Under Heaven

CHAPTER XV

He woke from another dream that escaped him, slipping away like a salmon from his childhood grasp in a cold river. Awareness of morning came.

It was not a dream of a fox-woman, not this time. No desire, no sense of desire spent. Instead, wistfulness, loss, as if something, someone, was leaving, was already gone, like the dream itself. A path in life, a person, a shape to the world? All of these?

I am powerless to amend a broken world.

It occurred to him, still half asleep, that the way Chan Du had phrased that celebrated grief, it suggested other worlds than this. Others that might need mending—or amending. The two words were not the same, Tai thought, though they glided into each other, in the way the best poetry did.

Then that thought, too, fled from him as a rapping came at his door, and Tai understood that he had heard it already, asleep, that it was the knocking that had awakened him, sending the dream away down the river of night with the moon.

He glanced over. The second bed was empty, had not been occupied—as usual, although the poet's manner had been sombre when Tai had left him after their talk last night.

Wei Song and two of the soldiers had been in the courtyard when he'd crossed it to go to bed. They'd walked him to the door of his room. It was clear they were going to stay outside. Three guards now. Roshan had warned him to be cautious. Tai hadn't told that to Song but she'd made changes anyhow. He'd said nothing, not even a good night.

Another knocking. Not imperative or demanding. But it was also—he knew this from the courtesy of that sound—not his Kanlin summoning him.

From outside came a voice, carefully pitched, exquisitely cultured: "Honourable Shen Tai, be so gracious as to acknowledge a humble servant's presence and request."

Tai sat up in bed. "You haven't made any request, and I don't know whose presence I am acknowledging."

"I bow twice in shame. Forgive me, noble sir. My name is too unworthy to be offered. But I am entrusted with the office of second steward in the household of the Shining and Exalted Companion. You are invited to present your honourable self."

"She is here?"

The steward said, with the faintest hint of asperity, "No, no, she is at Ma-wai. We are sent to bring you there, with all courtesy."

Tai began dressing very quickly.

It was beginning. You could say it had begun by Kuala Nor, when Bytsan sri Nespo had brought him a letter. Or at Chenyao, when the governor of the Second and Third Military Districts had sought to claim him and his horses, had even sent a daughter to him at night. A sign, in silk, of what might come.

You could say there never was a clear beginning to anything in life, unless it was the moment you drew your first breath in the world.

Or you could say it was beginning now.

Because the Shining and Exalted Companion was also called Precious Consort and Beloved Companion, and her name was Wen Jian. The court hadn't waited for him to get to Xinan. It had come for him.

He splashed water on his face at the basin. Tied his hair hastily and then did it again to marginally better effect. Rubbed his teeth with a finger. Used the chamber pot. Put his swords on, his boots.

He went to the door. Just before opening it, a thought occurred.

"Wei Song, please report."

Silence. Tai drew a breath. He truly didn't want a confrontation here, but...

"Steward, where is my Kanlin guard?"

On the other side of the door, the steward cleared his throat. His voice was as smooth as before, however. "The Shining and Exalted Companion is not always enamoured of Kanlin Warriors, my lord."

"Not everyone is. What does that have to do with the present circumstance?"

"Your guard was assertive in trying to prevent us from knocking at your door."

"As was her duty, since I was asleep. Once more: where is she?"

A hesitation. "She is here, of course."

"Then why is she not answering me?"

"I... do not know, my lord."

Tai knew. "Steward, unless Wei Song is released by those holding her, and until she speaks to me, I am not opening my door to you. I have no doubt you can break it down, but you did speak of respect, and of courtesy. I expect both."

This was not the mildest way to begin a day. He heard quick, low speech outside. He waited.

"Master Shen," he heard her say, finally. "I am shamed. I could not prevent them from disturbing your rest." They would have been holding her. She would have refused to speak until she was free.

He opened the door.

He took in the scene before him. The steward was bowing. There were a dozen soldiers in the courtyard's morning light. Two of them had wounds: one was on the ground, being attended to, another was upright but holding a hand to a bleeding side. Both, he saw with relief, looked as if they would be all right. Song stood among them with her own swords removed from her. They lay beside her. Her head was lowered.

She had, evidently, fought imperial soldiers for him. He saw his other two guards of the night. They were kneeling to one side, unharmed.

Tai's soldiers, far outnumbering these new arrivals, were standing in the middle of the courtyard. But the difference in numbers was meaningless. This steward was leading men of the imperial guard of the Emperor Taizu, might he rule a thousand years in joy upon the Phoenix Throne. These were elite soldiers of the Ta-Ming Palace. You didn't fight them, or deny them anything, unless you were keen to have your head on a spear at the city gates.

Tai saw the poet among his own soldiers. Zian didn't seem amused or curious this morning. He looked concerned and alert, though rumpled as ever: hair untied, belt askew.

There was a crowd in the courtyard beyond all of these. Gathered, early of a morning to see what was happening, why a company from the court was here. Who it was they had come to seize, or summon, or honour.

The second son of General Shen Gao, once Left Side Commander of the Pacified West, said, carefully, "Steward, you do me too much honour."

The man straightened from his bow, a practised movement. He was older than Tai, had little hair, just fringes at the sides. He affected a thin moustache, likely a fashion. No sword. The black robe of a civil servant, red belt of rank, key of office dangling at his waist.

The steward bowed again, fist in palm this time, in response to Tai's words. They were doing this very formally, Tai thought. It made him nervous.

He had a sudden image in his mind, vivid as a master-painting, of the mountains ringing Kuala Nor in springtime, rising up, and up. No men to be seen, just birds, mountain goats and sheep on the slopes, and the lake below.

He shook his head. He looked to his left, and saw a sedan chair waiting for him. He blinked. It was dazzling. It gleamed in the sunlight. It made Roshan's carriage yesterday look like a farmer's market cart.

There was gold adorning the four pillars. The rods the bearers would hold were banded in ivory and onyx, and he was fairly certain, even from here, that the wood was sandalwood. The curtains were heavy, worked silk, with the phoenix symbol, and they were yellow, which only the emperor's household could use. Kingfisher feathers were everywhere, iridescent, shimmering. Too many of them; an opulence that was almost an assault if you knew how rare they were, brought from how far, what they would have cost.

He saw jade decorations at the cross pieces, top and bottom, of the curtained cabin on the rods. White jade and pale-green and dark-green. The rods were long enough for eight bearers, not four, or six, and there were eight men standing by, expressionless, to carry him to Ma-wai.

He had tried, vainly in the event, to keep some control, some distance yesterday when An Li had summoned him beside the road. He tried again.

"Wei Song, reclaim your weapons and make arrangements for Dynlal to be saddled." He glanced at the steward. "I prefer to ride. I will be grateful for your escort, however."

The steward looked utterly composed, his expression formally regretful. "I fear your Kanlin cannot be permitted arms. She drew upon the imperial household guard. She must, of course, be punished."

Tai shook his head. "That is not acceptable. She was under orders that my night not be disturbed. There have been—I imagine your mistress knows this—attempts upon my life. If I die, the empire suffers a great loss. And I am not referring to my own unworthy life."

The slightest hint of unease in the man's smooth face, adjustments being made. "Even so, my lord, it remains that she—"

"She did exactly what she was ordered to do in the interests of Kitai and her current master. I am curious, second steward, did your soldiers explain their purpose? Did they invite her to knock at the door and address me?"

A silence. He turned to Song.

"Wei Song, report: were these things done?"

Her head was high now. "I regret it was not so, my lord. They came up on the portico, ignored requests to stop. Ignored requests for an explanation. This one, the steward, went straight to your door."

"Surely you saw their imperial livery?"

"My lord, livery can be a disguise. It is a known device. Men have been slain through that artifice. And the sedan chair did not arrive until after I had engaged the soldiers. I am shamed and sorry to have caused you distress. I will, of course, accept any punishment due to me."

"None is due," Tai said flatly. "Steward, I will make answer to your mistress for my servant, but I will not accompany you willingly if she is in any way harmed, or impeded from guarding me."

"Soldiers have been injured," the steward repeated.

"So was she," Tai said.

It was true. He saw blood on Song's shoulder, a rip in her tunic. She would be, he thought, more distressed at being defeated (by a dozen of the best-trained soldiers in the Ta-Ming) than anything else. He let his voice grow cold. "If there is anyone who can confirm the report she has offered, I daresay the fault—and the punishment—does not lie with my guard, and I will say as much at Ma-wai." He lifted his voice. "Sima Zian, will you be good enough to assist?"

It was useful sometimes to have a celebrated name to bring into a conversation, and see what ensued. In a different time and place, he might have been amused.

The steward wheeled, stumbling, as if caught in a swirl of wind. He spied the poet, who had obligingly stepped forward to be spied. The steward achieved two bows with speed, but his composure was clearly shaken.

Zian smiled genially. "I do not believe, to my great distress, that the Lady Wen Jian is fond of me this spring. I would be honoured and grateful to have the chance to express my respect for her, should the opportunity arise."

He'd hinted to this effect, Tai remembered, in their first conversation. A reason he'd left Xinan.

"Master Sima," the steward spluttered. "This is unexpected! To find you in the... in the company of Master Shen Gao, er, Shen Tai."

"Poets turn up in strange places. I was here this morning to see your soldiers refuse a request to explain themselves at Master Shen's doorway. I believe a Kanlin must respond to that refusal, by the code of their order. Han Chung of the Seventh Dynasty has a verse on the subject, praising their dedication. The poem was a favourite of the glorious emperor's illustrious father, now with the gods and his ancestors. Perhaps he is even listening to Han Chung recite in one of the nine heavens." Zian lifted a hand piously. "We can only hope, amid the dust and noise of the world, that it might be so."

Tai felt an impulse to laugh, so befuddled did the steward look.

He schooled his features. He said, as gravely as he could, "Steward, I am accompanied by the illustrious Master Sima, by a Kanlin guard, and by a company of soldiers personally assigned to my command by Governor Xu Bihai. I will ride among them. I am humbled by your mistress's invitation to attend upon her and will make my way to Ma-wai immediately. Would you do me the honour of riding with us?"

He said it loudly, he wanted people to hear.

From this point forward, he thought, a great deal of what happened would be for display—positions, and posturing. He knew that much about the court.

The steward of Wen Jian knew more, of course. But the man seemed acutely uncomfortable now. He cleared his throat again, shifted his feet. An awkward silence descended. He seemed to be waiting. For what, Tai didn't know.

"Ride with me," Tai repeated. "There has been a minor embarrassment here, nothing of consequence. I will happily tell your mistress that you were properly zealous in her cause."

"Master Shen, your entirely unworthy servant begs forgiveness. It was not considered that you might decline the sedan chair. It is known that you are attached to your horse and we wished to ensure it came safely with us. Some of our soldiers took it already this morning, from the stables here. They are to meet us at Ma-wai. Of course no harm will come to—"

"You took my horse?"

Tai felt a hard pulsing at his temples. He was aware that Wei Song had reclaimed her weapons, just below him in the courtyard. The imperial soldiers made no movement to stop her. Zian stepped forward to stand beside her. The poet's face was cold now, the wide eyes watchful.

Tai said, to Song, "Dynlal was guarded?"

"As always, my lord," she replied.

The steward cleared his throat again. This morning's encounter had not, quite evidently, unfolded as he had expected it to. "Two of the three men by the horse, I understand, were prompt to stand aside, as was proper, given who we are."

"And the third?" said Tai.

"The third, I greatly regret, also elected to draw blade upon officers of the imperial palace guard."

"Defending my Sardian horse—a gift from the Princess Cheng-wan! As he'd been instructed to do. Steward, where is he?"

Another silence.

"I am informed that he unfortunately succumbed to wounds incurred, my lord. May I offer my regrets? And the hope that the passing of a nameless soldier will not—"

Tai threw up both hands, fingers spread, palms outward, compelling silence. It was a gesture of force, arrogance, a superior stilling an underling—in public. Even as he did it he was trying to sort through if he did carry rank against this man. Tai was a middle-level, purely symbolic military officer, but also an honoured general's son and—importantly—younger brother to the prime minister's principal adviser.

But this steward, in the red-belted black robe of a mandarin of the eighth degree, high in the household of the Beloved Companion, outranked him by any and all possible—

No. He didn't. And that was why the man bowed yet again, instead of snarling in outrage at Tai's gesture. The steward knew.

Tai was, over and above all other possible truths and alignments and ranks, brother to royalty now. To Li-Mei. Princess Li-Mei, elevated into the imperial family before being sent north in marriage.

In Kitai, in the Ninth Dynasty of the Emperor Taizu, that relationship mattered. It mattered so much. It was why Liu had done what he'd done, sacrificing a sister to his ambition.

And it was why Tai could stand here, hands thrust forward to silence another man, and see a Ta-Ming Palace mandarin stand abashed before him.

Through clenched teeth, fighting anger (rage could undo him here, he needed to think), Tai said, "He is not nameless. His name was Wujen Ning. A soldier of the Second District army posted to Iron Gate Fortress, assigned by his commander to guard me and my horse, serving the emperor by obeying the orders of his officers, including myself."

He was trying, even as he spoke, to remember the man, his features, words. But Wujen Ning had never said anything Tai could recall. He'd simply been there, always near Dynlal. A worried-looking, gap-toothed expression came to mind, thinning hair exposing a high forehead. Sloped shoulders, or maybe not... Tai was relieved he'd remembered the name. Had been able to offer it to this courtyard assembly, to the gods.

He said, "Steward, I await the formal response of office to the killing of a soldier and the theft of my horse."

Theft was a strong word. He was too angry. He saw Zian glance at him, lips pursed together, as if urging caution.

Then—a small motion in a crowded courtyard—he saw something else. Discreet as the movement was, it seemed as if every man and woman (girls from the music pavilion had come out by now) in that open space in morning light saw the same thing, and responded to it as if a dancing master had trained them all.

A hand appeared through the silk curtain of the sedan chair.

It gestured to the steward, two slowly curled fingers.

There were rings on those fingers, Tai saw, and the fingernails were painted red. Then he was on his knees, head to the ground. So was everyone in the courtyard except her guards, and the steward.

Tai allowed himself to glance cautiously up and look, heart pounding, mind askew. The steward bowed three times then walked slowly across to the curtained chair as if towards his own beheading.

Tai watched the man listen to whatever was being said to him from within. The steward stepped aside, bowed again, expressionless. The hand reappeared through yellow silk and beckoned a second time, exactly the same way, two fingers, but this time to Tai.

Everything had changed. She was here herself, after all.

Tai stood. Offered the same triple bow the steward had. He said, quietly, to Song and Zian, "Stay with me if you possibly can. We won't be going quickly in that. I'll do my best to ensure your safety, and the soldiers'."

"We aren't in danger," Sima Zian said, still kneeling. "We'll be at Ma-wai, one way or another."

"Master Shen," he heard his Kanlin say. Her expression was odd, looking up at him. "Be careful. She is more dangerous than a fox-woman."

He knew she was. Tai took the steps down from the portico, crossed the dusty courtyard through a crowd of kneeling people, and found himself beside the curtained sedan chair.

He said loudly, looking at the steward, and at the captain of the imperial escort beside him, "I give my companions into your protection. If my horse is missing or harmed I lay that upon you both." The officer nodded, standing straight as a banner pole. The steward was pale.

Tai looked at the closed curtain. His mouth was dry. The captain gestured at Tai's swords and boots. He removed them. The steward pulled the curtain back, just enough. Tai entered. The curtain of the sedan chair fell closed with a rustling sound. He found himself enveloped by scent in a softened, silk-filtered light that seemed to not be entirely of the world he'd just left.

It wasn't, of course. It wasn't the same world in here.

He looked at her. At Wen Jian.

He had known lovely women in his life, some of them very recently. The false Kanlin who'd come to kill him by the lake had been icily beautiful, cold as Kuala Nor. The daughters of Xu Bihai were exquisite, the older one even more than that. Spring Rain was golden and glorious, celebrated for it. The preferred courtesans in the best houses in the North District were lovely as flowers: the students wrote poems for them, listened to their singing, watched them dance, followed them up jade stairs.

None of these women, none of them, were what this one was in the brightness of what she offered. And she wasn't even dancing now. She sat opposite, leaning upon cushions, gazing at Tai appraisingly, enormous eyes beneath shaped eyebrows.

He had seen her from a distance, in Long Lake Park, at festival ceremonies with the emperor and court in their elevated place on a Ta-Ming balcony, removed from ordinary men and women, above them, nearer heaven.

She wasn't removed from him here, she was annihilatingly close, and they were alone. And one small, bare, high-arched foot seemed to be touching the outside of his thigh very lightly, as if it had drifted there, all unawares.

Tai swallowed hard. Jian smiled, took her time assessing him, utterly at ease.

An entire courtyard of people at an imperial posting station had seen him enter this sedan chair. A man could be killed for being alone with the emperor's beloved. Unless that man was a eunuch, or—an abrupt thought—was made into one as an alternative to having his throat cut. Tai tried to find a safe place to rest his gaze. Light came gently through silk.

She said, "I am pleased. You are handsome enough. It is better when men are pleasant to look upon, don't you agree?"

He said nothing. What did you say to this? He lowered his head. Her foot moved against his thigh, as if idly, a restlessness. She curled her toes. He felt it. Desire was within him. He worked fiercely to suppress it. Head down, avoiding those eyes, he saw that her toenails were painted a deep red, almost purple. There was nowhere safe to look. And with every breath he caught the scent she wore.

He made himself look up. Her mouth was full and wide, her face heart-shaped, skin flawless, and the silk of her thin blue summer gown, patterned in a soft yellow like the curtains, was cut low. He saw an ivory pendant in the shape of a tiger between the rich curves of her breasts.

She was twenty-one years old, from a well-known family in the south. Had come to Xinan to be married at sixteen to a prince of the imperial family, the eighteenth son.

Then the ever-glorious Emperor Taizu, her husband's father, had seen her dance one night in the palace to the music of a flute (the story was very well known) and the course of her life and the empire's course had been altered forever by the time the music and the dancing stopped.

The pious had declared (quietly) that what followed was a profanation of marriage and family. The eighteenth son accepted a larger mansion, another wife, and exquisite concubines. Time passed at court, pleasantly. There was music in the palace and at Ma-wai and a woman danced for the emperor. Poets began to write of four great beauties.

The empress was invited to follow her own clear inclination towards devotion and withdraw to a retreat outside Xinan and the palace, to enfold her life in prayer.

Tai's sister had gone with her. He used that quick image of Li-Mei—brave and bright—to bring him back from what felt, truly, like intoxication. There was, he thought, no wine in the world like the presence of this woman. There might be a poem in that, it occurred to him.

Someone had probably written it.

He said, as the chair was lifted and they began to move, "My lady, your servant is too greatly honoured by this."

She laughed. "Of course you are. You won't be killed for being here, if you are thinking about that. I told the emperor last night I intended to come and bring you myself. Will you take a lychee? I can peel it for you, Master Shen Tai. We could even share it. Do you know the most enjoyable way to share lychee fruit?"

She leaned forward, as if inclined to show him right then. He said nothing. He had no words, no idea what to say.

She laughed at him again, the eyebrows arched. She regarded him another moment. Nodded her head, as if a thought was confirmed. "You reminded me of your brother when you held your hands up to my steward just now. Power hidden behind courtesy."

Tai looked at her. "We are not very like, my lady. You believe he shows power?"

"Liu? Of course he does. But carefully," said Wen Jian. She smiled. "You say you are greatly honoured. But you are also angry. Why are you angry with me, my lord?" She didn't have to call him that. The foot moved again, unmistakably.

She would use her beauty, any man's desire for her, as an agency, a weapon, he told himself. Her long neck was set off by golden earrings to her shoulders, set with pearls, the weight of the gold making her seem even more delicate. Her hair was coiled, but falling to one side, famously. Her own invented style, the "waterfall," copied throughout the empire now. The hairpins were jewelled, variously, and he didn't even know the names of all the gems he saw.

She laid a hand, as if carelessly, upon his calf. He caught his breath. She smiled again. She was measuring his responses, he realized.

"Why so angry?" she asked again in a voice suddenly like a child's, grieving at being punished.

He said, carefully, "One of my soldiers was killed this morning, illustrious lady. I believe you heard. A soldier of the emperor. My Kanlin guard was wounded, and two of your own men. And my Sardian horse—"

"I know it. It was uncivilized. There was violence in my presence, which is never permitted." She lifted her hand from his leg. "I have instructed my under-steward to kill himself when we reach Ma-wai."

Tai blinked, wasn't sure he'd heard correctly.

"You... he...?"

"This morning," said the Beloved Companion, "did not proceed as I wished it to. It made me unhappy." Her mouth turned downwards.

You could drown in this woman, Tai thought, and never be found again. The emperor was pursuing immortality in the palace, men said, using alchemists and the School of Unrestricted Night, where they studied the stars and asterisms in the sky for secrets of the world. Tai suddenly had a better understanding of that desire.

"Your brother," she said, "doesn't look like you."

"No," said Tai.

She was going to do this, he realized: change topics, make him keep up with her, test him that way.

"He advises my cousin," she said.

"I know this, illustrious lady."

"I don't like him," she said.

Tai was silent.

"Do you?" she asked.

"He is my brother," Tai said.

"He has measuring eyes and he never smiles," said Wen Jian. "Am I going to like you? Do you laugh?"

He took a breath, then answered more seriously than he'd thought he would. "Less often since my father died. Since going to Kuala Nor. But yes, your servant used to laugh, illustrious lady."

"In the North District? I have been told as much. You and my cousin appear to have admired the same woman there."

Treacherous ground, Tai thought. And she was doing it deliberately.

"Yes," he said.

"He has her now."

"Yes."

"Do you know how much he paid for her?"

"No, illustrious lady." How would he have known?

"A very great sum. More than he needed to. He was making a declaration, about himself."

"I see."

"I have seen her since. She is... very lovely."

He considered that pause.

He said, "There is no wine in Kitai or the world as intoxicating as the Lady Wen Jian."

The smile that brought him was a gift. He could almost believe she was flattered, a girl reacting to a well-turned compliment.

Almost. She said, "You never answered about your brother, did you? Clever man. You might survive at court. They tried to kill you?"

They. Such a dangerous word.

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

"Twice?"

He nodded again. The palace would have known this several nights ago. Xu Bihai had written, the commander at Iron Gate had sent word. She would know what the Ta-Ming knew.

"Twice, that I know about," he said.

"Was it Roshan?"

Terrifyingly direct. This was no girl-woman seduced by a turn of phrase. But he could sense apprehension, as she waited for his reply. There was, he thought, a reason she'd come to speak with him alone. This might be it.

"No," said Tai. "I am certain it wasn't."

"He persuaded you of that yesterday?"

This had become a precise interrogation—amid silk and scent, with a bare foot against his thigh.

He had been certain that a report of yesterday's encounter in the carriage by the road would reach the court, but the speed of it made him realize something, belatedly: she'd have had to travel half the night from Ma-wai to be here now. He calculated distances quickly. She'd have left almost as soon as word came of his meeting with An Li.

He didn't know what to make of that. He had never been part of the court, never even near it. He was coming from two years of solitude beyond Iron Gate.

"He did persuade me, illustrious lady."

"You believe what he told you was true?"

"I do."

She sighed. He couldn't interpret that. It might have been relief.

What he didn't say, yet, was that he knew that what Roshan had told him was true because he'd already known who had tried to kill him in the west—Spring Rain had risked her life so he could know this.

He was going to need to see her.

Jian said, "Because An Li can order men killed without a thought."

"I have no reason to doubt it, illustrious lady." He chose his words carefully.

She smiled slightly, lips together, noting his caution. "But he still made you believe him."

Tai nodded again. "Yes, my lady."

He didn't know if she wanted him to say more. It crossed his mind to consider that this questioning was being done here and in this way by a woman, the emperor's dancer-love, his late-in-life dream of eternity.

It came to Tai that this was a part of why the Ninth Dynasty might be as precarious as it was dazzling. Why Sima Zian had said what he'd said yesterday: I feel chaos coming.

This matchless creature across from him, lovely as a legend, was the cousin of the first minister and the supporter (the adopting mother!) of the man who was his rival, and she had the trust and passion of an emperor who wanted to live forever because of her.

The balance of Kitai—of the known world—might be reclining across from him. It was, Tai thought, a great burden to lay upon slender shoulders.

He sat there, the sedan chair moving steadily along the road, breathing perfume in an enclosed, intimate place removed from the ten thousand noises of the world, and he waited for the next question. The one that could plunge him—all of them—into the chaos Zian feared.

It wasn't Roshan? Who was it, then? she was going to ask him.

She never did. Either she knew already, or she was afraid to know, or to have it said aloud. Be brought into the world, compelling a response. Her hand lifted from his calf where it had been resting again. She selected a lychee from a bowl beside her, peeled it expertly.

She extended it towards him.

"Please," said Wen Jian.

Tai took the ripe, slippery fruit from her fingers. It tasted like the south, and summer, like memories of sweetness lost.

That last, he realized, was what he was feeling. Something slipping away, almost gone. Yesterday's encounter by the road and now this one. Both of them coming to meet him on the way. Entirely different encounters but also the same at their core. Power approaching, to know what he was going to do. Needing to know, because power always needed that—knowledge was how power preserved itself, or tried.

He had set out from a mountain bowl, the battleground his father had never left behind, determined to reach Xinan to do... to do what, precisely?

He had never decided, he'd been moving too fast.

Kill a man, he'd told the poet yesterday, as an answer for Yan's death. But Xin Lun was dead already. No fault of Tai's, no achievement of his, no credit to his name with Yan's ghost by the lake. And Lun had only been an instrument.

What else? What else had he been racing here to do, straight down the imperial road past the cut-off south that could have taken him home? Deal with the horses, somehow, that life-claiming gift.

Life-claiming. The thought reverberated strangely in his mind. Tai hadn't lived a life where enemies, on a murderous scale, had played any kind of role. But the first minister wanted him dead. On a whim, most likely. Because he could. Wen Zhou, who was this woman's kin, holding office because of her.

He looked at Jian, across from him. She had peeled her own lychee and, as he gazed, placed it delicately between her front teeth and bit down. Tai shook his head, then smiled. He had to smile, she was so obviously playing with her own desirability.

"Oh, good!" she said. She licked her lips, glistening with the fruit. "This will be a tedious journey if you are serious all the time."

The back and forth of it, he thought. Hard questions, ripe fruit bitten, a slow tongue tracing wet lips, a foot or fingers touching him, conjuring desire. Then the questions would come again.

In that moment, Tai arrived at a decision. It seemed obvious enough, and it had the virtue of simplicity. He'd only needed to finally grasp something: that he could never be subtle enough to match those waiting for him. He didn't have time to know enough, or gain an awareness of relationships, at a level that would let him move with these men and women to their music. He wouldn't even hear the notes they heard.

He wasn't able to probe for what they knew or wanted, play the game of words spoken and unspoken with the court and the higher civil servants and even some of the governors, in and around the Ta-Ming Palace and the emperor.

He would be among them today. And he couldn't learn that rhythm, not in the time he had. So he wouldn't even try. He'd go another way, like a holy wanderer of the Sacred Path choosing at a fork in the road, following his own truth, a hermit laughing in the mountains.

Tai drew a breath. He said, "I offered the horses to Governor An yesterday."

She stared, sat up straighter. Carefully put down an unpeeled lychee she'd just picked from the bowl.

"All of them?"

He nodded. "But I had a condition, and he declined."

"An Li rejected two hundred and fifty Sardian horses?"

"I said they were his if he brought my sister back from the Bogu. He said he could not do it. The horses are yours, illustrious lady, if you can do this."

"All of them?"

He nodded again. She was clearly shaken. Roshan had been, as well.

"I don't... Is she your lover, your sister?"

He could not allow himself to be offended. This was the court. Such thoughts would occur to people. He shook his head. "Nothing like that. This is to honour my father as much as anything. He would never have let my brother do this. In our mourning period, it was an act of disrespect."

She was staring as if dazed. And the woman in this sedan chair was no simple concubine or dancer, however exquisite. This was someone who defined the life of the Ta-Ming now, who shaped and balanced it, in a dangerous time.

He was beginning to understand how dangerous, since yesterday and the thought he'd had: of the knife he carried, and committing murder in that carriage by the road.

"You are not suggesting it was wrong to give your sister to this marriage and send her north?"

He needed to be careful. "The Son of Heaven cannot be wrong."

"No, he cannot." Her voice was emphatic.

"This is a personal request, my lady, only that."

"You do understand," she said, her voice controlled now, "how much you can expect at court as the last hero of Kuala Nor and brother to a new princess? Have you considered that the emperor cannot be less generous than the Lion of Tagur or he is shamed? He must give you gifts that exceed those horses from Sangrama."

He hadn't thought about that. At all. Including, before this morning, the connection to Li-Mei, how much her elevation meant for him. He said as much.

Jian shook her head impatiently. Her earrings made a jingling sound. "Son of Shen Gao, you are angry with your brother for what he did. You are a rival to my cousin for a woman. Very well. Do you think their ranks and honours are set in jade, reserved to them forever? Do you think they might be just a little fearful of your coming?"

Tai's turn to be unsettled. "I don't know enough to judge such matters. I have little experience, or guidance. Sima Zian's, perhaps."

The woman made a face. "Not the surest counsellor, Master Shen. He has never held office, and he owes me a sweeter poem than the last he offered."

"Perhaps later today?" Tai said. "If he is permitted to—"

"I have other intentions today. Some people have been summoned to Ma-wai. This is too important to go any longer unaddressed."

"What is?"

"You are, son of Shen Gao! You are too important. Why do you think I am here?"

"Because... because of the horses?"

A slow smile, honey poured to sweeten a drink. A hand, shining with rings, touched his unshod foot where he had kept it carefully against the side of the sedan chair. "You are permitted to think it is only them. But consider what I have said. I will be disappointed if you prove unintelligent. Or lack decisiveness."

Fingernails moved. He said, a little desperately, "Illustrious lady, you do not want the horses?"

"Ten of them," she said promptly. "If you wish to give me a gift in exchange for company on this road and lychees peeled for you. I want to train them to dance, I have been told it can be done. But what would I do with more than that? Lead them to war?"

"Then... then surely the emperor? I will give the Sardians directly to the Son of Heaven."

"You are anxious to be rid of them, aren't you? No. Think, Shen Tai. Our exalted emperor is not permitted to be indebted to any of his subjects. His is the duty of supreme generosity. He'd have to return more than you gave him or be shamed in the eyes of the world. You control more of these horses than Kitai has received at any one time, ever. The Son of Heaven must honour you as soon as you arrive. And if you also give him the horses...?"

Tai suddenly wished he'd taken that turnoff south, that he were riding home along a road he knew. Not all men, surely, needed to be part of the ten thousand noises, the swirling dust, the palace struggles, the guiding of the world?

He closed his eyes. Not the wisest thing to do. Her foot moved immediately, as if she'd been waiting for that. The toes flexed against his thigh. If she chose to move just a little more... Tai opened his eyes, quickly.

"Have you ever made love in a sedan chair?" Wen Jian asked, guilelessly. Those enormous eyes met his from under perfect, painted eyebrows. "It can be done." She moved her foot.

Tai made a small, involuntary sound.

Directness. He had decided upon that.

He said, "My lady, you are making my heart pound. My mouth is dry with desire. I know you are toying with me, like a cat, and I wish only to honour you and the emperor."

That smile again. "You know I am doing this... this toying, do you?"

He nodded his head, too rapidly.

"And that is my only purpose, you have decided?"

He stared at her. Couldn't speak.

"Poor man. Would a lychee help at all? That dryness...?"

Tai laughed. He couldn't help it. Her expression was mischief incarnate. A moment ago she'd been crisply explaining affairs of the empire and the world, now she was enjoying her beauty and the power it gave her. She took and peeled another fruit without waiting for his answer. She extended it. Her fingers touched his.

She said, quietly, "I told you, the emperor, may he live eternally and in joy, knows I am here, knows you are with me. He will ask me at Ma-wai if you were respectful and I will tell him you were, because indeed, you are. Does this make you feel easier?"

He was doing a lot of nodding or shaking of his head. He nodded again.

She said, "I have arranged that compensation will be paid to the family of your soldier. My under-steward has been instructed to do this before he attends to his own affairs and ends his life."

He'd forgotten about that. Tai cleared his throat. "May I ask, gracious lady, that the steward be permitted to live? Wujen Ning, my soldier, and my Kanlin will both have been aggressive in defence of me, and of the horse."

The eyebrows arched again. "You may ask. I am disinclined, however. This morning was incorrectly undertaken. It reflects badly upon me, and the throne." She selected another lychee. "In a short while we will reach a waiting carriage and your horse and companions. You will ride to Ma-wai, escorting me. I like this chair, but not for longer journeys. Do you like it?"

Again, he nodded. Then said, "Illustrious lady, I think I would like being anywhere you are."

That unhurried smile: genuine pleasure it seemed (though he truly couldn't be sure). "A smooth-enough tongue, Shen Tai. As I said, you might survive in the palace."

"Will you help me?" he asked.

He hadn't known he was going to say that.

Her expression changed. She looked at him. "I don't know," said Wen Jian.

A SHORT TIME LATER they halted at a place where—when the yellow silk curtain was pulled back—he saw that a carriage was indeed waiting. This one, too, had kingfisher feathers.

Beside it on the road (not the imperial road now, they had turned off, northeast) Tai saw Zian and Song and his soldiers on their horses, and the restless, magnificent figure of Dynlal.

He gave his horse a lychee by way of apology, and mounted up.

No great speed now, they were escorting a carriage. A west wind blew. There was birdsong as the sun climbed. They saw green hills ahead of them. They rode that way. These were the forested slopes where the most extravagant country estates of Xinan's aristocracy were to be found. The Five Tombs District it was called, near the burial place of the last emperor and his ancestors, and the vastly larger tomb the Emperor Taizu (might he live another thousand years) was building for himself.

Just before they reached the first foothills they passed a large postal station inn on this northeast-southwest road, then they came to a small lake surrounded by trees, a place celebrated for hot springs and healing waters. On the western side of the lake were a silk farm and a Kanlin retreat, on the other shore lay Ma-wai.

CHAPTER XVI

Li-Mei has lost track of how long they've been riding. Five nights? The landscape is unvarying, remorseless. The approach of summer has made the grass very tall and there are few paths or tracks. Time blurs. She doesn't like it. She has lived her life anticipating possibilities, knowing what is happening, where she is going. Shaping where she is going, to whatever degree she can.

She is much like her oldest brother in this, but would not happily acknowledge that.

She knows how to ride, was taught as a child because her father thought it important, even for a girl, but this much time on a horse, day after day, is hard for her, and Meshag is not inclined to rest very often.

She is in pain at the end of each day and then weary through the next morning's riding because nights sleeping under stars are cold and not restful. She'd hoped this discomfort would pass.

She says nothing about it, but is aware that he knows. She has a sense they are travelling more slowly than he wants to, because of her. She's tried to shorten their rest times herself, being the first to stand up, but Meshag has simply ignored her when she does this. He will only move when he is ready to move, or decides that she is, more likely.

But he'd said, back in the cave (another world, where she killed a man), that his brother would follow them, with shamans, and it is clear to her that whatever Meshag, son of Hurok, has become, whatever dark link he might have to wolves and the wild and spirits, he doesn't want the shamans catching them. Surely for her sake, possibly for his own.

He's avoided his people, hasn't he? Stayed clear of his brother all these years since her brother saved his life (maybe saved his life). But now, for her—for Shen Li-Mei, a woman from Kitai—he's approached the Bogu again, stolen her away, and they are being pursued. So he has told her. Li-Mei has no way of knowing the truth. It leaves her uneasy, even angry. She asked him, some time ago, why they hadn't already been caught, since they weren't travelling at great speed.

"They have to find us," he said. "Have other princess to carry north. They do not know which way we travel. He had to wait for a shaman."

A long answer, for him.

She has only the barest idea of where they are. They have been riding east. These are Shuoki lands, but if she remembers rightly they move north as the weather warms. The Shuoki are enemies of the Bogu. There are Kitan garrison forts somewhere in this direction, northern outposts. The Long Wall is south of them, of course. She doesn't know how far, but it will be rising and falling with the land like some serpent heading to meet the sea. Ahead of them will be nothing but grassland if the Shuoki are indeed north. The Bogu do not graze their herds this far east, and they are nowhere near the Koreini Peninsula.

He is taking her into emptiness.

It has been two days since any sign of human life—morning smoke by a distant lake. Meshag had decided not to go that way for water, though they'd been rationing theirs by that point. He'd found a small pool towards evening. They camped there, the wolves on guard.

So she does have some notion of time, after all, she tells herself. A pool of water two nights ago, a slight rise in the land last night in the open. No real shelter since the cave with the horses on the walls.

They have made no fires of their own at night. He hasn't touched her, except to help her on her horse. She has thought about that. Has thought about it a great deal.

She'd expected to have been taken physically by now, has been preparing for it from the time she waited in the yurt, in darkness. She is a woman alone with a man in an expanse of empty land—certain events usually follow upon that.

Meshag is too different, however, in visible, unsettling ways. She doesn't know what to think any more.

She has never made love to a man, has only played with the other girls at court, giggling or whispering explorations to little import. Some of the others have done more—with each other, with courtiers (or one of the princes) in the Ta-Ming—but Li-Mei has not. The empress, even when they were still in the palace, was devout and demanding: her women were expected to observe rules of well-bred conduct, which were clear on this matter.

Once, the emperor's named heir, Prince Shinzu (a special case, of course), had come to stand behind Li-Mei during a musical performance in the Min-Tan, the Hall of Light.

As the musicians played and the dancers began, she had felt sweetened breath on her neck, then a hand brushing her lower back, through silk, gliding down, back up, down again. Shinzu was regarded as vividly irresponsible, charming, rarely sober. There were endless rumours as to how long he'd remain heir, or even why he was Taizu's chosen successor among so many sons.

She remembers that day extremely well, remembers standing, eyes forward, towards the dancers, not moving at all, breathing carefully, suspended between outrage and excitement and helplessness as he touched her from behind, unseen.

He hadn't done anything more. Hadn't even spoken with Li-Mei afterwards, then or at any other time before she went away from the palace with the empress into exile.

With a murmured phrase (she hadn't even heard the words clearly) he'd moved on when the music ended. She'd seen him talking to another lady of the court, after, laughing, another wine cup in his hand. The woman was laughing, too. Li-Mei could recall ambivalent feelings, seeing that.

She has never considered herself the sort of beauty to drive a man to excesses of desire or recklessness. Nor, even, was she the kind of woman who normally elicited even transitory attention on an autumn afternoon in the Hall of Light.

Had her father been alive she'd be married by now, undoubtedly, and would know much more about this aspect of the world. Men and women. She's been ready to learn for a while. Were Shen Gao still living, his daughter would not now be alone with a barbarian rider and wolves among the grasslands of the north.

Meshag sleeps a little apart from her. The wolves take stations like sentinels in a wide circle around them. The stars have been more dazzling each night as the moon wanes. She sees the Weaver Maid set each evening, then the Sky River appear overhead as darkness deepens, and then the lost mortal lover rising east, on the far side of the River.

She is never easy about the wolves, still tries not to look at them, but they aren't going to harm her, she knows now, because of Meshag. Every day he has ridden away before sunrise, mist rising from the grass. He's made her keep riding alone, heading into the sun as soon as it is up and the mist has burned away. The wolves guide her, guard her.

She still hates them. You couldn't change a lifetime's thinking and feeling and fear in a few days, could you?

Each time, Meshag has caught up with them before midday, with food. He is hunting, in the hunter's time before dawn. He even brings firewood, kindling on his back. He tramples grass, shapes a space, builds low, careful daytime fires.

They eat rabbits, or marmots most recently—today—skinned and cooked, a whittled stick through them. He gives her some kind of fruit to peel. She doesn't know the name of it. It is bitter but she eats it. Drinks water. Washes her face and hands, always, more symbol than anything else. She is Kitan, and her father's daughter. Stands and stretches, does it before Meshag does.

They ride on, the sun overhead, clouds, no clouds, the days mild, evenings chilly, the nights cold. The plain stretches, all directions, unlike anything she's ever known, the grass so high, nearly hiding them, even on horseback, as they go. It does conceal the wolves, she can just about forget that they are there.

She can almost imagine they will ride like this forever, in silence, through tall grass, with wolves.

NOTHING IS FOREVER, not since the world changed after the war in heaven.

Late that same day, the sun behind them. Li-Mei is weary, trying to hide it, glad Meshag rides in front and seldom looks back. He leaves it to the lead wolf to be sure she is keeping up. She has been reciting poetry, not with any theme or coherence, only to distract herself, keep herself riding until he calls a halt.

Then he does halt, too sharply. She hasn't been paying attention, almost bumps his mount with hers. She pulls up quickly, twitches her reins, comes around beside him.

He is looking at the sky.

A few clouds ahead of them, some to the north, pink and yellow in the light of the low, long sun. No sign of rain, any kind of storm. The wind is easy. It isn't anything like that.

She sees a swan. Sees that this is what he is watching. His face has become very still. It is just a bird, she wants to say. But she has been among strangeness long enough now to know that he would not be looking up like this, looking like this, if it were simply a bird flying by.

She sees him draw the short, thick Bogu bow from his saddle.

He hadn't had a bow when he'd come for her. He'd taken this one when he stole the horse. Li-Mei moves her own mount away, to give him room. The swan is flying south, towards them.

It is springtime. Even she knows a swan should not be flying south in spring. It is alone. Perhaps lost, having wandered in the high roads of the sky? She doesn't really think that. Not when she looks at the man beside her, arrow now to bowstring, the bow lifted. It is a very long shot, she has time to think.

She hears the arrow's release. Red song of war arrows, red sun. There are so many poems about bow-songs and war in Kitai, back a thousand years to the first shaping of the empire.

Meshag has not looked awkward or rigid, she realizes. Not claiming his bow, fitting the arrow, letting it fly.

The swan falls out of the sky. So white against the colours of the clouds and the blue. It disappears into the grass.

She sees two wolves go after it, swift, avid. There is silence.

"Why?" she asks, finally.

He is looking back west. Sky and grass. He puts the bow away.

"He has found me," he says. "Ill chance."

She hesitates. "Your brother?"

He nods. The wind moves his hair.

"The... a swan was searching?"

He nods his head again, absently this time. It is clear that he is thinking. Devising.

He says, "Now when shamans will call it there is no answer. They know direction each bird was sent. Will know I killed it."

She is afraid again. It is the strangeness of all things that frightens her most. You killed a bird in the sky, just as you killed rabbits or marmots in morning mist, and that meant...

"Couldn't it have been hunted for food? By someone else?"

He looks at her. The black eyes. "Bogu never kill swans."

"Oh," she says.

He continues to gaze at her, a longer look than any she can remember. His eyes take in light and swallow it.

He says, "My brother would hurt you."

She has not expected this. "Hurt me?"

"He is... like that."

She thinks a moment. "Some men are, too, in Kitai."

He seems to be working with a thought. He says, "When I was... I was not like him."

When I was. When he was a man? She doesn't want to go towards that, it is dark in that direction.

She says, to fill silence, not really needing an answer, "Why would he hurt me? A Kitan princess, bringing him glory?"

He moves a shoulder, the awkward shrug. "Far too many questions. You are always asking. Not proper for women."

She looks away. Then back. "Then I need to thank you again, and be grateful I am not going to him, don't I? Will they catch us now? Where are we riding? What have you decided to do?"

They are a test of sorts, these swift, immediate inquiries. She is the way she is.

She sees the expression she has decided to call a smile.

There are ways of beating back fear, strangeness, the sense of being profoundly lost in the world.

THEY HAVE RIDDEN until darkness has almost gathered the land, eating cold meat in the saddle and the remains of the fruit. The waning moon has set. Li-Mei, in real discomfort, has continued to remain silent about it. They will be pursued now. He is trying to save her. This is no springtime ride in the Deer Park to see animals feeding or drinking at twilight.

He brings her to water again. She isn't certain how, this far from Bogu lands. It is the wolves, she decides.

He tells her they can rest only a short while, that she is to sleep right away. They will ride in darkness now, will do this every night. But then, after staring towards her in the almost-lost gloaming, his features difficult to see, he orders her to lie face down on the short grass by the pond.

She obeys. Now it begins, she thinks, her heart beginning to race against her will. (How does one control a heartbeat?)

But she is wrong, again. He comes to her, yes, but not in need, or hunger. He kneels beside her and begins to work the muscles of her back, his fingers mingling pain with the easing of pain. When she tenses, wincing, he slaps her lightly, the way you might slap a restive horse. She tries to decide if she's offended. Then makes herself settle into his hands. She is going to be riding again soon, this is no time or place to carry pride. What can offended mean here? His movements remain stiff, but very strong. She cries out once, apologizes. He says nothing.

She wonders abruptly—perhaps an illumination?—if his physical restraint, this indifference to her being a woman, is caused by what happened to him those years ago. Could it be he has been rendered incapable of desire, or the accomplishment of it?

She knows so little about this, but it is possible, surely. And it would explain...

Then, at one point, as his hands slow, and then slow again, and linger near her hips, she becomes aware that his breathing has changed. She cannot see anything by then, is face down in the grass, can only be aware of him as a presence, touching her.

And though Shen Li-Mei, only daughter of an honourable house, has never shared a bed or couch with any man, or explored very far along even the first pathways of lovemaking, she knows—with instinctive certainty—that this man is not indifferent to her as a woman in the dark with him, and alone. Which means, if he is holding himself back it is not because he cannot feel—

And in that moment she understands another part of what is happening. Now, and since he came for her between the campfires, back west. She closes her eyes. Draws her own slow breath.

His is, in truth, a gesture, from a largeness of spirit she's not been prepared for. These are barbarians. Everyone living outside the borders of Kitai is a barbarian. You didn't expect... grace from them. You couldn't, could you?

She listens to his breathing, feels his touch through her clothing. They are alone in the world. The Weaver Maid, alone as well, is shining in the west. Li-Mei realizes that her heartbeat has steadied after all, though she is aware of something new within herself.

She thinks she understands more now. It calms her, it always has. It makes such a difference. And Shandai was, after all, the first word he'd spoken to her. The name.

She says, softly, "Thank you. I think I will sleep now. You will wake me when it is time to ride?"

She shifts position, onto her side, and then up on her knees. He stands. She looks up at him against the stars. She cannot see his eyes. The wolves are invisible. She knows they are not far.

Still on her knees, she bows to him, her hands touching the earth.

She says, "I thank you for many things, son of Hurok. For my unworthy self, in my father's name, and in the name of my brother Shen Tai whom you are honouring by... in the way you guard me." She does not say more. Some things cannot be made explicit, even in the dark.

Night breeze. He says nothing, but she sees him nod his head once. He walks off, not far but far enough, nearer the horses. Li-Mei lies down again, closes her eyes. She feels the wind, hears animal sounds in the grass and from the waters of the pond. She becomes aware, with surprise, that she is crying, for the first time since the cave. Eventually, she sleeps.

Spring Rain has not thought of herself by the name her mother gave her since she left Sardia years ago.

She had come to Kitai as part of a small company of musicians and dancers sent as tribute to Taizu, the Son of Heaven. The Sardians were a careful people, offering annual gifts to Kitai and Tagur, and even to the emerging powers west of them. When your small home-land lay in a fertile valley between mountains, that was what you needed to do. Sometimes (not always) it sufficed.

She wasn't enslaved, and she wasn't abducted, but she hadn't had a great deal of choice in the matter. You woke up one morning and were told by the leader of your troupe that you were leaving your home forever. She'd been fifteen years old, singled out for her appearance already, and for skill in singing and on the pipa, all twenty-eight tunings of it in the Kitan fashion, which may have been why she was chosen.

She remained with that troupe for two years in Xinan, all twelve of them coming to terms with the fact that the great and glorious emperor had twenty thousand musicians. They all lived in a vast ward east of the palace—it was like a city in itself, larger than any in Sardia.

In two years they had been summoned to play three times, twice for minor court weddings, once at a banquet to welcome southern emissaries. On neither occasion was the Son of Heaven present.

You might be green-eyed and yellow-haired, lovely and lithe and genuinely skilled in music, and still see your life disappearing down the years. You could be invisible and unheard among the Ta-Ming Palace entertainers.

To the court, perhaps, but not to those on watch for a particular sort of woman. Rain had been noticed at that second wedding, apparently. She'd been seventeen by then. It was time to begin achieving something, she'd thought. A life, if nothing else.

She accepted an invitation to enter the pleasure district and be trained in one of the best houses there—trained in many things, and on terms that were (she knew by then, having paid attention) better than most girls received. Green eyes and yellow hair made a difference, after all. Her ability to leave the musicians' district was a matter of bribing the eunuchs who controlled the Ta-Ming entertainers. It happened all the time.

She was to become a courtesan, and was under no illusions about what that meant. She was taught to be a mistress of the table, the highest rank among the pleasure district women. They were the ones hired to perform at banquets by aristocrats or high mandarins. To perform, also, more privately and in other ways after the feasting had ended.

And when there were no wealthy courtiers on a given evening or afternoon in the Pavilion of Moonlight, there were always the students studying for the examinations—or not actually studying (not if they were in the North District) but aspiring to the rank that would come with passing the exams.

Spring Rain tended to like the students more than the courtiers, which wasn't the cleverest way for a girl to be. But their enthusiasms, their dreaming, spoke to something in her that the extravagance and hauteur of Ta-Ming aristocrats didn't touch—and they made her laugh sometimes.

The palace guests gave better gifts.

It was a life—while a woman was young, at any rate. A better life, most likely—though no one could ever say this for certain—than she'd have had back home. Xinan, under Emperor Taizu, was the centre of the world. She did sometimes wonder if the centre of the world was always the best place to be.

She can remember the moment, years before, as they'd passed through Jade Gate Fortress into Kitai, when she'd made the decision to leave her name behind.

The girl born to that name was gone, she'd decided. She was almost certainly never coming back—to home, family, the view of the mountains north of them, range upon range, to heaven. The girl travelling east would leave her name with her memories.

At fifteen, it had felt like a way to go forward, to survive.

But if her birth name is long since gone, that does not mean she must accept, in her mind, the one Wen Zhou has chosen for her, as if selecting among fabrics or polo horses.

She answers in the compound to Lin Chang because she must, and does so smiling, effortlessly gracious, but that is as far as she will go. The surface of a lake.

He cannot see what she is thinking or feeling. She has a talent for deceiving men by now. She's had time to learn. It is a skill like any other a woman can teach herself: music, conversation, lovemaking, simulating yearning and the tumult of desire.

She ought to be more grateful, she tells herself many times a day, or lying at night, alone or beside him. Hers is a destiny, thanks to Zhou, that marks, like a banner, the highest summit of the dreams of every courtesan in the North District.

He is the second most powerful man in the empire—which means in the world, really. She lives in a vast compound with servants at her whim and call. She entertains his guests with music or witty talk, watches him play polo in the Deer Park, shares his pillow many nights. She knows his moods, some of his fears. She wears silks of the finest weaving, and jewellery that sets off her eyes or dazzles by lamplight at her ears, in her golden hair.

He can dismiss her at any moment, of course. Cast her out, with or without any resources to survive—that, too, happens all the time to concubines when they age. When skilful use of masicot, onycha, indigo sticks for beauty marks, sweet basil, plucked eyebrows and painted ones, powder and perfume and exquisitely adorned hair are no longer enough to sustain necessary beauty.

It is her task to ensure that he has no cause to send her from his presence, now, or when that day comes when the mirror of men's eyes tells a darker tale.

In which case, she has not been acting prudently at all. Kanlin Warriors hired secretly. Listening on porticoes.

She has been distracted and disturbed the last few days, is afraid that it might show. There are other eyes besides his in this compound. His wife is famously inattentive to the women, her gaze turned towards the heavens and alchemical mysteries, but the other concubines are not her friends, and each of the important ones has servants devoted to her.

A household like this can be a battleground. There are poets who have seen this, lived it, written of it.

Events seem to be moving faster now. Late this morning a messenger came from Ma-wai. Wen Zhou and his wife left the compound by carriage not long after. Zhou was swearing, flushed and angry, through the flurry of preparations.

His cousin had evidently requested their presence for the afternoon and evening. Short of the absolute dictates of warfare or crisis, this is not an invitation that may be declined, even by the prime minister.

He holds office because of her, after all.

A case could be made, and she knows Zhou wishes he could do it, that they are in a time of crisis, but the growing tensions with Roshan are not the sort of matter he can use as an excuse to offer his regrets to Jian. Not until he's ready to reveal this, raise it with the emperor, and Rain knows he isn't. Not yet.

There are too many dangers, and they need working through.

He has already sent word to his principal adviser. Liu will follow to Ma-wai in his own carriage. Zhou always wants him nearby when there is any likelihood they might see the emperor, and in Ma-wai there is a good chance.

The first minister is increasingly dependent on Liu. Everyone in the compound knows it.

What Rain does not yet know, though she has done her best to find out, is whether Liu was privy to, or even the agent of, certain instructions given with respect to a man coming back now (it seems) from the far west, having escaped attempts upon his life.

Escaped them, possibly, because of her.

That, of course, is how she's been most reckless. Zhou would kill her and she knows it. At least one man in Xinan has already died in this affair in the past few days: Xin Lun, after word of Tai's journeying had come.

Lun was killed to preserve a secret. If Tai chooses to reveal it, the prime minister will be exposed. She's made her peace with that. Any loyalty to the man who brought her here stops short of this attempted assassination. A woman, as much as a man, is surely allowed her own sense of right conduct in the world.

No, her real fear right now is of herself.

Word has come by courier from Chenyao. That was days ago. Travelling at any normal speed, a horseman from that city could be here tomorrow, or even tonight. And Tai is riding, if the tale is to be believed, a Sardian steed. A Heavenly Horse, from her home.

Rain is too self-possessed, too controlled (always has been), to attach meaning or weight to that last. Nor is she a poet, as some of the courtesans are. She sings the songs others have written. But still... Sardian horses?

And he is alive, very nearly here. After two years.

The morning passes, a midday meal, a rest in her rooms, a walk in the gardens by the bamboo grove. Time crawls at a pace that kills.

It occurs to her, sitting on a stone bench by the artificial lake, shaded from the sun by sandalwood leaves, that if Zhou has been summoned to Ma-wai for this afternoon, and a banquet after, he will not be home tonight.

It is just about then that the second messenger arrives. The household steward stalks into the garden to find Mistress Lin. She doesn't think he likes her, but he doesn't like anyone so it isn't significant.

It seems there is another message from Ma-wai, this one sent to her. That has never happened before. She wonders if she's being summoned to play for them... but no, it would be too late by now. And there is hardly a deficiency of performers at Ma-wai.

The courier is escorted through the sequence of public rooms and courtyards back through the garden, preceded by the steward and a warning to her that someone is coming—so that she can be properly seated and composed on one of the benches. She is, or presents herself as such.

The courier bows. She is, after all, the newly favoured concubine of First Minister Wen. There can be power in that for women. He hands her a scroll. She opens it, breaking the seal.

This message is also from Wen Jian, the Precious Consort. It is very short. Do not retire early tonight, unless you are excessively fatigued. Not all windows above jade stairs need be seen through tears.

The second line is derived from a celebrated poem about a woman left alone too long. Jian has changed three words. You can imagine her smiling as she wrote or dictated that.

Actually, that isn't quite true: it is difficult to imagine that woman. She eludes too easily, and frightens because of that.

You can begin to feel your own heartbeat going too fast, however, as you consider those words on the scroll, dismiss the courier with a grave expression, give instructions that he be offered food and drink before starting back to Ma-wai.

For one thing, how does Wen Jian even know of her existence? For another, why would she be disposed to assist Rain in anything, if indeed she is doing that? If this is not some trap, or test?

Rain feels like a child, overwhelmed by complexities.

The steward leads the courier past pagoda trees. Her maidservant lingers, ready if called. Rain sits alone, looks across the water at the island he'd had made in the lake he'd had made. The light breeze ruffles leaves overhead, touches her skin and hair.

She'd liked amber and apricots and music, very young. Horses a little later, but only to look at them. They'd frightened her. Her eyes had drawn attention, very young. Her mother had named her Saira when she was born. A sweet name left behind, many years ago.

CHAPTER XVII

"I should like," said Wen Jian, "to be entertained. Cousin, will you offer a poem for me?"

Her cousin, the first minister, smiled. He was as Tai remembered him in the North District, or glimpsed in Long Lake Park... a big man, handsome and aware of it. He wore blue silk with dragons in silver. There was a lapis lazuli ring on his left hand.

A breeze entered through unshuttered windows, rippling pennons outside. It was late afternoon. They were in Ma-wai, where the hot springs had eased imperial weariness for centuries, and where the decadent games of various courts had been notorious for as long. Just north of here, not far away, were the tombs of the Ninth Dynasty.

Poets had written of this conjunction of symbols, though doing so carried risks and one needed to use care.

Tai wasn't feeling careful just now, which was unwise and he knew it. He was tense as a drawn bowstring. Wen Zhou was here and Tai's brother was here.

They didn't know he was in the room.

Jian, amusing herself (or perhaps not so), had arranged for Tai to enter before her guests, and to seat himself on an ivory bench behind one of two painted room screens (cranes flying, a wide river, mountains rising, the tiny figure of a fisherman in his boat).

He hadn't wanted to do this. It felt too passive, acquiescent. But he didn't know, on the other hand, what he did want here. He had arrived. This was the court. He had decisions to make, alignments to choose or reject. It would also be useful, he thought wryly, to remain alive. One person here had been trying to kill him.

At least one person.

For the moment he would accede to what the Beloved Companion wished of him. He could start that way, at least. Jian's women had bathed him when their party arrived, and washed his hair (gravely, with propriety, no hint of rumoured immorality). After, in a chamber overlooking the lake, they had laid out silks more fine than any he'd ever worn in his life. Liao silk: compared to ordinary weaving once, in a poem, as what a glistening waterfall was to a muddy stream dried out in summer heat.

He remembered that image as he dressed. His robe was a shimmering, textured flicker of greens, the colours of a bamboo grove in changing light. His slippers and belt and soft hat were black, with pale-yellow dragons on them. His hatpin had an emerald.

Two women had led him, silently, hands in full sleeves, eyes downcast, along corridors of marble and jade, then across a courtyard and down more corridors to the chamber where Wen Jian evidently purposed to receive certain guests.

Tai had not seen her since they'd arrived. She had told him in the sedan chair that she had a plan for this afternoon. He had no notion of what this might be, or of his own role in it.

At Kuala Nor each night, watching the stars set and rise, or the moon, he'd known his task at every moment. What he was there to do. Here, he was one of many dancers, and he didn't know the dance.

He wished Zian were with him. Wei Song he'd released for the afternoon, to report to her own Kanlin sanctuary farther along the shore. It had crossed his mind that now that they'd arrived, her duties, her employment, could be considered over. He'd felt oddly exposed when she'd bowed and gone away.

The poet was somewhere in Ma-wai. He'd been a guest here before. They hadn't had a chance to speak before being led in different directions. Zian was almost certainly sampling some celebrated wine. Tai wondered if the women were as proper with the Banished Immortal as they had been with him.

His two escorts had led him into this audience chamber, showed him the room screens (the paintings were by Wang Shao) and the low seat behind one of them. They'd invited him, prettily, to sit. He could have refused. But he didn't know what he'd achieve by doing so. It seemed wisest, for the moment, to see what Jian was doing. What she was playing at—if it was a game.

He discovered he could see quite well through tiny holes in the screen. He hadn't noticed them from the painted side. He was entirely certain the viewing holes, his ability to observe the room unseen, were not accidental. The ceiling, he saw, looking up in wonder, was of beaten gold. There were lotus flowers and cranes worked upon it. The walls were sandalwood, the floor was marble.

Jian smiled at his screen when she walked in with her steward—a different man from the one this morning. (The one this morning was probably dead by now.) It was not, Tai thought, the smile she'd offered when they were alone on the road.

He'd asked, just before getting out to ride Dynlal the rest of the way, if she'd help him here at court.

I don't know, she had said.

This wasn't about helping him, he decided. He might be wrong, but it didn't feel that way. He felt cowardly sitting here. He wanted to confront Wen Zhou and his brother. He had a quick, clean image of drawing swords with them. Liu was hopeless with a blade. Zhou was likely a match for Tai, or more than that. It was an idle thought: no weapons were allowed here. He'd been made to surrender his when they arrived.

Seen through the screen, Jian looked very different: cooler, more serene, with a gravity that had not existed (could not exist) while she reclined in a perfumed sedan chair, peeling lychees, curving a bare foot against his thigh.

She was in green as well, with imperial phoenixes in the same pale yellow as his own dragons. He wondered if that meant something. Her hair was as before: the widely imitated, side-slipping style. It could do things to a man, looking at her.

There was a small, discreet door behind him. He could get up right now and walk out—if the door wasn't barred. He wondered if it was. He wondered if there was a door behind the other painted screen, set diagonally to this one against the same wall, the two of them framing a space for Wen Jian and her friends, at Ma-wai, in springtime.

He stopped wondering about such things when Jian seated herself on a platform in the centre of the chamber, accepted a cup from the steward, and gestured for her guests to be admitted.

Tall doors opened. A number of men came in, no women. Jian was the only woman in the room. Even the servants, pouring wine into jade cups, were men. There were no musicians.

Among the arrivals was Sima Zian. A surprise. The poet was properly dressed and groomed, with a dark hat and his hair neatly pinned. His expression was alert, amused, as ever. Tai registered this, but didn't look at him for long. His attention was pulled away. Not to the first minister, though Wen Zhou had also entered the room.

Hidden, silent, afraid, and fighting anger, Tai looked at his older brother for the first time in two years.

Liu had gained weight, it showed in his face, but he was otherwise unchanged. Smaller than Tai, softer. In a mandarin's rich, sober black silk, with the dark-red belt of highest rank and symbolic key at his waist, he entered discreetly, bowed formally, took a place behind Wen Zhou, a little to one side.

Tai was staring at him. He couldn't stop. Fear, and fury.

He recognized another of those who entered: the imperial heir. Another surprise, if Jian intended anything serious today. Prince Shinzu was notorious for sensuous luxury, though seldom seen in the city, and never in the North District.

Women were brought to him. He didn't go to them. He was an even bigger man than the first minister, affecting a short beard, but wider than the mandarin fashion. He already carried a cup of wine, Tai saw. Scanning the room, from a position he took near an open window, the prince smiled at Zian, who bowed, and smiled cheerfully back.

Jian waited until her guests had wine, then spoke her first words to her cousin: inviting a poem, entertainment.

From behind his screen, Tai saw Zhou offer his confident, lazy smile. "We retain people to offer poetry, cousin. You ask the one man here whose effort would surely not amuse you."

"But surely he will make an effort? If only to please me?" Tai could hear the sly smile in her words.

"I love you too much for that," said Zhou. One man laughed appreciatively. Tai couldn't see who it was. Wen Zhou added, "And we seem to have, for some reason or other, a poet among us. Let him divert you, cousin. Is he here for any other purpose?"

A fair question: the poet had left the city under one of his usual clouds and it had to do with Jian and a poem. The Banished Immortal, as in heaven so on earth. That was the way the stories ran.

Jian only smiled. She had, Tai was realizing, more than a dozen ways of smiling. This one was closer to the cat with a mouse he'd sensed in the sedan chair. It occurred to him that she wasn't really pursuing amusement here. He wondered if Zhou knew that yet.

He shivered suddenly. Wasn't sure why. In the tales his nursemaid used to tell, you shivered that way when someone was walking across the ground where your grave would one day lie. If you never shivered so, she used to say, you were doomed to die in water, or lie unburied.

His brother knew those same stories from the same source. Liu knew the same orchard fruits, the same tree-swing in the farthest garden, stream for fishing or swimming, paulownia leaves on the path all at once in autumn, the same teachers, sunsets, birds returning at winter's end, the same lightning-riven summer storms of childhood in a room they'd shared, listening for thunder.

"I am afraid to have Master Sima offer any lines after the last ones he gave us in the Ta-Ming," said the Precious Consort. "A poem about an ancient emperor and his beloved." She looked at the poet, and did not smile.

"It is a grief to my soul, and will last all my days, if anything your servant has ever written brings you or the Son of Heaven other than pleasure," Sima Zian said earnestly.

"Well," said the prime minister, grinning, "a number of them have failed to bring me pleasure, I can tell you that." Another laugh from someone, probably the same person.

Zian looked at him. He bowed again. "Some griefs," he murmured, "we learn to expect in life."

It was Jian who laughed this time. She clapped her hands. "Cousin, cousin," she cried, "never play at words with a poet! Don't you know that?"

Wen Zhou flushed. Tai was fighting an impulse to grin.

"I'd have thought a disgraced poet without rank or office would be the one who needed to be careful," the first minister said coldly.

Tai looked instinctively to his brother. He had spent a good deal of his childhood looking at Liu, trying to read what he might be thinking. Liu's face was impassive but his watchful eyes went from the woman to the poet, then quickly to the man who—unexpectedly—broke the ensuing silence.

"There are many ways of measuring rank, as the Cho Master has taught," said Prince Shinzu quietly. "On the matter of taking care, as it happens, I have a question of my own for the first minister. Though I fear to interrupt our dear Jian's pleasures."

"You, of all men, need never fear doing so," said Wen Jian, prettily.

Tai had no idea how to interpret that. Or the manner of the prince, leaning against the wall by a window, a cup held so casually it almost spilled its wine. Shinzu's voice was more crisp than Tai had expected. He'd never actually heard the heir speak. He only knew the tales.

"I am, of course, at your service, illustrious lord." Wen Zhou bowed.

He had to, of course. Tai didn't think it pleased him. Already, from his place of concealment, he was exhausted trying to trace the lines of connection and tension here, read surface meaning, let alone what lay beneath.

"I am grateful," said the prince.

He sipped his wine. Gestured to a servant, waited for the cup to be refilled. The room waited with him. When the servant had withdrawn, Shinzu leaned back again, at ease. He looked at Wen Zhou.

"What have you been doing with An Li?" he asked.

Behind his screen, Tai found himself breathing carefully.

"My lord, you invite a discussion of state policy here?" Zhou looked pointedly at the poet and then at two or three other men in the room.

"I do," said Shinzu calmly. "Among other things, I would like to know what state policy is in this matter."

There was another silence. Did the emperor's heir have the right to demand this of a prime minister? Tai had no idea.

"Cousin..." began Zhou, turning to the woman in the room. "Surely a pleasant springtime gathering is not—"

"In truth," Jian interrupted, gently enough, "I admit I should like to know, as well. About An Li. After all," she favoured the room with an exquisite smile, "he is my adopted child! A mother always has concerns, you know. Everlastingly."

The silence this time was almost painful. Zhou looked back over his shoulder at Liu. Tai's brother stepped forward a little (only a little). He bowed to Jian, then to the prince.

"My lord prince, illustrious lady, it is our understanding that Governor An has left the capital." Which was true, and Tai happened to know it, but wasn't an answer to anything.

"He did," said Shinzu promptly. "Three days ago, in the evening."

"And his eldest son left before that," added Jian. She wasn't smiling now. "An Rong rode northeast with a small company on good horses."

"Roshan went west, however," said Liu. His brother was shifting them away from whatever questions the prince had, Tai realized.

Not successfully.

"We know that," said the prince. "He met with your brother on the road to Chenyao."

Tai stopped breathing.

"With my brother?" said Liu.

He looked shaken, and this would not be an act. Liu was skilled at hiding feelings, not simulating them.

"With Shen Tai!" said the first minister in the same moment. "Why did he do that?"

"I'd imagine it was regarding the Sardian horses," said Shinzu carelessly. "But that isn't what I wish to discuss."

"It should be!" snapped the prime minister. "Roshan is obviously—"

"He is obviously interested in their disposition. He is commander of the Imperial Stables, among other offices. It is his duty to be interested, is it not?" The prince shifted himself off the wall. "No, my question is for you, first minister—and your adviser, of course, since he seems well informed. Why, pray tell me, have you been engaged in actions designed to drive him from the city, or worse?"

Tai swallowed hard, made himself breathe again, carefully.

"The Son of Heaven did invite him here, cousin. We all know that." Jian shook her head. "I even asked for him myself, he amuses me so whenever he comes to court."

It was only in that moment that Tai realized that she and the prince were working together, and it was not spontaneous at all.

"Drive him from the city?" Wen Zhou repeated. "How could I do that?"

The prince sipped his wine. "By planting stories in the Ta-Ming and the mandarin courtyards as to his intentions. And doing so while he was in Xinan, away from his soldiers, and feeling vulnerable because of it."

There was nothing idle about the room now.

Tai saw two or three of those present begin to back away, as if removing themselves from a combat. Sima Zian's wide-set eyes went from one speaker to another, avidly, absorbing it all, like light.

"Sometimes," said Tai's brother softly, "my lord prince, sometimes the stories being told can be true."

Shinzu looked at him. "They can. But there are ways of dealing with a man as powerful as An Li. These do not include making him feel as if his back is to a stone wall, or that he faces ruin at the hands of a first minister."

"Ruin? Not from me," said Zhou, regaining his composure. "I am no more than a servant of the empire. It would be our glorious emperor, may he live forever, who decreed anything at all!"

"In that case," said the prince in a voice delicate as silk, "might it not have been wisest to advise the glorious emperor, and others perhaps, as to your intentions? This is," he added, "a game so deeply perilous, Minister Wen, it beggars description."

"Hardly a game, my lord!" said Wen Zhou.

"I believe I will disagree with you," said the prince.

There was nothing remotely indolent or drunken about him, Tai thought. What was this moment? What was happening here?

He saw the prince set down his wine on a lacquered table. Shinzu added, "This feels, I am sorry to say, to be about two men and power, not the empire, or the emperor, may he rule another thousand years."

"I am distressed to hear you say so," Zhou murmured.

"I'm certain you are," agreed the prince. "My father was, as well." He said it quietly.

"You... you spoke of this with the emperor?" Zhou had flushed again.

"Yesterday morning. In the Pagoda Tree Garden here."

"My lord prince, if I may?" It was Tai's brother. "We are confused. Please enlighten us all. You say there are ways of dealing with Roshan. That suggests you agree he needs to be dealt with, if your servant may be so bold. The first minister and all of us who labour, unworthily, to assist him in his heavy tasks will be grateful for guidance. How does one address the danger General An represents for Kitai and this dynasty?"

There was nothing, nothing, Tai thought, of the amusing here now.

The prince, Taizu's heir, said, speaking as quietly as Liu, "By giving him honour and power. By summoning him here to be given more honours and more power—which is what the Precious Consort and my exalted father have been doing. Offering him banquet after banquet in the Ta-Ming or here at Ma-wai—and then watching him die of the sugar sickness, which he is doing in any case."

Wen Zhou opened his mouth.

Shinzu held up a hand. "And, after the great and glorious An Li has lamentably gone to join his ancestors, by giving him the most sumptuous funeral any barbarian military leader has ever had in the long history of Kitai."

He paused. The room was riveted. "And then, by bringing his eldest son into the palace, to whatever forms and variations of luxury appeal to him most. Making that son a supreme officer of the Palace Army, or leader of the Hundred Horsemen, or both! And doing the same thing for the younger sons. Keeping them all here for life. Giving them every woman in Xinan their fancy might turn towards. Every horse they wish to ride. Giving mansions and jade and country homes, endless wine and finer clothing than they have ever worn—while three new governors take control of the armies and districts in the northeast."

He looked at Zhou. "That is what you do, First Minister Wen, if you are thinking about the empire and not a private war between two men who hate and fear each other. Private wars, Wen Zhou, can become more than that."

A silence. No man rushed to fill it.

"Every woman?" said Jian, a hand to her breast. "Oh, dear!"

Prince Shinzu laughed aloud.

Tai realized he'd been forgetting to breathe again. He resumed, as silently as he could.

"It is not, my lord prince, so simple as that!" said Wen Zhou strongly. "Not when the man in question, ill as he might or might not be, remains ambitious beyond words."

"Nothing at court is simple," said Jian, before the prince could speak. "You are tasked, cousin, with guiding an empire. An Li is one of those charged with expanding and defending it. If you spend your days and nights circling each other like fighting cocks with metal claws, what happens to Kitai? Do we just watch and place wagers?"

From his place of hiding, Tai could not help but ask in the silence of his mind: And where is the emperor in all of this? Is it not his task to resolve such matters, for his people, under heaven?

Then something occurred to him and he caught his breath, again.

"Fighting cocks?" Wen Zhou repeated, head high.

Shinzu nodded. "A good description. Who shall be lord of the battle ring, vanquish the other, whatever the cost. Minister Wen, with the burdens that lie upon you, great privileges also come. This was true of Chin Hai before you. He was—we all know it—a potent, fearsome man. Roshan has chosen to test you in your first year. Can anyone be surprised? Military leaders exploring the strength and will of the Ta-Ming Palace? How do you think you have responded, first minister of my father?"

Wen Zhou's voice was firm. "I have warned the exalted emperor repeatedly. I warned the Censorate, the Treasury, and the ministers, including those supervising the army. I warned my lovely cousin. Had you expressed the least interest in these affairs before today, my lord prince, I would have warned you! You are, my lord, being unjust. Cousin, I have spoken to all of you about Roshan."

"But he," said Jian, smiling gently, "also warned us about you. Where does that leave the Son of Heaven, cousin?"

"He... An Li has spoken to you about me?"

"You think him a fool, cousin?"

"Of course not. He'd not be a danger if he was."

"That is not always so," said the prince. "Folly can be dangerous."

Tai was being forced, moment by moment, word by word, to change everything he'd ever thought he knew about Shinzu.

"Cousin," said Jian, "until lately, the danger has seemed to be from each of you to the other, not to the empire. But if Kitai is placed in peril because two men hate each other..."

She left the thought unfinished.

"You arrested two of his advisers this spring. For consulting astrologers." The prince's eyebrows were level.

Tai's brother said quickly, "The inquiry established it was true, my lord prince."

"Did the inquiry also establish it mattered very much?" the prince said, just as swiftly. "Or was this simply provocation? Do tell me, adviser to the first minister."

Zhou lifted a hand, a small enough gesture, to forestall Liu's reply.

Wen Zhou bowed then, to the prince, to Jian. With dignity he said, "It is possible I have erred. No servant of the emperor should regard himself as infallible. I desire only to serve Kitai and the throne to the best of my abilities. I am prepared to be counselled."

"Good," said Jian.

"Indeed, good," said Shinzu. "And surely no more need be said about this on a lovely afternoon in Ma-wai. But before we turn to our diversions, will you tell me, first minister, where I may find one of your guards? Feng is his name, I am told."

"What?" said Zhou. "The honourable... the prince is asking after one of my household?"

"I am," said the prince affably. He had reclaimed his wine cup. He held it out to be refilled. "I sent some of my own men to your compound to bring him to the Ta-Ming. He appears to have left Xinan. Where might the fellow be?"

Tai looked at his brother. Instinct, again. Liu's face showed perplexity. Whatever this was about, Liu didn't know it.

Wen Zhou said, "My guardsman? You want to speak with one of my guards?"

"I did say that," the prince murmured. "I also said he seems to have disappeared."

"Not at all," said Zhou. "He's been sent to my family. My parents are at greater risk with all these instabilities, and I thought they should have an experienced guard supervising their household retainers."

"Instabilities," the prince repeated. "So he'll be there now?"

"Still on his way, he departed only a few days ago."

"Actually, no, he's here in Ma-wai," said Jian.

Her voice was gentle. The room turned to her. "Perhaps I ought to have informed you both, cousin, my lord prince. I had the man followed and brought back, after receiving certain information."

"You knew he'd left?" The prince's expression was admiring.

"It seemed a reasonable expectation he would do that."

"You stopped my man on his journey?" Zhou's voice was odd.

"Greatly esteemed lady, please, what... information?" It was Liu.

Tai didn't know whether to be amused by his brother's confusion, or to pity it. Liu hated, even more than Tai did, not understanding what was unfolding, anywhere, any time.

"We received a suggestion," said Jian, still gently, "that the man might have committed a murder before leaving. Dear cousin, this will all be new to you, of course."

It wouldn't be, of course. Tai reminded himself: he was among the dancers, and he didn't know the music.

"Of course it is new!" the first minister exclaimed. "Murder? Who alleges such a thing?"

"The Gold Bird Guards have submitted an account of something they say happened a few nights past. They were alerted that an act of violence might take place and some of them were there when it did. They made no arrest, seeking counsel from the palace first. You will appreciate why they did this: the murderer was your guardsman."

"I am shocked! Who alerted them to this terrible thing?"

The prime minister did not, Tai noted, ask who had been killed.

Zhou's demeanour, under the circumstances, was remarkable. Aristocratic breeding did make a difference, Tai thought. The Wen families of the south were not among the very wealthiest in this dynasty, but they had a lineage that went back a long way.

That was, of course, how Jian had become a lesser prince's wife, before rising beyond that.

"Who alerted us? Roshan did, as it happens," said Prince Shinzu.

Liu asked the question: "What man is he alleged to have slain?"

"A minor civil servant," said the prince. "I am told he was a drinking companion of your own brother. His name was Xin. Xin Lun, I am told."

"And... you say An Li told the Gold Bird Guards that this might be about to happen...?" Liu was struggling.

"Well," said Jian, sounding regretful, "the fellow, Master Xin, seems to have feared he might be in danger after certain tidings reached the Ta-Ming from the west. He wrote Roshan asking for protection."

Tai was watching the first minister. Zhou was impressive in that moment, showing nothing of what would have to be extreme agitation.

"And Governor An...?" Liu asked.

"... alerted the Gold Bird Guards, quite properly. They arrived too late, it seems, to prevent a death. It is," said Jian, "an unfortunate business."

"Most unfortunate," the first minister murmured.

"I can imagine how it distresses you, cousin, to have been sending such a violent man to guard your dear parents. My own uncle and aunt. The spirits shield them!" said Jian. "We will, of course, learn more when this Feng is questioned."

"This... has not yet happened?" Wen Zhou's voice was a little strained. Tai was suddenly enjoying himself.

That didn't last long.

"We were waiting for Master Shen Tai," said Jian, matter-of-factly. "To learn what he might add to the story. I spoke with him earlier, myself."

"With... you spoke with my brother?" said Liu.

"I did, since this seems to have to do with him." Jian looked at her cousin, and she wasn't smiling. "I think I like him. I decided he should have a chance to listen before speaking himself."

It was Liu who figured it out.

He looked at the two screens, from one to the other. His face was unreadable. Almost. If you knew him well, there were clues. Jian glanced over, as if casually, to where Tai was hidden.

And that was, Tai thought, as clear a signal to join the dance as he was ever going to get.

He stood up, straightened his clothes. Then he stepped around the screen, brushing the rich sandalwood of the wall, and came out to be seen. There was a degree of astonishment that—he supposed—the Precious Consort might find enjoyable. He didn't.

He had no idea what he was expected to do. He bowed to the heir, to Jian. Not to the first minister or his older brother. Both would have been proper, of course. He managed a brief smile for Sima Zian. The poet was grinning, clearly delighted by this theatre.

Tai cleared his throat. A roomful of high-ranking figures was staring at him. "Thank you, exalted lady," he said. "I admit I was unhappy about concealing myself, but your servant defers to your greater wisdom."

She laughed. "Oh, dear. You make me sound ancient! Greater wisdom? I just wanted to see their faces when you came out!"

Which wasn't the truth, and he knew it. All of them knew it. But this was a part of how Jian danced at this court, Tai was realizing. How she made others dance. This lay beneath the silk and scent. You didn't have to be with her long to see it.

Now that he was among them, the fact that he and she were wearing similar colours was unmistakable. Tai had wondered if it was deliberate. Of course it was.

He'd made a decision before, he reminded himself. If he could not weave subtle intentions towards a known design, he would have to do things differently. There wasn't really a choice, was there? Either he was a puppet, or a piece of wood in a river in spate, or he had some control over what was happening.

And he could do that here only one way.

He turned to Wen Zhou. "How did you know I was at Kuala Nor?"

He ought to have phrased it with courtesy, prefaced by bows and a deferential greeting. He ought not to have asked it at all.

Zhou stared bleakly at him. Said nothing.

"Second Brother," said Liu, a little too loudly. "Be welcome back among us! You have brought great honour to our family." Liu bowed, and not just the minimal salute of courtesy.

There was no way forward here, Tai thought, but straight.

"And you have shamed our father's memory, Eldest Brother. Did you never think how he would have felt about Li-Mei being sent north to barbarians?"

"But of course!" cried Prince Shinzu. "I had forgotten that our newest princess was of this family! How interesting!"

Tai doubted he'd forgotten it at all. Liu did not answer him. That could come later.

He turned back to Zhou. "You haven't responded, first minister." He could only be direct here. Or accept being a wood chip in rapids.

"I am unaware," said Wen Zhou coldly, "of any protocol in any dynasty that would require a prime minister to respond to a question phrased that way. A beating with the rod is possibly in order."

Tai saw Zian signalling with his eyes, urging caution. He declined. He was here. Li-Mei was gone. Yan was dead by a cold lake. And his father was dead, lying under a stone Tai hadn't even seen.

He said, "I see. Roshan suggested you might avoid the question."

Zhou blinked. "You spoke with him?"

Tai's turn to ignore a question. "A beating with the rod, you said? How many? People die under the rod, first minister. That could cost the empire two hundred and fifty Sardian horses."

If he was doing this, Tai thought, he was going to do it. There was exhilaration in having the chance, to be out from concealment, standing before this man and saying this. "Protocol might be amended, don't you think, when murder is involved? I ask again, how did you know I was at Kuala Nor?"

"Murder? You seem healthy enough. Are you a ghost yourself, then, Shen Tai?"

It was upon them, Tai thought. The poet had stopped trying to get his attention. The prince moved forward from the wall again. Only Jian seemed composed, sitting (the only person sitting) on her platform in the midst of all of them.

Tai said, "No, first minister. I am not dead yet. But the scholar Chou Yan is, at the hands of the assassin sent after me. Admissions have been made. By that false Kanlin who killed my friend. By two other assassins who confessed their purpose to Governor Xu in Chenyao." He paused, to let that name register. "Those two were also seen by my friend Sima Zian, and the governor's own daughter brought us the name the killers offered up. So there are others who can speak to this. And then, first minister, Roshan presented me with a copy of the letter sent him by Xin Lun, saying he feared he would be killed, since he knew too much."

"A copy of a letter? From Roshan? He cannot even read!" Zhou actually managed a laugh. "After all we've heard this afternoon—some of us skulking behind a screen—about his designs? You don't think that would be an obvious forgery meant to damage me? The only one openly resisting him? Surely you are not so entirely—"

"It is not a forgery," Tai said. "Lun died that night. Exactly as he feared he would. And the Gold Bird Guards saw who did it."

He turned to his brother, as if ignoring Zhou. As if there was nothing left to say to him at all. He looked at Liu. His heart was pounding.

"Someone tried to kill you at Kuala Nor?" Liu asked. He said it quietly. Assembling information—or that was how it sounded.

"And at Chenyao."

"I see. Well. I did know where you were," said Liu.

"You did."

It was strange, speaking to his brother again, looking at him, trying to read his thoughts. Tai reminded himself that Liu was easily skilled enough to dissemble here.

"I tried to persuade you not to go, remember?"

"You did," said Tai again. "Did you tell the first minister where I was?"

The question he'd been waiting to ask since leaving the lake and the mountains.

Liu nodded his head. "I think I did, in conversation." As simple as that, no hesitation. Someone else could be direct, or appear to be. "I would have to check my records. I have records of everything."

"Everything?" Tai asked.

"Yes," his brother said.

It was probably true.

Liu's face, carefully schooled from childhood, gave nothing away, and the room was much too public for what Tai really wanted to say again, face to face this time, a hand bunching Liu's robe tightly at the collar: that his brother had shamed their father's memory with what he'd done to Li-Mei.

This wasn't the time or place. He wondered if there would ever be a time or place. And he also realized that, for reasons that went far beyond his own story, this encounter could not turn into anything decisive about murder attempts. There were issues too much larger.

His thought was mirrored, anticipated. There was a dancer here. "Perhaps we should wait for my cousin's guardsman to answer some questions," said Jian. "Perhaps we can talk of other matters? I don't find this as amusing as I thought I might."

An order to desist, if ever there was one.

Tai looked at her. She was icily imperious. He drew a breath. "Forgive me, illustrious lady. A dear friend was killed in a place beyond borders. He died trying to tell me about my sister. My sorrow has made me behave unpardonably. Your servant begs indulgence."

"And you have it!" she said promptly. "You must know you will have it—from everyone in the Ta-Ming—for the honour you have done us."

"And for the horses!" said Shinzu cheerfully. He lifted a cup towards Tai. "Whatever questions or troubles any of us might have, surely our task now is to amuse our hostess. What sort of civilized men could we call ourselves, otherwise?"

A servant appeared at Tai's elbow, with wine. He took the cup. He drank. It was pepper wine, exquisite. Of course it was.

"I asked for a poem," Jian said plaintively. "Half a lifetime ago! My cousin declined, our wandering poet declined. Is there no man who can please a woman here?"

Sima Zian stepped forward. "Gracious and exalted lady," he murmured, "beauty of our bright age, might your servant make a suggestion?"

"Of course," said Jian. "It might even earn you forgiveness, if it is a good one."

"I live only in that hope," said Zian. "I propose that someone present a twinned pair of subjects and our two brothers, the sons of Shen Gao, each offer you a poem."

Tai winced. Jian clapped her hands in delight. "How very clever of you! Of course that is what we will do! And who better to offer the subjects than our Banished Immortal? I insist upon it! You choose, General Shen's sons improvise for us. I am happy again! Does everyone have wine?"

His brother, Tai knew, had passed the imperial examinations in the top three of his year. He had been preparing for them all his life. His poetry was immaculate, precise, accomplished. It always had been.

Tai had spent two years at Kuala Nor trying to make himself a poet in a solitary cabin at night, with little success, in his own estimation.

He told himself that this was just an entertainment, an afternoon's diversion at Ma-wai where they liked to play, not a competition that signified anything. He felt like cursing the poet. What was Zian doing to him?

He saw Liu bow to Jian, grave, unsmiling. He never smiles, she'd said in the sedan chair. Tai also bowed, and managed a wry smile. It probably looked apprehensive, he thought.

Sima Zian said, "Xinan, and this night's moon. Any verse format you choose."

The prince chuckled. "Master Sima, did we even have to wonder? Do you always choose the moon?"

Zian grinned, in great good humour. "Often enough, my lord. I have followed it all my days. I expect to die by moonlight."

"Many years from now, we hope," said the prince, graciously.

Tai was wondering, amid all else, how everyone had been so wrong about this man. He did have an answer, or part of one: it had been fatally dangerous through the years for an imperial heir to show signs of ambition, and those signs might all too easily be thought to include competence, intelligence, perception. It was safer to drink a great deal, and enjoy the company of women.

Which did raise a different question: what was Shinzu doing now?

Zian murmured, "Do you know... well, no, you can't possibly know, since I have never told anyone... but I have sometimes dreamed of a second moon to write about. Wouldn't that be a gift?"

"I'd like a gift like that," said the Beloved Companion, quietly. She was, Tai remembered (it needed remembering sometimes), very young. She was younger than his sister.

Jian turned to look at him, and then at Liu. "The First Son must surely go first, whatever other protocols we are abandoning."

Wen Zhou had stepped back as this new game began. He smiled thinly at this, however. Tai felt as if his senses had become unnaturally sharp, as if he was seeing and hearing more than he ever had. Was this what life at court was like? What the dance involved?

Liu folded his hands carefully in his full black sleeves. He had been doing this all his life, Tai knew, preparing for such moments as this. Xinan, and tonight's moon, he reminded himself. It was customary in such contests to pair two images.

Liu said, looking at no one, measuring stresses:

There was a kind of pain in Tai's chest, shaped by and entangled with memory. This was his brother, they were at the heart of the court, the heart of empire, and Liu could do this, effortlessly. All the world may be.

But what else had he done, what else could he do, as easily?

Everyone in the room seemed to be looking at Tai. There had been no response at all to Liu's exquisite offering: that, too, was proper. When two or more people had been set a verse challenge you waited until the last one was done. They did these in the North District, often very drunk, often very late.

Tai sipped his wine. He was impossibly sober. He thought of Yan, of his sister. He looked across at Liu.

"If deserved," he murmured. "I like that."

His brother's mouth tightened. Tai hadn't expected a reaction. Nor had he expected to have to compose a poem in this setting. This was the court, not a pleasure house among fellow students. He took another drink. He had only one thing to bring to this room, he realized, that these elegant dancers would not have.

He looked at Zian. The poet's face was attentive. It would be, Tai thought, when poetry was concerned. This was his life, air and water.

Tai thought of a first phrase, and then—quite suddenly—of a conclusion, a contrast to his brother's, and he began, speaking slowly, picking his way, as through a moonlit wood. And as the words came, so, too, did images he'd lived with:

He looked at Liu first, in the silence that came when he was done, a stillness coming into the room like the breeze from outside. He'd spent so much of his childhood looking to his brother for approval. Liu turned away, reflexively, and then—it must have been difficult, Tai thought—back to his younger brother.

"A bright loom," he said. Old phrase. Poetry and silk.

"It is more than that," said Sima Zian, softly.

Laughter was heard. "Well. That didn't take long, did it?" said Wen Zhou, caustically. "Only a few moments out from hiding, and Shen Tai hastens to remind us of his so-heroic time in the west."

Tai looked across at him. And he realized two things in that moment. That he could do this, could dance to at least some of the music here if he chose—and that someone else in the room had even more anger than he did.

He stared at the handsome figure of the prime minister. This was the man who had taken Rain. Had killed Yan.

Tai took his time. They would wait for him, he realized. He said, "There were past a hundred thousand unburied there. Half of them were ours. I wouldn't have thought you'd need reminding, first minister of Kitai."

He saw his brother wince, which meant he knew how deeply Tai had thrust—and couldn't hide it.

"You will spoil my pleasure if you quarrel," said Jian. She let her voice sound petulant. Tai looked at her: the exaggerated downward curve of that lovely, painted mouth. She was toying with them again, he thought—but with a purpose.

He bowed. "My apologies again, illustrious lady. If I am to spend time at this court, I shall need to show restraint, even when others do not."

He saw her suppress a smile. "We have little intention of letting you leave us, Shen Tai. I imagine the emperor will wish to receive you formally very soon. Where are you staying in Xinan?"

He hadn't given it a thought. You could find that amusing. "I have no residence there any more, gracious lady. I will take rooms somewhere and I will—"

She seemed genuinely astonished. "Take rooms?"

Prince Shinzu stepped forward. "The Precious Consort is right, as ever. It would be a shocking lapse on the part of the court if you were allowed to do that. Will you accept one of my homes in Xinan for the present? Until my father and his advisers have had time to consider the proper ways to honour you."

"I have... I have no need for honours, my lord prince. I did what I did at Kuala Nor only—"

"—only out of respect for your father. I understand. The world is permitted to honour this, is it not?" The prince grinned. He drained his cup. "And there are those horses. One of my men will call upon you this evening, to make arrangements."

There were, indeed, those horses, Tai thought. He wondered—yet again—if Princess Cheng-wan in Rygyal on its far plateau had had any idea what she was doing to him when she decreed that gift.

The other woman who seemed to be entering and shaping his life now, the one who seemed to know precisely what she was doing, declared an end to her gathering.

Guests bowed to her and began filing out the doors. Shinzu remained in the room. Tai looked at the screen he'd hidden behind. The viewing holes were invisible.

He looked at the other screen.

He went out, last to leave. The steward closed the door. Tai's exquisitely delicate escorts were there, hands demurely in sleeves. He saw Zhou and Liu striding away together. He'd wondered if his brother would linger to speak. He wasn't certain if he was ready for that.

Sima Zian had waited.

"Can you spend a few moments with me?" Tai asked.

"I would be honoured," the poet said gravely, no hint of irony.

They started down the first long hallway together with the two women. Sunlight came from the west through tinted, silk-paper windows, casting a mild afternoon light at intervals. They walked through it as they went. Light and shade, then light and shade.

CHAPTER XVIII

The sun is low, reddened, there is a murky tint to the air. It has been cooler today, windy. Li-Mei wears a Bogu shirt over her tunic and a camel hair vest over that. She has no idea where Meshag found these for her in this emptiness. She has seen no signs of human life, not even smoke on the wind.

In the luxurious hot springs retreat of Ma-wai to the south and west across grasslands, the Wall, the wide, dangerous river, her older brothers are reciting poems for members of the Kitan court in a room of sandalwood and gold. Their listeners drink spiced pepper wine, and a sweet breeze softens the spring air.

Li-Mei keeps looking over her shoulder. She's been doing that, nervously, from the time the sun rose, offering light enough to see. They'd begun riding under stars, the thin moon down, the wolves invisible. Night noises. Some small animal had died in the dark, she'd heard a short scream.

Meshag never looks back. He allowed only two brief halts in a very long day. He told her during the first rest that they would not be caught that day, or the next. "They will have had to wait, to learn which way we go. They know now, but there is a dust storm. It will cost them some of a day."

"And us?"

He shook his head. "The storm? Not this far. Only wind."

Only wind, and endless grass, and a sky so much farther away than any she's known. It is difficult to feel that your life means anything under this sky. Are the heavens more removed from humankind here?

Do prayers and souls have a greater distance to travel?

Meshag signals another halt towards sunset. She's anticipated this one. Sunset is the other time he hunts. She dismounts. He nods curtly, his awkward motion, and rides off, east this time, along the way they've been going.

She has no idea how he chooses his direction. If she understood him yesterday, these are lands where his people rarely travel. The Shuoki here are enemies, and have also been restive, unsettled in their submission to Kitan authority. She doesn't know much about the Shuoki. Remembers a story about General An Li suppressing a rebellion, a heroic ride, something of the sort.

They haven't seen anyone. She has a sense it would be bad if they did, if they were found here. The grasslands are vast, however, beyond belief. That may be what saves them, she thinks.

No water this time, where he's decreed their evening rest. She was hoping for a pond. She badly wants to be clean again. It is a part of how she understands herself. This begrimed, lank-haired creature on a Bogu horse in Bogu clothes (the shirt is much too large and smells of animal fat) is not who, or what, Li-Mei considers herself to be.

She's aware that this is more and more inadequate as a way of thinking with every day that passes, every li she travels. The person she was has already been altered, destroyed, by the decision to name her a princess and send her north.

If she were really strong-minded, she thinks, she'd declare the girl who'd been raised by a stream near the Wai River, the woman who'd served the empress at court and in exile, to be dead.

She'd leave her behind with memories, like a ghost.

It is hard to do. Harder than she expected. Perhaps it ought not to surprise her. Who can so easily lay down habits and images of a life, ways of thinking, an understanding of the world?

But it is more than that, Li-Mei decides, stretching out her aching back. She is living—and riding—in a fragile but undeniable condition of hope, and that changes things.

Meshag, son of Hurok, is strange beyond words, barely human at times, but he is helping her, because of Tai. And his dead eyes do not undermine or refute steadiness and experience. He killed a swan with a single arrow. And he has the wolves.

He returns to her before night has completely fallen.

She is sitting in the tall grass, looking west. The wind has died. The hook moon has set. She sees the star of the Weaver Maid. There is a song about how the moon swings past her, then under the world through the night, and comes back up carrying a message to her love on the far side of the sky.

Meshag has water in the flasks and a saddlebag full of red and yellow berries. Nothing else. She takes the water, uses some to wash her face and hands. She wants to ask about rabbits, other meat. Does not.

He crouches beside her, places the leather bag between them. He takes a fistful of berries. He says, as if she's spoken aloud, "Would you eat marmot not cooked?"

Li-Mei stares at him. "Not... not yet. Why...?"

"No fires. Shuoki. More swans, maybe at night."

Searching for them. He has said she asks too many questions. She is not ready to let this part of her be dead or lost. She takes some of the berries. The yellow ones are bitter. She says, "Is it... am I allowed to ask where we are going?"

His mouth twitches. "You did ask," he says.

She wants to laugh, but it is too difficult. She runs a hand through her limp, tied-back hair. Her father used to do that when he was trying to think. So do both her older brothers. She can't remember (a sorrow) if her little brother does.

She says, "I am afraid. I don't like feeling that way."

"Sometimes fear is proper. It is what we do that matters."

She'd not have expected a Bogu rider to admit the idea. She says, "It helps me when I know what is to come."

"Who can know this?"

Li-Mei makes a face. It occurs to her that they are having an actual conversation. "I only mean our intention. Where we are riding."

He is already harder to see. It has grown dark quickly. She hears the lead wolf in the grass, not far from them. She looks at the sky. She is looking for a swan.

Meshag says, "There is Kitan garrison not far. We sleep now, ride tonight. See it in morning."

She had forgotten about the garrison. The soldiers posted beyond the borders—here in the north, in the southwest, or west along the Silk Roads beyond Jade Gate—these seldom enter the thoughts of the Kitan. And many of them are recruited barbarians, she knows, moved from their own homelands to serve the emperor in a far place.

But that is not what she is thinking about now.

A hand goes to her hair again. She says, "But I cannot go to them! When they learn who I am they will take me back to your brother. You must understand." She hears her voice rising, tries to control it. "The emperor is dishonoured if they don't. I was... I was given as a bride. The garrison commander will be terrified if I arrive! He will... he will hold me and send for instructions and they will tell him to escort me back! This is not—"

She stops, because he has held up a hand in the darkness. When she falls silent, the night is very still around them, the only sound the wind in grass.

Meshag shakes his head. "Do Kitan women all speak so much, not listen?"

She bites her lip. Resolutely says nothing.

He says, quietly, "I said we see garrison. Not go there. I know they take you back west. I know they must do this. We see walls and turn south. Kitan fortress is protection for us from Shuoki, they not go near it."

"Oh," Li-Mei says.

"I take you..." He pauses, shakes his head. "Difficult tongue. I am taking you to Long Wall, is only three days if we ride quickly."

But the Wall, she thinks, the Wall's soldiers will do exactly the same thing, whichever watchtower they come to. She remains silent, waiting.

He says, "Soldiers there also send you back. I know. We go through Long Wall into Kitai."

"But how?" She cannot help herself.

She sees him shrug with one shoulder. "Not difficult for two people. You then see. No. You... will see."

She is heroically silent. Then she hears a strange sound, and realizes he is laughing.

He says, "You are try so hard not to ask more."

"I am!" Li-Mei says. "You shouldn't laugh at me."

He stops. Then says, "I take you through your Wall, sister of Shendai. Near to it is flat mountain. Drum Mountain, you call it? We go... we are going there."

Her eyes widen. "Stone Drum Mountain," she whispers.

He is taking her to the Kanlin Warriors.

The two women bowed at the tall doorway to Tai's chamber. One of them opened the door. Tai let Sima Zian enter first. The women waited in the corridor. They didn't lower their eyes now. It was clear that they would come in if he invited them. It was equally clear that there was little he or the poet might think to request that would not be granted. Zian smiled at the smaller, prettier one. Tai cleared his throat.

"I thank you both. I must speak now with my friend. How may I summon you if needed?"

They looked perplexed. It was Zian who said, "They'll be right here, Shen Tai. They are yours until you leave Ma-wai."

"Oh," said Tai. He managed a smile. Both women smiled back. He closed the door, gently. The two large windows were open, screens rolled up. It was still light outside. He didn't imagine any real privacy existed here, but he didn't think anyone would be spying on him.

There was wine warming over a brazier on a small, lacquered table. He saw that the cups set beside it were gold. He felt overwhelmed. Zian crossed to the table, poured two cups. He handed one to Tai. He lifted his own in salute and drained it, then poured himself another.

"What just happened?" Tai asked.

He set his own wine down. He was afraid to drink any more. The intensity of the gathering they'd just left was washing over him. This happened in wartime, too, he knew.

This afternoon had been a battle. He'd been placed as an ambush, had engaged in single combat. Not necessarily with his true enemy. Enemy. That word again.

Zian raised his eyebrows. "What happened? You created a very fine poem, so did your brother. I will make copies of both."

"No, I mean..."

"I know what you mean. I can judge the poems. I can't answer the other question."

Zian crossed to the window, looking out. From where he stood Tai could see that the gardens were glorious. This was Ma-wai. They would be. A little way north of here were the Ninth Dynasty tombs.

Tai said, "I think the emperor was behind the other screen."

"What?" Zian turned quickly. "Why? How do you...?"

"I don't know for certain. I think. Two painted screens, and what Lady Jian and the prince did together in there... it felt like it was meant for an audience, and it wouldn't be me."

"It might have been."

"I don't think so. I've never heard of Prince Shinzu behaving in such a... talking so..."

They were both fumbling for words.

"So strongly?"

"Yes."

"Neither have I," said Sima Zian, almost reluctantly.

"He was challenging Zhou. And he couldn't have done it without knowing—surely!—that his father would learn of it. So it seems to me..."

"That he might have been doing it for the emperor?"

"Yes."

Zian's last word hung in the room, with all its obvious implications, and all those they could not see. The breeze at the window was mild, scented with flowers.

"Could you see us? From where you were?"

Tai nodded. "She'd arranged for that. So what happened there? I need help."

The poet sighed. He refilled his cup again. He gestured, and Tai reluctantly drained his own. Zian crossed the room and poured for him. He said, "I have spent my life between cities and mountains, rivers and roads. You know it. I have never had a place at court. Never sat the examinations. Shen Tai, I am not the man to tell you what is unfolding."

"But you listen. You watch. What did you hear in that room?"

Zian's eyes were bright. The afternoon light streamed in. The room was large, gracious, inviting. A place to be easy, to seek tranquility. That was what Ma-wai had always been about. The poet said, "I think First Minister Wen was given a warning. I do not think it will cost him his position."

"Even if he was plotting murder?"

Sima Zian shook his head. "No. Not even if he had achieved your killing. What, they will say, is the meaning of so much power if you can't use it to rid yourself of someone you dislike?"

Tai looked at him, said nothing.

Zian went on, "They'd have cheerfully allowed him to have you killed—before the horses. It would have been a matter of no consequence. Whether he did it because of a woman, or to prevent you from threatening his adviser, your brother. No one here would have blinked if you'd died at Kuala Nor or on the road. The horses have changed that. But I think today was about Roshan. Your presence was that warning to Zhou. He's at risk. They were telling him that." He poured another cup. He smiled again. "I very much liked 'cold stars shine on white bones.'"

"Thank you," said Tai.

There were two pre-eminent writers among thousands in Ninth Dynasty Kitai. This man was one of them. You could go happily to your ancestors carrying praise from Sima Zian for lines you'd written.

Tai said, "You just gave me guidance, after all."

"Treat it with caution," said the poet. "I claim no wisdom."

"Those who claim are those who lack," said Tai. It was a quote, the poet would know it.

Zian hesitated. "Shen Tai, I am not a humble man. I am only being honest. I keep returning to this jade-and-gold, it draws me. Sandalwood and ivory, the murmur and scent of women. But to visit, to taste. It is no home. I need to be here, and when I come, I need to be gone. A man must see it as his home to understand the court."

Tai opened his mouth to reply, but realized he didn't know what he wanted to say.

Zian said, "There is more beauty in the Ta-Ming, or here at Ma-wai, than anywhere else where men have built palaces and gardens. It may be that there is more beauty here, right now, than there has ever been. Who would deny the wonder and glory of that? Or resist seeing it?"

"Or fear that it might end?" Tai asked.

"That is... one fear, yes. Sometimes I am happy I am no longer young." Zian put his cup down. "I am awaited, friend. There are two women who promised me flute music and saffron wine when the sun went down."

Tai smiled. "No man should keep another from that."

"Truly. Will you come?"

Tai shook his head. "I need to think. I imagine there will be a banquet tonight? I have no idea how to conduct myself."

"Because of Wen Zhou?"

"Yes. No. Because of my brother."

The poet looked at him. "He should not have done what he did."

Tai shrugged. "He is head of our family. He will say Li-Mei brings us honour, stature in the world."

The poet looked at him. "He is correct in that." His eyes were bright again, a trick of the light. "Still, I could understand if you killed him for it. But I am not a clever man in these ways."

Tai said, "I'm not certain I am, either."

Zian smiled, a wintry look. You were made to remember that he'd been a warrior in his time. "Perhaps. But you must be clever now, Tai. For a little while, or for longer than that. You have importance now."

"The world can bring us gifts, or poison in a jewelled cup," Tai quoted.

The poet's expression changed. "I don't know that. Who wrote it?"

"My brother," said Tai quietly.

"Ah," said Sima Zian. "I see."

Tai was thinking of summer thunderstorms watched from a shared-bedroom window.

He was walking towards the door to open it for the poet when the knocking came. It didn't come from the hallway outside.

Both men froze where they were. A moment later the tapping came again. Tai turned to look at the wall beyond the handsome bed.

As he watched, a door-shaped panel swung away into shadow, and then a second panel did. Double doors, hidden in the wall. No one appeared. From where Tai stood he couldn't see within the recess. A corridor? An adjacent room?

The two men looked at each other. "This is not a time for me to be here," said Zian quietly. The poet's expression was grave. Close to Tai's ear, he murmured, "Be clever, friend. Be slow to act. This will not play out in a day and night."

He opened the door to the hallway himself. Tai's escorts were still there, one against the windows, the other across from her. The corridor was now lit by lanterns all the way down, in anticipation of sunset.

They smiled at the two men. Zian went out. Tai closed the door behind him, turned back into the room.

Six soldiers came in quickly, almost running.

They took positions, paired, by the two windows and the door, moving past Tai, ignoring him, their expressions impassive. They had swords and helmets and leather armour. The four at the windows looked out, carefully, but did not close them. The light coming in was beautiful, this time of day.

One of the soldiers knelt and looked under the bed. He stood up and nodded towards the recessed passage.

Wen Jian entered the room.

She didn't look at Tai, either. She walked across to the window opposite, then turned back to face the double doors, her expression sober. She was still wearing the green silk with pale-yellow phoenixes decorating it.

Tai's heart was pounding. He was afraid now.

Through the doors in the wall came six more soldiers carrying a curtained palace chair on poles. The curtains hid the figure they were carrying. You knew, however. You knew who this was.

The chair was set down in the middle of the room.

Tai dropped to his knees, forehead to the floor, hands stretched before him. He didn't look up. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying not to tremble. He remained that way, prostrate.

That was what you did when the Serene and Exalted Emperor of Kitai, ruling in glory through the mandate of heaven, entered a room. Any room, let alone your own bedchamber, having come to you in secrecy through a passage in the walls.

"You have permission to stand, son of Shen Gao." It was Jian who spoke.

Tai scrambled to his feet. He bowed, three times, towards the curtained chair. And then twice to the woman by the window. She inclined her head but did not smile. The soldiers who'd carried in the chair took positions along the walls, heads high, eyes staring directly ahead.

The curtains enclosing the chair were red, decorated with yellow suns. There were nine on this side, Tai saw, and there would be nine on the opposite, for the legend. Too much brightness for mortal men. That was the meaning here.

He had seen the Emperor Taizu three times in his life, from a distance.

The emperor had stood on a high balcony of the Ta-Ming overlooking a throng in the square before the palace on three festival days. The imperial party had been so far away and so far above that one of the students had said they might easily have been people hired to pose in imperial colours, under banners, while the real court were hunting or at ease in the Deer Park beyond.

"The august shepherd of our people wishes you to answer a question," Jian murmured.

Tai bowed to the curtains again. He was sweating. "Your servant is honoured beyond deserving," he stammered.

From behind the red curtain a voice came, stronger than Tai had expected. "Did you truly hear the voices of the dead at Kuala Nor?"

Tai dropped to his knees again, forehead to floor.

"You have permission to stand," said Jian a second time.

Tai stood. He had no idea what to do with his hands. He clasped them in front of his waist, then let them fall to his sides. His palms were damp.

"Your servant did, gracious and exalted lord," he said.

"Did they speak to you?" There was vivid interest in the voice. You couldn't miss hearing it.

Tai refrained, with an effort, from kneeling again. He was still trembling, trying to control that. He said, "Gracious lord, they did not. Your servant only heard them crying in the night, from the time the sun went down until it rose again."

"Crying. In anger, or in sorrow, son of Shen Gao?"

Tai looked at the floor. "Both, exalted lord. When... when... when bones were laid to rest, that ghost would cease to cry."

There was a silence. He glanced at Jian out of the corner of his eye. She stood by a window, late sunlight in her hair.

"We are well pleased," said the emperor of Kitai. "You have done us honour, and your father. It is noted."

Tai knelt again. "Great lord, your servant is not worthy of such words."

There came a chuckle from behind the curtain. "Do you mean that I am wrong in what I have said?"

Tai pressed his forehead to the floor, speechless. He heard Jian's laughter. She murmured, "Dearest love, that is unkind. You terrify the man."

Dearest love.

The Emperor Taizu, unseen, but also laughing, said, "A man who lived two years among the dead? I hope it is not so."

Tai didn't move, didn't speak.

"You have permission to stand," Wen Jian said again, and this time there was exasperation in her voice.

Tai stood.

He heard a rustling of the curtain—but it was on the other side, away from him. A moment passed, then the rustling again.

The emperor said, "We will formally receive you when such matters have been arranged. We wished to express our approval, privately. We always have need of brave men in the Ta-Ming Palace. It is good that you are here."

"Your servant thanks you, great lord," Tai murmured. He was perspiring now.

The emperor, in a quieter voice, said, "Honour falls into three parts, son of Shen Gao. One part restraint. One part right-thinking. One part honouring ancestors. We will leave you."

He didn't care what the woman had told him three times now: Tai fell to his knees again and put his head to the floor. He heard the soldiers moving, a creak as the chair was lifted, then the floorboards as they carried it back through the hidden doors.

He was thinking of those last words, trying without success to remember if he'd ever heard or studied them. Then, wrongly, entirely wrongly, the thought came to him that the unseen man who'd spoken them had taken his young son's young bride for his own concubine, was pursuing forbidden immortality with hidden alchemies, and was also building himself a tomb that dwarfed his father's and all those of his line.

One's own thoughts could be terrifying.

He heard the tread of the other soldiers, again almost running across the room. After a moment, he looked up.

Jian was by the double doors, alone, smiling at him.

"That was well enough done," she said. "I will confess, for my own part, that I find restraint to be over-praised. Do you not agree, Shen Tai?"

It was too much. Too many different directions for a man to be pulled in one day. Tai simply stared at her. He had no idea what to say.

She could see it in his face, obviously. She laughed, not unkindly.

"You are excused from my banquet tonight," she said.

He flushed. "I have offended you, illustrious lady?"

She shook her head. "Not so. There are gifts from the Phoenix Throne on the bed. These are the emperor's, not mine. My gift is your freedom tonight. The little Kanlin, so fierce in your service, is waiting outside this room with nine other Warriors. You will need guards when you go to Xinan tonight."

"I am going to Xinan?"

"And had best leave soon. Darkness will find you on the road."

"I... what am I...?"

"My cousin," said Jian, with a smile that could undo a man's control over his limbs, "is here with me tonight, and with others tomorrow morning, in discussions about Roshan."

"I see," said Tai, although he didn't.

"She has been told you are coming," said Wen Jian.

Tai swallowed. Found that he could say nothing at all.

"This is my gift. Your Kanlin knows where your horse is stabled. And you have a steward now, for the city home the emperor has just presented you. You will need a steward."

"A steward?" Tai repeated, stupidly.

"He was mine this morning. I have reconsidered a decision taken. He owes you his life. I expect he will serve you well."

The smile deepened. There was no woman on earth, Tai thought, who looked the way this one did.

But there was another woman, in Xinan, with golden hair. Who had put her life at risk for him, who had warned him, more than once, of what might happen if he went away.

She had also told him, Tai remembered, that he was going to need to be much more subtle, if he had the smallest hope of surviving in the world of the court.

"They will send word when you are summoned," said Wen Jian. "There will be an audience, and then, of course, you will need to go back west to bring your horses."

"Of course, gracious lady," said Tai.

"You have promised me ten of them," she reminded him.

"I have," he said. "For dancing?"

"For dancing," she agreed. "One more gift." She turned and laid something down on the bed and then went out through the doors in the wall. Someone closed them. The room was as it had been. It was still light outside.

On the bed lay a heavy key. Beside it was a ring, set with an emerald larger than any Tai had ever seen in his life.

There was a third object as well, he saw.

A lychee, not yet peeled.

He took the fruit, he took the key—it would be for the house in Xinan. He placed them in a pocket of his robe. He took the ring and put it on the ring finger of his left hand. He looked at it there for a moment, thinking of his father and mother. Then he took it off and placed it in his pocket, as well.

He drew a strained breath, let it out. For no good reason he removed his hat.

He crossed to the door and opened it.

"I am happy to see you," he said to Wei Song. She stood there, straight, small, unsmiling, fierce as a grassland wolf.

She made a face. Said nothing. Did incline her head, mind you. Behind her were, as promised, other Kanlins, black-clad.

Beside Song, kneeling, was the steward from this morning at the inn. The man who'd been ordered by Jian to kill himself when they reached Ma-wai. I have reconsidered a decision.

"Please stand," said Tai. The steward stood up. There were, embarrassingly, tears on his cheeks. Tai pretended not to see them. He took out the key. "I will assume you have been told which gateway, which house in Xinan, this will unlock?"

"I have, gracious lord," said the steward. "It is in the fifty-seventh ward, the very best. A handsome property. It is even close to the mansion of the first minister!" He looked proud, saying this.

Tai blinked. He could almost hear Jian's laughter.

He said, "I wish you to take horse or carriage, whichever is easier for you, and prepare this house for me tonight. There will be servants there?"

"Of course! This was a home belonging to the emperor, may he live a thousand years. They will be waiting for you, my lord. And they will be honoured and grateful, as... as I am, to serve you."

Tai scowled. "Good," he said. "I will see you in Xinan."

The steward took the extended key, bowed, turned, went hurrying down the hallway. A man with a clear, shining purpose again, in a life he'd thought was over.

"His name is Ye Lao," said Song. "You neglected to ask."

He looked at her. The neat, calm figure in black. Her intense features. She had killed for Tai, had been wounded again this morning.

"Ye Lao. Thank you. Would you prefer him dead?"

She hadn't expected that. She shook her head.

"No." She hesitated. "This is a different world," she said. She wasn't as calm as she seemed, he realized.

He nodded. "It is. It will be."

She looked up at him. He saw her smile, the wide mouth. "And you will have your thighs torn raw, my lord, if you try to ride to Xinan on a Sardian horse while wearing liao silk. Have you riding clothes?"

He looked to the window and then the wall. His two women were still there, looking fearful and proud.

"Have I riding clothes?" he asked.

They hurried (gracefully) past him into the room. He heard them opening a chest, heard rustling sounds, giggling.

He went in a moment later. He did, it seemed, have riding clothes, exactly fitted, and his own boots had been cleaned. He changed. Neither woman looked away, he noted.

He kept the ring and, for no very good reason, the lychee fruit. He went back out, joined Song and the other Kanlins assigned to him. They led him to the stables, to Dynlal and horses for all of them, and they rode out from Ma-wai near the end of the day, towards the city of dust and noise, of two million souls, where lights would be shining by the time they arrived, and would shine all through the night.

No one ever rests in Xinan, his brother Liu had just said, in a poem.

And Rain had been told he was coming.

CHAPTER XIX

There is a rosewood gazebo near the back wall of the compound. It is set among fruit trees and flower beds, a long way beyond the artificial lake and the island set within it, past the grassy space for entertaining guests, and the bamboo grove with its laid-out paths, and the open area where Wen Zhou's guards practise swordsmanship and archery.

For Rain, the gazebo is a favourite place. She has many reasons. Rosewood is named not for its colour, but for its scent, which she loves. The wood itself is dark, with lines running through it as if trying to reach the surface, to break through. You can see that, imagine that, in daylight. Rosewood comes to Xinan from forests in the far south. It is imported overland and then along rivers and up the Great Canal, at a cost that does not bear thinking about.

There are nightingales here sometimes, this far back from the rooms and pavilions of the compound. (The street beyond the wall is quiet at night in a sedate, very wealthy ward.) They can be heard most often in summer; it is early in the year to expect one tonight.

She has meandered back this way, carrying her pipa, plucking it as she walked through the twilight. She has noticed that when she carries the instrument people don't look at her as closely, as if she's part of the setting, not a woman to be observed. Or carefully watched.

It is dark now. She'd had Hwan, the servant who loves her a little too much, light one of the gazebo's lanterns for her, and then she'd dismissed him. She doesn't want it to appear as if she's hiding: see, there is a light. Although you'd need to come a long way back and look through trees to see it. Earlier, in the afternoon, Hwan had run a different errand for her outside the compound. She has done what she can do, and is here.

Rain plays a few notes of an old song about the moon as messenger between parted lovers. Then she decides that's the wrong music to be thinking about tonight.

She is alone here. She's confident of that. Her maidservants have been dismissed for the night. One will remain in the suite of rooms against her mistress's return, but Rain has stayed out late in the garden with her pipa before. A mild eccentricity, usefully established.

And Wen Zhou doesn't spy on his women. His mind doesn't run that way. He can't actually conceive, Rain believes, that they would not be devoted and compliant. Where, and how, could they have a better life? No, his fears are cast, like a shadow, outside these walls.

He and his wife have been gone all day. Summoned to Ma-wai, no warning. He wasn't happy about the suddenness. On the other hand, there was never a great deal anyone could prudently do in the way of resisting when Jian wanted them. Rain sees fireflies among the trees, watches them for a time. Moths flutter around the lantern.

The compound has been quiet since the master left this morning, or at least since the arrival of the second message from Ma-wai. The one sent to her. Not all windows above jade stairs need be seen through tears.

No jade stairs here. Neither real jade nor a poet's symbol-shaped imagining. She sits on a bench with her instrument in a rosewood gazebo, roofed, but open to the night on all sides.

The scent of the wood, scent of the air. Nearly summer now. No jade, and no tears, Rain decides, although she knows it would be possible to make herself weep. She isn't going to do that. She is thinking too hard.

Mostly about Wen Jian.

No one knows this mountain where I dwell.

Tai found it ironic, in an over-elaborate way, that when the nearness of Xinan first announced itself—a wide, diffused glow on the southern horizon—the phrase that came to him was from a poem about solitude.

Yan would have had a remark about that, he thought.

So would Xin Lun, actually. The one man gentle, amused, the other wittily astringent. Both were dead. And the memories he was conjuring were more than two years old.

So was the memory, rich as the emerald he carried (but didn't wear), of the woman he was riding through the night to see.

He wasn't sure why he hadn't put on the ring. He wasn't ready yet, he decided, for people to look at him the way one looked at a man with so much wealth on display. He didn't want Rain seeing him like that, though he couldn't say why. It wasn't as if she would be unused to opulence in the first minister's house.

Even in the Pavilion of Moonlight, she had moved through a world that included extravagantly wealthy men. It had never seemed to touch her. She'd been as happy—or had made them think she was—among the students, singing for them, teasing, listening to late-night philosophy and verse and plans to remake the world.

That was what a skilled courtesan did, of course: induce every man to think he was the one she'd choose, had she only the freedom to pursue that innermost desire.

But he knew, Tai knew, that to think that way about her was to deny a deeper truth about the golden-haired woman behind the walls (so many of them). Xinan's walls loomed now in the middle distance beyond the bridge they were clattering across. The bridge had bright lanterns, and soldiers guarding it.

Two years ago, Rain had told him—had warned him—that the stylish southern aristocrat Wen Zhou, cousin to the emperor's beloved, might be minded to take her away from the North District.

Both of them had seen it happen many times. Mostly, it was a dream for a courtesan that this might occur. A doorway opening on a better life.

Tai, immersed in his studies and friendships, trying to decide what his own idea of a properly lived life should be, had been painfully aware that what she said might be true, but there was nothing a student preparing for the examinations, the second son of a retired general, could do if an aristocrat with wealth and connections wanted a North District woman for his own.

And then his father had died.

He was thinking of her, green eyes and yellow hair and the voice late at night, as they came to the city walls. Tai looked up at the enormous, many-storeyed tower above the gates. There were lights now, hiding the stars. The gates were locked, of course. It was after darkfall.

That didn't seem to matter: Jian had sent word ahead of them.

The leader of his Kanlin escort (not Wei Song, there was a more senior figure now) handed a scroll through a small sliding window, and a moment later the Gold Bird Guards manning this entrance through the northern wall opened for them, with a shout.

Then, as he and his Kanlins rode through, the city guards—those on the ground and those in the tower and on the nearby walls—all bowed twice, to Tai.

He truly wasn't prepared for this. He looked at Song, who had stayed close through the hours of this ride. She didn't meet his glance, was staring straight ahead, hood up, watchful and alert. She'd been wounded this morning. Seemed to show no signs of it.

The gates swung closed behind them. He turned in the saddle and watched, patting Dynlal absently. Tai wondered why he wasn't exhausted. They had been travelling most of the day, except for an interlude at Ma-wai that was likely to change his life.

He was in Xinan again. Heart of the world.

He still didn't know why Jian was doing this. His best guess was that it was a small part of the endless balancing act she performed in the palace: Wen Zhou and Roshan, ambitious mandarins, the heir, other governors, the eunuchs, other princes (and their mothers)...

And now one more man, arrived from the west. The brother of an influential adviser and of a newly named princess. A man with an absurd number of Sardian horses in his control.

To a woman in Jian's position, it would only make sense to assert a claim to such a man. And so, when it had emerged, through routine inquiry, that he'd had a relationship with a singing girl in the North District, a girl who might even be the reason Jian's cousin had sought to have him killed...

Well, you might undertake certain things in such a circumstance, set them in motion, if you were a clever woman dealing with a fiendishly difficult court. And with an aging emperor, tired of protocols and conflicts and finance and barbarians, obsessed with you, and with living forever, while shaping the most opulent tomb ever built, should that second dream not come to pass because the gods did not wish it so.

Gates had been opened for Tai, not just symbolically, as in a verse, but real ones, massive and intimidating, looming by torch and lantern light.

He had never done this: enter the city after dark.

If you approached Xinan towards day's end you found an inn, or a farmhouse with a barn (if you were a student, watching your money), and listened from outside the walls to the long ceremony of drums that closed the gates. Then you entered with the market crowd in the morning amid the chaos of another day among two million souls.

Not now. Now, the gates had just swung wide. Four of the Gold Bird Guards even came with them, to preclude the necessity of showing their scroll all the way through the city.

The streets were eerily quiet. Within the lanes and alleys of some of the wards there would be raucous, violent life even now, Tai knew, but not along the main roads. They turned east immediately inside the gate, passing in front of the vast palace complex until they turned south down the central avenue. The widest street in the world, running from the Ta-Ming to the southern gate, straight as a dream of virtue.

She had pressed her fingers to his mouth, their last night, to stop him from being clever, he recalled. He had once been a man who prided himself on being clever. He remembered her scent, her palm against his face. He remembered kissing her hand.

He looked around him. He had never done this either, ride a horse right down the central avenue, after dark. He didn't like being in the middle of the wide street. It felt too much as if he were laying claim to something. He wasn't. He'd have liked to claim a cup of wine in the Pavilion of Moonlight, if she had still been there.

"Over more, please," he said quietly to Song. "Too much of a procession, where we are."

She looked quickly at him. They were near a guard station, with lanterns. He saw concern in her eyes, then they moved from the light and he couldn't see her face any more. Song twitched her horse's reins, moved ahead, and spoke to the man leading them. They began angling southeast across the vast, open space, to continue along the roadway, nearer one side now.

There were only a handful of people abroad on the street, and no group so large as theirs. Those on the far side, west, were so distant as to be almost invisible. There were guard stations at intervals, large ones at the major intersections, all the way down the centre of the road. He saw a sedan chair being carried north. The bearers stopped as their company passed by. A hand pulled a curtain back, to see who they were. Tai glimpsed a woman's face.

They carried on, ten Kanlin Warriors, four of the Gold Bird Guards, and the second son of General Shen Gao, down the principal avenue of Xinan, under stars.

All journeys come to an end, one way or another. They reached the gate of the fifty-seventh ward.

He had been born in the south, beyond the Great River, in lands that knew tigers and the shrieking of gibbons. His family were farm labourers for generations, going back further than any of them could have counted. He, himself—his name was Pei Qin—had been the youngest of seven, a small child, clever.

When he was six years old his father had brought him to the under-steward of one of the Wen estates. There were three branches of the Wen family, controlling most of the land (and the rice and salt) around. There was always a need for capable servants to be trained. Qin had been accepted by the steward to be raised and educated. That had been thirty-seven years ago.

He had become a trusted, unobtrusive household servant. When the eldest son of the family decided to make his way to Xinan and the courtly world not quite four years ago (observing the useful, astonishing rise of his young cousin), Qin was one of the servants he'd taken north to help select and teach those they would hire in the capital.

Qin had done that, capably and quietly. He'd been a quiet child, was unchanged as a man. Never married. He had been one of the three servants entrusted with laying out clothing for the master, with preparing his rooms, with warming his wine or tea. Had he been asked at any time, he'd have said that his was a privileged life, since he knew the conditions in which his siblings lived, among the rice and salt.

One evening—the wrong evening, for reasons heaven decreed—he had been distracted by the inadequately supervised presence in the compound of a dozen girls from the pleasure district. They were being fitted with costumes for a pageant Zhou was hosting on his lake. (The lake was new then.)

Hearing their uninhibited laughter, worrying about who was watching them, Qin had overheated the master's evening wine.

The wine had, evidently, burned Wen Zhou's tongue.

Thirty-five years with the family had been as nothing, Qin would think, after. Decades of service had been less than nothing.

He was beaten. In itself, not unusual. The life of a servant included such things, and a senior retainer could be required to perform the beating of a lesser one. Qin had done that. The world was not a gentle place. No one who'd seen a brother mauled by a tiger would ever think that. And a short time in Xinan could make a man realize there were tigers here, too, even if they might not have stripes or pad through forests and fields after dark.

The thing was, Wen Zhou had ordered sixty strokes with the heavy rod for Qin. His tongue must have been quite badly burned, one of the other servants said bitterly, afterwards.

Or something else had greatly distressed the master that night. It didn't matter. Sixty strokes of the rod could kill a man.

Two and a half years ago, that was, in the days just before the Cold Food Festival. Qin did not die, but it was a near thing.

The household steward (not a bad man, for a steward) arranged for two doctors to attend upon him, taking turns, day and night, in the small room where they'd brought him after the public beating in the Third Courtyard. (It was important for all the servants to see the consequences of carelessness.)

He survived, but never walked properly again. He couldn't lift his right arm. That side of his torso was twisted, like some trees above the Great River gorges that grow low to the slanting ground to stay out of the wind and suck moisture from sparse soil.

He was dismissed, of course. An aristocrat's compound was not a place for the unemployable. The other servants undertook to look after him. It was not something he'd expected, not something normally done. Usually a man as deformed as Qin would be taken to one of the markets and do what he could to survive by begging there.

It might have helped if he could have sung, or told tales, or even served as a scribe... but he had no singing voice, was a small, shy man, and his writing hand (he'd been taught by Wen Zhou's father's steward how to write) was the one that was twisted and useless after the beating.

He'd have been better off dying, Qin thought for a long time. He shaped such thoughts in the street behind Wen's compound, where the other servants had placed him after he was dismissed. It was not a busy thoroughfare, not a good place for a beggar, but the others had said they'd look after him, and they had done so.

Qin would limp on his crutch to the shady side of the street in summer and then cross as the sun moved, or huddle in an alcove in rain or winter winds. Begging brought little, but from the compound each morning and many evenings food and rice wine came out for him. If his garments grew threadbare, he would find that one day the person bringing his meal would be carrying new clothes. In winter they gave him a hooded cloak, and he even had boots. He became skilful with the crutch at beating off dogs or rats eyeing his provisions.

Last autumn his life had even changed for the better, which was not something Pei Qin had thought was possible any more.

One cold, clear morning, four of the household servants, walking the long distance around from the south-facing front doors, had come along the street towards where Qin kept his station against the compound wall. They carried wood and nails and tools, and set about building a discreet shelter for him, set in a space between an oak tree and the stone wall, not easily seen from the street, not likely to offend.

He asked, and they told him that the new concubine, Lin Chang, had heard Qin's story from one of Zhou's other women—apparently meant as a cautionary tale. She had made inquiries and learned where he was.

She had given instructions that he be provided with a shelter, and his food rations became more substantial after that. It appeared that she had assumed responsibility for him, freeing the servants from the need to feed him out of their own allocation.

He never saw her. They told him she was beautiful, and on five occasions (he remembered them perfectly) he heard her play the pipa towards the back of the garden. He knew it was her, even before they confirmed for him that it was Mistress Lin, of all the women, who played and sang best, and who liked to come alone to the gazebo.

Qin had decided she was playing for him.

He would have killed, or died for her, by then. Hwan, the servant who most often brought his food or clothing, clearly felt the same way. It was Hwan who told him she'd been bought from the North District, and that her name there had been Spring Rain. He also told Qin what the master had paid for her (it was a source of pride). Qin thought it an unimaginable sum, and also not enough.

It was Hwan who had told him, at the beginning of spring, that a Kanlin Warrior would be coming to meet privately with Mistress Lin.

Hwan—speaking for the lady, he made clear—asked Qin to show this Kanlin how to get over the wall using his own shelter-tree, and to give her directions to the gazebo from there (it was a distance back west in the compound).

It brought intense joy to Qin's battered body and beating heart to be trusted with such a service for her. He told Hwan as much, begged him to say so to Mistress Lin, and to bow three times in Qin's name.

The Kanlin came that night (a woman, which he hadn't expected, but it made no difference). She looked for Qin in the darkness, carrying no torch. She'd have had trouble seeing him, had he not been watching for her. He called to her, showed her the way over the wall, told her where the gazebo was. It was a cold night, he remembered. The woman climbed with an ease Qin would never have matched even when he had his legs and a straight back. But Kanlin were chosen for their aptitude in these things, and trained.

Qin had been chosen for intelligence, but had overheated wine one night.

You might call the world an unjust place, or make of life what you could. He was grateful to the servants, in love with a woman he would never see, and he intended to live long enough to celebrate the death of Wen Zhou.

He watched the Kanlin woman disappear over the wall and saw her come back some time later. She gave him a coin—silver, which was generous. He was saving it for an extravagance. Lychees would be in season now in the south, where he'd been born. The court might have them already, the Xinan marketplaces would see them soon. Qin intended to ask someone to buy him a basket, as a way of remembering childhood.

He'd actually gone once to the nearer, eastern market the summer before, just to see it again. It had been a reckless, misguided thing to do. Getting there had taken him most of a day, limping and in pain, mocked by children. He'd fallen several times, and been stepped on, and had then been at real risk, at day's end, of not getting back inside the ward when the drums began.

You were beaten by the gate guards for that.

He would ask someone to buy him lychees. There were several of the servants he trusted, and he would share his bounty. They had saved his life, after all. And surely there was value in any life, even one such as his?

Earlier today, Hwan had come out again, taking the long walk around to tell him someone else would be coming along Qin's street tonight, and would need to be shown the tree and how to climb, and where the gazebo might be found.

"It is for her?" was all Qin asked.

"Of course it is," Hwan said.

"Please bow three times. Tell her that her most humble servant in the world under heaven will ensure that it is done."

That night a man did come walking, with five Kanlins. One of these, Qin saw, was the woman who'd come before. He knew because he didn't need to call out to them, she came straight over to his tree. Since it was the woman who'd been here they didn't need instructions. The man looked down at Qin in the darkness (they carried no torches). He saw the small shelter built for him.

He gave Qin two coins, even before going over the wall. Three of the Kanlin went with him, two remained in the street, on guard.

Qin wanted to tell them that he would have served as a guard, but he wasn't a foolish man. These were Kanlin, they had swords across their backs. They wore black, as ever, and melted into the night. After a time he had no idea where they were, but he knew that they were there.

Her Pipa Rests on the wide, smooth, waist-high railing. She is standing by one of the gazebo's rosewood pillars, leaning against it. It is chilly now but she has a short jacket, green as leaves, with gold thread, to cover her bodice, which is gold. Her green, ankle-length skirt has stripes running down it, also gold. The silk is unexceptional. It would have been noted had she worn finer silk, with the master away.

She wears no perfume, same reason.

She is on her feet because she has heard someone coming—from the eastern side of the garden, where the oak tree can be climbed.

The one lantern casts an amber glow. The gazebo will seem like a cabin in a dark forest, she imagines, a refuge, sanctuary for a lost traveller. It isn't, she thinks. There is no sanctuary here.

Footsteps ascend the two steps and he is here.

He kneels immediately, head lowered, before she can even see his face, register his presence properly. She has not expected him to do this. She's had no real idea what to expect. No jade stairs, she reminds herself. No tears at window ledges.

He looks up. The remembered face. She observes little change, but it is not light enough to see closely here, and two years need not alter a man so much.

She murmurs, "I am not deserving of this, my lord."

He says, "I am not deserving of what you did for me, Rain."

The voice she also remembers, too vividly. Why, and how, does one voice, one person, come to conjure vibrations in the soul, like an instrument tuned? Why a given man, and not another, or a third? She hasn't nearly enough wisdom to answer that. She isn't sure if anyone does.

"Master Shen," she says formally. "Please stand. Your servant is honoured that you have come."

He does stand up. When he looks at her, his face, beneath the lantern, shows the intensity she recalls. She pushes memories away. She needs to do that. She says, "Are you alone, my lord?"

He shakes his head. "Three Kanlin are with me, to keep watch. Two more in the street. I'm not allowed to be alone any more, Rain."

She thinks she understands that. She says, "Is the one I sent to you...?"

"Wei Song is here, yes. She is very capable."

Rain allows herself a smile. She sees him register that. "I thought she might be. But did she... how did you survive?"

He hesitates. He has changed, she decides. Is weighing his words. "You know where I was?"

She nods. She is glad of the pillar behind her, for support. "I didn't know, before. I had to have her find your home, start there. I didn't even know where your father's home was."

"I am sorry," he says, simply.

She ignores that. Says, "I know that Wen Zhou had Lun hire a woman to kill you."

"Sent with Yan."

"Yes. Is he all right?"

"He's dead, Rain. She killed him. I was saved only by... by the ghosts. And Tagurans who came to help, when they saw riders."

By the ghosts. She isn't ready to ask about that, to know about it. Yan is dead. A hard thing to learn. A sweet man.

"I'm sorry," she says.

He is silent, looking at her. She is accustomed to men looking at her, but this is different. He is different.

Eventually he says, "He was dead the moment she became his guard, I think."

She wishes there was wine. She ought to have brought some. "So I did nothing at all?" she says.

He shakes his head. "There was a second attempt. At Chenyao. Wei Song fought a number of men alone, outside my room."

"A very capable woman, then." She isn't sure why she's said it that way.

Tai only nods. "As I said." He hesitates again. He isn't being awkward, she decides, he is choosing what to say. It is a difference from before. "Rain, you would have been killed if this had been discovered." It is a statement, not a question.

"It was unlikely it would be," she says. He hasn't moved from under the lantern, neither has she, from her place by the pillar. She sees fireflies behind him. Hears crickets in the garden. No sign of the Kanlins he mentioned, or anyone else. There is a silence.

"I had to go away," he says, finally.

This will become difficult now, she thinks.

"I know," she says. "Your father died."

"When did... when did he bring you here?"

She smiles at him, her smile has always been an instrument she could use. "Not long after his appointment."

"As you tried to tell me."

"As I did tell you, Tai."

She hadn't meant to say that so quickly. Or use his name. She sees him smile this time. He steps closer. She wants to close her eyes, but does not.

He says, "No perfume? I have remembered it for two years."

"Have you really, my lord?" she says, the way she might have in the Pavilion of Moonlight.

He looks down at her, where the light touches her features, catches yellow hair. She has not posed herself, it was simply a place against a column where she could lean back for support. And be on her feet when he came.

He says, "I understand. You wear scent now only for him, and he's away."

She keeps her tone light. "I am not sure how I feel about you becoming this perceptive."

He smiles only a little. Says nothing.

"I can also move more easily undetected without it," she says. But she is disconcerted that he has so swiftly understood.

"Is that important?" He is asking something else now, she knows.

She lifts her shoulders again, lets them fall.

"Has he been cruel?" he asks. She hears strain in his voice. She knows men well, this one very well.

"No. Never," she says.

A silence. He is quite close.

"May I kiss you?" he asks.

There it is. She makes herself meet his eyes.

"No. Never," she says.

And sees sorrow. Not anger, not balked desire. Sorrow, which is—perhaps—why and how another's voice or soul can resonate within you, she thinks.

"Never?" he asks.

He does not move nearer. There are men who would, she knows. She knows many of those.

No jade stairs, she tells herself.

"Are you asking my views on eternity and the choices of life?" she says brightly. "Are we back to discoursing upon the Sacred Path?"

He waits. The man she remembers would have been eager to cap her own half-witticism with a quip of his own. That, or take the exchange deeper, despite her teasing.

She says, to delay: "You have changed in two years."

"Where I was," he says.

Only that. He has not touched her.

She lifts a hand to his cheek. She had not meant to do that. She knows exactly what she'd meant to do among the fireflies tonight. It was not this.

He takes her hand in his, and kisses her palm. He inhales, as if trying to bring her back within himself after so long.

She closes her eyes.

She has not changed, Tai thought, and he realized that it had been childish for him to imagine that she'd appear to him like some fragile princess abducted into sad captivity.

What had happened to Rain was not, he finally understood, his sister's fate. It was a difficult truth. Had he merged the two of them in his mind, journeying east?

What, truly, was better about a singing girl's life in the Pavilion of Moonlight? Serving any man who had money and desire? Compare that with existence in this compound with one powerful man she knew—clearly she knew—how to entrance and lure? As for when she grew older: also clear as moonlight on snow, her chances of a protected life were better here. This destiny was what the North District girls all longed to find.

He felt a wave of self-reproach, and sadness.

Then she touched his cheek, and then she closed her eyes.

He bent and kissed her on the lips. He did it gently, trying to acknowledge what had happened, the reality of it, and that he'd been away two years. Her mouth was soft, her lips parted. His own eyes closed.

He made himself draw back. He said, "Rain, there has never been a woman who reaches into me as you do."

Her eyes opened. The gazebo was lit by only one lantern, so it was hard to see how green her eyes were, but he knew, he remembered. He wondered—a shockingly hard thought—if he'd ever see those eyes again.

For that was where this night was travelling, he realized.

She said, "I am sorry for it, my lord. And pleased. Am I permitted to be both?"

"Of course," he said.

She had slipped, effortlessly, into the mixture of formality and intimacy that had characterized her manner in the Pavilion of Moonlight. He tried to match it. Could not.

He said, "Why did you come tonight?"

She shook her head, suddenly impatient with him. He remembered that, too. "Wrong question, Tai. Would you have me shame myself with an answer?"

He looked at her. "I'm sorry."

She was angry now, he could see it. "I came because the Beloved Companion sent a note advising me not to sleep tonight, and she quoted the jade stairs poem."

"I see." He thought about it. "She told me you were alerted I might come. She kept Wen Zhou at Ma-wai. Gave me guards and a pass into the city after dark."

"So we are both serving her needs?" He heard amusement under the bitterness. "How compliant of us."

He smiled. "Rain, I would say the feel of your mouth, the taste of you, serves my needs very well."

She looked up at him for a long time. Then away into the dark, and then she said, with finality, "I cannot be your lover, Tai. There is no proper way for it to happen. I did not send a Kanlin to you for that."

"I know," he said.

Sorrow in the quiet dark. The astonishing truth of this woman: proud and seductive, more subtle than he was. Needing to be more subtle, he thought, in the life she'd lived.

"I could accuse Zhou of trying to kill me," he said. "It was almost said at Ma-wai today, not by me. He did have Yan murdered, and Lun. It might change your—"

"You would accuse the first minister of Kitai, governing this empire, of killing students or minor civil servants? And this would accomplish what, Tai? Who would care? How would you prove it?"

"Others would do that. Wen Jian has the man who killed Lun."

"What? Feng?"

He saw that she was startled by this. "He was heading south to Wen Zhou's family. She told us all that she had the man. There were important people in the room, including Prince Shinzu."

He didn't mention the emperor. It was not the sort of thing you spoke about. He said, "I think... we think... that she is giving her cousin a warning. He's in difficulty, Rain, mainly because of Roshan."

She crossed to the bench, sat down, looking up thoughtfully at him now. Moths darted around the one light. The air was cool. He remembered this about her, the way her mind could be so suddenly engaged.

"Who is we?" she asked. Not the question he'd expected.

"I was befriended on the road. Sima Zian has been with me since Chenyao."

She stared. Then inclined her neck, as if in submission. "The Banished Immortal? Oh, my. How may a singing girl from the North District, a simple girl, ever hope to keep the interest of a man with such illustrious connections?"

Tai laughed softly. "For one thing, she isn't simple at all. For another, she isn't in the North District. And her own connections are more potent than his." He grinned. "How else may I assist you?"

He saw her return his smile this time. "If I said, You could kiss me again, that would be wrong, wouldn't it?"

He took the one step necessary, and did so. Her mouth came up to meet his. It was Rain who pulled back this time. She looked away. "That was wrong," she said. "Forgive me."

He sat on the bench beside her. He was aware that she'd left room for him to do so. "Rain, your life has changed. I have been foolish in my dreaming."

"Most of us are foolish in our dreams," she said, still looking the other away. "The trouble comes when we bring folly out of dream."

"Rain, listen to me. If I am right, if Jian is sending a warning to her cousin and it has to do with me... does that endanger you?"

She thought about it. "I don't think so. There is a servant who could destroy me, but he won't. If you were seen here I would be killed." She said it matter-of-factly. "But Wen Zhou is worrying about Roshan right now, not you. An Li left the city a few days ago, and so did his oldest son."

"I know," said Tai. "I spoke with him on the roadside, coming here."

He saw that he'd shaken her again. He was young enough to feel a flicker of pride in that, and old enough to know it was unworthy.

She said, "Tai, what is all this? You are in a swift river."

"Yes," he said. "Because of the horses. Only that."

"And the ghosts," she said. "What you did."

"The horses come from what I did. It is the same."

She was silent, considering that, then said, "Sardian horses."

"Second thing from that country to change my life."

She smiled. "I haven't changed your life."

"You might," he said. "Rain, we can't know what the next days will bring us. Sima Zian thinks something grave is happening."

He could see her thinking about it.

He said, "I have a house in the city now, in this ward. If you need to get word to me, can someone do that?"

"If I need to? Or if I wish to?" She turned to look at him.

His turn to smile. With every word they spoke some of the old manner was coming back, like the steps of another dance. It was unsettling.

He said, "You were always better at judging. You will know if there is danger for you, or something I need to be told."

She took his hand. Looked at the interlacing of their fingers. "I think I am not so much better than you any more, Tai. If I ever was."

"You were. You are. And you risked your life. What is it I can do? Please ask."

He was wondering how many men had said I love you to this woman, late at night. He wondered what Zhou said to her.

Her head remained lowered, as if she were fascinated by their twined fingers on her lap. She wore no perfume. He'd understood why immediately, but there was a scent to her, to her nearness after so long, and it conjured desire, drew it forth.

She said, "I will have someone learn where your house is. If I need to send word, I can. The man by the wall may be trusted with messages. They will get to me. The servant here to approach is named Hwan. No one else." She fell silent, still gripping his hand. When she spoke again her voice had changed. "I think... Tai, you need to leave, or I will relinquish my pride. This is more difficult than I thought it would be."

He drew a breath. "And for me. I am sorry. But... Rain, I am also pleased. Am I permitted to be both?"

She squeezed his hand hard for that. It was painful, because a ring of hers bit into his skin. She meant to hurt him, he knew, for so neatly echoing her phrase from before.

"How clever," she said. "You students are all alike."

She released his hand. Clasped hers together in her lap. Her gaze remained lowered, as if submissively. He knew she wasn't submissive at all. He didn't want to leave, he realized.

There came a rustling sound from the trees, then a voice beyond the spill of light. "Gracious lady, Master Shen. Someone is walking past the lake. We can kill him, but it would not be wise."

It was the Kanlin leader. "Where is Wei Song?" Tai asked quickly.

"Farther along the garden, awaiting instruction."

"Kanlin, is the man carrying wine?" Rain asked.

"He is, gracious lady."

She stood up. "That's Hwan. Do not harm him. Tai, I mean it... you must go."

He hesitated, then did something she couldn't see, or the Kanlin. He stood up, looked at her in lantern light.

She clasped her hands before her, bowed formally. "My lord, it was too kind of you to visit your servant."

"I will see you again?" He found it difficult to speak.

"I would like that, but it is hard to know the winding of paths. As you said, my lord. Tonight's... was not the greeting I would have most wanted to give you."

She still knew exactly what to say to set his heart beating.

"Nor mine for you," he said.

"It pleases me to hear that," said Spring Rain, eyes demurely lowered.

"Come, my lord!" said the Kanlin.

Tai turned, and went from her.

She watches him go down the steps and away into darkness. She hadn't even seen the Kanlin, only heard a voice in the night. She looks to her pipa on the railing, sees the moths still fluttering.

Then she sees what he has left behind him on the bench where they've been sitting. She picks it up. Looks at it under the light. Her hand begins to tremble.

She swears aloud, in a voice that would shock many of the men who once valued her for serene grace in the Pavilion of Moonlight.

She looks up. The guard had said...

She calls out, "Wei Song? Are you still there?"

A moment, no sound, no woman appearing from the blackness. Then, "I am, my lady. How may your servant be of use to you?"

"Come here."

Out of the night garden the woman comes. The one she'd met here earlier this year, had hired and sent west. The Kanlin woman bows.

"The servant will be here very soon," she says.

"I know. He has seen you before."

"I remember."

Rain looks at her. A small woman, hooded. She extends the ring Tai has left for her.

"Take this. Give it back to Master Shen. Tell him I could never sell it, or wear it, or even have it cut down to sell, without being at risk. There is writing on the band! This is from the emperor, isn't it?"

"I have never seen it," says the other woman. "He didn't wear it, riding." Her voice is odd, but Rain has no time to work that through. "I believe the emperor might have been with..."

"Indeed. This ring suggests he was, or sent someone. Tell Tai he must have this, and be seen to have it. He has to wear it. It will protect him. He needs to learn these things. He can't go around making gifts of something like this. Take it."

The ring is stunningly beautiful, even in this light. It would match her eyes. She believes—in fact she is certain—that Tai will have thought of that. Not his reason for doing this, but a part of his wanting to.

The Kanlin hesitates, then bows again, takes the ring. "I am sorry I failed you," she says. "I did not reach Kuala Nor, and I—"

"Master Shen told me," Rain says briskly. "He also said you fought attackers for him. And he is alive. No one failed. Do I need to pay you more, to continue guarding him?"

The Kanlin, who is smaller than Rain remembered, draws herself up straight. "No," she says. "You do not."

"Why not?" says Rain.

"We have been retained by Lady Wen Jian. Ten of us. He is defended."

"She did that? I see. It is out of my hands, then," says Rain. She isn't sure why she says it that way. She looks at the woman more closely, but the light isn't strong, and the Kanlin is hooded.

The other woman seems about to say something. She doesn't. She goes down the stairs and east through the garden, the way the others have gone.

Rain is alone. Not for long, and she knows it. She picks up her pipa, is tuning it when she hears Hwan calling to let her know—quite properly—that he is approaching.

He comes into the gazebo bearing a round tray with a small brazier heating wine, and a cup for her.

"Why are you here?" she asks coldly.

He stops, shaken by her tone. He bows, handling the tray carefully. "My lady. It is cold now. I thought you might want—"

"I left instructions, did I not, Hwan?"

She knows why he is here. There is a balance to be achieved in this, as in all else. She needs his devotion, but he must not be allowed to assume, or presume. There are lines to be drawn, not to be crossed.

"My lady," he says, abjectly. "Forgive me. Your servant thought only that you might—"

"That I might want wine. Very well. Leave it and go. You will not be punished, but you are aware that the master has instructed that servants are to be beaten for failing to follow instructions. He said it is our task to ensure this."

It is not, she knows, the response he expected. That is all right, she thinks. He bows again, the tray wobbles slightly.

"Put it down and go," Rain says again. She allows her voice to soften. "It was a kind thought, Hwan. Tell my woman that I will be back shortly. I will want a fire, to take the edge off the night."

"Of course, my lady," he says, and backs away. "Do you... do you wish an escort back through the garden?"

"No," she says. "I just gave you your instructions, Hwan."

"Yes... yes, my lady."

She smiles, makes certain he sees it. She is in the light. "No one will be told of this. You are a loyal servant and I value you for it."

"My lady," he says again, and leaves her, bowing twice.

Dealing with men of all stations and all ranks, learning their needs and anxieties... is this not what a girl from the North District, especially from one of the best houses, is supposed to be able to do?

She actually does want the wine he's brought. She removes the top of the warmed flask and pours for herself. Trained girls know how to pour, another skill they are taught.

She seems to be crying, after all.

She sips the spiced wine and puts down her cup. She takes the pipa and begins to play, for herself, but she knows someone will be listening, and she owes him this.

An emerald ring, she is thinking. From the emperor. Perhaps from his own hand. Tai hadn't said. A delicacy in that. The world is a place of surpassing strangeness, she thinks. And then she is thinking, without knowing why, of her lost home in the west.

Qin saw the man and his guards come back over the wall. It was harder to get up and out. You needed to be boosted over, and the last one had to be exceptionally skilled at climbing. The last Kanlin was the woman, Qin saw, and she seemed to do it easily.

The man seemed distracted, not even certain which way to walk. The Kanlins led him away, including the two who'd been waiting here in the street. The fellow—clearly an aristocrat of some kind, though he wasn't dressed like one—did pause long enough to offer Qin two more silver coins. That made four, in all, which was more money than anyone had ever given him out here.

He saw the last Kanlin catch up with the man and draw him aside. He saw them speaking, saw her hand over something small. They walked on, farther into the ward, and were lost to sight down the street.

Qin had managed to push himself to his feet, and offer what passed for a bow with him, when he was given the money, but he wasn't sure the fellow noticed. He sat down again, looking at the four coins. Silver! A breeze came up, stirring the dust. He was thinking about lychees, and when they'd reach the markets. Then he stopped thinking about that.

From within the garden, pipa music began. The sound came faintly to him, for she was some distance away from where he sat against the wall, in the small hut she'd had made to shelter him.

She was playing for him. Qin knew she was. A music more precious than any coins anyone could give. He heard sadness, sweet and slow, in the plucked strings, and thought about how a beautiful woman, from within her sheltered, easeful life of luxury and power, was offering sorrow to the spring night, for what had been done to him.

Qin listened, claimed unconditionally by love. He imagined that even the stars were still and listening, above the haze and lights of Xinan. Eventually the music stopped and the night street was quiet. A dog barked, far away.

CHAPTER XX

As he had promised her, they see the Kitan fortress before sunrise. Even in the night and far away, it is imposing.

It is another unsettling moment for Li-Mei, among so many: looking under stars at something her own people have built here, this heavy, squared-off structure on the grass. Something set solidly, walls rising. An assertion about permanence in a world where the presence of mankind was transitory, lying lightly on the earth. Everything carried with you where you went.

What did it mean, wanting to proclaim this permanence? Was it better, or wiser—a new thought for her—to be a people who knew there was no such thing?

It is as if, she thinks, looking at the fortress her people have erected, some giant, heavenly civil servant had taken his scroll-stamp—the seal he used to signify he'd read a document—and dropped it on the grass, and left it there.

There is something so unnatural, so foreign, about the walled fort being here that she misses the important thing.

Meshag does not. He mutters something beside her, under his breath in his own tongue, and then, more clearly, he says, "It is empty."

She looks quickly over at him. "How do you know?"

"No torches. No one on the walls. The pastures, there should be night guards for the horses. Something has happened." He stares ahead. They are on a rise of land, the fortress lies in a shallow valley.

Meshag makes a sound to his horse. "Come," he says to her. "I must see." Fearfully, hating her fear, she follows him down.

The fortress is even larger than she'd realized, which means it is farther away. There is a hint of grey in the sky as they finally come up to it. Li-Mei looks to left and right, and now she can see their wolves.

This close, she can see the strangeness of the fort, the thing he understood right away. There is no one here at all. Not on the wall walks, not above the gates, in the squared corner towers. This is a hollow structure, lifeless. She shivers.

Meshag dismounts. He walks to a fenced pasture ahead of them. Goes to the gate, which hangs open, unlatched. It creaks in the wind, banging at intervals against the post. A thin sound. She sees him kneel, then walk a distance south and kneel again. He stands and looks that way.

He turns and walks towards the main gate of the fort. It is far enough that she loses sight of him against the looming walls, in the dark beyond the pasture. She sits her horse, beside wolves, and feels fear blow through her like a wind.

At length, she sees him walking back, the loping, rigid stride. He mounts up. His face is never easy to read, but she thinks she sees concern in it, for the first time.

"When did they leave?" she asks. She knows that is what he's been trying to determine.

"Only two days," he says. "Towards the Wall. I do not know why. We must ride quickly now."

They ride quickly. They are galloping the horses up out of the valley along the southern ridge, the sun about to rise, when they are attacked.

It is called the raider's hour on the steppe, though that is not something Li-Mei has any way of knowing. Attacks in darkness can become confused, chaotic, random. Daylight undermines surprise. Twilight and dawn are—for hunters of any kind—the best times.

Li-Mei is able to piece events together only fitfully, and only afterwards. She experiences the attack in flashes, images, cries cut off, the screaming of horses.

She is sprawled on the ground before she even understands they are being attacked. He must have pushed her down, she realizes. She looks up, a hand to her mouth, from deep grass. Three, no, four now, of the attackers fall before they even come close.

Meshag's movements are as smooth as they were when he shot the swan. He is shooting men now, and it is the same. Sighting, release, another arrow nocked and fired. He keeps his horse moving, wheeling. The raiders have bows, too, she sees—that is why he pushed her down. There are a dozen of them, at least, or there were. One more falls, even as she watches. The others move nearer, screaming, but there is something strange about their horses, they rear and wheel, hard to control.

She is in the grass. They can see her horse, but not her. She doesn't know who these are. Shuoki? Or the pursuing Bogu, come upon them? This is a battle, she has time to think. This was her father's world all his life. Men die in battle. And women, if they find themselves in the wrong place.

Two riders come thundering towards her, whipping their mounts into control, tracking her by her own horse. She can feel the earth vibrate. They are close. She is going to scream. These are not Bogu. Their hair is short, shaved on both sides, long in the middle, there is yellow paint on their faces. They are near enough for her to see this, and understand that these painted features may be her last sight, under nine heavens.

Then the wolves rise up.

They rise from the grasslands that were theirs to rule before men came with their families and herds, whether treading lightly or trying—hopelessly?—to set wooden structures down to endure as a stamp upon the land.

And when the wolves appear from hiding, she realizes how many more of them there are than she's been aware of in these days of journeying. She's seen only the nearest of them—the lead wolf, a handful of others. But there are fifty or more, rising like grey death in the dawn. They have been hidden by the tall grass, are not any more.

They go straight for the Shuoki horses, panicking them wildly into screams and rigid, bucking halts. The horses thrash, kicking out, but to no avail, for there are fewer than ten riders left now, and five times as many wolves, and there is a man (if he is a man) shooting steadily, lethally at them, again and again. And the wolves are his.

Li-Mei sees a yellow-painted Shuoki fall very close to her. She hears something crack as he hits the ground. He screams in pain, in throat-raw terror. Four wolves are on him. She looks away, burying her face in the earth. She hears the man stop screaming, she doesn't watch it happen. Snuffling sounds, snarling. Then another sound she never forgets: flesh being torn, ripped away.

Nothing frightens her more than wolves.

She would be dead or taken if they were not here.

The world is not something to be understood. It is vanity, illusion to even try.

Her body is shaking where she lies. She can't control it. And then, as suddenly as the first cries came, and the terrifying vision of those riders, there is stillness again. The light of morning. Dawn wind. Li-Mei hears birdsong, amazingly.

She makes herself sit up, then wishes she had not.

Beside her, much too near, the dead Shuoki is being devoured. He is blood and meat. The wolves snap and grunt, biting down, snarling at each other.

She is afraid she is going to be sick and, with the thought, she is, on her knees in the grass, emptied out in spasms.

A shadow falls. She looks up quickly.

Meshag extends one of the water flasks. She sits up. Takes it and unstoppers it. She drinks and spits, does so again, heedless of dignity or grace or any such concepts from another world. She drinks again, swallows this time. Then she pours water into her hand and wipes her face. Does that again, too, almost defiantly. Not everything is lost, she tells herself. Not unless you let it be.

"Come," Meshag says to her. "We take four horses. We can change, ride more fast."

"Will... will there be more of these?"

"Shuoki? Might be. Soldiers have gone. Shuoki come to see why."

"Do we know why?"

He shakes his head.

"Come," he says again. He reaches a hand. She gives him back the stoppered flask, but though he takes it and shoulders it, he puts his hand out again, and she understands that he is helping her get up.

HE CHOOSES two more horses for each of them. The Shuoki horses have scattered, but are well trained and have not gone far. She waits by her own mount, and watches him. He reclaims his arrows, first, approaches one Shuoki horse, examines and leaves it, takes another. She has no idea how he's making these choices.

Around her, hideously, the wolves are feeding on the dead.

She remembers from another life Tai telling their father (she is in the trees, listening) how the Bogu take their dead out on the grass, away from the tribe, to be devoured under the sky, souls sent back that way.

The sky is very blue, the wind milder today.

He has left her a flask. She drinks again, but only a little, to take the bad taste from her mouth.

She watches him ride back. He has four horses looped to each other, tied to his own. He doesn't appear to say anything at all, but suddenly wolves spring up and lope away, to be lost in the grass.

Li-Mei takes her reins and does the leap (not graceful) she's taught herself to get up on a horse without his aid. When you lose your access to pride in almost all things, perhaps you find it somewhere else? She says, "Shouldn't two of them be tied behind mine, to make it easier?"

"Not easier. We must go."

"Wait. Please!"

He does wait. The sun is washing the land in morning light. His eyes are dark, nothing comes back from them.

"Forgive me," she says. "I told you, when I don't understand, it makes me fearful. I am better when I know things."

He says nothing.

She says, "Can you, do you control wolves? Do they follow you?"

He looks away, north, the way they've come. Says nothing for so long she thinks he's chosen not to answer, but he hasn't moved yet. She hears birds singing. Looks up, almost involuntarily, for a swan.

He says, "Not all. One pack. This one."

The lead wolf is near them again; he is always close to Li-Mei. She looks at him. Fights a new horror and an old fear.

She turns back to Meshag, the black eyes. The wolf's are so much brighter. The man is waiting. She says only, "Thank you."

He twitches his reins and she follows him south, leaving the dead behind under birds and the sky.

UNDER STARS, that same night. They have ridden all day, two brief halts. No cooking fires, berries only, but they've stopped by a pond this time. Li-Mei takes off her clothes and bathes in the dark: a need to wash away the memory of flesh being shredded, the sound it made.

After dressing again, she asks him, "What you said before? About the wolves? This is because of what was done to you?"

It is easier to ask in the night.

He has been crouching in the grass, after watering the horses. She sees him look away. She says, "I'm sorry. You don't have to—"

He says, "Shaman in north was making me a wolf-soul. Bound to him. His command? Hard magic, bad. Not... not done. Wolf his totem creature. He summoned a wolf to come. Your brother killed him as he was doing this. I was... I am caught between."

"Between?"

There are frogs in the pond. She hears them croaking in the night. He says, "Man and wolf. This body and the other."

The other. She looks over, against her will. The lead wolf is in the grass, the grey shape. She'd seen him tearing flesh at sunrise, blood dripping from those jaws.

The animal looks back at her, steadily. She can barely make it out but these eyes, unlike Meshag's, seem to shine. A fearful sensation comes over Li-Mei, and the realization that it would be wrong, wrong for her to push him more, to ask for more.

She lowers her head. Her hair is wet, she feels it dripping down her back, but the night is mild. She says, "I am sorry. Perhaps it would have been better if Tai had not—"

"No!" he says strongly. She looks up quickly, startled. He stands, a shape against horizon and stars. "Better this than what I would have been. I am... I have choices. If that shaman bind me, I am only his, and then die. Shandai gave me this."

She looks up at him.

He says, "I choose to come for you. To honour Shan... Shendai."

"And after? After this?" She had just decided not to ask more questions.

He makes his one-shoulder shrug.

She looks over at the wolf again, a shadow more than something you can see. There is a question she cannot ask.

"Ride now?"

He actually puts it as a question.

"Thank you," she says.

Li-Mei gets up and walks over and mounts one of her horses, by herself. They are changing mounts every time they stop. Just before sunrise he shoots a second swan, but a third one, following behind, wheels away west, very high.

Someone had a wolf for a totem, she thinks. Someone has a swan.

You can fall asleep on a horse, but not when it is galloping. Li-Mei collapses into an aching, fitful slumber whenever he allows a halt. She knows why he's pushing so hard, since shooting the second swan, but body and mind have their demands.

She lies on her back in shorter grass now. Consciousness reasserts, recedes. She has been dreaming of swinging—the swing in the garden at home—arcing higher and higher among spring blossoms, back and forth. She doesn't know who is pushing her, she never looks to see, but she is not afraid.

The pushing is Meshag, shaking her shoulder.

She opens her eyes. Pale light. Morning. He hands her the water flask, gestures towards the saddlebag beside her. More berries. If there are further days of nothing but this, Li-Mei thinks, a rabbit eaten raw might begin to seem appealing. Then she remembers the wolves and the Shuoki, and that thought slides away.

She drinks, splashes water on her hands and face. Takes a fistful of the berries, and then does it again. She has learned to avoid the unripe ones, picks them out. She is a Kitai princess, isn't she?

She's too weary to be amused by her own irony.

She gets to her feet. Her legs hurt, and her back. Meshag is already mounted. He is scanning the sky as it brightens. She does the same. Nothing to be seen. Another fresh day, high clouds. She goes to the horse he's freed from the line for her. She flexes stiff limbs and gets herself into the saddle. She's become better at this, she thinks.

She looks at him.

"It will change now," he says.

"What do you mean?"

"The land. You will see. We are leaving the steppe. Your Wall is not far."

Even fatigued as she is, this makes her heart beat faster. Just the words. The Wall means Kitai, and an exile's return, if they can get through it to the other side. He'd said they could.

We are leaving the steppe.

She looks back, turning in the saddle. As far as she can see under the risen sun and the high sky the grass stretches, yellow-green, darker green, tall, moving in the breeze. There is a sound to its swaying, and that sound has been a part of her existence since the Bogu claimed her. Even in the sedan chair she'd heard it, incessantly. The murmur of the steppe.

Gazing north, her eyes filled with this vista, imagining how far it goes, she thinks, If there was a morning in the world, this is the way it looked. And that is not a thought natural to her people.

They start south. Li-Mei looks to left and then right, and sees the lead wolf beside them. The others are out there, she knows. But this one is always near.

BY MIDDAY the land begins rising, the grass is shorter, differently textured, darker, and there are clumps of green and silver-green shrubbery, and then bare rock in places. When she sees a stand of poplar trees it is almost shocking. She realizes she isn't fatigued any more.

They cross a shallow river. On the other bank Meshag halts to let the horses drink. He refills the water flasks. Li-Mei dismounts as well, to stretch her aching legs. She keeps looking at the sky. More wind today, the clouds moving east. Sometimes they pass before the sun and a shadow slides along the land and then away.

She says, "Do you know how close they are, behind us?"

He stoppers the flasks. He takes the line that holds the four horses behind his and makes the changes needed to give each of them new mounts. He swings himself up and Li-Mei does the same.

He says, "Most of a day. I think we are enough ahead."

She is afraid to ask him how he knows this. But she also thinks she knows the answer: not all the wolves are with them here.

"Thank you," she says.

They begin to ride again, south, under the high sky and the coming and going of light and shadow across the changing land. One more stop, mid-afternoon. He switches their horses again.

They see a swan, late in the day, flying too high for an arrow. A little after that they crest the long, steady rise of land they have been climbing. There is a downward slope in front of them.

Beyond it, stretching to the ends of sight, west and east, lit by the long, late sun, is the Wall.

He has brought her home.

Tazek Karad had never made any real distinction between the nomads of the grasslands, however much they might have hated each other. He looked out over Shuoki lands now, having been abruptly shifted two hundred li east of his normal gatehouse on the Wall.

Both the Shuoki and the Bogu were domesticated, nose-wiping sheep-herders to him. Their women dominated them in their yurts, by day and by night. That, his fellow Kislik joked, was why so many of the steppe-men slept with their sheep.

They might boast of their thick-maned horses, of battling grassland wolves, hunting gazelle, but what did these things mean to a Kislik? His were a people of the desert, where men murdered for half a cup of water, and sometimes drank the blood of the victim, too. Where you'd have to drag your camel down to the ground and shelter against it, wrapping your face completely, to try to survive a sandstorm.

The deserts killed; these steppes nurtured life. You could make a guess, couldn't you, as to which land produced harder, more worthy men?

Tazek would have denied it if someone had called him bitter. Still, when it came to talking about worthy you could make a case that command of only fifty men in the Kitan Sixth Army after twelve years along or north of the Wall was not even close to showing proper respect. A dui was nothing. He ought to have had two hundred or more, by now.

True, Kitai and its empire had fed and clothed him since he was fifteen, and had made women and wine (or kumiss, more often) available for soldiers posted along the Wall. True, he had not died in desert sand as his father and two brothers had.

Serving the Kitan emperor was a way of life, and not the worst. But surely anyone worth being named a man wanted to rise, to move nearer the centre. What sort of person would come this close, and look, and say, "It is enough, what I have. I don't need more."

Not the person Tazek Karad was, at any rate.

Add the fact—it was on his record—that he'd accepted, uncomplainingly, doubled six-month shifts at outpost forts in the grasslands three times, and you had to concede that the officers either had it in for him, for some reason, or they were just too incompetent in the Sixth District to recognize a man ready for promotion.

Not that he was bitter.

Part of the problem was that the flaccid sheep-lovers of the steppe were too quiet these days. The Bogu had become a subject people of the emperor, selling him horses at the spring gathering by the river's loop, requesting Kitan intervention in their own squabbles, but not fighting nearly enough in those to let good soldiers engage in the sort of actions that got you promoted.

The Shuoki were more contentious, and the forts in their lands—Near Fort and Far Fort, the soldiers called them—saw some combat. The nomads here had even tried to break through weak places in the Wall on raids. A mistake, and they'd suffered for it. But the two outpost forts and the Wall below them had been manned by soldiers of Roshan's Seventh Army, so the glory (and citations) from that fighting didn't get anywhere near Tazek Karad or his fellows in the Sixth.

In the Sixth Army they supervised horse trading, heard whining complaints about sheep raids levelled by one rancid-smelling tribe against another, and let long-haired Bogu riders through with furs and amber, destined for markets in Xinan or Yenling.

It was predictable, safe, unspeakably dull.

Until four days ago, when dui commander Tazek Karad had received urgent orders to lead his fifty men east to take up a position at the gatehouse and towers directly south of Near Fort.

Other officers and men went with them, some halting sooner, some going farther east, thinning the numbers at their own guard posts. Along the way, changing orders overtook a number of them, causing confusion. There was an apparent need to move quickly.

The emerging report was that the soldiers of the Seventh along the Wall had been withdrawn. All of them. They were gone. The gates and the watchtowers between gates were undefended. It was almost inconceivable.

No one told them why. No ranking officer (in the Sixth Army, anyhow) would bother telling a lowly commander of fifty men anything.

Nor did anyone explain why, just two days ago, the garrison soldiers of the Seventh and Eighth, posted in Near Fort and Far Fort, had come marching and riding back, both armies together, thousands upon thousands of them funnelling through the Wall section Tazek now controlled. They disappeared south through a curtain of dust that took most of the morning to settle, leaving an eerie, empty silence behind.

Soldiers had asked soldiers what was happening as the garrisons passed through. Soldiers didn't know. They never did.

And although army life was almost always lived in a state of ignorance and one grew accustomed to that, there were times when sudden and shifting orders could unsettle the most dour and steady of minor officers, even one with the western desert in his blood.

The sight of the Seventh and Eighth garrisons approaching his gate and passing through and disappearing south had done that for Tazek Karad.

He felt exposed, looking north. He was commanding an important, unfamiliar gate, he was undermanned, and he was above Shuoki lands now. A man might want the chance to fight the barbarians, earn a reputation, but if the nomads raided right now in any numbers he and his men could be in serious difficulty.

And with both forts emptied out, there was a good chance the Shuoki would come down to, at the very least, see what was happening here. Tazek didn't even want to think about what they would do to the two forts. Not his problem, until someone made it so.

He stood in the wooden gatehouse at sundown and looked east and west along the rise and fall and rise of the Long Wall of Kitai, to where it vanished in each direction. They'd used rammed earth to build it here above the grasslands, pressed between wooden frames, mixed with lime and gravel carted north. They'd used stones, he'd been told, where the Wall climbed towards mountains over rocks.

It was a staggering achievement, difficult to think about. They said it stretched for six thousand li. They said four hundred thousand men had died in building and rebuilding it over the centuries. Tazek believed that last part.

He hated the Wall. He'd lived twelve years of his life defending it.

One of his men said something. He was pointing north. Tazek sighted along the man's extended finger.

Two traders approaching, still far off, a string of horses behind them. Here in Shuoki lands this was uncommon. It was the Bogu who went back and forth, who had the spring meeting by the Golden River's bend where thousands of horses were brought and bought and led away south for the Kitan army's endless need.

The Shuoki traded more sporadically. Often the goods were stolen horses—often from the Bogu. It wouldn't surprise Tazek if that were so now. As the pair drew nearer he saw four horses in addition to the two being ridden. In theory, he could arrest the would-be traders, hold them for tribal justice (which was never pretty), and keep the horses as the price of inconveniencing Kitan soldiers.

In reality, they tended to let traders through. Standard army policy these days: horses mattered too much, you wanted the nomads to keep bringing them, they would stop if it meant being captured. The usual practice was for the gate commander to accept discreet compensation for looking the other way while stolen goods went into Kitai.

He waited for the thieving Shuoki to get closer. He had questions to ask. He needed information more than the horse or the handful of coins they'd likely offer. Their mounts were tired, he saw, even the ones being led on a rope. They'd been ridden hard, probably confirmation they were stolen. Tired horses sold for less.

Tazek stared stonily down at the approaching riders. He wasn't a happy man.

The two men came up to his gate and halted below.

They weren't Shuoki. First sign of the unexpected.

"Request to pass through with horses to sell," the larger one said. He was a Bogu, you could see it in the hair. He spoke Kitan like the barbarian he was. The smaller one was hooded. Sometimes they did that, out of fear in the presence of Kitan soldiers.

Well, fear was proper, wasn't it.

This was a father and son, Tazek decided, stealing together. But it was a surprise to find Bogu this far east, especially just a pair of them. Not his problem. His problems were different.

"What have you seen to the north, thieving Bogu?" he demanded.

"What do you mean?" No reaction to the insult, Tazek noted.

"The garrison!"

"Fortress empty," agreed the big man. He was bare-chested, kept his eyes cast down. This, too, was normal—and appropriate. These were barbarians talking to an officer in the Sixth Army of Kitai.

The man said, "Tracks of horses and men go this way. They not come here?"

That was none of his business, was it?

"What about the other fort?"

"Not go so far. But many soldiers go this way. More than one fort. Two days, maybe?"

He didn't look up, but he had it right. The nomads knew how to read their grass.

"Anything happen up there?"

"Happen?"

"You see any Shuoki?"

"No," said the big one.

"I need a better answer!" snarled Tazek.

"No, honourable sir," the man said, which would have been funny, some other time.

"Any of those shit-eaters coming this way? You see them?"

"No Shuoki. There are Bogu behind us."

"Why?"

"We are... we are exiled from tribe, honourable sir."

And that put an answer in place as to why these two were so far east. Interesting that they were being pursued, but not interesting enough. The tribes had their laws. If they stayed north of the Wall and didn't bother the garrisons, it had nothing to do with Kitai. Or with Tazek Karad of the Sixth.

It could, however, get complicated if the Bogu showed up, and he was seen letting these two through. There were horses. Horses mattered. Tazek looked north. Emptiness.

He nodded to the man beside him. "Open them up."

He looked down at the two riders. "Where you taking these?"

"These horses requested by Kanlins," the bigger man said.

A surprise. "You aim to go all the way to Stone Drum Mountain with these?"

"Requested by them. Three smaller horses. Some Kanlin are women."

Well, the gods send a sandstorm to blind fools! As if Tazek didn't know some of the black-robed ones were women? And that the women could kill you as easily as the men?

"In that case, we have a problem, my shirtless friend. Stone Drum is what, six days? I am not letting Bogu horse-thieves ride alone that far through Kitai."

"It is only four days, dui officer. You are properly cautious, but it is all right, we are here to escort them."

The voice was behind him. Speaking impeccable Kitan.

Tazek turned quickly—and saw three Kanlin Warriors, astride their horses, just inside his gates.

It had happened to him before: they could be right up on you, in among you, before you were aware they'd even been approaching. Two men, one woman, he saw. They had hoods down in the evening light, carried swords across their backs, bows in saddles.

Tazek stared down. If he'd been unhappy before it was as nothing now.

"How did you know they were coming?" he demanded.

The first Kanlin smiled. He seemed amused. "It had been arranged," he said. "It is not hard to watch for riders from places along the Wall."

Well, fuck your by-the-hour mother, Tazek wanted to say. "You learn anything about the garrison soldiers? The ones who came through?"

"Seventh and Eighth Armies," the Kanlin said, promptly. "They are all moving south. Do you have enough people to deal with this stretch of the Wall?"

"Course I do!" snapped Tazek. As if he was going to admit anything to a black-robe.

"Good," the man said equably. "Be generous enough to let our horses through? And please accept, for you and your soldiers, some rice wine we have brought as a humble offering to those who defend us here. It might be better than what you have."

Might be better? It couldn't help but be better, because the accursed soldiers of the Seventh, the ones posted here before, the ones who'd gone away south, had taken all the wine and most of the food stores with them.

He had sent word about the stores as soon as they'd arrived. He was expecting provisions from the west, as soon as tomorrow, with luck. On the other hand, the sun was going down and a dry night stretched ahead.

He nodded to the three in the black robes, and then to the soldier beside him. The man barked the orders.

The gate bars were pulled back. The heavy gates swung inward, slowly. The Bogu father and son waited, then rode through with their horses. Three of the horses were, Tazek saw, smaller ones.

He still didn't know how the Kanlin had gotten a message, a request for horses, through the Wall to Bogu exiles. That part didn't make sense. He was trying to decide if it mattered.

He decided it didn't. Not his problem.

He looked down and saw that the three Kanlins had dismounted and were shifting flasks from their pack horse into the extremely eager hands of his own soldiers.

"Hold off opening those till I get down!" he shouted.

He'd need to count and estimate, figure out how to do this. But rice wine meant that at least one good thing had happened today. Pretty much the only good thing.

He was turning to go down the steps when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a grey shape streak through the gate.

"The fuck was that?" he roared.

"A wolf, I think," the Kanlin leader said, looking up.

"It just went through my Wall!" Tazek shouted.

The Kanlin shrugged. "They do go back and forth. We'll shoot it for you if we see it. Is there a bounty this spring?"

There sometimes was, it depended how many there were. Tazek had just arrived here. He was short of men, of food, of water and wine, and he had no idea what had happened with the Seventh and Eighth.

"No," he said sourly. There might well have been a bounty for all he knew, but he felt like saying no to someone. "Shoot it anyhow."

The Kanlin nodded, and turned. The five of them rode off, the extra horses trailing after the big, bare-chested Bogu.

Tazek watched them for a while, discontented. Something was still bothering him, a thought teasing at the edge of his mind. Then he remembered the wine and went quickly down the stairs. He never did chase down that stray thought.

When a party of Bogu riders appeared the next morning he ordered his men to begin shooting as soon as the riders were in arrow range. He was undermanned; he did not want the nomads to get close enough to realize it.

They were chasing the horse-thieves, obviously. Well, he'd made his decision to let those two pass through. An officer in the Kitan army didn't show uncertainty or doubt to barbarians, or his men. You didn't get promoted that way, and your soldiers would lose faith in you. They were allowed to hate you, they just couldn't worry about your competence.

He watched the Bogu withdraw out of range and linger there, arguing amongst each other. They had wolfhounds with them, he saw. He had no idea what the quarrel was about. He didn't care. He watched—with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had done his assigned task well—until they turned and rode off.

Two swans appeared, flying towards the Wall. Tazek let his men amuse themselves shooting at them. They brought one down.

The other wheeled away, higher, and went back towards the steppes.

She is in Kitai again. The Kanlins, silent, courteous, bring them to an inn as darkness falls. Li-Mei sees torchlight and lanterns, hears music. She is shown by bowing servants to a room with walls and a bed, and she bathes in a brazier-heated bath chamber, with hot water, and servants to attend her, and she weeps as they wash her hair.

Her hands are shaking. The girls make pitying sounds when they see her nails and fingers, and one of them spends a long time with brush and file, doing the best she can with them. Li-Mei weeps through this, as well.

They tease her gently, trying to make her smile. They tell her they cannot paint her eyebrows or cheeks if she will insist on crying. She shakes her head, and they leave her face unpainted for this first night. She hears the wind outside, and the knowledge that it will be outside tonight, that she will sleep sheltered, sinks into her like a promise, like warm wine.

She goes downstairs, unadorned, but in clean robes and sandals, and sits with the Kanlin Warriors in the dining pavilion. They speak politely and gracefully. One addresses her by name.

They know who she is.

Fear, for a swift, shattering moment, until she understands that if they were going to expose her, reveal her identity, they'd have done so at the Wall.

"You are taking me to Stone Drum Mountain?" she asks.

The leader, an older man, nods his head. "Both of you," he says. "My lady."

"How do you know who I am?"

The briefest hesitation. "We were told," he says.

"Do you know who is with me? Who he is?"

A nod. "They wish to see him at Stone Drum, as well."

Li-Mei realizes that there is wine in front of her. She sips, carefully. It has been a long time since she drank rice wine.

"Why?" she asks.

The Kanlins exchange glances. The woman is very pretty, Li-Mei thinks. She has silver hairpins, for the evening.

The older man says, "You will be told when you are there. Questions will be answered. But you do know your brother was among us, once."

So it is Tai, she thinks. It is Tai again, even so far away. One brother had exiled her, another is drawing her home.

"He told us that when he left Stone Drum, some of you... some were not..."

"Some were not happy, no," the Kanlin leader says. He smiles.

"Not everyone who comes to the Mountain becomes a Warrior," the woman says. She sips her wine. Fills three cups. She gestures with the flask to Li-Mei, who shakes her head.

"Where is Meshag?" she asks.

He's outside, of course. Wooden walls, a wooden roof, a room full of people, Kitan people. He'll be out in the night he knows, although the land is no longer known. A thought occurs to her.

"You mustn't kill the wolf," she says.

"We know that," says the Kanlin leader. "The wolves are why they want to speak with him at the Mountain."

She looks at him, a thought forms. "It was a wolf that brought you word of our coming, wasn't it? You weren't looking out from the Wall for us."

It sounds impossible, even as she says it. But he nods his head. "You are very like your brother," he says.

She begins to cry again. "You knew him?"

"I taught Shen Tai for a time. I sorrowed when he left us. I asked to be one of those sent to bring his sister."

She is not a woman who cries. They wait, patient, even amused. She wipes her eyes with her sleeve.

She says, looking at the leader, "What has happened? The armies have all left the garrisons, the Wall. Why?"

Again they look at each other. The older one says, "I think it is better if you are told this at the Mountain."

"There is something to tell?"

He nods his head.

She asks no more questions. She eats with them, and there is a singer (not very skilled, but they are in a remote place), and then Li-Mei goes to her chamber and sleeps in a bed and dreams of wolves.

There are three more nights' travelling. Meshag stays with them. She wasn't certain he would do that. He keeps to himself, sleeps outside each night. She never sees the wolf, though she'd watched him burst through the gate at the Wall.

On the second day she sees Stone Drum Mountain for the first time, rising from tableland, magnificently alone, green slopes like jade in the sun, one of the Five Holy Mountains.

On the fourth afternoon they reach it. The Kanlins lead them up a slow switchback path along the forested slope, until finally they come to the flat summit that gives the Mountain its name, where the sanctuary is, and she is welcomed there with courtesy, because of her brother. And that evening she is told, as promised, what has happened—by the Wall, and elsewhere—and what it means for the empire and the times into which they have been born.

At least three historians of a later dynasty, working within the Hall of Records (after it had been rebuilt), expressed the view that tens of millions of people might have been spared famine, war, displacement, and death if someone had stopped the kingfisher-feathered carriage of Governor An Li as it sped northeast that spring, returning to his own territories. And his armies.

The soldiers of the command posts that carriage passed had no reason to do so, the historians agreed. They were not attaching censure to the officers and men who watched it go by, rolling heavily through mild days and nights along the roads of Kitai.

They were only observing a truth, the historians wrote.

Others, from the same period and later, dissented. These writers suggested that truth when examining events and records of the past was always precarious, uncertain. No man could say for certain how the river of time would have flowed, cresting or receding, bringing floods or gently watering fields, had a single event, or even many, unfolded differently.

It is in the nature of existence under heaven, the dissenting scholars wrote, that we cannot know these things with clarity. We cannot live twice, or watch as moments of the past unfurl, like a courtesan's silk fan. The river flows, the dancers finish their dance. If the music starts again it is starting anew, not repeating itself.

Having noted this, having made the countervailing argument as carefully (and in one case as lyrically) as possible, these historians, without exception, appeared to join in accepting the number of forty million lives as a reasonable figure for the consequences of the An Li Rebellion.

CHAPTER XXI

An Tsao, second son of General An Li, resided in the Ta-Ming Palace and had done so for three years, enjoying the many pleasures of courtly life and the honours appropriate to a son of a distinguished father.

He had formal rank as a commander of one thousand in the Flying Dragon Palace Guard, but—along with most other officers in a largely symbolic army—his days were spent hunting in the Deer Park or farther afield, playing polo, or riding abroad in pursuit of diversion, with sons of aristocrats, mandarins, and senior officers of the army.

His nights were given over to pleasure, in various houses of the North District, or among sleek, lithe women invited to city mansions or the palace itself to entertain the wealthy and empowered with their music and their bodies.

On the same day word reached the Ta-Ming of his father's rebellion in the northeast, Roshan proclaiming himself emperor of Kitai and founder of the Tenth Dynasty, An Tsao was decapitated in a garden of the palace.

The engraved sword that did this was wielded by the first minister, Wen Zhou, himself. A big man, skilled with a blade, somewhat impulsive.

This action was widely considered among senior mandarins to have been a mistake, even at the time. The son had been useful alive, as a hostage or an earnest of good faith in negotiating peace. Dead, he was worthless, and possibly worse than that, if the father proved vengeful.

Wen Zhou was also, of course, the proclaimed reason for General An's treacherous rising: the need to free the empire from the reckless, incompetent stewardship of a corrupt first minister, whose presence in power proved that the aged emperor had lost his way—and the mandate of heaven.

That was the declaration sent in a letter to the Ta-Ming carried by a Kanlin courier. The Kanlins were important in times of conflict: they could be hired and trusted by either side.

Given this stated cause of revolt, the fact that Wen Zhou had killed the son himself was seen by many, with wringing of hands and shaking of heads, as worrisome.

It was noted by some, however, that judgments and reactions among the civil service in those first days of the rebellion could not be called calm or poised—or sound.

There was, in truth, panic in the palace and abroad.

An attempt to suppress news of the rebellion proved predictably unsuccessful. Xinan was not a place where tidings could readily be contained. And once word spread through the capital, it began running everywhere.

Someone said that a red fireball had been seen in the northern sky the week before. That this had been reported to the astrologers in the School of Unrestricted Night.

True or not, there was an army, a large one, in the north, and it appeared to be moving down towards the second city of the empire, the obvious initial target. Yenling was east of Xinan, nearer the Great Canal, on the far side of Teng Pass. Roshan's advance put nearly a million of the emperor's loving subjects in extreme peril behind those city walls.

They were likely to surrender.

A number of cities north of the Golden River had already done so, it appeared. Word came that Roshan was treating prefecture officials with courtesy, that many were crossing over to him. It was difficult to judge the truth of this.

Distances were great, communication became uncertain.

There were obvious truths: the armies to resist Roshan were south and west and northwest and could not possibly reach Yenling in time to defend it. The best they could do—and it became the immediate military plan—was to defend Teng Pass.

In making these decisions, it was agreed, First Minister Wen showed decisiveness and confidence. Amid military leaders and mandarins in various stages of terror and uncertainty, he expressed the steady view than An Li would falter soon, that turmoil behind him would stop his progress.

Kitai, he declared, would never accept or support an illiterate barbarian as emperor. As soon as people started to think this through events would take their course.

The Sixth Army was pulled back from the river's bend and stations along the Wall and sent east to disrupt Roshan's supply lines, put the northeast in play, force some of his rebel soldiers back that way.

The Second and Third and Fifth Armies were commanded to proceed as fast as they could to seize and hold Teng Pass. Five thousand of the Flying Dragon Palace Guard were sent there immediately from Xinan. These were hardly distinguished soldiers, but the Pass was narrow, famously so, and could be held for a time by even a small number if they had any courage at all and adequate commanders. It had happened this way many times in the history of Kitai.

Yenling was sent instructions to hold out as best it could. Delaying the rebels mattered.

The First and Fourth Armies were kept where they were, along the northwestern and western borders. Calamity would result if Kitai lost control of the Silk Road fortresses and the corridors there, and it was considered unwise to withdraw from the Tagurans at any time.

From the south would come three other armies, but messengers had a long way to go just to summon them and those forces would be some time in coming.

Wen Zhou predicted a short campaign.

Others were less certain. Roshan had command of the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth, and had merged them. These soldiers were the most battle-hardened in Kitai, and since General An had not been shifted from district to district—once the rule for military governors—their loyalty to him was absolute. If the Golden River was crossed and Yenling besieged, they would have made their own commitment.

Roshan had also been the Imperial Stable-master for years, and had assigned to his own cavalry the best of the horses obtained from the Bogu at the river's loop each spring.

In hindsight, not the wisest power to have given him, either.

Beyond all of this (as if this were not enough to make a civil servant panic), appeasing the northeast had always been a delicate matter for this dynasty. That region was the home of powerful families with intermarrying lineages that they claimed (truthfully or not) went back a thousand years, to the First Dynasty itself. There were many in the northeast who saw the Ninth Dynasty as ill-bred interlopers. Xinan's measures to reform taxation and land ownership to the benefit of the farmers had not been well received in the northeast. The aristocracy there called themselves the Five Families, and their response to rebellion could not be known with certainty.

It was entirely possible that they might see a gross, illiterate general in precarious health as an improvement for their own purposes, because he would surely be transitory, and easily manipulated. Once change was set in motion, clever men could very well shape where it went.

And, as it happened, both Chin Hai, the first minister who had instituted the loathed reforms, and Wen Zhou, now, were from southern families, and therefore rivals.

It could matter, something like that.

Another element might also be important, someone pointed out in the Ta-Ming (it was the imperial heir who said this). Given the size of the empire, the vast distances that had to be dealt with for communication, and the always critical importance of cavalry, two hundred and fifty Sardian horses were suddenly even more important than before.

The second son of General Shen Gao was summoned to the palace.

The message from the court came at the end of two weeks of intense frustration, even before news of rebellion began to run through Xinan.

Tai had heard stories of how slowly the wheels of the Ta-Ming turned in matters such as audiences granted and decisions made within the multitude of layers in the civil service. There were one hundred and forty thousand mandarins in Xinan, through the nine degrees. Speed was not a strength.

He'd never had anything near the importance that would have caused him to experience this directly. Had never been someone who might expect a summons to court, in anticipation or apprehension.

That had changed. He wore the emperor's ring. He hadn't wanted to, hadn't even wanted to keep it, thinking it more important for Rain to have. A secret access to funds for her in the event of...

Of what? And had he entirely lost his bearings in the world, to think she couldn't find jewellery to sell if she needed to? In that compound? Concubine to the first minister? How else, he thought ruefully, had she managed to hire a Kanlin Warrior in the first place?

He'd asked Wei Song about that. Predictably, she'd given him a scornful glance. As if, as if a Kanlin would answer such a question.

She wasn't the one who'd made him wear the ring, though she'd brought it back to him in the street the night they climbed the wall, two weeks ago. He hadn't seen Rain since then. Hadn't seen many people at all. And the summons to the palace had not come.

His Kanlins had told him he could not go to the North District. Too dangerous, they'd said, the lanes and alleys after dark. He knew those alleys extremely well.

"No one can attack me now!" Tai had snapped angrily. "The horses are my protection, remember?"

"Only from a known assassin," the Kanlin leader had replied calmly. His name was Lu Chen. "Not if it is unknown who attacks you, if they escape."

"How do you plan to stop me from going?" Tai had demanded.

Song had been present that evening, behind her leader, head lowered, hair neatly pinned, hands in the sleeves of her robe. He'd suddenly remembered the first time he'd seen her, coming across the courtyard at Iron Gate Fortress, just risen from sleep, her hair unbound. It wasn't so long ago, he thought. He knew her well enough by now to read her posture. For a Kanlin, she didn't hide her feelings well. She was angry. He could see it.

"We can't stop you, Master Shen," Lu Chen said quietly. "But our assigned task, from the Precious Consort and the Imperial Heir, is to guard you, and Xinan is an uncertain place. You understand that if harm comes to you, all of us forfeit our lives."

Song looked up then. He could see fury in her eyes.

"That's... that's not fair," Tai said.

Lu Chen blinked, as if this was an observation that had no immediately obvious meaning.

Tai didn't go to the North District. He didn't try to see his brother, either, though the thought crossed his mind several times a day that he might as well just go to Liu's house and confront him.

He knew Liu spent many nights at the Ta-Ming in the Purple Myrtle Court of the mandarins, but it was easy enough to have a servant track his movements. He had servants now, and a steward who seemed effective, and alarmingly dedicated. He had a city mansion. He could ride out, or even be carried out in a sedan chair, and confront Liu.

Such a false-sounding word. Confront, to say what? That what Liu had done to their sister was a disgrace to their father's name? He'd already said that at Ma-wai. Liu would simply disagree again, smoothly. And the bitter truth was that most men—and women—at higher levels of the court would agree with Adviser Liu, the first minister's trusted counsellor, and not with his inexperienced younger brother.

How could it possibly be wrong to have a sister elevated to the imperial family? How could that not be a glorious thing for the Shen line? Did it not border upon an insult to the Phoenix Throne to even hint at less than rapture?

The offence, the nature of the wrong, was unique to their family: to their father, and how he'd seen the world. And perhaps, in truth, only to General Shen as he'd become later in life. After Kuala Nor.

On the other hand, Tai could accuse his brother of trying to have him killed. He could do that. The conversation there was even more predictable. And he wasn't sure, in any case, about this. If he ever was certain, his proper task might be to kill his brother. He wasn't ready to do that.

Late one night, struggling with a poem, he looked out the window at the stars and an almost-full moon shining, and realized it was likely he never would be ready to do that. Someone might call it a weakness.

Wen Zhou he avoided. Easy enough. One didn't encounter the prime minister in the marketplace or riding outside the walls.

Sima Zian visited often, sharing wine and talk and not-quite-sober good humour. He urged patience or careless indifference in the waiting period, depending on his own mood.

Tai made sure the poet had chambers in his new mansion, ink and good paper, spiced wine kept warm, and whatever else he might want. Zian came and went. Spent some nights with Tai, others abroad.

He wasn't forbidden the North District.

Tai rode Dynlal in Long Lake Park. The vast green space in the southwest of the city was open to all, and much loved. He took the track around the lake, under plum blossom trees.

There were memories here, as if in ambush. Gatherings with friends three years ago, less than that. Rain and other girls—allowed out from the Pavilion of Moonlight three days each month, and at festivals. Tai even had images of Xin Lun from that time when they were all students together, dreaming of what might be. Lun, who was playful and brilliant, in the general view likeliest of them all to pass the examinations with honours, rise to rank and distinction in the Purple Myrtle Court.

The general view hadn't been especially reliable, Tai found himself thinking as he rode.

Wei Song was with him on those rides, with four of the other Kanlins. All of them poised, alert, even before word of Roshan's rising came, and panic began.

Heads would turn to watch as they rode past. Who was this unsmiling man on a magnificent Sardian horse, guarded by the black-robed ones?

Who, indeed?

He had never been inside the palace. Never nearer than standing in crowds at festivals to receive the emperor's elevated blessing. Xin Lun made the same joke every time: how did they know it was Glorious Emperor Taizu up there, so far away, in white and gold?

Three hundred thousand bodies could be in the square at festivals, a crushing, dangerous press in the vast space before the Ta-Ming's inner wall. People did die: trampled, a lack of air, sometimes knifed in a quarrel, then kept upright by the dense mass of people even after they were dead, while the murderer squeezed himself away. Nimble-fingered thieves could retire on what they stole at such times. Lun had said that, too, often.

There was no crowd this morning as Tai rode up with his Kanlins. The Gold Bird Guards were present in numbers, keeping traffic moving briskly through the square and along the streets. No one was being permitted to linger and look up at the palace. Not with a rebellion under way. Order and flow were the mandate, Tai realized, or at the very least a simulation of such things, the illusion of calm. Appearances mattered.

His own appearance was formal. His steward had been unyielding. The man showed indications of being a tyrant. Tai wore blue liao silk, two layers, two shades, a wide black belt, black shoes, a soft felt hat, also black. The pins holding it, placed carefully by the steward himself, were gold, with ivory elephants for decoration. Tai had no notion how he'd come to own gold hatpins with elephants.

He wore the emperor's ring.

The emerald was noted, he saw, by all those in the chamber into which he was finally ushered. He had proceeded, under escort, through five enormous courtyards and then, after dismounting and leaving Dynlal with his Kanlins (who were not allowed any farther), up a prodigiously wide flight of fifty stairs, through two large chambers into this one, the ceiling supported by massive pillars of pink-and-yellow marble.

Twelve men were seated cross-legged on couch platforms, advisers standing behind them, servants in the distant corners of the room.

At the head of the gathering was Wen Zhou.

Tai made a point of meeting his gaze, and so tracked the prime minister's glance as he approached. Approaching took time, the room was ridiculously oversized. He had to cross an arched marble bridge over a pool. There were pearls embedded in the railings of the bridge.

Because he was watching, refusing to look away, he saw when the first minister's expression shifted from frigid to uneasy—in the moment Wen Zhou's gaze registered the emerald ring.

Sima Zian had predicted this would happen.

It was very simple, he'd said the night before, drinking the season's first lychee-flavoured wine. Tai had not yet been formally received. Newcomers to the court were not seen by the emperor without precise observance of protocol and priority. No one knew of the emperor's visit through the walls at Ma-wai two weeks ago.

The ring was a signature, it was known to be Taizu's. And tomorrow a new arrival, a man who hadn't even taken the examinations, let alone passed them, who had no military rank that mattered, no claim by birth to favour, was going to walk into the Ta-Ming wearing the emperor's ring.

The poet had expressed a wish that he could be there to see it.

Tai looked away from the first minister, beyond him to his brother behind Wen Zhou. For the first time in his life—and it was unsettling—he saw extreme anxiety in Liu's face, staring back at him.

Tai stopped with his palace escort beside the platform couch opposite the first minister's, the one evidently left for him. He bowed, turning slightly each time, to include all those here.

He saw the heir, Shinzu, halfway along one side. The prince had a cup of wine, the only one there who did. He smiled at Tai. If he noticed the ring, if it surprised him, there was no sign of it.

Tai had briefly wondered if Jian would be here, but it had been an idle thought. Women did what they did behind such scenes as this—not among a council tasked with running an empire facing an armed rebellion.

He'd known, not being a complete innocent, that the emperor would not be present. Once, he might have been. Not any more. Kitai's glorious emperor would receive a report—or more than one—in due course. Although...

Tai looked around, trying to do so casually. There were tall room screens behind Zhou, between him and the doors at the back. If someone wanted to listen and observe, unseen, it would not be difficult. The servants would see him, or her, but servants didn't matter.

"Be seated, Second Son of Shen Gao." Zhou's voice was almost casual. "We have been discussing the movements of the Sixth Army. This does not concern you. Your presence has been solicited on a small matter, by the imperial heir."

Tai nodded, and bowed again to the prince. He gathered his robes and sat down opposite the first minister. There was something almost too direct about that. Shinzu was between them, on Tai's right side.

Wen Zhou went on, "We saw no reason—as ever—not to accede to the illustrious prince's wish to summon you."

We, Tai thought. He wasn't sure what that meant.

He inclined his head again. "I am anxious to be of any possible assistance, among such august company."

"Well," said Zhou airily, "I believe I have a sense of what his excellency has been thinking. In truth, the matter is already in hand."

"Indeed? How so, first minister?"

It was Shinzu. And though he still held his wine cup at a lazy, indifferent angle, his voice wasn't lazy at all. Instinctively, Tai glanced at his brother again: Liu's expression was transparently unhappy.

Suddenly uneasy himself, Tai looked back at the prime minister. Zhou said, with an easy gesture, "It is the western horses, of course, my lord prince. How else could this fellow be of significance? Accordingly, I dispatched twenty men yesterday to fetch them from the Tagurans. I trust your lordship is pleased." He smiled.

Tai stood up.

It was almost certainly barbaric, he thought, to do so at such a gathering. It might even be an offence. There were precise rules for how one spoke to power in the Ta-Ming, especially if one had no proper standing. He didn't care.

What was astonishing was how calm he'd suddenly become. It was when you cared, he thought, that you felt at risk. He said, without any salutation, "Did you ask your adviser, my brother, before you did that? Did Liu really let you do something so foolish?"

There was a shocked silence. Wen Zhou stiffened.

"Have a care, Master Shen! You are in this room only—"

"He is in this chamber at my invitation, first minister. As you noted. What were you about to say, Master Shen, while wearing my revered father's ring as a sign of very great honour?"

So he had noticed. The prince put down his wine.

Tai couldn't help himself: he looked again at the room screens behind Zhou. It was impossible to tell if anyone might be behind them.

He bowed again, before answering. "I only asked a question, august lord. Perhaps my brother might be allowed to answer, if the first minister remains disinclined?"

"My advisers do not speak for me!" Wen Zhou snapped.

Shinzu nodded briskly. "A sound policy. It would undermine confidence in the first minister even further if they did. So tell us, was this done after consultation with your advisers?"

Even further. No possible way to miss that.

"The proceedings of the first ministry are hardly a matter for this council. Decisions are taken in widely varied ways. Anyone with experience of governance knows that."

A return arrow shot at a dissolute prince.

"Perhaps," said Shinzu. "But I must tell you, I would dismiss any adviser who had urged me to send those men."

"Ah! The prince wishes now to discuss the staff of the first ministry?"

"Too boring in every possible way." Shinzu smiled thinly.

Wen Zhou did not smile back. "My lord prince, this man has not yet been received by the emperor. He is placed in the list for attendance. Until he appears before the Phoenix Throne he cannot leave the city. The horses matter, as you have said yourself. Therefore I sent for them. What, my lord, do you wish to tell me is improper about that?"

It sounded impeccably reasonable. It wasn't. Tai opened his mouth, but the prince was before him.

"I wish to tell you that those men were stopped on the imperial road last night, at the first posting station."

This time Zhou stood up.

Protocol was taking a fearful beating here, Tai thought. His heart was racing.

"No one would dare such a thing!" Wen Zhou snapped.

"A few of us might have thought it necessary, but only one would dare. You are almost correct, first minister. Your riders were halted by soldiers of the Second Military District, who happened to still be at Ma-wai after escorting Master Shen Tai from the west."

"What is this? How can we defend ourselves against Roshan if we—?"

"If we ignore very clear information as to the conditions under which those horses will be released! Master Shen is required by the Tagurans to collect them himself. They are his!"

Zhou shook his head. He was taut with fury. "The Sardian horses are a gift to Kitai from the exalted emperor's own beloved daughter. The Tagurans would not embarrass themselves by denying a gift merely because a small aspect of the transfer—"

"Please!" said Tai. Zhou stopped. They all looked at him. "My lord first minister, allow your adviser to speak. For himself, not for you. Brother, did you urge this course upon him?"

Liu cleared his throat as all eyes turned to him. He was an accomplished speaker, with a real skill at pitching volume and tone to circumstances. He had worked at this all his life, from before he could grow a beard.

He was visibly uneasy now. He looked from Wen Zhou to the prince. He said, "His gracious lordship, the prince, was surely correct when he suggested we require those horses more than ever, with the need to communicate over great distances."

"Which is why I invited your brother to join us," said Shinzu. "The horses are an honour given to one man. If twenty soldiers simply ride up to the border and demand them we'll be insulting Tagur by ignoring their conditions. We'd shame ourselves with our actions!"

"Who stopped my men?" Wen Zhou said, ignoring what the prince had said. There was a hard edge to his voice. A wolf cornered, Tai thought—or thinking he might be.

Tai knew by now. Zhou had to know, as well.

"Your cousin gave the orders," said Shinzu quietly. "The Lady Wen Jian told me I might say as much, if asked."

It would have had to be her, Tai thought. And it meant so much, that she would do this, that she was watching her cousin so closely. The empire was facing open rebellion and the two men she'd favoured, had tried to keep in balance, were at the centre of that. One in this room, one with his armies moving even now.

The prince paused, then added, even more softly, "Also, I was to tell you that she has now spoken with that man of yours, the one stopped some weeks ago, riding south."

The one who had killed Xin Lun.

"A conversation I should enjoy learning about," said Zhou, with genuinely impressive calm. "But this is a far more important matter!"

"My lord first minister," Tai said, and he said it formally this time. "The august prince is surely right. We risk losing two hundred and fifty Sardian horses. The terms of a supremely generous gift, one far beyond my deserving, were conveyed. I wrote myself, so did the Tagurans, so did the commander of Iron Gate Fortress."

"How vulgar and vainglorious to see yourself as so important, second son of Shen Gao. And do note: supremely generous gifts are in the giving of the emperor of Kitai, not tributary, subordinate nations who beg imperial daughters from us as a sign of heavenly favour."

Tai knew what he had to do next. It was not in his nature, and he was realizing that more and more with each passing moment. This was not where he wanted to be, not now, and perhaps not ever. But he could dance a little here.

He held up his hand, with the ring. "I know all too well how supremely generous to his least-deserving servant our beloved emperor can be, may he live and rule a thousand years."

There was a short silence.

"May it be the will of heaven," said that emperor's son and heir. Zhou said nothing.

Tai turned to Shinzu. "My lord prince, do you wish me to take men and go west for the horses? I am at the service of the court. They are being held across the border from Hsien."

"So we understand."

"I am prepared to leave immediately."

The prince shook his head. Zhou was still on his feet, Tai saw. He faced the first minister, down the length of the council space in a vast and echoing chamber. If Zhou had somehow obtained the horses, Tai thought, there would have been nothing to stop him from having a certain second son killed. Nothing at all.

The prince said, "As it happens, the prime minister is correct in one respect. You cannot leave Xinan while awaiting an audience. Your name has been put forward."

Tai stared at him. "I would rather serve the emperor, as best I can, than seek an appearance at court."

Shinzu smiled. He had an effortless charm. It might have been, Tai thought, one of the things that had kept him alive all this time. That, and a reputation—disappearing moment by moment—for indifference to imperial affairs.

The prince shook his head again. "Events must flow as they are decreed under nine heavens, Master Shen. The palace and the empire will spin into disarray if they do not. When the periphery is unstable, as the Cho Master taught, the centre must be firm. My father will receive you. You will be given honours that—because they must—will exceed those given by Sangrama in Rygyal. This is the way the world unfolds. And then, if it should be the desire of the Phoenix Throne, you may be asked to ride for your horses."

"My lord, time might matter."

"Which is why I sent for them!" interjected Wen Zhou.

"Is it?" asked Prince Shinzu. The prince looked at Tai. "Time always matters. But order, right conduct, right thinking have always mattered more. It is our way."

Tai lowered his head. He felt self-conscious now, standing so conspicuously. "I do understand, my lord. But if that is so, why am I here? You said you asked for me..."

A flicker of amusement in Shinzu's eyes. This was, Tai suddenly thought, the son of a man renowned for intelligence and command. If the emperor had grown old and weary (thoughts not to be spoken), it did not take away from the lineage.

The prince said, "I asked for your attendance as soon as we learned of those riders sent for the horses. Those men would have been rejected at the border. We all know it, or should have known it. Your presence will be required there, and then the horses will be required by the empire, if you are good enough, of course, to make them available. Accordingly, I have asked you here, in the presence of the first minister, because we have need of his great power."

Tai blinked. He looked at Zhou.

And only now did Shinzu turn that way. "First minister, I would dedicate myself and my own limited abilities to protecting this man, for the sake of Kitai and my father, but the times are dangerous and my own resources are meagre. I ask you, in the presence of this council, to pledge your office and life to guarding him for us. Only someone with your wisdom and power can ensure his safety in troubled times, and we know Roshan is aware of those horses."

The expression on Zhou's face was genuinely interesting. Defeat was there, unmistakably, but behind it Tai thought he saw an amused, aristocratic flicker of irony: acknowledgement of a game well played, as if this had been a match on a polo field, and the ball had just been elegantly struck into his goal.

He agreed, of course.

There was no way, Sima Zian said, over Salmon River wine that evening, that he could have failed to agree.

The moon, past full, was overhead. They were on a curved stone bench under lanterns in the garden of Tai's home. The garden was nowhere near the size or intricacy of Wen Zhou's, but it had a small pond, a bamboo grove, winding paths, an orchard. The scent of flowers was around them.

"The prince," said Tai. "He's changed."

Zian thought about it. "He is letting people see now what he has always been."

"He was hiding it?"

Zian nodded.

"Why now?"

"Perhaps it is time."

Tai's turn to think about it. "Is he in danger because he's doing this?"

"Shinzu?"

"Yes."

The poet drank his wine. A servant filled his cup, and withdrew. "Perhaps. But no more than any of us. There are a quarter of a million soldiers moving on Yenling."

He looked at Tai, and then away, and murmured:

He'd written that himself, during the last Taguran war. Tai's father's war.

Tai was silent a while, then said, "The first minister seems to think it will be over quickly. That the northeast will not accept Roshan's ambitions, will rise up behind him, and the Sixth Army will cut his supply lines."

Sima Zian's enormous tiger-eyes met Tai's. "We must hope," he murmured, "that the first minister is correct."

Tai dreamed that night that he was back in the north. By that cabin beyond the steppe, watching men burned and devoured beside a jewel-bright blue lake. It wasn't a dream that came often any more, but the memory was never entirely absent, either.

Smoke was drifting, and through it leering faces surged, bare-chested Bogu looming close, waving severed limbs of human beings in his face, offering them as if they were gifts, then drifting away. Blood dripped from arms and from hacked-off slices of thigh. The cabin burned with a roaring sound. Tai felt terror, and an overwhelming grief. He had a sense that he was crying aloud, in the dream, and in Xinan.

He became aware, as if in fog and mist, half asleep, of a voice soothing him. He was trying to see. He looked for yellow hair. A hand brushed his forehead, or so it seemed to him. Someone beside his curtained, canopied bed in the dead black of night. He felt himself struggling to wake, then surrendered and slipped back into sleep—an easier sleep, without the horrifying images of memory.

In the morning, waking at sunrise, he said nothing about his night, and no one else did, either.

Nine days after this, the Second Son of General Shen Gao was summoned to the Ta-Ming Palace and received in the Hall of Brilliance by the Emperor Taizu in the presence of the most illustrious members of his court, including the Precious Consort.

Tai, clad by his steward in white for the occasion, approached the Phoenix Throne, making the triple obeisance three times, as instructed. He stopped the stipulated distance from the imperial presence, his eyes cast down, also as required.

He was then presented, by an admiring and grateful empire, with an estate in the Mingzhen Hills, the aristocracy's hunting and riding playground north of Xinan. He received another estate and considerable land in the south, near the Great River, once the property of a minister convicted of stealing from the Treasury.

The corrupt minister had been executed, his property confiscated. It now went to the brave man who had lived among the ghosts of Kuala Nor, laying them to rest.

He was further presented with a staggeringly large sum of money, ceremonial artifacts, jade, coral, pearls, ivory, and precious gems, and two ceremonial swords that had belonged to an emperor of the Fifth Dynasty.

Not speaking (speech was forbidden), Tai rose at a tall eunuch's discreet hand signal and bowed again, nine times, as he backed slowly away from the throne.

Outside, light-headed, but breathing in a sunlit courtyard, he fully expected that orders would now come for him to set out immediately to claim his horses. It did not happen that way. Events intervened.

Word came that same afternoon that Yenling, second city of the empire, east of them on the far side of Teng Pass, had surrendered to Roshan. He had declared it the capital of his Tenth Dynasty.

His soldiers had, it was reported, left the general population substantially unharmed, but they were butchering every civil servant and soldier who had not managed to flee when the rebels appeared before the walls.

More ghosts, Tai thought. More to come.

CHAPTER XXII

It is not one of the things she's ever thought about, but Li-Mei has never been on a mountain. She never even climbed the hills east of their home. Women didn't do that. She remembers dreaming about seeing the sea. A different sort of thought.

In her first days here, with no tasks, no need to rise in darkness and ride anywhere, clutching the unimaginable luxury of time to herself, she walks the broad, flat top of the mountain and the green terraces below. There isn't even anyone escorting her. Not here, there is no need.

Stone Drum, one of the Five Holy Mountains, stands out vividly because of where it is, above mostly level land in all directions. The top looks as if some god had taken a sword and sliced, creating the level summit. She can see a long way, whichever direction she looks. Sometimes she imagines she can even see the Wall, but she knows that is an illusion.

She has no restrictions, can wander anywhere. She wears the grey robes of a Kanlin acolyte, though she isn't one. She watches them training in combat, or with the bow, or practising movements that seem nearer to dance than fighting. She watches men and women run up walls, spring back across open space, and down a different wall, and then do it again.

She hears the bells that summon the Kanlins to prayer and she drifts that way, among grey and black figures on a green mountain.

She loves the sound of bells in this high place. She stands at the back of a temple, watching the rites, tall candles burning, hearing the chants rise and fall, feeling more peace than she can remember.

It is the same at twilight, when she finds a quiet place on one of the terraces and watches the sky grow dark and the stars appear.

She has to deal with some guilt. Slipping into peace at this moment is surely selfish, even shameful. They know by now why the Long Wall and the garrisons beyond have been emptied out. They know where the armies of Roshan have gone, are going.

Even so—or perhaps, more honestly, because of this—by the evening of her third day on Stone Drum, Li-Mei has decided she wishes to remain on the Mountain all her life, training to be a Kanlin, or simply serving them.

Early the following morning, summoned before the trio of elders who govern the sanctuary, she learns that she will not be allowed to do this. She is to leave almost immediately, in fact.

They do not look like men inclined to alter any decision made, she thinks, standing before them. Their faces are austere. Two are very tall, the third has only one hand. They wear the unadorned black of all the Kanlins she has ever seen. They sit on cushions on platform couches in a pavilion open to light and wind. The sun is rising.

She has questions.

She sinks to her knees. Isn't sure if that is the proper thing to do, but it feels correct. She says, looking from one to the other, "Am I so unsuited to becoming a Kanlin?"

Unexpectedly, the elder in the centre, the one with a single hand, laughs aloud, a high-pitched, merry sound. He isn't so remote, after all, she thinks. Neither are the others: they are smiling.

"Unsuited? Hopelessly so!" says the laughing one, rocking back and forth in mirth. "Just as your brother was!"

She stares. "You knew my brother?"

"I taught him! We tried. He tried." He calms himself, wipes his eyes with his sleeve. He looks more thoughtfully at her. "His was not a spirit meant to grow within a larger group, a shared belief. Neither is yours, daughter of Shen Gao." His voice is actually kind. "This is not to be seen as a failure."

"It feels that way," she says.

"But it is not so. Your brother had too strong a feeling of what he was, within. So do you. It is a nature, not a flaw."

"I don't want to leave." She is afraid of sounding like a child.

"You love the Mountain because you have come through peril and it is peaceful here. Of course you want to linger."

"I cannot? Even as a servant?"

One of the tall ones stirs. He is still amused, she sees. He murmurs, "You are a princess of Kitai, my lady. Circumstances have now changed in the world, and it is nearly certain you will not go back north. You cannot be a servant. It shames the Ta-Ming Palace, and us, too many people will know who you are."

"I didn't ask to be made a princess."

This time all three of them laugh, although it is gentle enough.

"Who chooses their fate?" It is the third one, the tallest. "Who asks to be born into the times that are theirs?"

"Well, who accepts the world only as it comes to them?" she says, too quickly.

They grow quiet. "I do not know that passage," the one in the centre says. "Is it from a disciple of the Cho Master?"

She says, not fighting a ripple of pride, "It is not. It is from General Shen Gao. My father said that to all his children." She remembers him saying it directly to her, his daughter, more than once. It was not something she'd only overheard.

The three men exchange glances. The tallest inclines his head. "It is a challenging thought, and places burdens on those who heed it. But, forgive me, it only makes more clear why you are not meant to be a Kanlin. We are of many minds, and natures, but our way is to find fulfilment and harmony in the larger identity. You know this."

She wants to fight, but finds it difficult. "My brother could not do that?"

"No more than he could find harmony in the ranks of the army," says the one on the right. "It seems your father succeeded in shaping independence in his children."

"Kanlins cannot be independent?"

"Of course they can!" It was the small one again, in the centre. "But only in some measure and only after acceptance of the self as gathered into our robes and the duties they bring."

She feels foolish, young. These are things they might have expected her to know. She says, "Why are you helping me, then?"

They look surprised. The one in the centre—he appears to be the leader—gestures with his one hand. "For your brother, of course."

"Because he was here?"

Three smiles. The tall one on the left says, "Not that. No. Certainly not that. It is because of Kuala Nor, my lady."

And so she asks, having never learned what it was that Tai had done after he left home and went west in the mourning period.

They tell her, on a far-off mountain. They explain about the horses, and the attempts upon his life, one by a woman disguising herself as a Kanlin—trained here, in fact, before leaving the order, though still wearing the black robes, deceiving people. Something they deeply regret, the tallest one says. A burden they feel.

It is a great deal to absorb.

Li-Mei has the sensation that the world she left behind when she departed from Xinan in a litter, travelling north to the Bogu, is coming back in a rush of words and thoughts.

"Why would anyone have wanted to kill him?" The first question that comes.

They shake their heads. Do not answer. Choose not to answer.

"Is he all right?" she asks.

"He is in Xinan, we are told. And guarded. By Kanlins, which is as it should be. The horses will be even more important now, and they are his. It is a good assurance," the tallest says. They are not smiling now, she sees.

A good assurance. She shakes her head.

It is all so strange, enough to change the way you understand everything. But it seems as if her second brother has done something astonishing, and that, even so far away, he has been with her, has protected her, after all. Here on Stone Drum, and before that, on the grasslands, because of—

"What about Meshag?" she asks suddenly. "The one who brought me. Will he be allowed to stay? Can you do anything for him? Do you understand what has happened to him?"

The one on her left answers this time. "Our teachings and our understanding do not go so far into the north."

She stares at him. They have been nothing but kind to her. Still, she dislikes being told something untrue. They are right, of course: hers is not a Kanlin nature. These are elders, wise and revered.

She says, "Forgive me, but that is not correct, is it? Someone here understood a wolf messenger. Isn't that how three of you came to meet us by the Wall?"

She has had several days to think about it.

"Kitan do not like wolves," the one in the centre says. The one who had been Tai's teacher here. It is not an answer.

She says, "He's bound to the lead wolf, isn't he? Meshag. That is what happened to him? His life ends when the wolf dies?" She's had time to think about this, too.

"Perhaps," says the elder on her right. "But it would be a presumption for us, for anyone, to believe we understand this."

For anyone. That means her. And here, again, she knows what he says is true. How could what happened by that far northern lake be grasped?

"You won't let him stay." She doesn't ask it as a question.

"He has no wish to stay," the one in the middle corrects her, gently.

She hasn't seen Meshag—or the wolf—since the evening they arrived. Surely, she thinks, he would say farewell before going back. It isn't necessarily a well-founded belief. She has no... good assurances.

She tells herself it must not be allowed to matter. The world came to you, and you tried to make of it what you wanted it to be. If you broke upon rocks, as the seas did in room screen paintings she'd seen at court, you broke with your pride.

But no one was allowed to choose the times into which they were born. Her father was right, and the elders were. There was no true contradiction in the teachings.

She stands up, and bows. "Where will you send me, my lords?"

The small one has a kind face, she decides. It is a kindness hidden by scars, his bald head, the black severity of the Kanlin robes. But it is a gentle face, nonetheless, and so is his voice.

He explains, speaking for the three of them, what is to happen to her. She feels a flicker of fear, listening, like the first tongue of flame as a fire is started, but she pushes it down.

She is, after all, a princess of Kitai, and her father's daughter, and she sees now, with clarity, that it would have been pursuing a false simplicity to live out her days upon this mountain, pretending otherwise.

She goes looking for Meshag and his wolf when she leaves the pavilion and the elders.

She doesn't expect to find them unless he wishes it, but she is still certain he will not have gone away, not without speaking with her.

As she winds her way down green terraces late in the day, away from others, among pine trees, the scent of them, she is remembering the cave where she placed her handprints on the body of the king-horse on the wall—before the entrance to the last cave, where she'd been afraid to go.

He'd gone in there, Meshag.

She watches the sun go down.

Late at night, she lies in the narrow bed they have given her, in a simple room with a fireplace, one small table for a washbasin, a chest for belongings, and nothing else, and he comes to her.

A tapping at the door, once and then again. Soft, you could think you had imagined it.

"Wait," she says. She has not been asleep.

She rises and dons her grey robe and goes to the door and opens it. Moonlight in a cold, clear night. She is barefoot. Goes out nonetheless to where he stands a little distance from her threshold.

She sees, without surprise, the grey wolf not far away, the yellow-gold of its eyes. It is achingly quiet upon the Mountain's summit. No one stirs. No bells in the dark hours. The moon dims all but the brighter stars. A wind blows.

"Thank you," she says.

He is lit by moonlight but she cannot see his eyes, which is always the case at night. He is wearing the leggings and boots he wore on their journey.

The wolf sits. It is alert but calm, she thinks. She doesn't understand wolves, however. She might easily be wrong.

He says, "You were looking for me, before?"

His Kitan has improved, she thinks. Several days of talking with the Kanlins. The open space and the buildings here are silver in the moonlight, otherworldly.

"I was afraid you had gone."

"Afraid? But you are safe now."

She had thought he might say that. It pleases her to be right, if only in small things. It is a way of not being lost.

"There is a rebellion. I wonder if anyone is safe."

"They will not send you back. They have told me this."

"They won't. Someone else might. I don't know."

She hears the wind. The wolf rises, moves a little, settles.

Meshag, standing very still, says, "I do not think so. Too much will change now, Kitan and Bogu, and others. But if... if they do this, I will know it. And I will come for you again."

And with that, she begins to cry.

She sees the wolf stand up again as she does so, though she is silent, only the tears sliding down her face. Meshag does not move. And because she hates to cry—she tells herself later—because of that, she steps forward and reaches up and takes his head in both her hands and kisses him. First time she has ever done such a thing, outside of dream.

It feels like a dream here, on the Mountain, in silver light. She holds her eyes open, as long as she can, and so she sees when his dark eyes shut, and only then does she close hers, knowing he is not, after all, entirely gone from the world and needs of men.

His mouth is unexpectedly soft, but his arms do not come around her, and when she steps back, light-headed, a little unsteady on her feet, her heart pounding much too fast, he says, gravely, "I did not take you from my brother to claim you for myself."

"I know!" she says, too loudly. "Of course I know that."

The small movement of his mouth she has learned to call a smile. "You are so certain?"

She feels herself flush. Finds she has nothing to say.

He murmurs, "I lose what there is in this, if I take you now."

"I understand."

A silence, wind. She is suddenly aware that the wolf has gone. At length, he says, softly, "In different lives..."

He leaves the thought unfinished. He doesn't have to finish it.

"I understand," she says again.

Eventually, she adds, "You are leaving now?"

"Yes."

She's expected that. She feels the tears on her cheeks in the night. She manages a smile. "I have questions," she says.

She hears the sound that is his laughter. "Always."

Another sound, to her right. The wolf is back, and has growled, though softly. Meshag says something to it in his own tongue. He looks back at her. That stiff nod, last time. He lifts one hand—it is not at all a graceful lover's motion—and touches the side of her face.

Then he goes, running after the running wolf.

His horse will be waiting somewhere, she knows. Probably two or three horses, for the Bogu seldom ride just one when they have a long way to travel.

She thinks of walking out to where she can overlook the slopes and the plain below them to the north; she might see them go. It is cold, though, and there really is no reason to go look.

She stands in the moonlight, alone on the mountain. She wipes at her cheeks with the sleeve of her robe. The world, she thinks, is impossible to measure.

Two mornings later she leaves as well, with a good-sized party of Kanlins, heading south. She is dressed in black, with a hood, as if she is one of them.

They are riding to Teng Pass.

The elders, considering and communing, have decided that this is where Kanlins will be needed. This has happened at that pass, it seems, years ago, and before that, and before.

In warfare there are times of frenzied urgency and violence that saturate the churned earth with blood, and there are periods when everything seems to slow, or even come to a halt.

The rebel armies had taken Yenling with alarming ease and some savagery. An Li's well-horsed cavalry thundered down from the north, forded the Golden River, and appeared before Yenling's walls before any opposing force could arrive to defend the second city of the empire.

This had been anticipated within the Ta-Ming Palace. It was accepted by the emperor's senior mandarins in the Purple Myrtle Court that this would be so.

There would be casualties in the east, lamentably. How not? This was an armed rebellion, and no one was unaware of how ruthless An Li could be.

Teng Pass, which protected Xinan itself, was manned and guarded. Not with the very best soldiers at first. Roshan might possibly have been able to fight through, had he moved immediately from Yenling, but the pass was notoriously narrow, easy to defend. And going south of it through the hills, or crossing and recrossing the river north, were appallingly treacherous (especially with horsemen). Attempting such manoeuvres had destroyed armies over the centuries. Teng Pass was a central square on the Kitan gameboard.

Put another way, warfare could also be a dance, and often the steps and music were well known by both sides.

The vanguard of the rebels—now calling themselves the Tenth Dynasty of Kitai—consolidated their hold on Yenling, killed anyone they decided to kill, seized control of the Grand Canal ports nearby, and waited for their foot soldiers to subdue the north and join them.

Subduing the north proved a difficult matter, however, made more so by the arrival of imperial forces from the Sixth Army to attack supply lines. Rebel troops were forced to remain northeast in order to prevent cities from being retaken—or even throwing open their gates to the emperor's troops.

Roshan and his generals had nourished hopes that the Five Families, long displeased with certain measures taken regarding taxation and land rights, might join the rebellion, or at least not oppose it. In the event, though there was some discussion among the northern aristocracy, this did not happen.

Instead, almost from the start, there were insurrections north of the river, in the supposed heartland of the newly proclaimed Tenth Dynasty.

One might dislike the current imperial family, find them presumptuous, of modest lineage, and far too inclined to consolidate power in Xinan... but compared to a barbarian and his vulgar sons and generals? Well, there was really nothing to choose between, was there? And no one in the northeast, having lived with Roshan as governor for years, was inclined to be seduced by the notion that he would be easily manipulated once in power.

In addition to which, the proud leaders of the Five Families knew their history and geography as well as anyone.

Roshan had probably missed a chance, they agreed, exchanging elegantly scripted missives on silk paper, or meeting at one estate or another over summer fruit and wine. He had erred: by waiting in Yenling to have himself crowned, then setting up the trappings of a court, by not moving swiftly enough with the advantage of the first army in the field.

It was understandable that he might try to assume the mantle of legitimacy, of a new emperor. A hero of the suffering Kitan people, bent on destroying a corrupt first minister, and replacing an aged, hapless, love-snared emperor.

This was the tale as Roshan needed it told. But keeping his army in the field, away from barracks and families, as summer heated up and autumn's harvest came—and was not gathered—was going to be a challenge.

With Teng Pass secured and Xinan safe, the emperor's forces could slowly gather from all directions, assemble ranks and regiments, and eventually squeeze the rebels, north and south, as a man might squeeze a grape between his fingers.

This was, in fact, the almost universally accepted opinion among historians of what should have happened.

For all his disclaimers that he'd never held a position at court, never wanted one, and would not pretend to understand manoeuvres there, it was Sima Zian who continued to anticipate the events that began the change of the world.

Zian did not write the "Song of Everlasting Sorrow." That was a younger poet, years after. But the Banished Immortal did, over lychee wine in Tai's city garden on a summer evening, indicate what he thought was about to happen. The Second Army, under Governor Xu Bihai himself, was in Teng Pass by then, blocking the rebels.

There were skirmishes, no major engagements. Armies of both rebels and empire were moving all over Kitai. Locusts crossing ruined fields, a poet had written during another war long ago.

A second blazing star had been reported, falling in the east.

It had to do with apprehension, Zian said that night, amid fireflies. "Great events often begin in fear. And the Ta-Ming is a frightened place. Mistakes can be made."

Tai remembered looking around, even in his own garden, to see who might be placed to overhear. They were alone except for two of his Kanlins, at some remove. They were always with him now. He'd stopped permitting himself to be unhappy about it.

Zian, not even nearly sober, had expounded on what he expected in the not-too-distant future. He quoted two poems and a passage from the Cho Master.

Tai had listened, and looked at him under two lanterns burning, and had said, when the poet was done, "My brother would not permit that. It will not happen."

Zian, he remembered, had laughed: that uninhibited amusement that was so near to the surface in him. An ability to find joy in the world.

"Not permit?" the poet said once he'd subsided. "Have you considered that your brother's influence is not what it might once have been?"

"It isn't?" said Tai. He put his wine cup down. "Why not?"

"Because you came back to Xinan! Liu reminds the first minister of you. Think about it!"

"What am I thinking about?"

"Those twenty riders he sent for your horses. You think your brother approved those?"

Tai knew the answer to that. He'd seen Liu's face that day.

"No," he said. "He knew it was wildly foolish."

"Wildly foolish. That is good! But Wen Zhou still went ahead, didn't he? Do you think Liu was even told it was happening?"

"I doubt it."

"You see? I speak for the sage in the cup! Pour me more of your good wine, friend." He waited for his cup to be filled, then added, softly, "We will pick our way through the shards of broken objects that folly leaves behind. And some of what breaks will be very beautiful."

Tai would remember that, too.

She has always been able to tell when he is uneasy. It is a part of her training—and her nature. The ability to read a man's mood is critical in the North District. It is one of a singing girl's essential skills.

When it comes to Wen Zhou it is not—unlike some other men—an important signal when he shows no inclination to make love. He can absently take her on a bed or against the wall when he is disturbed, his attention entirely elsewhere. Or he can linger at ease, let her make music for him, on an evening when his thoughts and mood are perfectly tranquil.

With Zhou, gauging his mind often has to do with how he answers when she speaks to him. Or does not answer. Rain can almost feel the whirling of his thoughts some nights, and knows that though he is with her, though he might even be inside her, he is scarcely present—and is even (though he'd be angered if she were ever so foolish as to say this) afraid.

But he is. For several nights now, when he arrives home late from the Ta-Ming and comes to her, she has sensed his disquiet, and tonight it is even stronger.

Although she has no understanding of what has happened, she is aware that Shen Liu, his most trusted adviser, has not appeared at the compound for days.

They must be meeting at the palace, she decides.

She very much misses one aspect of the North District: all kinds of tidings arrived there in a steady, endless flow, like a river. You needed to be skilled in extracting what was true (or might be true) from what was only the idleness of streets and markets, but you heard things in a house like the Pavilion of Moonlight, you felt connected to the world.

Here, ironically, in the home of the most important man in Kitai, according to some, Rain is cut off from events and their report. The other women are useless in this regard, and the servants alternate between stolidly uncurious and wildly credulous.

She knows that the rebels have taken Yenling and that the emperor's forces are holding Teng Pass. It is summer now, fighting season, but when autumn comes, with winter to follow, the rebels in the field should be in serious difficulty. The imperial forces might be in trouble, as well, mind you, since Grand Canal supplies will be interrupted, but the west is theirs, and Roshan is bottled up in the northeast and in his proclaimed capital of Yenling.

On the other hand, Zhou is clearly uneasy, so there must be something she doesn't know. She puts aside her pipa and says, a slight risk, "You are quiet, my lord."

He does not answer.

After a moment she takes up the instrument again, and begins to play. They are in her chamber, it is very late. The sliding doors are open to the summer.

Gazing out, he says quietly, as if he'd not even heard her words, "Rain, have I ever been cruel to you?"

She is genuinely startled, hides it as best she can. "My lord, your servant knows—all your servants know—how good you are to us!"

His expression is odd. "But have I been cruel? To you?"

Rain shapes a smile. "Never, my lord. Not ever."

He stares at her a long time. He stands up and finishes his wine, sets the cup down. "Thank you," he says, and walks out.

She hears him speaking commands. He wants his horse, and guards. He is going back to the palace. At this hour?

And... Rain. He'd called her by her North District name. He never does that. And expressing gratitude? It is disturbing.

The next day she dismisses her servants mid-afternoon, claiming a need to rest after a tiring night with the master, and she sets about filling a discreet cloth bag with some of her most valuable jewellery.

Later, walking alone, as is her carefully established custom, towards the far end of the garden—not far from the rosewood gazebo—she buries those jewels at the base of a cherry tree.

The flowers on the tree have come and gone by then: beautiful for a little time, then falling.

In the Ta-Ming Palace, and in Ma-wai when she wishes to be there, a woman dances for the emperor of Kitai.