recently also the Ninth District armies. A man everyone watched. And feared.

Tai had been away too long. There were elements—balances—he needed to learn, and he didn't have a great deal of time.

I can almost pity you was the other thing Xu Bihai had said. And at Kuala Nor among the ghosts a blue-tattooed Taguran had said nearly the same thing.

He had seen Roshan only once, in Long Lake Park, watching princes and aristocrats at a polo game. The general, visiting from his base in the northeast, in Xinan to receive yet another honour (and the gift of a city palace), had sat with the imperial party. He had been unmistakable in his colossal bulk, clad in brilliant, overwhelming red, his laughter ringing across the meadow.

He hadn't always been so fat, but one needed to be older than Tai to remember An Li's fighting days. He would destroy a horse under him today.

It was said that he laughed all the time, even when killing people, that he had never learned to read, that he was advised by a steppe demon, and had given the emperor certain potions for the delights of darkness in that time when Taizu first turned his aging eyes—and heart—to the youthful glory of Wen Jian.

It was also said that the only man Roshan had ever feared—and he had very greatly feared him, as everyone did—was the infinitely subtle, calculating, now-deceased first minister, Chin Hai.

With Chin gone, there was a new prime minister, and though Wen Zhou might be a favoured cousin of the Precious Consort, and owe his appointment to that as much as anything else, Roshan was also beloved of the emperor and had long been said to be equally close to the exquisite Jian—and perhaps more than merely close, depending on which rumour you heard and believed.

In the night street before a courtesan house in Chenyao's pleasure district, remembering a summer day in the park, Tai recalled looking across at the corpulent figure of the military governor from a distance and flinching inwardly at the image of such a figure embracing, crushing, the most beautiful woman of the age.

Jian was already named by then in poems, and had been painted, as one of the Four Great Beauties of Kitai, going back to the First Dynasty and the Empress Jade Pearl, among the immortals now.

To Xu Bihai tonight, Tai had simply said that he would seek counsel from as many people as he could before deciding what he would do, and expressed a willingness to come back west and meet the governor here, drink and dine again—perhaps in the presence of his charming daughters.

One of them had giggled at that from by the door, not the one in green. That one had simply looked across at Tai, her expression suddenly difficult to read.

Thoughts of the two of them drew his mind back to the house in front of him. He wasn't in the best condition, after so much saffron wine, to deal with matters of court and rival governors. Such issues could surely be deferred for a night? His first in a city after two years?

The doors of the house were wide open. He saw lights within. The attendant woman smiled from under two red lanterns. Of course she'd smile a welcome. It was her assignment here, and she would have just been informed that anything—anything—the young man wanted was to be offered to him, and charged to the governor.

The young man wanted more wine to start with, he decided. The sage in the cup, the poets said. The rest could follow as the spring night deepened and the late moon rose.

He heard a voice inside, speaking poetry.

He went up the wide, handsome steps, between lanterns, and entered the White Phoenix, giving a coin to the woman at the door.

CHAPTER VIII

The ridiculous Kitan adoration—and that feels like the right word!—of poetry and of declaiming, drunken poets is an endless mystery to Amber, and deeply annoying. Amber is from Sardia, has honey-gold hair, therefore her name. Not particularly inventive, but courtesan names never are.

She is beautiful (green eyes!). She's long-legged, has perfect skin, is very young. Beauty has been enough to ensure her a stream of clients since arriving here, even infatuated ones, though she can't sing or play one of their instruments, and poetry puts her to sleep.

Not every silk merchant or off-duty officer in need of a woman for a wintry afternoon or summer night wants the girl to discourse upon philosophy, or pluck "The Bandits of the Gorge" on a pipa before he takes her upstairs and throws her across a bed.

Amber makes a point of giggling when they do this to her. Men tend to be excited by that. She may not be educated, but she understands certain things.

In bed (or on the floor beside it) she knows exactly what she's doing, has a talent, especially if the man is young and not offensive in manner or appearance.

A few of the women who have been here longer are constantly urging her to listen more carefully to the poetry, even memorize some of it, to practise harder at her music. They are always pointing out that the men with real money, the ones who leave additional sums for the girl (they are allowed to keep half of this), will usually be those with some worldliness. That's just the way of things here in Kitai, even in a western market town.

Bright Amber (she likes the name they gave her, as it happens) doesn't entirely disagree, but she also knows that a merchant just off the long road will be generous to a pretty girl with smooth legs and an easy laugh and green eyes, and that many of those men will be indifferent to (or bored by, as she is) obsessive distinctions between eight-line regulated verse and any other of the hopelessly contrived forms poetry takes here.

Poetry! In the name of the bull-god! You even need to be a poet to rise in the civil service here. Can there be a clearer sign of a culture that has lost its way? Amber doesn't think there is, when she thinks about it at all, though she does concede the point Jade Flower makes: if Kitai has lost its way, why does it control so much of the world?

Maybe it would be different in a pleasure house in Xinan or Yenling, where the aristocrats are. Maybe she'd accept that it was worth her while to work on other skills. But Amber is happy in Chenyao, has thoughts already about one or two merchants and one extremely handsome officer of the Second District cavalry.

She's perfectly content to spend a year or two in the White Phoenix and then cajole or induce the right man to buy her as his concubine. It is as good a life plan as any for a girl.

She is from a hard world, after all. Orphaned in a plague summer, sold at twelve by her oldest sister to a brothel-keeper, noticed there by a merchant heading east, bought by him to sell. Her good fortune, that, no doubting it. She is distinctive in Kitai, and the White Phoenix is the best house in Chenyao. She has food and a bed of her own, firesides in winter, two days a month to herself, and half the festival holidays. Life has not dealt badly with her.

Chenyao is as far into Kitai as Amber feels any desire to go. They recite more poetry in pleasure houses east, among other things. She's been told that often enough. You need to pretend to listen and admire and understand it, strum accompaniment on your pipa, or else the men in fine silks of their own will laugh the wrong way, or ignore you entirely. A waste of a pretty girl, as far as Amber is concerned.

Let the older women, who need to spend time each day painting away lines, struggle to find ways to keep the attention of clients: clapping and smiling at drunken, mumbled verses, placing a pipa strategically in front of fallen breasts. Amber tends to find that standing a certain way, then just looking across the room at a man is enough.

At this particular moment of an almost-summer night, however, in the large, subtly lit reception room of the White Phoenix, crowded with a variety of men and a number of perfumed women, circumstances are otherwise.

No one is looking at Amber, though she's positioned herself by her favourite lamp near an archway and knows her hair is beautiful tonight.

Even one of her regular clients, the cavalry officer she has thoughts about, is among those crowding the central platform. On that platform, a soft-bellied, badly groomed, considerably intoxicated man well past his middle years is reciting a verse about—as best Amber can tell—a wife and her absent husband.

It is, she feels strongly, insulting.

The poet is proceeding slowly—in part, because he stops to take a drink every few lines. This poem is not (alas!) one of their brief, formal things. This one, he declared (his voice is not deep but it carries), is a ballad, whatever that is.

Well, Amber knows one cursed thing it is: long.

She makes herself smile with that. No one notices. One of the other girls, looking as if she was on the cresting edge of extreme desire, had breathed the word immortal when the poet came in some little time ago.

The Banished Immortal.

It is laughable. Amber wants to laugh but knows she'd be in trouble if she did. Where she comes from, an immortal, exiled from heaven for whatever reason, would have to look a great deal more as if he knew how to use the sword that lies beside the poet now, and would surely have the dignity to not be so obviously unable to stop himself from drinking cup after cup of their best grape wine.

It hasn't happened yet, but she expects his voice to start slurring soon—if he even manages to remain upright. This one isn't going to be much use to himself or the girl he takes upstairs, Amber thinks. Sometimes, if the man is too drunk to use you properly he leaves a larger sum, to have a girl keep quiet about his embarrassment.

She doesn't think this one, this immortal in his dusty, wine-stained clothing, is likely to care.

He is still reciting to an unnaturally silent room, and still drinking another cup every few lines. He's impressive in that, at least, Amber concedes. Two of the girls, hovering by the platform, visibly excited, hasten to refill his cup, taking turns. Amber wonders if their nipples are hard. She is tempted to have a coughing fit or cause a lamp to topple, so annoyed is she by this spectacle. No one is looking at her, no one is talking or even whispering to anyone else, no one is taking any of the women to another room, and the owner doesn't look as if she cares in the least.

Incredulously, Amber realizes that some of the girls—and many of the men—have tears in their eyes. Tears! Bright Amber is from a land famed for horses and women, and for men who fight bare-chested with knives, priding themselves on their scars.

She is seventeen and a half years old, has been in the White Phoenix for a little more than two years now. But honestly, she thinks, she could live among these Kitan till she was dried up like an end-of-autumn grape, bent like an ox-cart wheel, and she'd never understand them, or how the Celestial Empire dominates the world they know.

She is thinking this, outraged and aggrieved, when another man steps quietly into the room, following Lotus through the open doorway. Lotus just watches at the entrance now, greets arrivals, too old to ever be asked to go to a room with a man any more. Her hands are twisted, painful in rain and wind, she can't even play the pipa properly. Apparently she was the best of all of them, once.

Amber sees Lotus bow to this man, as low as she can, twice, as she backs out to the portico. That—of course—is the usual sign to all of them: this one is important, has money.

No one but Amber is even looking.

She runs a quick hand to her bright hair, checking the pins that hold it in place. Prepares her smile for when his gaze finds her beside the lamp.

It doesn't. He stops where he stands. His mouth opens. He stares—it is too upsetting—at the poet on his raised platform. The new arrival's expression is awed, disbelieving.

He has money to spend, Lotus has signalled it. He's young, presentable. You might even call this one handsome (unusual, deep-set eyes). Amber wants him to look at her with that dazzled expression, as she unbinds her golden hair and slowly, teasingly, discards silken clothing in a private room and kneels gracefully to attend to him.

She swears, not quietly enough. Two of the older women turn back to glare at her. Amber offers the response that makes the most sense at this particular moment: she sticks out her tongue.

In the teachings of the Path, beliefs to which he'd tried, erratically, to adhere, Tai knew that coincidence, the fortuitous encounter, was to be accepted with composure.

If grim and unpleasant, such moments were properly understood as tasks, lessons one was meant to master. If benevolent, they were gifts to be humbly received.

Sometimes there was no obvious tilt towards one side or other of that balancing, there was simply a moment, an event, that startled in its unexpectedness.

Regarding these, there was a dispute among teachers. Some said the wayfarer's task was to interpret the meaning of the moment as best he could, and respond appropriately. Others taught that there were moments in a life that did not admit of understanding until long after. At such times, they counselled, one was merely to experience, and strive towards comprehension in the fullness of time.

That Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, most beloved poet of the empire, should be in the reception hall of the White Phoenix Pleasure House of Chenyao, declaiming one of the poems Tai loved most in the world, felt—immediately—to be one of those moments that could not possibly be grasped.

There was no point even trying. Be in the room, Tai told himself. Be aware of all of this. Gather it.

Before anything else, however, it made sense to close his mouth, which was hanging open like that of a child watching fireworks at the Chrysanthemum Festival.

He took a few cautious steps forward. The women, their silks in many colours, like butterflies or flowers, were exquisitely trained in an expensive house. Perfumed deliciously, they made way for him, lingering close in subtle and less-subtle ways to read how he responded, what he liked.

Girls like these, and the wine they offered, and their flute and pipa music, had been what he'd dreamed about for two years. They almost didn't matter now.

He moved forward a little more, among other men around the platform. Merchants and soldiers, provincial bureaucrats in their belted gowns. No students, not in a border town, or a house this expensive.

Up close, there was resistance as Tai tried to get nearer to the poet. He saw a willowy girl bend, her hair swept up stylishly, the curves of her perfect breasts showing, to pour for Sima Zian as he paused between verses. He waited for her, smiled, drank off the entire cup. He hesitated, resumed:

Sima Zian paused again, lifted his cup. It was refilled from his other side, another girl, lissome as the first, her dark hair pleasingly disordered, brushing the great man's shoulder.

He smiled at her and Tai saw—for the first time, so near—the poet's notorious tiger-eyes, wide-set.

Dangerous, you might even say. Eyes that would know you, and the world. On the other hand...

The poet hiccupped, and then giggled. "Oh, dear," he said. "I have friends in Xinan... I do still have friends in Xinan... who would be disappointed in me, that this small sampling of a good wine should cause me to lose the thread of my own verse. Will someone...?"

He looked around, optimistically.

Tai heard himself, before he was aware that he was speaking:

The crowd by the raised platform parted, turning to look at him. Tai moved forward, aware that he wasn't entirely sober himself, light-headed with what he was doing, overwhelmed to be among this many people after so long alone, all these women. His gaze was met—and held—by tiger-eyes.

He stopped. Had reached the last verse.

Sima Zian smiled. No danger in it at all, only good-natured, inebriated delight.

"That was it!" he exclaimed. "Thank you, friend. And have you left the ending for me?"

Tai bowed, hand in fist; he didn't trust himself to speak. He had loved the words of this man, and the legend of him, since he'd left childhood behind.

When he straightened, a tall girl in crimson silk attached herself to his side, hip against his, a long arm lightly around his waist, head tilted to rest on his shoulder. He breathed the scent of her, felt a surge of desire, over and above and through all else.

Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, who had never held a single post in the imperial civil service, never even sat an examination, who had been banished from Xinan (as well as heaven!) three times that Tai knew about, who was reliably reported to have not been entirely sober in decades, who could nonetheless extemporize a poem, write it on the spot with immaculate brushwork, and break your heart, said softly, into the hush:

There was a further silence. Surely there would always be, Tai thought, a silence after this, everywhere. The hand around his waist lingered. There was musk in her perfume, and ambergris. Both were expensive. This really was, he thought, the best house in Chenyao, if the girls wore such scents.

"Thank you, master," he said.

Someone had to say it, he thought. Sima Zian didn't turn his head at first. He lifted a hand, holding the empty cup. The first girl moved beside him and refilled it. The poet drank it off, held it up again. The second woman, refusing to yield her rights, came forward this time.

The poet's eyes, pale and brilliant in the lamplight, finally turned to look at Tai.

"Join me," Sima Zian said, "if your mourning time is over. It must be, since you are among us. We can drink together."

Tai opened his mouth, realized he had no idea what to say.

The girl beside him pressed her head briefly against his shoulder, a reminder of her presence, a promise, and withdrew. Tai stepped up to the platform, bowed, and slipped off his own sheathed sword, laying it near the poet's. He sat opposite the other man, cross-legged. A cup was handed to him, wine was poured. He lifted the cup in salute. He decided to be careful how much he drank.

He had no idea how Sima Zian knew who he was.

The poet, seen close, was a bigger man than Tai had imagined. His long hair was mostly grey, tied at the back with a nondescript blue strip of cloth, no hairpins. His robe was stained. His face was remarkably unlined, round, flushed, and benign. The bright eyes were unsettling, however. His hands were steady, large, the fingers long.

He said, "I knew of your father, of course. His death was a loss. It has always seemed to me that the best military leaders are gentle in their souls, aware of what war means. I thought this might be true of Shen Gao."

He lifted his cup and drank. Tai did the same, cautiously.

Tai cleared his throat. It was necessary to speak, or be thought simple-minded. The two girls had withdrawn down the two steps, leaving them a space of privacy on this platform. The evening activities of the chamber had resumed. He heard pipa music begin, then a flute, and laughter; saw men and women retiring through curtained doorways.

Tai wished he were sober. He said, "Our family is honoured, of course, that you even know who he was. Or... who I am."

The pale eyes were briefly sharp, then amusement returned. "You have been long away," said the poet. "I know your brother, as well. Shen Liu is too close to the first minister not to be known... and judged."

Tai said, "Judged, but not admired?"

Sima Zian grinned again. A smile seemed to be his natural expression. "Not by all. The same is true, of course, of the first minister himself. We live in challenging times. Assessments are going to be made."

Tai looked quickly around. Only the two girls with their wine were in possible range of hearing this.

The poet laughed. "You are concerned for me? What would Wen Zhou do? Exile me from Xinan again? He would like to, I suspect. So would others. It was decided by friends who care for me that this might be a good summer to absent myself from the capital. That's why I'm drinking in a pleasure house in the west. In part."

A deliberate pause, an obvious invitation. Taking it, Tai murmured, "In part?"

That laughter again, uninhibited, infectious—though Tai was not in a state to share amusement. "The prefect was kind enough to tell me of your arrival, over dinner this evening. He mentioned that you'd inquired about where the best courtesan house in town might be. A sensible query. I wanted to meet you."

"I am... I am humbled..." Tai heard himself stammering.

"No," said Sima Zian. "Not after that lake beyond borders. What you did there." His wide gaze was suddenly direct.

Tai nodded, a single awkward bob of the head. He felt flushed. Wine and the room's warmth, the intensity of the eyes holding his.

The poet murmured:

The lines were well known. Zian had written them himself for a friend, years ago. Another poet, older, now gone.

Tai lowered his eyes. "You do me too much honour."

Sima Zian shook his head. "No," he said again. "I do not." Then, quietly, "Do you see ghosts here tonight?"

It was a real question. Tai was startled, looked at the other man and then away. Zian held up his cup and one of the women came forward. She gestured at Tai's and he shook his head. The poet made a face.

Tai tried to ignore that. He said, "I never saw them. At Kuala Nor."

"Heard?"

Tai nodded, more slowly. "Every night. Once... once only, by day." Last afternoon, sun going down. A wind that was not wind.

"Are they angry?"

The girl had stepped back down again, with the wine.

This was difficult. "Some of them. Others are lost. Or in pain."

The poet looked away this time. At length, he shook his head. "Did you ever write about it?"

"How did you know that I...?"

The smile again, more gently. "You were studying for the examinations, I understand, when your father died. All of you write poetry, son of Shen Gao."

"Or we try," Tai amended. "I had paper and ink. Wrote little I judged worth keeping. I am not equal to their story."

"Perhaps none of us are."

Tai drew a breath. "What else did the prefect tell you?"

He wanted, he badly wanted, a man he could trust. He wanted it to be this man.

Sima Zian hesitated for the first time. Then, "He did inform me about your Sardians, the Heavenly Horses. The princess's gift."

"I see," said Tai.

It was too large a tale to keep, he thought. Every man who heard it would tell.

"They will probably know in Xinan soon," the poet added.

"I hope so. I sent word ahead."

The eyes were thoughtful. "Because?"

"The horses are being held for me at the border. The gift is revoked if I do not claim them myself."

"Clever," the other man said, after a moment. "It might save your life." He didn't smile now.

"A Taguran captain thought of it."

Tai wasn't sure why he'd said that.

"A friend, clearly."

"I think so. While we're at peace."

"Ah. You believe we might not be?"

Tai shook his head, suddenly uneasy. "I've been away two years. I have no information. What should I know?"

Abruptly, he lifted his cup. It seemed he did want another drink. The poet waited until a girl had come with wine and withdrawn, slender and young, in wine-coloured silk that rustled as she moved.

Sima Zian's gaze drifted across the crowded, lamplit room, came back to Tai. "As to saving your life," he murmured, under the music, "don't look away from me, but is there a chance uncivilized men would be here with ill intent towards you?"

His voice was relaxed, almost lazy, as if they were discussing poetry or world affairs.

"It is possible," Tai said carefully. He felt his heart beginning to hammer. Kept his gaze on the poet's.

"Even with that message you sent ahead? The loss of the horses should you die? Of course, they might be here for me."

"Truly?"

The poet shrugged. He was deceptively broad-shouldered; the softness hid it. "Unlikely. I offended the prime minister and the chief eunuch in the same room, which is difficult, but I don't believe it was a deadly insult for either. Remind me to tell you the story later."

"I will," said Tai. Later. That meant something, didn't it?

He cleared his throat. It took some effort not to look around. He made a decision. He would acknowledge, after, that some of it had to do with the sense of the person that came through in the poetry, and that this might not be a sound basis for judging a man. Nonetheless: "There was an assassin sent west for me, before the gift of the horses was known."

Sima Zian's expression changed again. Watching him, Tai saw curiosity and then—unexpectedly—a hint of pleasure.

"You killed him?"

It was widely reported that the poet had been an itinerant warrior in his youth, two horses, two swords and a bow, sleeping in caves or under stars, defending peasants against landlords and tax collectors like one of the hero-bandits of folk tales. There were stories—legends, really—about his deeds along the Great River in the wild country by the gorges.

"It was a woman," Tai said. "But, no, I didn't. She was killed by the Tagurans and... and the ghosts."

You had to trust some people in life.

The poet considered this, then: "Look now! Near the door. Do you know them?"

Tai turned. There were two men to the left of the entranceway. They were in profile, engaged by three girls. Neither man was dressed for an evening in the pleasure district, let alone the best house there. Their boots and clothing were dusty and stained. They carried two swords each. One of them glanced over his shoulder just then—directly at Tai. Their gazes met, the man flicked his eyes away. It was enough, however. They were here for him.

He looked back at the poet. "I don't know them."

Sima Zian said, "They know you." The poet gestured to the girl whose turn it was with their wine. "Sweet joy, are those two often here?" he asked, indicating with his chin. "Are they ever here?"

She was a composed young woman. Would have stature among the girls, to have been chosen to serve the poet. Her glance towards the door was brief, appraising. She poured the wine and murmured, "I have never seen them." She made a disapproving face. "They are not dressed suitably."

"Not at all," Zian agreed cheerfully. He looked at Tai, a brightness in those eyes now. He stretched, like a big cat. "I wouldn't mind a fight. Shall we kill them together?"

"I could ask the mistress to have them escorted out," said the girl, quickly, "if they distress you, my lord."

The proper thing to say. Fights were bad for a pleasure house. Killing was, obviously, worse. The poet made a face, but nodded reluctantly, was in the process of agreeing, when Tai spoke.

He heard the anger in his own voice, sharp, like the spikes of an assault ram breaking through a gate. He was tired of being acted upon: threatened, attacked, treated as an object of malice—or even apparent benevolence—with no resources of his own. No chance to shape his own course. He did have resources in Chenyao tonight, and not just his sword.

"No," he said. "Be so good as to go out to the governor's sedan chair in front. Advise the soldiers there that two men are inside with ill intent towards me, and that this threatens the Second Military District, the governor's authority, and the security of the empire. I would like them detained and questioned. I wish to know who sent them. I will await the governor's answer later tonight at my inn. Can you do that?"

The girl smiled. It was a slightly cruel smile. She set down the wine flask on a low table. "Of course I can, my lord," she murmured. She bowed to him, withdrawing. "Please excuse a brief absence."

She walked down the two steps and crossed to the entrance. They watched her go. Her movements were graceful, unhurried.

"I believe," said Sima Zian thoughtfully, "that one would make a memorable companion."

Tai found himself nodding.

"Do you know the military governor yet? Xu Bihai will not be gentle with them," said the poet.

"I met him tonight," Tai said. "Not by my own choice. And so I believe you. I need to know these things, however." He hesitated.

"The assassin who came to the lake? She killed the friend of mine she guided west under the pretext of serving him. I buried him at Kuala Nor."

"A soldier?" asked Sima Zian.

Anger still, sorrow returning.

"Nothing like. A scholar taking the examinations with me. A man without harm in him."

The poet shook his head. "I am sorry to learn of it. We live in troubled times."

Tai said, "He was coming to tell me something. Came all that way to do it. She killed him before he could."

A clattering from near the doorway. They turned. Six soldiers entered the White Phoenix.

There was a stir, but not an unduly disruptive one. The room was crowded and large. Men came in and went out all the time. The girl, who had come back with the soldiers, pointed to the two men Zian had noted.

They were approached. A brief, intense conversation ensued. One of the two went—foolishly—for his sword.

He was carried out a moment later, unconscious. The other man was hustled through the doorway between soldiers. It had only taken a moment. The music and laughter from the other side of the room hadn't even paused. Two girls were dancing, a flute was being played.

This, Tai thought grimly, was the way of life in cities. An assault could occur in a public place and not even be noticed. He needed to remember this, relearn it. Xinan would be more of the same, and infinitely worse. The dust of the world.

Sima Zian had turned back to look at him.

"I'd have enjoyed a fight," the poet said.

"I believe you." Tai forced a smile.

"It is unlikely those two can tell them anything. You do know that?"

"Because?"

"If this is from Xinan, from power, there will be many people between the order and those sent to execute it."

Tai shook his head. He was still angry. Too much wine, too much helplessness, and the memory, the image, of Chou Yan.

"Perhaps," he said. "Perhaps not so many people, if this is being kept quiet for whatever reason."

Zian grinned happily. "For someone without any rank and two years away from the world, you know more about such things than you should."

Tai shrugged. "My father. And my older brother advises the prime minister, as you noted."

"He does do that, doesn't he?" said the poet thoughtfully. "An honour for your family."

"A great honour."

He knew his voice didn't match the words, and that the other man would hear it.

Sima Zian said, softly, "If these two are in Chenyao looking for you, they'll have been given their orders some time ago. To watch for you coming back east. Probably in the event the assassin by the lake should have failed."

The voice of his own thought.

He stared at the other man. "I still don't know why anyone would have wanted me dead. Before the horses."

The poet did not smile. "I do," he said.

In the dense, canopied forests along the Great River, gibbons swung and shrieked at the boats bobbing and spinning east with the current or being pulled upstream along the gorges. Birds wheeled, crying, above the water and the crags. Tigers lived among the trees and killed men in the dark, should they be foolish enough to be abroad at night.

It was easy to see a tiger in the wide eyes holding his, Tai thought. For all the wit and worldliness of the poet, there was also something feral, a link to the wilderness that lay outside the walled and guarded cities. Sima Zian had been a bandit, on rivers and roads, never entirely a part of court or courtesan district.

You could see it.

The poet smiled again, compassion in his face now. But tigers weren't like that, Tai thought. They never looked kind. You are going to have to do better with your images, he told himself. There was too much complexity here for a jungle cat.

The other man said, gently, "You came here for a woman, I must imagine. It has to have been a long time, and that is not good for any man, let alone one with hard decisions to make. Go upstairs, Shen Tai. I will do the same. Make use of tonight, because you can. Let us meet here a little later. We will both be the better for it, then we can decide what we will do with what I have to tell you."

What we will do.

Tai cleared his throat. "I... whatever this is, it is surely not your trouble, or task."

The smile deepened. "Call it wisdom in the cup, if you like, which is not always wisdom, as we know. But I have lived my days making decisions this way and I am too old to change. Poetry, friendship, wine. The essence of a man's life. And then there is..."

The poet rose, smoothly enough, but he swayed a little when upright.

He looked down at Tai. Spread his feet a little. Rumpled, food-stained, greying hair inadequately tied. The wide eyes afire, though. He said, "You will know the passage: There is another world / That is not the world of men."

He looked around unsteadily for the girl they'd sent to carry the message. She was beside him already. She bent, took his sword, handed it to him. She said, with a slow smile of her own, "Though it is your other sword I want now, my lord, in all truth."

Sima Zian laughed aloud, and went with her down the two steps and then from the room through the nearest of the curtained doorways.

Tai sat a moment longer, then stood, uncertainly, claiming his own sheathed sword as he rose.

A scent was beside him in that same moment, musk, ambergris. A slender hand at his waist again. He looked at her. Crimson silk.

Her hair was gathered with pins of ivory and jade, some of it artfully allowed to fall.

"I have been patient," she murmured. "Not without distress."

He gazed at her. She was as beautiful to him just then as moonlight on a high meadow, as the Weaver Maid herself, as everything he remembered about the grace and mystery of women, and she did not have golden hair.

"I may not be as patient," he said, hearing the change in his voice. Her expression altered, a darker note in the dark eyes. "That will please me, too," she said. His pulse responded. "Please honour my need and come upstairs, my lord."

Pipa music, quiet singing, flutes. Laughter and talk in a carefully lit room fading behind him, behind them, as she led him up the stairs to a room with a very wide bed and lamps already burning, lit by servants, flickering light waiting for them (for whoever it was who came), incense on a brazier, a window open to catch the late-spring breeze. There was a pipa on a table.

"Shall I play for you, my lord?"

"After," Tai said.

And took her in his arms with hunger and need, with fear beneath those, and an urgency that came from all of these and found its centre in the rich red of her mouth tasting his and the slipping down of silk as she let it fall and stood before him, jewelled at ears and throat, wrists and fingers and ankles, the lamplight playing with and over the beauty of her body.

He had a sense, even as she began to disrobe him and then drew him to her upon the bed, that after this, after he went back downstairs, his life would change yet again, as much as it had when the horses were given to him. And therein lay his fear.

She was skilled and clever, unhurried, intricately versed in what it was that women were to do here, and to know about men and their needs (hidden or otherwise), in a house this well appointed. She made him laugh, more than once, and catch his breath in quick surprise, and draw breath sharply (he saw her smile then), and cry aloud, both times she took him to, and through, the long-deferred crescendo of desire.

She washed him after, using water from a basin on the table. She murmured the words of a very old folk verse as she did, and her movements were languid, replete, slow as aftermath should be. And then she did play for him, quietly, upon the pipa left in the room, bringing him back with all of these, movement by movement, mouth, fingers, fingernails, with whispers in his ear of shocking things and subtle things and, finally, with music—back from Kuala Nor to the world.

At length, Tai made himself get up. He clothed himself again as she watched, still naked on the bed, posed artfully to let him see her to best effect in the muted light, breasts, belly, the dark, inviting place between her thighs. She would attend to herself, come downstairs after him, that was the way it was done properly.

He finished dressing, found his sword, bowed to her, which was something Chou Yan had initiated among their circle: a tribute to the woman, even when one didn't know her name and might never see her again, if she had given of herself beyond expectation and reached to needs held deep within. He saw that she was surprised.

He went out of the room and down the stairs towards the next change of his life.

The poet was on the platform, same place, likely the same cup in his hand. The two girls were there again. He wondered idly if they'd both been with him upstairs. Probably, he thought.

The room was quiet now. It was late, and though the pleasure districts never really stopped in any city, the mood would change as night deepened. The best houses let some of the lanterns go out in their reception rooms, the ambience grow gentler, the music softer and sometimes even melancholy, for men could take a kind of pleasure in sadness, remembrance of loves long ago or the days of their youth. Someone was singing "The Windmill Above My Village," which was only played late and made some listeners cry.

He placed his sword where it had been before, and sat opposite the poet again. The taller of the two girls came forward with a cup for him, poured wine, withdrew. Tai drank. He looked at the other man, waiting.

"It is about your sister," said Sima Zian.