Under Heaven

CHAPTER XXIII

There have been rebellions before in Kitai, civil wars from the time the earliest dynasties of the empire were forged, and shattered, and reforged.

In one of these conflicts, notoriously, a Sixth Dynasty army was treacherously undone by a false order sent to its generals, purporting to be from the palace. Since that time, measures have been undertaken to offer commanders on a battlefield assurance that communications from court are truly their orders.

A certain number of imperial seals are made, fired in a small and guarded kiln on the grounds of whatever palace the emperor is using. On these seals dragons are variously depicted. On the backs of the seals are numbers, in a recorded sequence.

In the presence of military leaders and mandarins from the Purple Myrtle Court, these seals are ceremonially broken in half. It is considered an honour to be the man entrusted with doing this.

Before taking his army to the field, a commander is given a certain number of these seals—or half-seals, to be precise. Orders relayed to him from court are accompanied by the matching half-seal. The messengers carrying these have been Kanlin Warriors, for several hundred years. They are trusted by all parties to any conflict, and in that trust lies their sanctity.

The military commander must ensure that the piece they bring to him fits, in shape and number, one he carries.

If it does match, he must accept those orders, or death and shame (and ruinous dispossession) will invariably follow, as wolves follow sheep through summer grass.

Of the two men who met on a summer morning at the eastern end of Teng Pass, one arrived on horseback, as a general in the field always should, in his own view. He needed help dismounting, however, and used a walking stick to make his way forward, swinging a stiff leg.

The other man approached the shadows of the pass from the open ground east, carried in an enormous sedan chair by eight large men. The number is a concession to the circumstances; normally there are twelve.

Behind this, two other soldiers could be seen bearing a western-style chair, very wide, cushioned and backed in yellow cloth. It was, when viewed closely, a throne, or meant to be seen as one. The colour indicated as much.

They placed this on level ground, not far inside the pass. The sedan chair was also set down. The curtains were drawn back. With assistance, a fabulously large figure emerged and made his way to the throne-chair and subsided into it.

The other man waited, leaning upon his stick. He wore a battle sword (not a decorative one). He smiled thinly throughout all of this, watching with interest. Birds circled in the updrafts overhead. It was windless below. A hot day, though cooler in the shade of Teng Pass.

Each of the two men had five others accompanying him (aside from those allowed by agreement to carry the sedan and the throne, and to handle the general's horse). None but the general was armed. His sword was, in truth, a transgression, as symbolic in its way as the throne and the kingfisher feathers on the sedan chair.

There were, in addition, fifty Kanlin Warriors in the pass, supervising this parley—as Kanlins had done during such encounters for hundreds of years.

Five of these were sitting cross-legged before writing tables with brushes and paper and black ink. They had arrived before anyone else. These would record, with precision, to be checked against each other, everything said this morning.

One scroll would be presented to each party attending, after the gathering was over. Three would be kept and archived by the Kanlins, as evidence of any agreement emerging here.

There was no great expectation on anyone's part that an agreement would emerge from Teng Pass today.

The other black-robed ones were spread out around the canyon, and these men and women bristled with weapons. Two dozen of them held bows where they were posted some distance up the slopes on either side of the pass. They were here to monitor—or to preserve—the peace of this meeting and the safety of all who came to it.

The Kanlins, even the ones preparing to write, were hooded. Their identities meant nothing here. They were emblematic of their order and its history. No more than that, but certainly no less.

General Xu Bihai, commanding the imperial armies of Kitai in Teng Pass, waited until the other man had settled himself in the large chair. It took some time. Xu Bihai's thin smile never wavered, but one would have been deceived in thinking there was anything but ice in his eyes.

It was, in most instances of this sort, customary for one of the figures behind the principals to speak first, addressing the Kanlins, formally requesting them to begin transcribing. This did not happen.

Instead, General Xu said, "I have a personal proposal for you, An Li." No title. Of course, no title.

"I await it with eagerness!" said the other man.

His voice was unexpectedly high if you were hearing it for the first time. A slight accent, even after so many years.

"Why don't you and I settle this conflict with a single combat right here, after the fashion of ancient days?" said Xu Bihai.

All those gathered, where sunlight did not penetrate, seemed to grow still, to breathe more shallowly. Roshan stared at the other man. His creased eyes widened, and then he began to shake—his prodigious belly, his shoulders, the folds of face and chin. High-pitched laughter, wheezy and urgent, echoed in the narrow pass. A startled bird flew up and away.

Xu Bihai, eyes still hard, allowed his own smile to grow wider. One is always pleased when a jest, however barbed, encounters an enthusiastic response.

Gasping, quivering, Roshan lifted an unsteady hand, as if pleading for mercy. Eventually he regained control of himself. He wiped at his small, streaming eyes with a sleeve of his liao silk robe. He coughed. He wiped his face again. He said, "A fight for poets that would be! You'd kick me to death with one leg or I'd sit on you! Crush the life out of you!"

"Right out of me," agreed the other man. His thinness, the lean, austere appearance, seemed shaped by a mocking deity to provide as vivid a contrast as possible to An Li. His smile faded. "I could fight your son?" The son, bulky and fit, stood beside his father's chair.

The man in the chair was no longer laughing. His eyes, nearly lost in the folds of his moon-face, became as cold as Xu Bihai's.

"He would kill you," he said. "You know it. The Ta-Ming would not allow it, or honour it. We are not children. These are not the ancient days. You asked for a meeting. The black-robes are writing. Say what you have come to say and then leave my presence."

Blunt, heavy, harsh. All of these things, and deliberately so.

The standing man's turn to be amused, or pretend to be. "Ah, well. You would have to leave my presence, wouldn't you? Since it is my army that holds this pass. Why don't you attack, Roshan? Or do you like camping on the hot plain out there? Is it soothing for your afflictions?"

"I hold the Grand Canal," An Li said, grimly.

"You hold the northern ports of it. But have you not heard? The weather has been glorious in the southwest. We have great hopes for that harvest. And have you not also heard? The Twelfth Army is on its way here even as we enjoy a morning together. And the Five Families are restless behind you, or so our tidings tell."

Roshan smiled. "Ah. The Five Families. Do your tidings also tell of the fate of Cao Chin and his family... behind me, as you say? Or has that news not yet reached the Ta-Ming? Be the first to know! His castle has been burned down. His wives and daughters taken by my soldiers. Granddaughters too, I believe. The men did need some diversion, after all. Cao Chin hangs naked, castrated, meat for carrion birds, from a hook on a pillar outside the ruins of his home."

When it grew quiet, as it did now, you became more aware there was no wind. It was clear to anyone watching that Xu Bihai had not known this, and equally clear that he believed what he was being told.

"That was a great name," he said softly. "It brings even more shame upon you."

Roshan shrugged vast shoulders. "He was a traitor to the Tenth Dynasty. The Families needed to learn there are consequences to the elegant exchanges of missives, and musings over wine discussing which way to turn, when an army is among them. I doubt the northeast is as restless now as you might think."

Xu Bihai stared. "Time and the winter will tell, whether you can feed the army that keeps them quiet. You are trapped here and you know it. Perhaps you would prefer to withdraw to Yenling? I enjoy siege warfare, myself. When autumn comes without an eastern harvest, you are done, Roshan."

Birds calling. No breeze in the pass.

"May I tell you something?" the man in the chair said. "I don't like you. I never have. I will enjoy killing you. I will begin by hacking off your crippled leg and showing it to you, then dripping your own blood in your open mouth."

It was, even for such a setting as this, savage enough to elicit another silence.

"I tremble," said Xu Bihai finally. "Before I commence to babble like a terrified child, hear the words of the emperor of Kitai. You are declared accursed of men and the gods. Your life is forfeit, and your sons'—"

"He killed my son," said An Li.

"One of them. A hostage to your own conduct. He was executed when that conduct became treacherous. Wherein lies your grievance? Tell me!"

There was something magnificent about the lean, thin-bearded man standing there with his heavy stick.

"He was no hostage! Do not shape lies that are being written down. He was an officer in the Flying Dragon Army, and a member of the court. He was killed by a fool in an act of fear. Will you pretend you approved?"

"I was in Chenyao," said Xu Bihai.

It was an admission of sorts.

"Nothing near to an answer! But I know your answer. However much you hate me, Governor Xu, I will wager the lives of my remaining sons against your daughters' that you despise Wen Zhou as much!"

There was no reply.

Roshan went on, his voice a hammer now, "You were afraid to challenge him, all this time! You stayed west and let a vain polo player, whose only claim to rank was a cousin in the emperor's bed, turn Kitai into his own fiefdom, while Taizu drank potions to straighten his male member and drank others to live forever!"

He glared at the other man. "Was yours, Governor Xu, the conduct of someone mindful of his duty to the state? Do you accept the fool whose cause you are serving here? I require Wen Zhou at my feet, blinded, and begging for death."

"Why? Are you the first man to lose a battle for power?"

"He is worth nothing!"

"Then neither are you the first to lose to a lesser man! Will you kill so many, destroy an empire, for it?"

"Why not?" said An Li.

The words, unadorned, hung in the air.

"Because you cannot blame Wen Zhou for this. You rose against the throne, your son died for it. You had to know it could happen. And sons die every day in the world."

"So," said Roshan, "do daughters."

Xu Bihai shook his head. Gravely now, he said, "Ministers of the empire come and are gone, leaving memories, or only tracks in sand. The Phoenix Throne is more than the man who sits it, or those who serve him, well or badly. I have my views on the first minister. I have no inclination to share them with a foul and accursed rebel."

"I am neither, if I win," said Roshan.

"You are both, now and until you die, and the words will cling to your name forever, wherever your body lies." Xu Bihai stopped, then he said, "Hear my offer."

"I am listening," said An Li.

"You and your eldest son have forfeited your lives. You will be graciously permitted to commit suicide and be buried, though not with monuments. I have the names of five of your commanders who must also accept their deaths. All others in your army, here or in the northeast or in Yenling, are offered pardon in the name of the Glorious Emperor Taizu, an offer to be recorded now by the Kanlins, and with my own name and honour behind it."

His voice grew quiet. "You are dying. You know it. All men who look at you know it. With your life, already ending, and six others, you can save all those who follow you, and Kitai, from this."

He ended. Five Kanlin scribes, their hands dipping brushes, shaped words. Otherwise, there was a stillness in the pass.

"Why would I do that?" Roshan said.

He sounded genuinely puzzled. He scratched at the back of one hand. "He drove me to this. Wen Zhou was stripping me of choices, poisoning the emperor against me, erasing anything I might offer my sons. What should a man with any pride in what he leaves behind do in the face of that?"

"Is that it?" said Xu Bihai. "Legacy?"

"It is different for you," said Roshan, dismissively. "You have only daughters." He shifted in his chair. "If this is all you came to say, we have wasted a morning. Unless it is of importance to you to understand that I do know of your daughters, and I will find them, to their very great regret. You may trust me in this."

The thin man appeared undisturbed. "I thank you," he said. "You turn the duty of destroying you into a pleasure, rare and delicate."

That last word, delicate, lifted into the air and was recorded, strange as it sounded in that place, on pale silk paper by five brushes moving swiftly, dipping and stroking—delicately, in fact.

The yellow-backed throne was carried out of Teng Pass. Roshan waited in the kingfisher-feathered sedan chair, curtains drawn, respecting—perhaps surprisingly—formalities. It may have been the case that, having named himself an emperor, these mattered more to him than they might once have done.

Eventually, three hooded Kanlins walked over, two escorting the one carrying a scroll that preserved the record of what had been said. The Kanlin extended the scroll. A hand reached through the curtain and took it.

The sedan chair was lifted and carried away into sunlight.

Li-Mei is deeply disturbed, not even close to working through all the reasons for this. One of them, however, is surely the savage intensity of what has just happened in Teng Pass, the words spoken, violence embedded—and with more to come. Surely, now, to come?

Another reason, on an infinitely smaller scale, shameful, almost unworthy of acknowledging, is that she's still recovering from the effect of the heavy, too-sweet smell that had come from An Li's sedan chair when she'd accompanied the Kanlin carrying the scroll to him. She'd been next in line when he was given the completed record. They'd motioned for her, and one other, to go forward.

A sweetness of perfume overlaying, thickly, an odour much darker, something corrupt. She feels ill in the aftermath of it, and the air in Teng Pass is too still, too dense, when she tries to breathe deeply. It will be very hot outside the pass, where the rebels are camped in the sun.

She remains shaken by a thought that came to her, walking towards Roshan, standing by, watching the scroll being extended to him.

She isn't remotely capable with a sword or knife, but there was surely a chance that, armed as she was—as a Kanlin for today—she could have stabbed him, ending this.

Ending all safety and tradition and respect for the Kanlin Warriors, too, mind you.

Hundreds of years of being judged worthy of trust, destroyed in a moment by Shen Li-Mei, only daughter of General Shen Gao—after they'd welcomed her on Stone Drum Mountain, given her shelter and guidance and even a way to make her way home through civil war.

Not to be thought of. Or, if thoughts cannot be barred, not to be permitted to be more than that.

Roshan is dying, in any case. That was the odour she smelled. The thin-bearded man who'd faced him down (she knew who he was, remembered her father speaking of him) had said it in blunt words. Words she'd watched being recorded in swift calligraphy by the scribes.

Killing him, she thinks, wouldn't have ended anything, necessarily. The sons—the one standing here, and there are two others alive (she believes)—and, probably, the five men whose names are carried on a second scroll, the ones whose deaths are required: these would carry on, even if An Li died.

Rebellion might not always be tied to one man's will and life. Perhaps it took on its own force, after a given point was reached and passed. You could turn back, and turn back, and then you couldn't.

Has that happened here?

She'd like to ask someone, but can't. She is disguised as a Kanlin, no one is to know who she is, and a Warrior would not be asking questions like that, of anyone.

They'd made her carry twin swords on her back during the ride south so she wouldn't look awkward and inept, moving with them when the time came. They'd been heavy at first, the swords, painful against her spine in their back-scabbards. She's more accustomed to them now.

A person—a woman—can adapt to more than she might have thought she could. What she's unsure about is when that stops being a virtue and turns to something else, leaving you too much changed, undefined, unanchored, like a fisherman's empty boat drifting on a river, with no way to be returned to where it belongs.

Thinking so, ashamed to be dealing with thoughts of her own life at such a time, Li-Mei sees three riders racing towards them up the pass from the western end.

The leading one carries a banner, the imperial insignia. These are couriers, she'd seen them often enough in her days with the empress. The second rider is a Kanlin. He is the one who dismounts from his lathered horse before the stallion has even entirely halted. He approaches General Xu, bows. He is perspiring from the heat. The black robes are soaked with sweat. He extends a small object. It is a seal, broken in half. Li-Mei knows what this signifies, though she's never actually seen one. The courier also extends a scroll to the general.

Xu Bihai accepts both. He hands the half-seal to one of his officers. This man reaches into a leather satchel he carries and extracts a similar object, rejects it, pulls out another. No one speaks. The man holds this second piece to the one the courier has brought. He looks at the fit, examines the back, nods his head.

Only then does Xu Bihai untie the scroll and read.

Li-Mei sees him grow older before her eyes. He leans on his stick for a moment. Then he straightens. "When was this given to you?" he asks the couriers. His voice is thin. Li-Mei is suddenly frightened, hearing it.

The courier bows before speaking. He is clearly exhausted. "Three nights ago, my lord. We left in the middle of the night."

"And it came from?"

"From the first minister himself, my lord general. His hand to my own, the scroll and the half-seal."

Rage appears in Xu Bihai's features; it is impossible to miss. He breathes in and out, slowly.

He says, very clearly, "He is afraid. He has decided that the longer we are here holding them back, the more likely it is that someone might decide this can be ended by delivering him to An Li."

No one says a word in Teng Pass. Li-Mei is remembering someone else this morning: I need Wen Zhou at my feet, blinded, and begging for death.

After a moment, General Xu says, quietly this time, as if to the stillness of the air, not to anyone beside him, "If I were a different man, and Roshan were, I might even have done it."

What Li-Mei feels, hearing this, standing so near, is fear. It chases away, as wind chases fallen leaves, all thoughts of her own destiny. There is too much more here now.

Not long after that, eight Kanlins ride west out of the pass, through the assembled armies of the Second and Third Districts. The armies are stirring. Orders have been given.

The eight riders go swiftly once beyond the canyon, with the wide river on their right and hills to the left—the features that make Teng Pass what it is, vital for so long in Kitai.

Two of these riders are bound for the Kanlin sanctuary at Ma-wai with three of the records of the morning. From there, two scrolls will be sent on to other sanctuaries, for greater security.

Two of the other riders will go only as far as Xinan, with the scroll for the Ta-Ming Palace, along with newer ones: the just-dictated words of General Xu Bihai, sent to the imperial heir and the Beloved Companion, but not to the first minister.

Three of the riders are escorting the last one farther west, and south, because of a promise made at Stone Drum Mountain. These four will branch off halfway to Xinan.

That last one, wrapped in fear and doubt as they ride, is the daughter of General Shen Gao.

There have been many chronicles of warfare in Kitai, from the First Dynasty onwards.

Disagreements as to strategy and tactics, not surprisingly, are everywhere in the texts, and a component of the civil service examinations is for students to analyze two or three such writings and express a preference for one of them, defending that choice.

Victory or defeat in battle can be attributed to many different elements. Some writers stressed the (somewhat obvious) point that numerical superiority, all else being relatively equal, could usually determine a combat, that a prudent general would wait for such superiority, decline to engage without it.

Others noted that all else was rarely equal.

Weaponry, for example, made a great difference. An often-cited example was the fate of an army in the northeast some time ago, an incursion into the Koreini Peninsula: undone before the crucial battle by a sudden rainstorm that soaked their bowstrings, eliminating the archers from playing any role, leading to a terrible defeat.

This incident was also cited in the context of preparation. The fact that the leaders of the expedition had failed to anticipate the rain was judged significant. All of the surviving generals were later executed, or ordered to kill themselves.

Other writers placed emphasis on terrain, positioning. The army with higher ground or territory protected by natural features would have a significant advantage. The capable commander sought such terrain.

Supply lines played a role. Food, clothing. Horses. Even boots for a marching army. So could the ratio of infantry to cavalry, and the quality of horsemanship. Experience, in general. Battle-hardened soldiers were worth much more than new recruits.

Surprise, whether by way of an unexpected assault (at night, in difficult weather, sooner than anticipated) or a battle conducted using new tactics, could make a difference. There were examples. Those taking the examinations were expected to know them.

Morale and passion were seen as important, and were linked to leadership.

There was a very old tale of a commander who committed his army to battle with a river in spate behind them, having refused to move forward from the edge of the water to better ground, waiting for the enemy there.

His soldiers had no possible retreat.

They did not retreat. They won a famous victory that day against significantly greater numbers. When men have nowhere to escape, the lesson went, they will fight more bravely, and often prevail.

So, too, will soldiers who are aware that defeat for them is decisive, and likely to mean death.

On the other hand, an army that knows there need not be (for them) finality to a given field, that flight is possible, is less likely to engage the enemy with the same ferocity.

This last distinction, it was subsequently agreed with a degree of consensus, was the best explanation for the victory of the An Li rebels against the forces of the Second and Third Armies in the battle joined east of Teng Pass.

The imperial army had an advantage in numbers, and they did surprise the rebels—who'd had no thought that General Xu Bihai would lead his forces out of an impregnable pass and onto a sun-broiled battlefield.

The initial appearance of the emperor's troops caused extreme consternation in the rebel ranks. General Xu had increased this likelihood by moving most of his men into position outside of the pass during the night, so the rebels woke to see their enemies gathered, and then had to face a charge.

This surprise changed, swiftly, to something else. Something that could be described as hope, or even joy. Short of an attack such as this (a mistake such as this) they had been almost certainly fated to withdraw from here and face the uncertainty of autumn and winter with too little ground gained, a large army to feed and house through the cold months, and unrest in their own base. All the while learning of the steady mustering of even greater numbers of imperial forces, readying themselves for the resumption of fighting in spring.

The attack out of the pass, once the initial shock was over, presented itself to An Li and his forces as what it was: a gift, an opportunity unlooked for.

It was a gift they did not fail to grasp.

There were a great many casualties on both sides that day. There were more in the imperial army. When the dead and wounded reached a certain number (there is always such a number for any army), the soldiers of General Xu Bihai broke and fled.

They raced back up Teng Pass, pushing through the rearguard left to hold the pass, running over them, pursued with triumphant ferocity by the rebel cavalry, into the pass, and along it through shadows, and out the other end into light again.

At the end of that day, more than half of the Second and Third Armies lay dead east of the pass or within it, or overtaken in flight to the west.

Most of the others were scattered in their frenzy to get away—to let others take on the burden of resisting these rebels while serving a court that issued commands that made no sense, forcing them out of a secure position into unnecessary battle.

General Xu was one of those who escaped the wreckage of that battlefield and headed west, riding at speed with his guards towards Xinan, which lay open now, undefended before Roshan.

Xu Bihai was seen to be weeping as he rode, though whether the tears were of rage or grief no man felt able to say.

It was a catastrophe for Kitai, that battle, leading to chaos that would last a long time. The ensuing nightmare ended eventually (all things end), but not before the changing of the empire and the world.

Beauty was not easily sustained in that time, nor music, nor anything that might be linked to grace or serenity. Not easily sustained at the best of times, those things. Sorrow lasts longer.

Word of the disaster reached the Ta-Ming in the dead of night three days later.

The glorious emperor was awakened from sleep and informed as to what had happened. At all costs, Taizu, beloved of heaven, had to be saved. Xinan had fallen before. It could be lost and retaken. But not if the dynasty fell.

With little time for decision-making, with Roshan's army of hardened soldiers approaching and Xinan wide open to them—and with panic certain in the morning when these tidings became widespread—a small imperial party, escorted by some of the Second Army who had been left with them, proceeded in secrecy out a northern gate of the palace into the darkness of the Deer Park, and then through another gate in the walls of the park, on the road towards Ma-wai, under stars, with the wind rising.

CHAPTER XXIV

Wei Song woke him in the dark of night.

The Kanlins had never let Tai bolt his chamber door in Xinan. There were entrances to his bedroom through sliding doors from porticoes on two sides; these were guarded, but they needed to be able to enter, at need, or so they'd told him. He'd thought about making a jest about needs in a bedchamber but never had.

He'd been deeply asleep, not dreaming. It took him time to fully rouse to her voice and her touch on his shoulder. She stood by the bed, holding a candle. Her hair was unbound. She'd been sleeping, too, he realized.

"What is it?"

"You are summoned. To the palace. An escort is waiting."

"Right now?"

She nodded.

"What has happened?" He was naked under the bedcovers.

"Trouble east, we think."

East meant the rebellion. There should not be any trouble there now, not with two armies blocking Roshan in Teng Pass.

"Who sent for me?"

"I do not know."

She handed him the scroll she carried. She ought to have done that first, he thought. She never did things properly.

He took it. Sat up. "Do you know what this says?"

She nodded. "A Kanlin brought it. That's why we're allowing you to go."

Allowing. He ought to correct her, but there was no point. If any harm came to him his Kanlins would die.

He untied the scroll, read it by the candle's light. It clarified nothing: was simply a command to come immediately, with a permit to pass through the ward gate and up to the Ta-Ming. The permit was signed by a senior mandarin, not a name he knew.

"Get Dynlal for me."

"It is being done."

He looked at her. Sometimes, not often, you were reminded of how small she was, for someone so fierce. "Then go put up your hair and let me dress."

She looked embarrassed. It occurred to him that Song might be as uneasy about a middle-of-the-night summons as he was. With armies in the field, the times were deeply troubling. She put the candle on the table that held his washbasin and went to the door.

On impulse, he added, "Is Master Sima here?"

He never knew whether the poet had come in late or lingered wherever else he'd spent the night.

She turned in the doorway and nodded.

"Please wake him, Song. Say that I would like him with me." The please and her name were an apology.

In the courtyard, another thought came. He hesitated. He might be making a large thing out of a small one, but trouble east, and a summons under stars carried weight, didn't they?

He saw the poet, rumpled as ever, but moving quickly, alert, walk into the courtyard. Zian had his sword across his back. Tai felt a measure of relief, seeing him.

He beckoned Lu Chen, the leader of his guards, and arranged for two of the Kanlins to carry a message. He called for paper and ink and wrote that message, quickly, by torchlight, on a small table brought on the run into the courtyard. Then he sent the two Kanlins to deliver it to Spring Rain, by way of the crippled beggar who lived in the street behind Wen Zhou's mansion.

The two guards had been there before, the night he'd met her in the garden, they would remember how to find the man. He instructed them to be respectful, request his aid, then stay until there was a reply. If they saw the Lady Lin Chang (that was her name now) they were to guard her life as surely as they'd been ordered to defend his.

He could give that order. He could assign them as he chose. There was no time to shape a better plan. Possible danger, he'd written, in hurried, ungraceful script. Be very alert. Two Kanlins in street behind garden awaiting word from you.

He didn't sign it, to protect her, but the reference to Kanlins probably undid that measure, if anyone saw this. There wasn't time for clearer thought. He didn't have a clearer thought.

He rode out of the gate on Dynlal, taken again—always, in the moments when he mounted up—by the sensation of being on such a horse, his bay-coloured Sardian.

They went down the night street of the ward, and through the ward gate, then north towards the Ta-Ming along the starlit main avenue of Xinan. Tai saw Gold Bird Guards at their stations, patrolling. Then a handful of people on the far side of the wide street, increasing the sense of emptiness. Their horses' hooves were the only sound.

The Kanlin who'd brought the summons was with them. At the city-side gates of the Ta-Ming another was waiting. The gates were opened at a signal, then closed behind as they rode through. Tai heard the heavy bar slide shut.

They continued north through the vast palace complex with its hundred buildings and courtyards. No paths were straight here, so that demons (who could travel in a straight line only) might be forestalled in any evil designs against heaven's beloved emperor within his palace.

The emperor, Tai learned, was not in the Ta-Ming any more. He was on the road, heading northwest.

He exchanged a glance with the poet.

They reached the northern wall of the palace complex, and passed through another gate into the Deer Park, and rode through that. Continuing north, they'd have eventually reached a stone wall by the riverside. They turned west instead, led by their Kanlin escort. Song was at his side, Tai realized, hair precisely pinned, swords on her back.

They passed a bamboo grove on their right, an open space, an orchard, then they came to a western gate in the park wall and went out. They began riding quickly now, in open country.

Not long after, they saw the imperial party ahead of them on the road. Torches under moonlight.

Fear and strangeness were in Tai as they caught up with the others. He saw Prince Shinzu near the back of the small procession. It was shockingly small, in fact: two carriages, some riders from the court. Twenty or thirty cavalry of the Second Army guarding them. No more than that.

Normally, the emperor would journey to Ma-wai accompanied by two or three dozen carriages, preceded by an army of servants and five hundred soldiers, and escorted by five hundred more.

The prince looked back, hearing them approach. He slowed when he saw the Kanlins. He greeted Tai, who bowed in the saddle. Briskly, with nothing in the way of warning or preamble, Shinzu told them of the disaster that had happened east.

Or the first disaster.

With Teng Pass fallen, there was much more now to come.

Tai felt his mouth go dry. He swallowed hard. Had the world, their world, come to this? The emperor, they were told, was in the carriage just ahead—no kingfisher feathers. Jian was with him. The prime minister was riding at the front of the party.

"It is good that you are here," said the prince. He was riding a handsome stallion, though it was almost a full head smaller than Dynlal.

"I don't understand," said Tai. "What can I do?" He felt lost. This night ride felt dreamlike, as if through some star-world not their own.

"We need your horses, Shen Tai. More than ever. As cavalry mounts, or for couriers. We are going to be spread very widely. Distances will need to be covered swiftly. When we reach the posting station ahead I am going to propose we head north to Shuquian. The Fifth Army is still mostly there, and we will summon the First Army from the west now. I think we can hold Roshan in Xinan while other forces come up from the south. We... we have to do that, don't we?"

Don't we? Why was a prince asking him? Was he waiting for a considered answer? A disagreement? What was Tai expected to know?

It was obvious the prince was shaken. How could he not be? It was the middle of the night. They were fleeing the capital, the palace, with twenty or thirty men, and an army of rebels was behind them, would be approaching Xinan unopposed. Was the mandate of heaven being withdrawn right here? Could the shape of the world change in a night?

"I am to go to Shuquian with you?"

He was confused, himself. The prince shook his head.

"You will take riders southwest to the border. You must claim your horses, Shen Tai, then bring them as speedily as possible to wherever we are."

Tai drew a breath. Precise instructions were good, they freed him from the need to think. "My lord, there are a great many of the Sardians."

"I know how many there are!" said the prince sharply. There was a half-moon shining but it was hard to see his eyes.

Another voice: "My lords, let the Kanlins do this. Take fifty of us, Master Shen, from our sanctuary ahead." It was Wei Song, still beside him (she was always beside him through that night, he would later remember). It made sense, what she said.

"Are there enough of you? At the sanctuary? Will they release so many?" Tai was calculating quickly. "If they are good with horses, we can do this with sixty, five horses behind each rider, ten to guard us."

"There are enough," she said. "And they will be good with horses."

The prince nodded. "Attend to it, Kanlin."

"This is why you sent for me, my lord?" Tai was still wrapped in strangeness, struggling to believe what had happened.

"I didn't send for you," the prince said.

It took a moment. They looked ahead, at the nearest carriage.

It wouldn't have been the emperor. Once, perhaps, in his burnished, brilliant youth, new to the throne or ready to claim it, but not now. Not any more.

It was Jian who had summoned him, Tai realized. Awakened in the middle of the night herself, amid panic, preparing to fly from all they knew, she had thought of this.

A question came. It ought to have been, he thought, his first. "My lord, forgive me, but I don't understand. How was there a battle? General Xu held the pass. He would never have—"

"He was ordered out," said Shinzu flatly.

And then, very deliberately, he looked ahead, towards where a handsome, moonlit horseman rode at the front of their small procession.

"In the name of all nine heavens!" exclaimed Sima Zian. "That cannot be. He would not have done that!"

"But he did do that," said the prince. He smiled, mirthlessly. "Look where we are, poet."

It seemed as if he would say more, but he did not. The prince flicked his reins and moved up beside his father's racing coach, then they saw him go past it to ride with the soldiers guarding them.

Just as the sun rose on a summer morning they reached the posting station by the lake at Ma-wai.

Tai had been warned that the soldiers were beginning to murmur amongst each other as the night drew to an end.

Lu Chen, a shrewd, experienced man, had moved up for a time among the cavalry escort. Then the Kanlin drifted back towards Tai, where he and Zian and Song had kept to the rear of the party.

Chen had spoken to Song first, then brought his quick Bogu horse over beside Dynlal. "My lord," he said, "I am not certain how it is, but the soldiers know what they should not."

"What do you mean?"

"Someone has spoken to them about Teng Pass. Word is spreading as we ride. The Second Army was in the pass, my lord. These men will be grieving, and angry."

Zian moved up. Song shifted her mount to let him. The road was wide; they rode four abreast in the night.

"They know who gave Xu Bihai that order?" the poet asked.

"I believe that is so, my lord." Lu Chen was invariably courteous to the poet.

"Do you think it was intentional? That they know this?" Zian's voice was grim. Tai looked quickly over at him.

"I do not know, my lord. But I believe it would be wise to be cautious at the posting station." He glanced at Tai. "My lord, I have determined that your honourable brother is in the other carriage. I thought you might wish to know."

Never much of a horseman, Tai's honourable brother, to their father's regret. Even less so now, undoubtedly. Clever in the extreme, however, hard-working, ambitious, precise, with foresight and discipline.

He would never have let Wen Zhou send that order to Teng Pass.

Tai knew it with certainty. As surely as he understood how Liu could send their sister to the barbarians, he knew he would not have ordered Xu Bihai out of that pass into battle.

His Kanlins were gathered tightly around him now. Someone had obviously given instructions. He looked ahead at the carriage nearest to them. The emperor of Kitai was in there, rolling through the night, fleeing in the night. Could the world really come to encompass such a thing?

Tai knew it could, that it had before. He'd studied a thousand years of history, hadn't he, preparing for the examinations? He knew the legacy of his people, the dark and the brightly shimmering. He knew of civil wars, palace assassinations, slaughter on battlefields, cities sacked and burned. He had not thought to live through any of these.

It suddenly occurred to him, belatedly, how almost all of the court and imperial family—children, grandchildren, advisers, concubines—had been left behind tonight, to get away as best they could, or face Roshan when he came.

And there were two million people in Xinan, undefended.

His heart twisted. Be very alert, he'd written to Rain. So helpful, that. What would she do? What was possible? Would she even get his message, from that twisted figure in the street? He'd left two Kanlins behind for her—at least he'd done that.

His mouth was dry again. He spat into the dust beside the road. Zian handed over a wine flask. Wordlessly, Tai drank. Only a little. He needed to be clear-headed, surely, above all else.

He glanced ahead. Wen Zhou was still among those up front. Lit by torches, he was easy to see, on a splendid black horse, a riding posture to be envied. Born to ride, they said about him.

The light grew as they went on. All but a handful of the brightest stars disappeared, then these, too, were gone. Individual trees took shape on their right, and fields on the other side of the road, ripe with summer grain. Torches were extinguished and discarded.

End of night. Morning, soft and clear. Tai looked back. Thin clouds east, underlit, pale pink, pale yellow. He caught a flash of blue, bright between trees, then he saw it again: the lake, ahead and to the right.

They came to the branching road that would lead around its shore to the extravagant luxury of the hot springs at Ma-wai. Jade and gold there, alabaster and ivory from the Silk Roads, porcelain, flawless silk, marble floors and columns, sandalwood walls, room screens painted with mastery, rare dishes from far lands, exquisitely prepared. Music.

Not today. They carried on along the road straight past that lakeside cut-off so often taken by this court, and not long after they came to the postal station inn and yard and stables, instead.

Riders had galloped ahead. They were awaited. The officers and attendants of the station were assembled in the courtyard, some bowing three times, some already prostrate in the dust, all visibly terrified to have their emperor suddenly among them like this.

There was a clatter of coach wheels and horses and orders shouted, then an odd, intense near-silence as they came to a halt. Birds were singing, Tai would remember. It was a summer morning.

The imperial carriage stopped directly in front of the station's doors. It was a handsome posting inn, Ma-wai's, so near Xinan, so very near the hot springs and aristocrats' country estates, and the tombs of the imperial family.

The carriage door was opened and they saw the emperor step down.

The Exalted and Glorious Emperor Taizu wore white, unadorned, with a black belt and hat. Alighting behind him, in a vivid blue travelling robe, with small gold flowers for decoration, came Jian.

The two of them went up the three steps to the station's porch. It was deeply disturbing to see the emperor walking. He was carried, always. His feet seldom touched the ground—not in the palace, and certainly not here in the dust of an inn yard. Tai looked around, and saw that he wasn't the only one unsettled by the sight. Wei Song was biting her lip.

Too much had changed too swiftly in a night. The world was a different place, he thought, than it had been when they went to bed.

On the porch, the emperor turned—Tai hadn't thought he would—and looked gravely out at those in the courtyard. He lifted a hand, briefly, then turned and went inside. He held himself very straight, Tai saw, leaning on no one. He didn't look like a fleeing man who'd lost the guidance of heaven.

Jian went in behind him. The prime minister and the prince followed, handing their horses to servants, going quickly up the steps. They didn't look at each other. The other carriage door was opened by a servant. Tai saw his brother step down and walk into the station as well. Three other mandarins alighted and followed.

The posting station doors were closed.

There followed an interlude of disquiet in the courtyard.

No one seemed to have any idea what to do. Tai gave Dynlal's reins to a stable boy, with orders to feed and water the horse and rub it down. Uncertainly, he went up on the covered porch, standing to one side. Zian came with him, and then Song and five of the Kanlins, staying close. Song was carrying her bow, had her arrow-quiver at one hip. So did the other five.

On the western side of the yard Tai saw a company of soldiers, fifty of them, a dui, such as he had commanded once. They appeared to have just arrived.

Their banners and colours marked them as also being of the Second Army. A mixed unit: forty archers, ten cavalry escorting them. Their presence was not unusual. When the main east-west road was congested troops would routinely be diverted this way. The posting stations were used by soldiers in transit throughout the empire, to change horses, eat and rest, receive new orders. These men would be coming from the west, assigned to the capital very likely, or they might even have been heading all the way to Teng Pass, to join their fellows there.

Not any more, Tai thought.

Some of the soldiers who had escorted their party here could be seen making their way across the inn yard to talk to the others. They were all of the Second Army. And there were tidings to share.

"This is not good," said Sima Zian quietly.

The two companies of soldiers were intermingled now, talking with increasing intensity in small clusters. Tai looked for their officers, wondering if they'd assert control. That didn't seem to be happening.

"The dui commander just drew his sword," said Song.

Tai had seen it, too. He looked at her.

"I have sent two of our people for sixty riders from the sanctuary," Lu Chen said. "They cannot be here before end of day." He said it as if apologizing.

"Of course not," said Tai.

"They will not be in time to help," said Chen. He had stepped in front of Tai and the poet, holding his bow. They were towards one end of the porch, away from the doors.

"We are not the target of their anger," said Tai.

"It doesn't matter," Sima Zian murmured. "This mood finds targets as it goes."

And with that, Tai thought of a cabin in the north, long ago, when anger had turned into flames, and worse. He shook his head, as if to shake off memory.

He said, "Keep together. No aggression. There are more than seventy of them. This cannot become violent. The emperor is here."

The emperor is here. He'd actually said that, he would recall later. Invoked the imperial presence like a talisman, a ward, something magical. Perhaps once it would have been, but too much had changed by the time that day's sun had risen.

An arrow flew in morning light.

It struck one of the doors of the posting station straight on, burying itself, vibrating there. Tai winced as if he'd been hit himself, so shocking was the sight, and the sound it made hitting the wood.

Three more arrows, and then ten, rapidly. The archers of the Second Army were widely known for their skill, and they were shooting only at doors, and not from far away. This was solidarity, the dui acting together. None of them would leave any others to face consequences alone. Tai looked for the dui commander again, hoping he could stop this.

A vain hope, entirely awry. The commander, not a young man, grey in his short beard, cold anger in his eyes, strode to the foot of the steps leading up to the porch and shouted, "Where is the first minister? We demand to speak with Wen Zhou!"

Demand to speak. Demand.

Knowing this might end his own days, aware of what men in such a state as this could do (they would be thinking about their fellows at Teng Pass), Tai stepped forward.

"Do not!" he heard Song say, a low, strained voice.

He didn't feel as if he had a choice.

"Dui commander," he said, as calmly as he could. "This is unseemly. Please hear me. My name is Shen Tai, I am the son of General Shen Gao, a name of honour among soldiers, and you might know it."

"I know who you are," said the man. Only that. But he did sketch a bow. "I was in Chenyao when the governor assigned you an escort and gave you rank in the Second Army."

"We share that army, then," said Tai.

"In that case," said the commander, "you should be standing with us. Have you not heard what happened?"

"I have," said Tai. "Why else are we here? Our glorious emperor is consulting even now with his advisers and the prince. We must stand ready to serve Kitai when they emerge with orders for us!"

"No," said the officer below him. "Not so. Not until Wen Zhou comes out to us. Stand aside, son of Shen Gao, if you will not come down. We have no quarrel with the man who went to Kuala Nor, but you must not be in our way."

Had this been a younger man, Tai would later think, what followed might have been different. But the officer, however low-ranking, had clearly been a soldier for a long time. He'd have had companions, friends, at Teng Pass, and he would have, just this moment, learned what happened there.

The dui commander gestured towards the door.

More arrows struck, all together, loudly. They had to sound like a hammer blow inside, Tai thought. A hammering from the changed world. He thought of Jian, more than any of the others in there, even the emperor. He wasn't sure why.

"Come out to us, or we will come for you," the officer shouted. "First Minister Wen, commander of the armies of Kitai, your soldiers are waiting! We have questions that must be answered."

Must be. From an officer of fifty men to the first minister of Kitai. Tai wondered how the sun was climbing in the sky, how birdsong sounded as it always did.

The door to the posting station opened.

Wen Zhou, whom he hated, came out.

Long years after, when that rebellion was another part of the past—a devastating part, but over with, and receding—the historians charged with examining records (such as remained from a disjointed time) and shaping the story of those days were almost unanimous in their savage writings as they vied to recount the corrupt character (from earliest childhood!) and the foul treachery of accursed An Li, more commonly known as Roshan.

Virtually without exception, for hundreds of years, Roshan was painted in text after text as the grossest possible figure, pustulent, oozing with depraved appetite and ambition.

In these records, it was generally the view that only the heroic and wise first minister, Wen Zhou, had seen through the vile barbarian's dark designs—almost from the first—and done all he could to forestall them.

There were variations in the writings, complicated by certain aspects of the records, and by the need (until later dynasties) not to be at all critical of the Great and Glorious Emperor Taizu himself.

Accordingly, the most common explanation of the events at the outset of the An Li Rebellion involved incompetence and fear among the generals and officers assigned with defending Teng Pass—and Xinan, behind it. A certain General Xu Bihai, an otherwise inconsequential figure, was routinely described with contempt as physically infirm and a coward.

This solution to the problem of explaining what happened was obvious, given that official historians are civil servants and serve at the court of any dynasty—and can readily be dismissed, or worse.

It would have been deeply unwise to imply, let alone assert, any error or failing on the part of heaven's emperor, or his duly appointed ministers. Easier, and safer, to turn one's gaze and calligraphy to the soldiers.

The handsome, aristocratic, preternaturally wise first minister was also, of course, part of a legendary tragedy, one embraced by both the common people and the artists of Kitai—and this, too, surely played a role in the shaping of official records.

When the desire of the court and the tales of the people meld with the vision of great artists, how should any prudent chronicler of the past set himself to resist?

The first minister, showing no sign of unease, stopped at the front of the porch, above the three steps leading to the yard.

It left him, Tai thought, looking disdainfully down on the dui commander and the soldiers. Wen Zhou had had no real choice but to come out, but this encounter needed care, and part of that, surely, was to make clear the gulf, wider than the Great River in flood, between himself and those below.

Tall and magnificent, Zhou looked out into the sunlight of the yard. He was dressed for riding: no court silk, but perfectly fitted cloth and leather. Boots. No hat. He often disdained a hat, Tai remembered, from days in Long Lake Park, seeing him at a distance.

A much greater distance than this.

Zhou extended an arm and swept it, one finger extended, in a slow, wide arc across the inn yard. He said, his voice imperious, "Each man here has forfeited his life for what has just been done. The officers must be executed first."

"No," murmured Sima Zian, under his breath. "Not that way."

Wen Zhou went on, "But our infinitely merciful emperor, mindful that these are difficult times for ordinary men to understand, has elected to let this moment pass, as if it were the troublesome behaviour of small children. Put away your weapons, form ranks. No punishment will be visited upon any of you. Await orders when we come out. You will be needed in defending Kitai."

And he turned, amazingly, to go back inside without waiting to see what they did, as if it were inconceivable that anything other than immediate compliance could take place.

"No," said the dui commander.

Tai could see that it cost him a great deal to say that single word. The man was perspiring in the sunlight, though the morning was mild.

Wen Zhou turned. "What did you say?" he asked. His voice and manner, Tai thought, could freeze a soul.

"I think you heard me," the officer said. Two others came to stand with him. An archer and one of his officers of ten.

"I heard treason," said Wen Zhou.

"No," said one of the archers. "We have learned of treason just now!"

"Why was the army ordered out of Teng Pass?" cried the grey-bearded commander, and Tai heard pain in his voice.

"What?" snapped Zhou. "Will the heavens crack above us? The sun fall? Are common soldiers asking questions of the Ta-Ming now?"

"They didn't have to fight!" cried the dui commander. "Everyone knows it!"

"And you are fleeing from Xinan, leaving it to Roshan!" shouted the archer, a small, fierce figure. "Why was any of this done?"

"They say you gave those orders directly!" the officer of ten said.

First hesitation in Wen Zhou, Tai saw. His mouth was dry again. He didn't move. He couldn't move.

Zhou drew himself up. "Who says such a thing?"

"Those who rode with you have told us!" cried the archer. "Your own guards heard it on the ride!"

Tai turned to Sima Zian. The poet's face was stricken. Tai wondered how he looked himself. He heard Wen Zhou again. "This encounter is over. Soldiers! Take custody of these three men. Your dui commander is relieved of his post. Bind them and hold them for execution when we come out. Kitai will fall if such chaos is permitted! Soldiers of the Second Army, do as you are ordered."

No man moved in the inn yard.

A flurry of wind stirring the dust. Birdsong again, and always.

"No. You must answer us," said the archer. His voice had altered. Tai heard Song draw a breath behind him. He saw Wen Zhou look down into the inn yard with the withering, lifelong contempt a man such as he would have for those below. He turned, to go back inside.

And so the arrow that killed him struck from behind.

Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, master poet of the age, who was there that day at the Ma-wai posting inn, never wrote a word about that morning.

A thousand other poets, over centuries, did take those events as a subject, beginning with the death of Wen Zhou. Poets, like historians, have many reasons for varying or amending what might have taken place. Often they simply do not know the truth.

Before the prime minister fell, there were five arrows in him.

The bowmen of the Second Army would not let one of their number carry the burden of this deed alone.

By the time the poems of lament were in full spate, like a river, some versifiers had twenty-five arrows (with night-black feathers) protruding from the first minister's back as he lay in his red blood upon the porch: poets straining for pathos and power, oblivious to the excesses of their images.

Tai stepped forward. His swords remained sheathed. His hands were shaking.

"No, my lord!" cried Song. "Shen Tai, please. Hold!"

And, "Hold!" echoed the dui commander below, eyeing him narrowly, visibly afraid. Frightened men were dangerous.

Tai saw that the man's hands were also trembling. The commander stood alone now, exposed in the dusty inn yard. The archer was no longer beside him, nor his officer. They had withdrawn, blending back in with their fellows. Tai was quite sure he could recognize the archer, the man who'd fired first.

The bowmen in the yard all had arrows to string. So, he saw, glancing back, did Song and the other Kanlins. They stepped forward to surround him. They would be killed before he was.

"This must stop!" he cried, a little desperately.

He pushed forward, past Song. He looked down at the dui commander. "You know, surely you know it must stop."

"You know what he did," said the commander. His voice was harsh with strain. "He sent all those men—an army!—to their deaths, left Xinan open to ruin, and only because he feared for himself if the officers in the pass decided he'd caused this rebellion."

"We can't know that!" cried Tai. He felt weary and sick. And afraid. There was a dead man beside him, and the emperor was inside.

"There was no reason for our army to leave the pass! That one there sent the order in the middle of the night, with the half-seal. He gave it himself! Ask those who escorted you here."

"How do you know this?" cried Tai. "How would they know?"

And the officer in the inn yard below, not a young man, said then, quietly, "Ask the prince you came here with."

Tai closed his eyes, hearing that. He felt suddenly as if he might fall. Because it fit. It made a terrible, bitter kind of sense. The prince would be readying himself to take command now, with a full-fledged war upon them and his father so frail. And if the prime minister was the one who had created this sudden nightmare...

They had seen Shinzu ride ahead in the darkness on the road, to join the escort from the Second Army, speak with them.

A man's actions could have unexpected consequences, sometimes; they could come back to haunt you, even if you were a prime minister of Kitai. Also, perhaps, if you were a prince of Kitai.

Tai opened his eyes, found himself unable to speak just then. And so, instead, he heard, in that bright, clear morning light near Ma-wai and its blue lake, another man do so, from among the gathered soldiers, lifting his voice. "One more must die now, or we will all be killed."

Tai didn't understand, not at first. His immediate thought was, You are all going to die, in any case.

He didn't say it. He was too shaken to speak. Very near him, blood slowly spreading on the wooden porch, lay Wen Zhou.

"Oh, please, no," said Sima Zian, barely a breath. "Not this."

Tai remembered that, too. That it was the poet who realized first what was happening.

He turned quickly to look at the other man, then wheeled back to the courtyard.

And with a sorrow that never left him, that lay in memory, in his days forever after, as powerful, in its way, as the terrible images of the Bogu by the northern lake, Tai saw the soldiers step forward, together, well trained, and he heard the one who had just spoken speak again, and this man—whose face Tai never properly saw, among seventy or so of them—said, very clearly, "He was prime minister for only one reason. All Kitai knows it! We will be slain in vengeance—by her. She destroyed the emperor's will with her dark power and has brought us all to this, through her cousin. She must come out to us, or this cannot end."

Dancer to the music. Bright as morning light. Lovely as green leaves after rain, or green jade, or the Weaver Maid's star in the sky when the sun goes down.

CHAPTER XXV

"This will not happen!" said Tai.

He said it as forcefully as he could, feeling a frantic need to push back against where the morning had now gone.

A trickle of perspiration slid down his side. Fear was in him, a twisting thing. He said, "She was working to control her cousin. Wen Zhou had even tried to kill me, at Kuala Nor. She was gathering information on that. Against him!"

He felt ashamed, telling soldiers this, but the moment was surely beyond shame, or privacy.

Hidden among the others, the archer (he would remember the voice) shouted, "This family has destroyed Kitai, driven us to civil war! As long as she lives they will poison us!"

That was clever, a part of Tai was thinking. A moment ago it had been about their own safety, those who had killed Wen Zhou—now it was something else.

"Bring her out," said the dui commander.

Tai felt like cursing him. He held back. This was not a time to let anger overwhelm. He said, as calmly as he could, "I am not going to allow another death. Commander, control your men."

The man shook his head. "I will. But after the Wen family poison is purged from among us. Our companions were sent out from Teng Pass. Will you measure two against so many? You have been a soldier. You know how many men are dead there. Does not the Ta-Ming invoke execution when someone in power has erred so greatly?"

"She is only a woman. A dancer." He was dissembling now, but desperate.

"And women have never shaped power in Kitai?"

Tai opened his mouth and closed it. He stared at the man below.

A twist of the officer's mouth. "I sat the examinations twice," he said. "Studied eight years before accepting that I would never pass them. I know some things about the court, my lord."

Tai would wonder about this later, too. If the world as it went forward from that day might have been otherwise had another leader and his fifty men been shifted to the northern route from the congested highway to Xinan.

There are always branches along paths.

"I will not permit this," Tai said again, as coldly as he could.

The commander gazed up at him. He didn't look triumphant or vengeful, Tai thought. The man said, almost regretfully, "There are... eight of you? We have better than seventy men. Why would you wish to kill your Kanlins, or yourself? Do you not have tasks in the war upon us now?"

Tai shook his head, aware again of anger. He fought it. The man was telling only truth. Tai could kill a great many people with the wrong thing said or done here. Even so: "I have no task greater than stopping this. If you wish to move into that posting station, you will have to kill me and my guards, and deprive Kitai of two hundred and fifty Sardian horses."

He was willing to play that card, too.

There was a short silence.

"If we must," said the dui commander. "Eight more deaths will not change what is to come, along with however many of us fall, including myself. I don't matter. I know enough to know that. And the horses are your duty, not ours. Stand aside, my lord. I am asking you."

"Tai," said Sima Zian softly, at his elbow, "they are not going to stop for you."

"Nor I for them," said Tai. "There comes a point when life is not worth enduring if one steps back."

"I agree, Master Shen."

A woman's voice, from the open doorway to the posting station.

She had come out.

Tai turned and he looked at her. Their eyes met. He knelt, near the blood of her cousin where it was spreading on the porch. And, with a shiver, he saw that not only did his Kanlins also kneel, and the poet, but every soldier in the inn yard did the same.

The moment passed. The soldiers stood up. And Tai saw that the archers still held their bows, arrows to strings. It was only then that he accepted that this was going to happen and he could not stop it.

In part, because he saw in her eyes that she willed it to be so.

"Poet," she said, looking at Zian with the mocking smile Tai remembered, "I still grieve that you chose to be ironic with your last verse about me."

"Not more than I do, illustrious lady," said Sima Zian, and Tai saw that he had not risen from his knees, and there were tears on his face. "You brought a shining to our time."

Her smile deepened. She looked pleased, and young.

Tai stood up. He said, "Will the emperor not come? He can stop this, surely."

She looked at him for what seemed a long time. Those in the courtyard were waiting, motionless. The posting station of Ma-wai felt to Tai as if it were the centre of the empire, of the world. All else, everyone else, suspended around it, unknowing.

"This is my choice," she said. "I told him he must not." She hesitated, holding Tai's gaze. "He is no longer emperor, in any case. He gave the ring to Shinzu. It is... the right thing to do. There will be a hard war, and my beloved is no longer young."

"You are," said Tai. "It is too soon, my lady. Do not take this brightness away."

"Others are taking it. Some will remember the brightness." She gestured, a dancer. "Shen Tai, I remember sharing lychees with you on this road. I thank you for it. And for... standing here now."

She wore blue, with small golden peonies (royalty of flowers) embroidered on the silk. Her hairpins were decorated with lapis lazuli and two of her rings were also of lapis, he saw. She wore no earrings that morning. Her slippers were silk, and golden, with pearls. He was near enough to tell that she had not left the Ta-Ming in the middle of the night without the scent she always wore.

Nor had she left without considering the Sardian horses at the border, and sending a messenger through the night city for the only man who could claim them for Kitai.

"You must let me go," Jian said softly. "All of you."

He let her go. He dreamed of it, and saw it in his mind's eye waking, all the rest of his days.

He watched her turn, poised, unhurried, stepping lightly past her fallen cousin who had brought them all to this. She went down the steps alone—lifting her robe so it might not catch—and into the yard, and she went forward there, in morning sunlight now, to stand before the soldiers who had called her out to kill her. It was a dusty inn yard, filled with fighting men, not a place for silk.

They knelt. They knelt down again before her.

She is too young, Tai thought. In the room she had left, an old emperor and a new one remained out of sight. Tai wondered if they were watching. If they could see.

With mild surprise, he saw tears on Song's face, too. She was wiping at them, angrily. He didn't think she'd ever trusted or liked Jian.

Perhaps liking was without importance sometimes, with some people. The dancers, like summer stars. You didn't say you liked a star in the sky.

He moved to the top of the steps leading down. He had no idea what he was doing, he was living inside sorrow.

Jian said, clear as a temple bell sounding across fields, "I have a request, dui commander."

The officer was still kneeling. He looked up for an instant, then lowered his head again. "My lady?" he said.

"I would not like to die as my cousin did, to have arrows disfigure my body, or perhaps my face. Is there a man here kind enough to kill me without marring me? With... with a knife, perhaps?"

That faltering, her first since coming out.

The commander looked up again, but not directly at her. "My lady, such a man would be too clearly marked for death. It is not proper for me to name anyone in my company to that."

Jian seemed to consider it. "No," she said. "I understand. I am sorry to have troubled you with such a request. It was... childish of me. Do as you must, dui commander."

Childish. Tai heard a footfall behind him. Then a voice by his side.

"I will do it," said the voice. "I am marked in any case."

The tone was precise. Not beautiful as a temple bell, but firm, no uncertainty.

Tai looked at his brother.

Liu was gazing at the commander in the yard, his posture and expression defining authority, a man accustomed to being heard without raising his voice. He wore his mandarin's robe and a soft hat, and the belt and key of his rank, as always. The man he had served was lying in blood at his feet.

That was it, of course. Add Wen Zhou's death to the emperor's abdication, a new emperor for Kitai. Consider Liu's position as the first minister's principal adviser, and...

And you had this, Tai thought. Added to the other moments unfolding here one by one, a morning tale.

The dui commander nodded his head jerkily. He seemed, for the first time, overawed by what they'd set in motion. Not so as to falter (his soldiers would not allow it by now), but by the weight, the resonance of this.

Liu lifted a hand in a practised gesture. "One moment, then, dui commander, and I will be with you." Jian had turned, was looking up at the two brothers. "My lady," said Liu, and bowed to her.

Then he turned to Tai. "This needs to happen," he said crisply, quietly. "I was the prime minister's man. There is a price to be paid for a failure such as this."

"Did you have anything to do with that order? Teng Pass?"

Liu looked contemptuous. Tai knew that look. "Am I such a fool in your eyes?"

"He never spoke of it?"

"He stopped seeking my counsel on some things from the time you returned to Xinan, Second Brother." Liu's thin, superior smile. "You might say your return caused all this."

"You mean my failure to die at Kuala Nor?"

"Or Chenyao, if I understand it rightly."

Tai blinked. Stared. Anger slipped away.

Liu's smile also faded. They looked at each other, the sons of Shen Gao. "You didn't truly think I had anything to do with that?"

The sensation was so strange. Relief like a wave, and then another wave, of sorrow.

"I wondered," Tai said. "We knew it came from Wen Zhou."

Liu shook his head. "It would have made no sense. I knew how far away you were, if you were still alive. You could do nothing about Li-Mei even if you were foolish enough to want to. Why would I need you dead?"

"Why would he?" Tai looked down at the dead man beside them.

"He didn't. Which is one reason he never told me about it. It was nothing but arrogance. He did it because of the woman, and because he could."

"And Teng Pass?"

"He was afraid of Xu Bihai. Afraid the general would decide the rebellion was Zhou's fault and come to an arrangement with the rebels. I think he feared all soldiers." A slight smile. "Makes this morning amusing, doesn't it?"

Tai said, "That wouldn't be my word for it."

Liu flicked his fingers dismissively. "You have," he said, "no sense of irony. Listen now, and carefully." He waited for Tai to nod, an instructor confirming a student's attention.

Liu said, "The horses will save your life. Let it be said abroad—by the Kanlins, if you can do it—that I did try to have you killed. They won't lie, you must make them think you believe it."

"Why? Why do I need to—?"

The familiar, impatient look. "Because Shinzu is more clever than any of us suspected, and if he thinks you are linked to me..."

"I am linked to you, First Brother!"

Liu's expression was impatient again. "Think. In this imperial family, brotherhood can mean hatred and murder as easily as anything else. Shinzu will know that. Tai, there is a clear path to power for you, for our family. He honours you already. He will have need of advisers, his own men, over and above your bringing the horses."

Tai said nothing. Liu didn't wait for him to speak.

"Also, the lands given you, by the Great River. A very good property, but not safe for the next while. I have no idea which way Roshan will go, but he might move south. After they take Xinan and finish killing there."

"He will allow killing in the city?"

A small headshake, as if it pained Liu that someone might not see these things. "Of course he will. Wen Zhou slew his son, and the rebel soldiers are hard men, more than half of them barbarians. Almost all of the imperial family are still in the city. They are dead when he finds them. Xinan will be a bad place for the rest of this summer at least. People will be leaving in panic. As soon as today." His voice was brisk, low, no one else could hear. The soldiers were waiting. Jian, Tai thought, was waiting.

Liu seemed to come to the same awareness. "I cannot linger to teach you," he said. "Our own estate will likely be safe for our mothers, but have an eye to them, wherever you are. Keep Shinzu content, stay as close to him as you can. If this rebellion lasts a long time, and I think it will now, there is a man in Hangdu, near our property. His name is Pang, he has only one leg, you cannot miss finding him at the market. He has been buying and storing grain for me, for our family, in a hidden barn I had built some time ago. He needs to be paid three thousand a month, the middle of every month. You are wealthy now, but there will be shortages of food. Try to keep buying. These things are yours now to look after. Do you understand, Second Brother?"

Tai swallowed. "I understand," he said. "Pang, in Hangdu."

Liu looked at him. No affection, no fear, not much of anything to be read in the soft, smooth face.

Tai said, "I am sorry for this, brother. I am... pleased to know you did not send the assassins."

Liu shrugged. "I might have, if I had thought it prudent for any reason."

"I don't think so, Liu."

A superior smile, well remembered. "You did until now."

"I know. My error. I request forgiveness."

His brother glanced away, then shrugged again. "I forgive you. What I did for our family, Li-Mei made a princess, I would do again. Tai, it was a master stroke."

Tai said nothing. His brother looked at him, then away towards the courtyard.

"So was Kuala Nor," Liu added softly.

It was suddenly difficult to speak.

"I didn't think of it that way."

"I know you didn't," said Liu. "If you can, have me buried beside father in the orchard." Another thin smile as he glanced back. "You are skilled at quieting ghosts, are you not?"

And with that, he went down the steps to the sunlit yard, drawing a jewelled court blade from the sleeve of his robe.

Tai saw him approach Jian and bow to her. The dui commander was the only one near them, and now he withdrew, backing away a dozen steps, as if to, belatedly, distance himself from this.

Tai saw his brother say something to Jian, too softly for anyone to hear. But he saw her smile, as if surprised, and pleased, by what she heard. She murmured something to Liu, and he bowed again.

He spoke one more time, and after a motionless instant she nodded her head. She made a dancer's spinning movement, a last one, the sort that ends a performance and releases the audience's approval and applause.

She ended it with her back to Liu, to the posting station. She faced south (her people had come from the south), towards the cypress trees lining the road and the summer fields beyond them, bright in morning light, and Tai's brother placed his left hand around her waist, to steady the both of them, and he thrust his knife cleanly into her, between ribs, into the heart, from behind.

Liu held her, gently, carefully, as she died. And then he held her a little longer, and then he laid her down on her back in the dust of that yard, because there was nothing else he could do.

He knelt beside her a moment, arranging her clothing. One of her hairpins had come loose. Tai watched his brother fix it in place again. Then Liu set down his jewelled blade and stood up and he moved a distance away from her, towards the archers of the Second Army. He stopped.

"Do it," he said. Making it his command. And was standing very straight as they sent half a dozen arrows into him.

Tai had no way of knowing if his brother's eyes were open or closed before he died. He did become aware, after a time, that Sima Zian was beside him, saying nothing, but present.

He looked out into the yard. At Liu, face down, and at Jian on her back, the blue robe spread about her, and it seemed to him that sunlight was wrong for what the moment was, what it would always be now, even as it receded. This morning brightness, the birds rising and darting, their singing.

He said that, to the poet. "Should there be birdsong?"

Zian said, "No, and yes. We do what we do, and the world continues. Somewhere, a child is being born and the parents are tasting a joy they never imagined."

"I know that," said Tai. "But here? Should there be so much light here?"

"No," said Sima Zian, after a moment. "Not here."

"My lords?" It was Song. Tai turned to her. He had never seen her looking as she did now. "My lords, we request your permission," she said. "We wish to kill two of them later. The commander and the first archer, the small one. Only two. But it must be done." She wiped at her cheeks.

"You have mine," said Zian, eyes gazing out upon the courtyard.

"You have mine," said Tai.

A different poet, younger, would write that. Part of a very long verse, one that would be remembered, among all the (deservedly) forgotten ones about that morning at Ma-wai.

On the posting station porch, shaded from sunlight, two men came out a little later to stand before the soldiers.

The older one, his hands trembling, holding himself not nearly as upright as before, formally presented the younger one, his son, with the phoenix ring, in public this time, making him emperor of Kitai.

The soldiers, all of them, the posting inn servants, the Kanlins on the porch, Shen Tai, the older of the surviving sons of Shen Gao, and the poet Sima Zian, all knelt, faces to inn yard dust or wooden porch, and so became the first to pay homage to the Glorious and Exalted Emperor Shinzu of the Ninth Dynasty of Kitai, in the first year of the An Li Rebellion, just before Xinan fell.

The new emperor's commands were exact, measured, appropriate. There were three dead people here. The Kanlins were asked to attend to them, with assistance from their sanctuary.

Jian would be carried to the imperial family tombs, close by. The oldest son of General Shen Gao was, after a consultation with his brother, also given to the Kanlins, with the request that his body be preserved and taken to his family's estate for burial. Word would go ahead to the family.

The body of the former first minister, Wen Zhou, was to be burned by the Kanlins on a pyre at their sanctuary, duly shrouded and with rites, but not with courtly honours. The ashes would be scattered, not preserved. The absence of ceremony was obviously—and cleverly—designed to allay the fears of the soldiers who had killed him.

The father-emperor, Taizu, who had awakened in the middle of this night as ruler of Kitai, frail-seeming, grieving and bewildered in the bright day, was to be escorted to safety in the far southwest, beyond the Great River.

In due course, it was hoped, he would recover his strength and purpose, and be brought back, with dignity, to his son's renewed court in Xinan.

The Emperor Shinzu himself would go north. He would make Shuquian, in the loop of the Golden River, his base. It had served that purpose before in Kitai. Xinan could not be held, but it could be retaken.

There was no hint of concession to the rebels in the new emperor, no flicker of doubt or surrender. An error had been made by a minister. The man (and his adviser) were dead, as required, here this morning.

The woman lying in the dust might be considered a source of regret, now and afterwards, but no one judging the matter with clarity of mind could deny that her family was at the root of this disaster. Just as women in Kitai could reap the benefit of the deeds of the men they knew, they could not be immune when those men fell.

One small incident, noted by only a handful of people in that inn yard, occurred just before Taizu re-entered his coach to be escorted from Ma-wai. An alchemist, a lean cleric of the Sacred Path, emerged cautiously from the second coach, where he had evidently remained through the violent events of the morning. He approached Taizu, bearing what was—evidently—the morning's elixir, designed to help pursue immortality.

The emperor, the former emperor, waved this man away.

Shortly afterwards, Master Shen Tai, a person of some importance now, was summoned by the new emperor into the posting station. He knelt there and was presented with another ring, pale jade—the first gift offered by Shinzu as emperor of Kitai.

Shen Tai was instructed to leave with the retired emperor for the posting station on the imperial road to Chenyao. From there, as soon as his sixty Kanlin Warriors arrived from their sanctuary, he was to proceed swiftly to Hsien, on the border with Tagur, to claim his horses and bring them safely back to Shuquian. The emperor formally requested that the Sardians be made available to the empire. Shen Tai formally acceded to this, expressing great happiness at being able to be of use to Kitai.

Xinan was about to be one of the most terrible places on earth. Tai had realized it at some point on the night ride to Ma-wai, and then his brother Liu had said the same thing to him, and his brother Liu was someone who was—who had been—brilliantly clever about courts and armies and the world.

And if this was so, if a red violence was approaching from the east, dust rising even now beneath an army's marching tread and their horses' hooves, there was a woman to be taken from the city.

Especially since that woman had been the concubine of the man who would surely be the most hated in Xinan, even before the rebels came. Vengeance could give birth to horrors not to be spoken aloud. So could fear.

One woman who had given all of them music (and more) was dead this morning, in her youth and grace. Tai wasn't ready to lose another now because of Wen Zhou.

He had always known that actions could have unintended consequences, any man's actions, of whatever rank. But sometimes events could also be shaped. Words had been spoken to soldiers by the imperial heir, on their ride from the palace. Consequences had followed.

Wen Zhou. Jian. Tai's brother. And the emperor yielding the throne that same morning to his son. Tai had knelt before the Serene and Exalted Emperor Shinzu, ruling now with the mandate of heaven, and realized he didn't know how much had been foreseen, or intended, by this man.

He didn't ever expect to know for certain.

He would do his duty. Kitai was an empire at war now, beset from within. But the Kanlins from the sanctuary could not be at the imperial highway inn before nightfall, at best. So he had a little time, though he'd have to move at speed, and probably through the night again, depending upon what he found in Xinan.

As ordered, he started from the inn yard with his own Kanlins, Taizu's carriage, and the soldiers who'd escorted their party from the palace in the night.

The other fifty men of the Second Army were going north with the new emperor. It was a great honour. Their dui commander had them standing in rigid, disciplined order in the courtyard, awaiting the command to set out.

Tai had watched Wei Song observing this. He thought about the idea that these men were being honoured. He said nothing. Sometimes it was better not to know the details of what might come. And he had his own task to attend to now.

A short distance from Ma-wai he reined Dynlal to a halt and in the middle of the roadway told Song and Zian and Lu Chen his intention. He didn't present it as a matter for discussion.

They all came with him. His other Kanlins stayed with Taizu and the soldiers. They'd wait at the inn for the sixty riders from the sanctuary.

Tai and three companions set out across the fields, cutting south to intersect the imperial highway. They rode through a late-summer morning and then an afternoon that ought to have registered as beautiful. High white clouds and a breeze from the west.

He was thinking of death. Behind them and at Teng Pass, and increasingly, as they rode, with a cold awareness of more to come in the days ahead.

The road system near Xinan was exceptionally good. It was rare that riders had to cross farmland or skirt the edges of what small bamboo forests remained. They found a track leading east, then another running off it south towards the highway, passing through village after village, a blurred progression.

People came out to watch them gallop through, or stopped in whatever they were doing. Riders moving so fast was unusual. Something to talk about on a quiet day. Dynlal was a glory, running easily. The other three had changed mounts at the station. Even so, he could have outstripped them had he chosen to. He almost did make that choice, but he knew he'd need them when he entered the city.

He never entered the city. He never came close to doing so.

They heard the noise, like a heavy storm or a waterfall, before they saw anything: a roar of sound as they raced up a rise in their small roadway near the highway. Then they crested that rise and saw what was happening below.

The city was emptying out, in panic. His heart aching, Tai saw the imperial road thronged with the people of Xinan, pushing west in a tumultuous mass that spilled into the drainage ditches and across them into the clogged going of the summer fields beside the road.

People were struggling with their belongings on their backs, or pulling carts with children and the elderly and their goods. The noise was punishing. At times a scream or cry would rise above it, as someone was pushed into the ditch, or fell and was trampled. If you fell you were likely to die. Progress was agonizingly slow, Tai saw, and the mass of people stretched back east as far as he could see.

He couldn't even see the city gates, they were too far away. But he could imagine them. All the gates. Word of disaster had arrived. Xinan's inhabitants were not inclined, it seemed, to wait for Roshan to come to them.

"They will starve out here," said Sima Zian softly. "And these are just this morning's vanguard. Only the beginning."

"Some will stay," said Lu Chen. "Some always stay, for their homes, their families. They will keep their heads down and hope that bloodshed passes."

"Eventually, it probably will," said Tai. "He wants to rule, doesn't he?"

"Eventually," agreed Lu Chen. "But that can seem like forever."

"Is it going to be forever, this war?"

Tai looked at Song, who had asked that, gazing down on the crawling-forward multitude on the road. She was biting her lower lip.

"No," he said. "But much will change."

"Everything?" she asked, looking at him.

"Much," he said again. "Not everything."

"Tai, we can't get into the city." It was Zian. "We must hope she received your warning and responded. But there's no way to swim against this current."

Tai looked at him, a bleakness in his heart. Then he shook his head. "Yes, we can. Swim is a good idea. We'll get in through the canals."

It was a good idea, but it didn't matter. Sometimes that happens.

They spent the rest of the afternoon cutting overland across fields and along small roads again, forcing their way east. Even the back roads and rutted cart tracks had crowds by late in the day, all fleeing west. It became difficult to make any headway. People cursed the four of them on their horses. If it hadn't been for the Kanlins, the respect and apprehension they engendered, they might even have been attacked. Tai fought anger and panic, aware that time was running against them.

When they finally reached a vantage point, forcing tiring horses up a ridge from which they could see Xinan's walls, he heard a voice cursing, and realized it was his own.

In the evening light, Xinan, capital of the empire, glory of the world, was spread below them. The city looked like a hive with all the insects in flight from it, pouring out of every gate, along all roads. And within the walls, they could see smoke rising.

Roshan was days away, and already Xinan was burning.

"Look at the Ta-Ming," Sima Zian said.

The palace was on fire.

"They'll be looting it," said Tai.

"Where are the guards?" Song cried.

"Looting it," Tai said wearily.

Zian murmured, "They know the emperor has fled. What could the city understand from that, other than that he's abandoned it? Abandoned them."

"He left to regroup! To gather armies. The dynasty will fight!" Song's tone revealed a great strain.

"We know that," the poet answered, gently. "But how does that help those down there, with An Li coming for them?"

Tai was looking at the canals, where they flowed lazily into the city under arches in the walls, bearing firewood and lumber, marble and other stone and heavy goods and foodstuffs on any normal day. There were substantial punishments for being found in a canal; they were known to be a weakness in the city's defences.

There were thousands of people, he saw, who had chosen to take the risk of a beating today. So many bodies were in the water, pushing, fighting their way through, bearing goods on their heads, children on their backs, or carrying nothing at all but terror and the need to get away.

People will drown, he thought.

Lu Chen lifted a hand and pointed. Tai saw a new tongue of flame within the Ta-Ming Palace.

The others sat their horses beside him on the ridge. They said nothing. They were honouring his sorrow, Tai knew, by letting him be the one to say it. To surrender the day's hopeless quest. They had come with him, and stayed by him.

He sat astride Dynlal gazing at a nightmare, or the beginnings of a nightmare. The sun was setting, its long light falling upon Xinan, making the walls seem gold. He was thinking of Rain, of green eyes and yellow hair, and a mind shrewder than his own, even in the days when he'd been immersed in his studies, trying to understand ancient courts and long-dead sages and the forms and rhythms of poetry.

He was thinking of her singing for him, of her hands in his hair, the two of them on a bed in a lamplit room.

There were so many poems over so many hundreds of years about courtesans, young or not young any more, at upper windows above jade or marble stairs, at twilight time or by moonlight, waiting for lovers to return. The night comes, and the stars, the streets are lit by lanterns on stone walls. The nightingale cries in the garden. Still no sound of horse's hooves beneath my open window...

"We can't do this," he said. "We have to go back. I am sorry."

He was, for so many things, as a long summer day finally went down to the dark. They turned west again, leaving the fires behind.

It took most of the night to reach the inn on the Imperial road. The same one where he'd awakened on a morning in spring to find Song wounded and held by soldiers, and Wen Jian waiting to take him to Ma-wai.

Because they were riding, even on tired horses and off the main roads, eventually they outpaced the struggling, exhausted vanguard of refugees from Xinan. They'd made their way down to the highway. It lay open before them under moonlight, serene and beautiful.

The Kanlins from the sanctuary, sixty of them, as promised, were waiting when they reached the inn. Taizu was asleep, they reported.

Tai had Dynlal led away to be watered and rubbed down and fed. They all needed to rest, he knew it, but he was unable to sleep. He was bone-weary and heartsick.

Song and Lu Chen went off with the other Kanlins. He thought of inviting her to stay with him, he'd seen how distressed she was. He didn't feel able to offer comfort. She'd be better off with the Warriors, he thought.

Or perhaps not. He didn't know. He didn't have that much clarity in him tonight. Ma-wai, what had happened there. And Xinan on fire, with Spring Rain inside the walls. Or perhaps trapped among tens of thousands on one road or another.

He didn't know. He walked through the reception chamber of the inn. Saw frightened men standing there, unsure of what to say or think. They bowed to him. He went through into the courtyard, the garden.

A little later Zian came out and found him. Tai was sitting on a bench under a mulberry tree. The poet carried wine, and two cups. He sat down and poured and Tai drained a cup, then held it out again. Zian filled it a second time and Tai drank that, too.

The poet was a quiet, comforting presence. It felt illicit, somehow, to take comfort in anything tonight. Friendship, starlight. The night breeze.

Zian said, "You will need to rest."

"I know."

"You will leave in the morning?"

"Before sunrise. We should stay ahead of those fleeing the city." Tai looked at the other man, a shadow beside him. The leaves above blocked the moonlight. "You are coming with us?"

A short silence. Then Zian shook his head. "It may be arrogant of me, a delusion, but I believe I can do more good with the emperor. The... father-emperor."

"Taizu can't keep up with us."

"Of course not. But he will be grieving, and he has only that fool of an alchemist with him, and soldiers. He has a long way to go and the roads are hard. Heaven's way is bent like a bow now. Perhaps an old poet can help."

"You aren't old."

"Tonight I am."

There was a silence in the garden, and then Tai heard the poet speak again, offering him a gift:

Tai said nothing for a time. He was moved, and very tired. The wine, the words, the stillness. "I will see you again?"

"If heaven allows. I will hope so. We'll drink good wine in another garden, listening to pipa music."

Tai drew a breath. "I will hope so. Where... where will you be?"

"I don't know. Where will you be, Shen Tai?"

"I don't know."

CHAPTER XXVI

Ye Lao, once under-steward to the Beloved Companion Wen Jian, was now principal household steward to the honourable and distinguished Master Shen Tai (son of the famous general). This meant, of course, that he was burdened with formal responsibility for Master Shen's quite substantial compound in Xinan in extremely uncertain times. Household stewards, without exception, preferred certainty.

Ye Lao had never endured a major rebellion or the arrival of angry soldiers in any city or palace he'd known. You heard tales about such times, you didn't live through them—if the gods in the nine heavens were kind.

They weren't always kind, of course.

Being quite good at his job, and priding himself on it, Lao refused to allow himself to be unduly frightened or flustered (and, most definitely, did not permit the household servants to see a hint of such feelings in him) until the army of An Li was actually sighted at the eastern gates of the city, seven days after the emperor and a handful of the court had fled.

At that point, as rebel soldiers began pouring into Xinan, and reports of shocking conduct reached Master Shen's compound, Ye Lao found himself becoming slightly perturbed. The jackals were in the city, someone quoted, the dragons were in the wild.

Xinan was left open for Roshan, of course: only fools would close city gates when there were no soldiers to defend them. But this courtesy had not induced any immediate limiting of violence.

One expected, in the usual way of soldiers arriving in a civilized place, a certain amount of intoxication, destruction, looting, even killing, unnecessary though it was.

It was undoubtedly wisest to keep women out of sight, and hope the poor girls in the pleasure districts proved equal to the task of assuaging a drunken army.

About half a million citizens of Xinan had, if widespread reports were accurate, chosen to flee ahead of the rebels. They'd streamed out in all directions, trampling each other in their haste. Some had even gone east, right into the approaching storm, probably towards country homes and family, hoping to scurry north and south around the advancing army and get back to their farmland roots.

Most of those escaping went west or south. A certain number were reported to be making their way north, once word arrived that the new emperor, Shinzu (it was a difficult idea, a new emperor), was rallying the Ninth Dynasty there.

In Ye Lao's view, most of the people in flight were making a mistake.

Unless they had family in the country with room for them, an actual place to go, starvation outside Xinan was a real possibility. In fact, with so many on the move it was hard to imagine how they could all be sheltered and fed, even with family waiting.

It was assumed by those who stayed that An Li and his sons intended to establish themselves in the Ta-Ming Palace, and would therefore act in a manner befitting a self-proclaimed new dynasty.

There would be some measure of undisciplined behaviour, but that would surely be brought under control, and life in the capital would resume in acceptable fashion.

With this underlying thought in Xinan, one that he shared, it was profoundly shocking for Ye Lao to learn of wanton slaughter in the palace from the first hours, and continuing.

There were public executions in the square before the Ta-Ming's walls. It was reported that the hearts of dead members of the imperial family were being ripped out and offered as a sacrifice to the ghost of An Li's slain son. It was said that some were executed by having the tops of their heads ripped off with iron claws.

Bodies were piled in the square and it was forbidden to claim them for burial. Huge bonfires were built and men and women were burned with black, choking smoke rising, and an appalling stench. It was barbarous, in Ye Lao's view.

All mandarins found, even newly graduated lowly officials, were killed within the Purple Myrtle Court, if they hadn't had the foresight to discard their robes and belts and hide themselves in the city, or flee.

The women of the palace were, report had it, being fearfully abused. Many of Taizu's concubines and musicians were being shipped in wagons, as slaves, back towards Yenling and the rebel soldiers left behind there. Roshan knew what needed doing, to keep an army happy.

There was a widespread smashing-in of private gates, almost at random, as inebriated soldiers crashed through, spilling destruction and death. Not all of Xinan's wives and daughters—or younger boys—were successfully hidden.

There were fires everywhere in those first days.

You risked your life walking the streets in search of food. The markets were closed. Bodies lay among refuse and wild animals, smoke and yellow dust, and the smell of burning.

Word was conveyed by military heralds moving through the city that anyone offering to the new dynasty's illustrious leaders the whereabouts of children or grandchildren of Taizu—once emperor, now unmasked as a coward and having lost the mandate of heaven—any such information would be met with a reward and formal assurances of household safety.

What followed was ugly, as the hiding places of Taizu's many offspring and their children (often very young) were promptly reported, their disguises revealed. These helpless, hapless princes and princesses were, every one of them, brought to the bonfires before the Ta-Ming walls and beheaded.

Steward Ye Lao's distaste for such conduct was beyond his capacity to express. This man, An Li, had proclaimed himself an emperor? Successor to nine dynasties of glory in Kitai? Men, Lao thought grimly, were no better than beasts, they were wolves or tigers.

He kept his head up and his ears open, gathered what information he could, and ensured that the household of Master Shen remained as orderly as possible, under trying conditions. Some of the staff had fled in the first days but most had nowhere to go and had stayed, fearfully.

There was a private well in the second right-side courtyard of the compound, a pleasing indication of its importance. Lao arranged for every bucket and pail on the property to be filled and kept in readiness, should the fires one could see everywhere now reach them. He had linens soaked in water every morning.

Food was a difficult matter, but not yet impossible. After ten days Roshan allowed the markets to reopen, for those brave enough to venture forth, either to sell or to buy.

Some farmers began hesitantly coming in after that, with milk and eggs, vegetables and poultry, millet and barley, picking their way past dead bodies, and crying, abandoned children, and smouldering ruins.

Prices were high. You could call them outrageous, except that you really couldn't, under the circumstances. Ye Lao expected them to go higher.

He took thought one morning and an idea came to him, a recollection: hadn't Master Shen had an encounter with Roshan himself, on his way back to Xinan from the west? If memory served, it had been the day before Ye Lao himself (and his former mistress) had encountered Shen Tai at the posting inn on the imperial road.

He didn't know any details, and no one in the compound knew more (he asked), but on impulse—a steward's instinct based on his master's nature—Ye Lao composed a brief, careful note and had it conveyed by a terrified under-servant (one he judged expendable) to the Ta-Ming, once Roshan had ordered the killing there to stop. He was occupying the palace himself, and had probably realized he needed some people to run it.

(An experienced steward could have told him that, from the outset.)

Word was that the Phoenix Throne itself had been smashed to fragments, and the gemstones embedded in it removed, by some members of the imperial family before they'd fled. This to prevent a barbarian usurper from placing his gross body on that throne.

Ye Lao approved, quietly.

He never did learn if his note was received. There was no reply. In it he'd simply advised the palace, all who might be there serving the Revered and August Emperor An Li of the Tenth Dynasty, who owned this particular property.

He did note in the days and weeks that followed, allowing himself a small measure of satisfaction, that no soldiers came to their gates, no one smashed them open, to do what they were doing elsewhere.

It was disturbing to learn, as they did learn, what had been done to the household of the late first minister within his city compound, not far away at all, in this same ward.

As if those poor men and women had had any role in the crimes attributed to Wen Zhou. The first minister was dead, a ghost, denied honourable burial. Why would anyone feel a need to take brutal, blood-drenched vengeance on household servants, concubines, stewards?

Ye Lao was angry, a disturbing feeling for a man who prided himself on a trained steward's composure.

He continued to manage the compound as best he could through the late summer (which was hot that year, and dry, increasing the risk of fires). As the days passed, the city was slowly brought under control. Bodies were removed from the streets; a subdued, hesitant rhythm returned to the capital. The sunrise drums, the evening drums. Most of the rebel soldiers left for battlefields north and south. Shinzu appeared to be rallying the Ninth Dynasty forces against them.

In Xinan, the killings and looting diminished, if they never entirely stopped. Some of it by now was pure thievery, Lao knew, criminals using chaos for their own purposes. Every so often another member of Taizu's family would be discovered in hiding, and killed.

Ye Lao awaited instructions of any kind, though without any real confidence that they'd come. He had no idea if Master Shen was even alive. He knew he'd left the city—he'd watched him go, in the middle of a night. He did think, perhaps too trustingly, that they'd have heard if he were dead, even with the empire fractured by war. They'd learned of other deaths, for example—including that of the first minister and the Lady Wen Jian.

That news had come right at the outset, after the emperor fled, well before Roshan's arrival. To Ye Lao, the tidings had, for many reasons, brought great sadness.

Over time he heard that there were poems being written about her passing. A brightness fallen from the world, a star returning to the heavens, words to such effect.

Ye Lao had no ear for poetry. On the other hand, later in what turned out to be a very long life, he would tell stories about her, warming himself on winter nights with the glow in people's eyes when they understood that he'd served Wen Jian, that he'd knelt before her, been spoken to, kissed the hem of her robe.

She had passed into legend by then.

Back in that summer when the rebels came, his task, as he came to understand it, was straightforward: to preserve order in one small place, one household, in a world that had lost all sense of order or claim to being civilized.

He didn't give it a great deal of thought, caught up in his day-today tasks, but one morning, in autumn, it suddenly came to him that the men and women here in Master Shen Tai's compound trusted him completely, relied upon him, were doing whatever he ordered, for reasons that went beyond rank or deference.

He was keeping them alive.

Most nights now Rain awakens afraid, disturbed by sounds that turn out to be nothing at all, whether they are in some small inn on the road or a larger one in a city, as now.

She doesn't like being so fearful, it isn't how she thinks of herself, but the times are very dangerous, and she knows she isn't the only one feeling this way.

She is alive to feel anything at all—and she's acutely aware of this—only because of a note sent in the middle of the night, and because two men turned out to be loyal beyond anything she might have expected.

And because of the Kanlins, of course.

Perhaps, also, her own decisiveness, but when she looks back at that night it doesn't seem to her that she'd felt decisive. She had been panicked as much as anything, acted on impulse, instinct. Fear.

Small things, a difference in her own mood that night, a message not sent, or lost, or not delivered until morning (by which time it would have been impossible to get away). Smallest differences: living or dying. Such thoughts could keep you awake at night.

They now know, here in Chenyao to the west, a little of what happened in Xinan after they left. The two Kanlins, still with her, have ways of discovering information even in wartime. A time when letters go astray, when posting inn horses are all claimed by the army, when news of any kind is worth a fortune.

In particular, they have learned what took place in the city compound of the recently deceased first minister, Wen Zhou, when the rebel army arrived in the capital.

Is it so surprising, really, if she startles awake at alarming sounds in the dark, or never even falls asleep?

It is the narrowness of survival, of her being here and alive, that unsettles as much as anything. That, and the awareness of how many are dead, and how savagely. She knows names, remembers faces. It is impossible not to think about what would have been done to her, as favoured concubine. There are sickening stories, worse than anything ever heard about the barbarians beyond Kitai's borders.

She is from beyond those borders. Sardia is a beleaguered little kingdom that has always known warfare and contended with invasion. Even so, Rain has never heard tales such as those that come to them from Xinan.

Xinan, which lies behind her only because Tai sent a note in the middle of the night. He'd been summoned to the palace—she understands that from the Kanlins. Wen Zhou had been sent for as well.

That was what had put her on edge that night. He'd been with her when the message came. Sitting up in bed, watching him read it by the light of a quickly lit lamp, Rain had understood that this wasn't any routine summons to the Ta-Ming. Those didn't come at this hour, and they didn't shake him so profoundly.

He'd dressed in haste and left immediately with guards, saying nothing—nothing—to her, to anyone. Also disturbing. He'd burned the note, or she'd have retrieved it and read it as soon as she was alone.

Some time later—the passage of time that night is blurred—Hwan had come with another message, this one addressed to her.

He might so easily have waited until morning. That would have made all the difference. Or the note might not have reached her at all.

It had been carried by Qin, the crippled beggar in the street.

She understood, and it humbled her even now, that he had entrusted it to no one. Had paid coins to a drunken tradesman (and why had he been in the street, passing by, so late?) to carry him—carry him—all the long way around to the front gates of the compound. And he'd stayed there, painfully on his feet, banging at the gates and shouting, until someone had sleepily, angrily come.

And then he'd demanded, loudly, fiercely, without backing down, that Hwan be brought to him, and no one else but Hwan.

And, improbably (another source of fear in her imagining those moments), they hadn't beaten him and turned him away. Hwan, awake since the master had ridden out, had come to see what the disturbance was.

The disturbance.

He had accepted the note, hand passing it to hand, and brought it to her. Immediately, not waiting for morning. Perhaps he'd known she'd be awake. Perhaps he'd been frightened. She's never asked, though he's been with her all the way here, to Chenyao.

So has Qin.

She can't say with certainty why she kept them with her, but it had seemed proper, it had seemed... needful. As she'd read Tai's note, Rain felt some inner imperative overtaking her.

Possible danger. Be very alert, he'd written.

Alert meant remembering Zhou's face as he read the summons from the palace, as he burned it, as he went away. No good night, or goodbye.

You could describe the first minister in many ways, but he had never been a coward—and he'd looked afraid that night. And Rain had already had enough of a feeling of danger to have hidden jewels in the garden.

It had been enough—she remembers now, in Chenyao, middle of another night, late summer. All these things together, and a sense (her mother had also had it) of when something decisive needed to be done.

Decisive. There'd been only one action she could take. Like a gambler throwing dice in a late-night game in the pleasure district, staking everything he owned.

She'd been a little unkind to Hwan then, trading upon his love for her, the love she'd nurtured for her own reasons. On the other hand, she'd almost certainly saved his life.

Her instructions had been precise, much more assured than she'd felt. Inside, she'd been terrified. He was ordered to go out the gates alone. He was to find a sedan chair in the streets of the ward—there were always one or two of them, even late at night, bearers ready to carry someone to an assignation, or home from one.

He was to get the beggar, Qin, into that sedan chair, and lead it around to the back of the property.

Hwan's eyes had widened, she remembers.

He was to do this immediately, she'd said coldly, or never find favour in her sight again. If he did do this, she'd said, looking straight at him by the light of the lantern, wearing her night robe, he would find very great favour.

He'd left to do as she'd said.

She rose and dressed by herself, moving quickly now that a decision had been made, as if speed could overmaster second thoughts. The gods alone knew what was to come, but if she was wrong about this she was unlikely to live through the day.

She took more gems from the chest in the room. There was no point leaving them. She walked back alone through the vast and silent garden, past the lake and isle and the small, moored boats and the bamboo grove and the grassy space where Wen Zhou had played at games with others of the court. The path wound through night flowers. She breathed their scent.

She came to the gazebo, found the tree where she'd hidden that small bag. She claimed it (dirtying her hands) and then she climbed the wall herself, using the elm tree at the eastern end.

She'd learned how to climb as a girl in Sardia, had been good at it, better than most boys, treating a skinned knee or elbow as a mark of honour. She still has a scar on her left knee. There'd been little call for climbing in the North District, or here at the compound, but some things the body remembered.

The two Kanlins appeared out of shadow as she dropped down into the street. She hadn't doubted for a moment that they'd be there.

"I am leaving now," she said. "Because of the message you brought. Will you stay with me?"

They had stayed with her.

They'd done more than that, through the flight west. For one thing, it was the Kanlins who had gotten them out of the ward in the night. No gate official was going to deny them. It brought bad luck, at the very least. The understanding was, if the black-clad ones were abroad they had reason to be, and so did those they were escorting. That was the way of things.

Because of this, they'd made it all the way across Xinan and to the western gate, were right there before curfew's end opened the city. While they waited for sunrise and the drums Rain had Hwan arrange a carriage, and two good horses for the Kanlins.

With the coming of morning they were out of Xinan, moving along the western road against the flow of traffic coming in with goods for the markets. They bought food as they went, wine, millet cakes, dried meat, peaches. Hwan had brought cash. She didn't ask where he'd gotten it. Her jewels weren't going to help until they reached a market town. You didn't buy boiled eggs or barley cakes with amber earrings set in gold.

She was to understand later that they had been able to leave the city only because they'd moved so quickly, were out and going west before word spread of the disaster at Teng Pass. And with it, tidings of the emperor's flight.

Later that day the capital learned of these events, and Ma-wai, and panic erupted in the city, choking every gate and every road with terrified people in flight.

Rain and her party had left the imperial road by then. She'd decided there were too many people who might know her at the well-known posting inn on the road. It was used by the court, which meant by people who might have visited the Pavilion of Moonlight Pleasure House.

They branched off, found another east-west road, kept going all day along that. Stopped the first night at a small inn near a silk farm.

Rain never knew it, no one can ever know such things, but had they stayed on the imperial highway, stopped at the posting inn that first night, her own life, and the lives of many others might have been different, going forward.

This is a reason why we sometimes feel as though existence is fragile, precarious, that a random wind can blow, changing everything. They might have gone to the inn on the imperial road—it was an impulsive thought to leave the road. She might not have been able to sleep, could easily have risen to walk in the garden late, and seen two men in conversation on a bench under a mulberry tree...

The Kanlins kept them moving quickly, staying on secondary roads. They changed horses each day until horses became hard to come by. One evening a discussion was started, courteously, by the older of the two. His name was Ssu Tan. They wished to know whether she intended to continue west, or planned to go south, or even north. A perfectly good question.

But it meant she needed to have an idea where she was going.

She'd chosen Chenyao, told them so that night, as much to name a destination as anything else. It was close, by then, large enough to let them melt into the city, sell some jewels. It had roads leading in all directions, was accustomed to travellers coming through, often from far away.

People had stories in Chenyao, and they didn't have to tell them.

When they arrived, Hwan negotiated the lease of a good-sized house, with a staff to run it. He was apparently skilled at such bargaining, but it had also helped, Rain knows, that both Kanlins went with him and were standing by. No one was inclined to offend the black-clad ones in any possible way, and someone who had two of them serving her was not to be troubled.

An uncharacteristic lack of energy or will had settled on Rain from the time they took the city house. She knew it, knows it tonight, weeks later, lying awake.

She has no clear (or even vague) idea what to do next. Along with everyone else—Chenyao is crowded with refugees from Xinan and elsewhere now—they watch the movements of soldiers from the west and northwest, passing through, riding or marching, grim-faced. Some of the faces seem very young to Rain.

Armies are moving all through Kitai this summer.

They seize on news, or the rumour of news. Qin spends mornings in the market begging for coins, though it is hardly necessary. But he finds that people talk to a crippled beggar and he learns almost as much as the Kanlins do through their own channels.

Rain has never asked what these channels are. She's too grateful for their presence, unwilling to intrude. At night they gather and share what they know.

They know that the Ta-Ming Palace had seen wholesale slaughter, as did much of Xinan. That it is quieter in the capital now, but strange, tense, a city under occupation. Crouched against another blow, someone said.

They know that the Emperor Taizu is now the father-emperor, reportedly heading southwest, beyond the Great River. Shinzu rules them now, although Xinan and Yenling are held by the rebels, which makes it a fair question if anyone can be said to rule Kitai.

There was a battle in the northwest, not far from the Long Wall. Depending on who tells the tale, it was a victory against the rebels, or a victory for them.

They have known from near the outset of their journey that Zhou is dead, and Jian.

Awake at night again because some animal has screamed in the street, Rain thinks about war, the boys' faces seen in the army ranks, about Kitai, this land that she came to years ago with her pipa, her yellow hair and green eyes, and so young.

In summer darkness, stars in her south-facing window, she makes—or accepts—a decision in her heart. There is fear again with it, and sorrow, but also a kind of easing of disquiet and distress, which is what acceptance is said to bring, is it not?

With that, it seems her clarity returns, the sense that she can sort matters through, make plans, a choice and then the next one. For one thing, none of the four men with her is to be burdened with this. It is her decision, and is to be hers alone, she thinks.

She falls asleep.

IN THE MORNING, when the men are out and about, in the market, buying goods for the household, pursuing information, she has one of the servants call a sedan chair and she makes her way to a merchant's place of business, alone.

It is almost certain that he cheats her on the price he offers for a jade necklace and a golden brooch in the shape of a dragon, but she doesn't think he's been outrageously dishonest, perhaps intimidated by her manner and a casually dropped reference to Kanlins awaiting her at home.

She makes one other stop, conducts another negotiation, and is back at the house before the others.

That evening, in her chamber, she calls for brush and ink and paper and, some time later, by lantern light, writes a single message addressed to the four of them.

Chenyao, she suggests, is a good place for Hwan to remain for now. He and Qin will have money (the point of this morning's first transaction) to keep the house, to buy food, to live... if the war does not last forever.

The Kanlins, she knows, will not accept money from her. They were hired and paid by Wen Jian. It is another strangeness for Rain, that these two—who have meant so much to her this summer, who have saved her life—she owes not just to Tai (whom she is leaving now) but to the Precious Consort, who is dead.

She thanks them by name: Ssu Tan, and the younger one, Zhong Ma. She asks them to accept her gratitude and to convey it to the leaders at their sanctuary. And also, if they will be so very kind, to convey that same gratitude, and farewell, to Master Shen Tai, who sent them to her, should they encounter him again.

There is sadness, and she doesn't write this part quickly, or easily. But what woman has ever been promised a life, has ever lived a life, without sadness? And at least she is not sitting above jade stairs in moonlight, waiting, waiting while life recedes.

He had asked her not to do that when he went home after his father died. He had ended up at Kuala Nor among the ghosts. She had ended up with Wen Zhou.

Or, no, she thinks. She has ended up here.

She finishes writing and puts the brush aside, blows on the letter until the ink dries. She leaves it on the writing table and she rises and takes the money she's received today and places most of it on the table.

They will be all right, she thinks. If the war does not last too long.

She looks out her window. Sees summer stars. It is time. She has not changed into her night robe. She is not going to sleep. She'll need to be quiet, leaving, but the sedan chair she hired ought to be outside the door by now, and the household is accustomed to her restlessness. It ought to be all right.

She takes the part of the cash she's kept back for herself, and the small bag with the jewellery she will need for a journey. A long journey. A hard one. She's hired two guards, paid them a third of the negotiated fee, and she's arranged to join a good-sized group leaving at sunrise. The two guards are her contribution to their safety. That is how these things are done.

There are always parties of one sort or another leaving Chenyao. The leaders of this one seemed to know what they were about, talking with her this morning, which is good. It is not truly safe, of course, especially not now, and for a woman, but the world never is. She wishes she had her pipa, a distracted thought.

Perhaps she'll find one on the way. It is time to go. She crosses the floor silently and opens her door to the dark hallway. She will need to step over the third step on the stairway down, she remembers. It creaks. She'd tested for that earlier today.

As it happens, it doesn't matter.

All four of them are in the corridor. Hwan, Qin, both Kanlins. They are dressed to travel.

"Ah, good," says Ssu Tan. "We had just decided to wake you. The chair has been outside for some time. We have to go, if we are to join the caravan before it leaves."

Her mouth is open. Hwan is holding, shielding with his hand, a single candle. She can see their faces. Amazingly, all of them are smiling.

Rain says, "You can't... this isn't a journey I can ask any of you to take!"

"You didn't ask," says Qin. When he has a wall to lean against, he can stand for a time. "We have chosen."

"You can't!" she says again. "Do you even know where I'm going?"

"Of course we do," says Ssu Tan. "We thought you'd decide this some time ago. We talked about it."

"You... you talked about what I'd decide?" She would like to be angry.

Hwan says, quietly, "We talked about what we'd do, my lady, once you made your decision."

The younger Kanlin, Zhong Ma, has said nothing. His eyes have never left her, and he's still smiling.

"But I'm going to Sardia!" she cries.

"You are going home," says Ssu Tan.

"But it isn't your home."

"It isn't," he agrees. "But Zhong Ma and I had you entrusted to our care, and it would shame us both to let you slip away."

"You have no duty once I leave Kitai!" she says. She's begun to cry, however, which makes it difficult to fight well.

"Not so," says Zhong Ma, quietly.

Tan smiles. "You may argue as to Kanlin duties once we're on the road. We will have much time, I believe."

"It is the Tarkan Desert," Rain says, despairingly. "People die there!"

"The more reason for us to be with you," says Hwan. And then, "We bought you a pipa in the market this morning. For the journey."

It takes half a year, a little more, the Silk Road journey through the deserts and then up the narrow, climbing mountain passes to Sardia. They do not die. She almost certainly would have, without them. Qin, it emerges, can ride a camel.

They are attacked twice, the attackers are beaten off. There are sandstorms. The second of these costs Ssu Tan his right eye, but there is a physician with them (the party leader is experienced) and he applies an ointment and gauze bandages and Tan survives. He wears a patch over the eye after that. Rain tells him it makes him look like a bandit from ancient days.

He and Zhong Ma no longer wear their black robes by then. They had removed them after they passed through the third and last of the garrisons in the Kanshu Corridor. At that point, really, they had left the empire behind.

Around that same time she'd made another decision.

"My name is Saira," she told them.

There is a taste in her mouth like spring cherries, saying it. All of them use it, or refer to her that way, surprisingly easily, from then on.

At the end of the very long road, burnt and weary, they arrive past the end of sand and rock to high, green pastureland surrounded by mountains. When she sees the horses for the first time, the Heavenly Horses (they still frighten her a little), she knows she is home.

It has been nine years. Her mother and father are alive. All but one of her brothers and sisters. There is little of glitter and jade, but less dust and noise, entirely. Merchants go both ways, east and often west now (new powers rising there). Over time she is able to sell, piece by piece, her jewels. Kitan work is highly valued west of here, she learns. The sky is blue and the mountain air is entirely unlike what she'd learned to live with in Xinan, with the yellow wind blowing and two million souls.

There are young children in her own family, amazingly. There is music. She teaches herself not to be afraid of horses, and eventually she rides one, a moment never to be lost. There is sadness, there are memories.

Qin stays, is made welcome in her father's home at first, and then in hers. Hwan stays. She is wealthy enough to need a steward to run a household.

Zhong Ma goes home. He is young, proud of his journey, and of being a Kanlin. She gives him a letter to carry back. It takes her time to write this one. Sadness, memory.

Ssu Tan stays. She marries him. One of their children, a green-eyed girl, though with darker hair than her mother, is gifted beyond words at learning music. She masters all twenty-eight tunings of the pipa before she is twelve years old.

The world, Saira thinks, through her days, can bring you surprising gifts.

CHAPTER XXVII

He had not been happy in that small fort above Kuala Nor, but Bytsan sri Nespo could not truthfully say that his self-described "flanking manoeuvre" to get away from there had improved his life yet.

His idea for dealing with the horses given to the Kitan had been approved. He'd been promoted and was now understood to have had direct communication with the palace in Rygyal, which was useful, obviously. He was in a far larger fortress now.

On the other hand, he had no clear role in the chain of command here, which was awkward and made him disliked. He outranked longer-serving officers, but he was here only to await one specific person, or message, from across the border.

He also knew, each morning and through each day and into each long summer evening, what his father thought of all this.

Principally, because his father was the commander of Dosmad Fortress. Dosmad, where Bytsan was posted to await the possible arrival of a Kitan gifted with an absurd number of Sardian horses.

Bytsan hadn't known who had just been made fortress commander here when he'd offered his clever suggestion about the Sardians. One of the (many) unfortunate aspects of having been in such an isolated fort.

It was an unhappy surprise.

His father entirely and unreservedly disapproved of the royal gift. He thought it was an act of decadent folly. But since it was impossible in Tagur, even for a high-ranking officer, to say anything like that, Fortress Commander Nespo discharged his ire on his own worthless son, who happened to be serving under him now, and who had evidently proposed amendments to the gift, making it more likely to happen.

The horses were here at Dosmad, in large pens outside the walls. They needed to be fed and watered, ridden regularly, monitored for health. To send defective horses east would reflect badly upon Tagur, Commander Nespo had been caused to understand, and this, in turn, might have implications for him, nearing retirement.

A small army of men had arrived with the horses to discharge these duties, adding to the burdens of a fortress commander. He'd placed his son in charge of them. It was beneath Bytsan's new rank, but the Sardians were the only reason for his son's promotion, so he could make sure their hooves and diet were tended to and the shit and mud brushed off them when they rolled in it. He could do it himself, for all Nespo cared. In fact, he'd have preferred it that way. He'd said that to Bytsan.

It was easy to blame his son for all of this: Bytsan had been the one to propose to the court that they hold the horses here.

As far as Nespo sri Mgar was concerned, it was a foolish idea added to a foolish gift. The thing to do, if you had to go through with this, would have been to dump all two hundred and fifty of them on the Kitan at Kuala Nor and let him do what he could to get them back to wherever he wanted them. If the horses were stolen or scattered, grew sick, or died on the way, so much the better for Tagur, in Nespo's view.

You didn't give Sardian cavalry horses to a once enemy who might be a future enemy. You didn't do that. And he wasn't going to listen to anyone, especially his hopeless son, going on about the treaty signed after Kuala Nor, or honouring the wishes of the so-lovely princess they'd been so kindly granted by the eternally untrustworthy Kitans.

In fact, Nespo had declared to his son one evening earlier in the summer, this whole business of the princess and the horses might be part of Kitai's intricate plotting.

Bytsan, who was far too modern in his thinking and too inclined to disagree if his father said the sun was shining at noon on a blue-sky day, had said, "After twenty years? Long time to hatch a plot. I think you're too much afraid of them."

Nespo had thrown him out of his chambers for that.

He did that often, throwing Bytsan out. He'd call him back the next night, or the one after if he'd been really angered, because... well, because this was his son, wasn't it? And because not every last thing he said was foolish.

It was possible, just, for an old army officer in Tagur to accept that the world was changing. He didn't have to like it, mind you.

And he wasn't sure how he felt when messengers came from across the border in late summer, two riders under a banner of peace, to say that the Kitan from Kuala Nor had come for his horses—which meant his clever son had been proven right.

They met, with half a dozen attendants each, on open ground near a stand of elm trees. The hilly country between Dosmad Fortress and the prefecture town of Hsien was one of the places of relatively open land between Kitai and the Taguran Plateau.

Shen Tai, he saw, riding up to where the other man was already waiting, had Kanlin Warriors as his escort. It surprised Bytsan a little, how pleased he was to see the other man.

Nespo had wanted his son to wear armour—he was enormously proud of Taguran linked-mail, better than anything in Kitai—but Bytsan had declined. It was a hot, humid day, they weren't going into battle, and he'd be embarrassed if the Kitan decided he was wearing the armour for show.

Shen Tai dismounted first, from Dynlal. It affected Bytsan to see his own horse again, looking well cared for.

The Kitan walked forward. He stopped and bowed, hand over fist. Bytsan remembered this about him. He swung down from the saddle and did the same thing, not caring what his own soldiers thought. Shen Tai had done it first, hadn't he? And the two of them had shared a night in a cabin among the dead.

He said, in Kitan, "You haven't had your fill of Kanlins?" He grinned.

The other man smiled a little. "That one was false, these aren't. I am pleased to see you again."

"I am pleased you survived."

"Thank you."

They walked together, a little apart from their escorts. It was a heavy day, a chance of rain, which was needed.

Shen Tai said, "Dynlal is beyond magnificent. Would you like him back?"

They could do that to you, the Kitan—or some of them could. Bytsan shook his head. "He was a gift. I am honoured that he pleases you."

"You have chosen three horses from the herd?"

Bytsan had done so, of course. Hadn't been shy, either.

He said, "I'm afraid I took three of the best."

Shen Tai smiled again, though there was an odd feeling that smiling came hard for him. Bytsan looked more closely, and wondered.

The other man registered the gaze.

He made a jest, too deliberately. "Ah, well, how would a Taguran know a good horse?"

Bytsan allowed himself to smile back. But now that he'd noticed it, it was obvious that even with the Kitan skill at hiding their thoughts, Shen Tai had changed since he'd left the lake.

Well, why shouldn't he have?

"Did you find out who tried to kill you?" he asked.

He saw the other man stiffen, hesitate.

"You were there," said Shen Tai, too lightly. "The false Kanlin did."

It was a rebuff. Bytsan felt himself flushing, humiliated. He turned away, to hide it.

Tai regretted his words as soon as he spoke them. He hesitated again, this was difficult. The other man was Taguran, and Kitai was in the midst of a rebellion.

He took a breath. He had decided to trust this man, back by the lake. He said, "Forgive me. That was a shameful answer. But I have not talked of this with anyone."

"Don't force yourself to—"

"It was Wen Zhou, the first minister, who sent that assassin. And there were others on the road. As you thought there might be."

He saw the Taguran, broad-shouldered, tanned by the summer sun, turn to look at him. There was no one nearby, which was good. Tai heard a distant roll of thunder. There would be rain.

"The first minister of Kitai hates you that much?"

"He hated me that much," Tai said.

"He doesn't, any more?"

"He's dead."

And if that told the Tagurans something they hadn't yet learned, so be it. They were going to learn it, and it might as well be this man, his... well, his friend, who relayed the news.

Bytsan was staring. "This may be known in Rygyal, but I'm not certain it is."

"There was an uprising in the northeast," Tai said. "First Minister Wen Zhou accepted the blame for allowing it."

That was enough for now, he thought.

"And he was killed?"

Tai nodded.

"So... you aren't in danger?"

"No more than any man in difficult days."

"But did... were you honoured by the emperor? As you deserved to be?"

"I was. I thank you for making it possible."

It was true, of course. Tai had wealth, a great deal of property, and access to power if he wanted it. Though the emperor who had given him these things was travelling somewhere south of here, even now, towards the Great River, and he didn't rule Kitai any more.

You didn't need to tell all the truth, not with armies moving.

"And you?" he asked. "You are not in your fortress any more. This is good?"

"Mostly so. I am at Dosmad, obviously. My... my father is the commander."

Tai looked at him. "Did you know that he...?"

"Am I so obviously a fool? He'd just been transferred."

"This is not good?"

Bytsan sri Nespo shook his head so gloomily, Tai laughed.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Fathers and sons..."

"I blame you," said the Taguran wryly. And suddenly they seemed to be as they'd been during a long night by the lake.

"I am your friend," said Tai with exaggerated seriousness. "One role of friends is to accept such blame unquestioningly."

He was jesting, but the other man didn't smile.

After a moment, Tai added, "I know that this has also changed your life."

The other nodded. "Thank you," he said. Bytsan looked at the clouds overhead. "I can bring the Sardians by late today, or tomorrow morning, if that suits better."

"Tomorrow suits very well. I will have sixty Kanlins with me. They will have weapons, they always have them, but they are only here to lead and guard the horses. Please tell your men not to be alarmed."

"Why would a Kitan alarm a Taguran soldier?"

Tai grinned.

Bytsan smiled back. "But I will let them know." The Taguran hesitated again. "What are you doing with the horses?"

Given the circumstances they'd shared, a fair question. Tai shrugged. "The only thing that made sense, in the end... I've offered them to the emperor."

He didn't have to name the emperor, he thought. But he suddenly pictured Bytsan some weeks from now, learning the truth, realizing that Tai had...

"You do know," he said abruptly, "that Emperor Taizu has withdrawn from the Phoenix Throne in favour of his son?"

They wouldn't know. Not here, not yet.

Bytsan's mouth opened, showing his missing tooth. "Which son?" he asked quietly.

"Third Son. The heir. Shinzu of the Ninth Dynasty is emperor of Kitai now, may he rule a thousand years."

"Has... has a message gone to Rygyal?"

"I do not know. Perhaps. If you send word swiftly, it might come from you. It is all recent, I came here quickly."

Bytsan stared at him again. "This may be a gift you are giving me."

"A small one, if it is."

"Not so small, being the one with world-changing tidings."

"Perhaps," Tai said again. "If so, I am pleased for you."

Bytsan was still looking closely at him. "Are you pleased about the change?"

Near to the bone this time. "A man in my position, or yours... who are we to be happy or unhappy about what happens in palaces?" Tai suddenly wanted a cup of wine.

"But we are," said Bytsan sri Nespo. "We always have thoughts on these changes."

"Perhaps eventually," said Tai.

The other man glanced away. "So you will take the Sardians to the new emperor? You will serve him, with them?"

And it was in that moment—in a meadow by the border with Tagur, under a heavy sky with thunder to the south—even as he opened his mouth to answer, that Tai realized something.

It made his heart begin to pound, so abrupt was the awareness, so intense.

"No," he said quietly, and then repeated it. "No. I'm not."

Bytsan looked back at him, waiting.

Tai said, "I'm going home."

Then he added something else, a thought he hadn't even known he'd been carrying until he heard his voice speaking it.

The Taguran listened, holding Tai's gaze. After a moment he nodded his head, and said, also quietly, something equally unexpected.

They bowed to each other and parted—until the next morning, it was agreed, at which time the Heavenly Horses of the west, the gift of the White Jade Princess, would be brought over the border to Kitai.

Looking back, Tai would name that day as another of those that changed his life. Paths branching, decisions made. Sometimes, you did have a choice, he thought.

Riding back from the meeting with Bytsan he understood, yet again, that he'd already made a decision within, he'd only needed to acknowledge it, say it, bring it into the world. He felt a quiet within, as they rode. He hadn't felt this way, he realized, since leaving Kuala Nor.

But this awareness—that all he wanted to do now was go home to his two mothers and his younger brother and his father's grave, and Liu's by now—was not the only thing that would emerge from that day and night by the border.

The storm came that afternoon.

The heavy stillness of the air, silence of birds, had foretold it. When it broke over them, lightning lacerating the southern sky, thunder cracking like the anger of gods, they were blessedly under a roof in the trading station and inn between Hsien and the border.

In times of peace, and there had been twenty years of peace now, Tagur and Kitai did trade, and this was one of the places where it happened.

As rain drummed on the roof and thunder boomed and snarled, Tai drank cup after cup of unexceptional wine, and did the best he could to fend off a verbal assault.

Wei Song was rigid with fury, had even enlisted Lu Chen to join her attack—and the very experienced leader of Tai's Kanlins, however respectful he remained, wasn't diffident about agreeing with her.

Song was less respectful. She called him a fool. He had made what appeared to be a mistake, had told the two of them his intentions. He was going home; the Kanlins would take the horses to the emperor.

"Tai, you cannot do this! Later, yes. Of course, yes. But not until you have taken the Sardians to him yourself! He needs to see you!"

She'd just called him by his name, which she never did.

Another hint that she was genuinely upset. As if he needed more evidence. He pushed a cup of wine across the wooden table to her. She ignored it. Her eyes were fierce. She was very angry.

"I am touched that a Kanlin Warrior should care so much about her employer's choices," he said, trying for a lighter tone.

She swore. She never did that, either. Lu Chen looked startled.

"You aren't my employer any more!" Song snapped. "We were hired by Wen Jian, or did you forget?"

There was another roll of thunder, but it was north of them now, the storm was passing. "She's dead," he said. He was somewhat drunk, he realized. "They killed her at Ma-wai."

He looked at the two Kanlins across the table. They were alone in the dining space of the inn, on long benches at a rough table. They had eaten already. The sun would be setting, but you couldn't see it. A hard rain had been pounding down, it seemed to be lessening now. Tai felt sorry for the Kanlins who'd gone back to Hsien to bring the rest of the company. They would claim the horses in the morning and start them north.

Sixty Kanlins would. Not Tai.

He was going home. Crossing a last bridge over the River Wai.

He thought for a moment. "Wait. If you're paid by Jian, then you aren't being paid any more. You don't even owe me..."

He trailed off, because Song looked extremely dangerous suddenly. Lu Chen lifted an apologetic hand.

He nodded to Chen, who said, "It is not so, my lord. The Lady Wen Jian presented our sanctuary with a sum of money to ensure you ten Kanlin guards for ten years."

"What? That's... it makes no sense!" He was shaken, again.

"Since when," said Song icily, "do the women of a court have to act in ways that make sense? Is extravagance such a startling thing? I'd have thought you'd learned that lesson by now!"

She really wasn't speaking respectfully. Too upset, Tai decided. He decided he would forgive her.

"Have more wine," he said.

"I do not want wine!" she snapped. "I want you to have some sense. You aren't a member of the court yet! You have to be more careful!"

"I don't want to be a member of the court, that's the whole... that's the point!"

"I know that!" she exclaimed. "But take the horses to the emperor first! Bow nine times, accept his thanks. Then decline a position because you feel a son's need to go home to protect his family, with a father and older brother dead. He will honour that. He has to honour that. He can make you a prefect or something and let you go."

"He doesn't have to do anything," Tai said. Which was true, and she knew it.

"But he will!"

"Why? Why will he?"

And amidst her fury, and what was also clearly fear, Tai saw a flicker of amusement in her eyes. Song shook her head. "Because you aren't very useful to him in a war, Tai, once he has your horses."

Using his name again. She sat very straight, looking at him. Lu Chen pretended to be interested in wine stains on the table wood.

Anger for a moment, then rue, then something else. Tai threw up both hands in surrender, and began to laugh. The wine, mostly, although wine could take you towards rage, too. Another crack of thunder, moving away.

Song didn't smile at his amusement. She stared angrily back at him. "Think it through," she said. "Master Shen, please think it through." At least she was back to addressing him properly.

She went on, "The emperor knows your brother was with Wen Zhou. That puts you under suspicion."

"He knows Zhou tried to kill me, too."

"Doesn't matter. It isn't Wen Zhou, it is your brother, his death. Your feeling about that. And Jian's. He knows she paid for your guards. For us."

Tai stared at her.

Song said, "He will remember that you were on the ride from Xinan, when he spoke to the soldiers about Teng Pass and caused what happened at Ma-wai."

"We don't know he did that!" Tai exclaimed.

He looked around, to be sure they were alone.

"Yes, we do," said Lu Chen softly. "And we also know it was almost certainly the right thing to do. It was necessary."

"Sima Zian thought so, too!" said Song. "If he were here he would say it, and you would listen to him! Shinzu needed Zhou dead, and could have foreseen what would happen to Wen Jian after, and even his father's reaction to her death. The empire needed a younger emperor to fight Roshan. Who can deny it?"

"I don't want to believe he intended all that," said Tai, gripping his wine cup.

The problem, the real problem, was that he did see it as possible. He had been thinking that way himself through that terrible day. And the thoughts had not left him since.

He looked at the two Kanlins. He drew a breath and said, quietly, "You are right. But that is one of the reasons I'm not going north. I accept that what you say may be true. I even accept that those are deeds men must do at court, in power, if they are to guide the empire, especially in wartime. But it is... I do not accept it for my own life."

"I know that," said Song, in a quieter voice. "But if you are to pull away, to remain safe and not under suspicion, you need to bring him the horses first and be seen to bow, wearing the ring he gave you. The emperor has to see you are not hiding from him. Hear you petition for leave to go. Decide he trusts you."

"She is right, my lord," said Lu Chen.

"Master Sima would agree with me," Song repeated.

Tai glared at her. "Master Sima has never in his life held any position at—"

"I know," she interrupted, though gently. "But he would still agree with me. Shen Tai, take the horses north, then beg him to let you go home as your reward."

"And if he refuses?"

She bit her lip. Looked young again, suddenly.

"I don't know. But I know I'm right," she said defiantly.

He had called for a writing table, paper and ink, brushes, lamps for his room.

The storm had passed. His window faced south, which meant good fortune; his was the best room, at the end of the long hallway upstairs. He'd pushed the shutters back. The air was sweet and mild, the heat broken by the rain. Tai heard the sound of water dripping from the projecting eaves. The sun was almost down when he began writing.

It was a difficult letter. He started with a full salutation, impeccably formal, summoning everything he'd learned about this while studying for the examinations. First missive to a new emperor, explaining why he was not coming back as instructed. Because his small Kanlin guard wasn't the only defiant person at this inn.

He employed every imperial title he could remember. He used his most careful calligraphy. This was a letter that could decide his life.

Because of that, he even invoked Li-Mei, thanking the imperial family, the Ninth Dynasty, for the great honour done his father's only daughter. Of course, that expression of gratitude was also a reminder that the Shen family was linked to the dynasty, and could surely be considered loyal.

He didn't mention his brother. Liu had died honourably, bravely, but it was wisest not to raise any connection to Wen Zhou.

He did hint, also obliquely, that his mother and his father's much-loved concubine were living alone with only a still-maturing young son in the household, and had been doing so for a long time.

He mentioned that he himself had not yet seen his honourable father's headstone and the inscription on that stone. Had not been able to kneel before it, or pour his ancestral libation. He'd been at Kuala Nor. Sardian horses were coming to the emperor because of that, had already arrived, if Shinzu was reading this letter.

All but ten of the Heavenly Horses (he was keeping ten, because he had people to honour and reward for their help) were humbly offered by Shen Tai to the exalted Emperor Shinzu, to use as the Son of Heaven and his advisers saw fit. It was a matter of great pride to the glorious emperor's most unworthy servant, Shen Tai, son of Shen Gao, that he could assist Kitai in this way. He used all of his father's offices and titles at that point in the letter.

He wrote of his own devotion to the Ninth Dynasty and to the emperor himself, since he who now held the Phoenix Throne (and would rise like the phoenix from the ashes of war!) had helped Tai himself, deigning to intercede one day at Ma-wai, and another time in the palace, against the murderous intrigues of a man whose disgraced name Tai would not even write.

He'd thought about that part for some time, as the night darkened outside, but it was surely right to make it clear that Wen Zhou had wanted Tai dead.

He hesitated again, sipping wine, reading over what he'd written, then he mentioned the rings the august and illustrious emperor and father-emperor, may the gods in all nine heavens defend them and grant them peace, had each given the unworthy but devoted Shen Tai, by their own hands.

He was looking at that part, and wondering about it, if it could possibly be read as a thought that the father, not the son, should be on the throne, when he heard the door to the room open.

He didn't turn around, remained on the mat before the writing table, facing the open window. There was a breeze, and stars now, but the three lamps lit the room too much for them to be clearly seen.

"If I were someone who wanted you dead, you would be by now," she said.

Tai laid down his brush. "That was one of the first things you ever said to me, at Iron Gate."

"I remember," she said. "How did you know it was me?"

He shook his head impatiently, looking out. "Who else would it be?"

"Really? Not an assassin from Tagur, perhaps? Trying at the last minute to stop their horses from crossing the border?"

"I have Kanlin guards," Tai said. "He wouldn't have gotten near this room. I recognized your footfall, Song. I do know it by now."

"Oh," she said.

"I thought I barred the door this time."

"You did. This is an old inn. The wood shifts, too much space between door and wall. A sword can be used to lift the bar."

He was still looking out the window. "Shouldn't I have heard it?"

"Probably," she said, "though someone trained can do it quietly. This is why you need guards."

He was tired, but also amused. "Really? Why would an assassin bother with me? I am apparently of no use to anyone, in wartime."

She was silent a moment. "I was angry. I didn't mean that."

"It is true, however. Once the emperor has the horses."

"I don't... I don't think it is true, myself. I was trying to be persuasive."

Her footfall, moving into the room.

A moment later one of the lamps was blown out. The one closest to him, illuminating his writing table. And because she'd come nearer he caught the scent of perfume. She never wore perfume.

He turned.

She had already crossed to the second lamp. She bent and blew that one out as well, leaving only the one by the bed. She turned to him.

"I'm still trying to be persuasive," Wei Song said, and let her tunic slip from her shoulders to the floor.

Tai stood up quickly. He looked away a moment, then his eyes were pulled back to her. The lithe form. She had a long, shallow gash across the ribs on one side. He knew how she'd received that wound.

"Please forgive my shyness with the lights," she murmured.

"Shyness?" Tai managed to say.

The single lamp beside her lit one breast more than the other, and the left side of her face. Slowly, she lifted both her hands and began unpinning her hair.

"Song, what... this is to persuade me to go north? You do not have to—"

"It isn't," she said, hands lifted, exposing her body to his gaze. "That wasn't true, about persuading. It just sounded like a clever thing to say. A pleasure district remark? They are clever there, I know. And beautiful."

She set one long pin on the table by the bed, and then removed and set down another, moving slowly, the light falling upon her. "This is a goodbye," she said. "We may not meet again, since you will not come north."

Tai was mesmerized by her movements. She had killed for him, he had seen her do it at Chenyao, in a garden. She was barefoot now, wore only thin Kanlin trousers, nothing down to the waist.

The last hairpin slipped free and she shook out her hair.

"Goodbye?" Tai said. "You were hired for ten years! You are mine until then!" He was trying to be ironic.

"Only if we live," she said. She looked away, he saw her bite her lip. "I am willing to be yours," she said.

"What are you saying?"

She looked back at him, and did not answer. But her wide-set eyes were on his, unwavering, and he thought, yet again, of how much courage she had.

And then, for the second time that day, Tai realized that within himself something had already happened, perhaps some time ago, and that he was only, in this lamplit, after-thunder moment, coming to know it. He shook his head in wonder.

"I can leave now," she said, "and be gone before morning, to collect the horses."

"No. I have to be there, remember?" Tai said. He drew a breath. "I don't want you to leave, Song."

She looked young, small, almost unbearably exposed.

He said, a roughness in his voice, "I don't want you ever to leave."

She looked away again, suddenly. He saw her draw a breath this time, then let it out slowly. She said, "Do you mean that? It isn't because I have been so... because I did this?"

"I have seen women unclothed before, Song."

She looked up. "I know. And I am thin, and have this new wound, which will be another scar. And one more on my leg, and I know I am insufficiently respectful and—"

She wasn't very far away at all. He moved forward and put a hand, gently, over her mouth. Then he took it away and kissed her, also gently, that first time. Then he did so again, differently.

He looked down at her, in the one light left burning. Eyes on his, she said, "I am not greatly experienced in these matters."

Some time later. Her left leg across his body where they lay in the bed, her head against his shoulder, hair spread out. The lamp had been extinguished some time ago. The rain had stopped dripping from the eaves. They could see moonlight, hear a night bird singing.

Tai said, "Not greatly experienced?"

He felt more than he saw her smile. "I was told men like hearing that from a woman. That it makes them feel powerful."

"Is that what it does?"

"So I was told." One of her hands was playing at his chest, drifting down towards his belly then back up. "You were on Stone Drum Mountain, Tai. You ought to remember what happens there at night. Or did none of the women...?"

"I don't think I'm going to answer that."

"Not yet, perhaps," she murmured.

The moon laid a trail of light along the floor of the room.

"You seem to always be coming into my chamber," he said.

"Well, once I was saving you from a fox-woman, remember?"

"She wasn't a fox-woman."

"She was a trap. Extremely pretty."

"Extremely," he agreed.

She sniffed. "Even if it wasn't a daiji, Sima Zian and I agreed you were not in a state to resist her that night, and bedding a governor's daughter would have put you in a very difficult position."

"I see," Tai said carefully. "You and the poet agreed on this?"

"We did. They wanted you in a difficult position, of course. Xu Bihai was after the horses."

"You don't think she might simply have fallen in love with me?"

"I suppose there's that possibility," said Song. Her tone suggested otherwise.

"She was very pretty," Tai said.

Song said nothing.

"So are you," he said.

"Ah. That will surely make me fall in love." She laughed again. "I'd have attacked you if you'd come into my room on the road."

"I believe that."

"I wouldn't do that now," she said, mock-contrite.

His turn to laugh. "I am pleased to hear it." After a moment, he said, "Song, I wanted you on the first night at Iron Gate, when you came in."

"I know," she said. He felt her shrug. He knew that motion by now. "I didn't feel flattered. You'd been alone two years. Any woman..."

"No. It was you. I think from when you walked up in the courtyard."

"My hair was down," she said. "Men are very predictable."

"Are we? Am I?"

A silence. "Not you so much."

They listened to the bird outside.

"I'll come north," he said.

She shook her head emphatically. "No. You've made that decision, Tai, bad luck to start a journey after that. Finish your letter. We will take it with us. We have decided that your sister and the fact that Zhou tried to kill you should keep you safe. With the horses."

"You have decided that?"

"Yes, Lu Chen and I."

"And what if I decide—?"

"Tai, you already did. It was an honourable choice. I was only afraid."

"And now I'll be afraid for you. There is a war, you're going a long way."

She laughed softly. "I'm a Kanlin Warrior, riding among sixty others. That is one fear you need not sensibly have."

"When is fear sensible?"

Her hand stopped moving, lay against his chest.

"And after?" he asked. "After you reach the emperor?"

She hesitated. "There is one thing I need to do."

He lay there remembering: We wish to kill two of them later. It must be done.

He squeezed her arm. "Song, if you kill those two yourself, and anyone links you to me—"

"I know," she murmured. "That isn't it. Those two from the Second District army are likely dead already. They shamed us, and our sanctuary will not permit that. I think the emperor knows it. I don't think he will be unhappy. That is not what I meant."

"Then what...?"

"I have to ask leave to withdraw from the Kanlins. I must do it at my own sanctuary."

He said nothing. He was deeply moved.

She misunderstood his silence. "I ask for nothing, Tai. If this is only tonight, I am—"

He placed a hand over her mouth again. "You have to come back, Song. I need you to show me another way to live."

"I have only been a Kanlin," she said, as he moved his hand away.

"Might we teach each other?"

He felt her nodding her head. "But I don't believe the world will let you stay by that stream all your days."

"It might not. But I do not want to be lost in the dust and noise. To be what Liu became. In the Ta-Ming."

"If they even reclaim the Ta-Ming."

"Yes."

"Do you... do you think they will?"

Tai lay in darkness, thinking about it.

"Yes. It may take time, but the new emperor is wiser than Roshan, and I think Roshan will die soon. This is not the end of the Ninth Dynasty."

"There will be changes."

He ran a hand through her hair: the unimaginable gift of his being able to do so. "This is a change, Song."

"I see. You prefer me this way? Obedient and submissive?" Her hand began moving again.

"Submissive? Is that like the inexperience, before?"

"I have much to learn," she murmured. "I know it." And she lifted her head from his shoulder and slipped down towards where her hand had gone.

A little later, Tai managed, with some effort, to say, "Did they teach you that on Stone Drum Mountain?"

"No," she said, from farther down the bed. And then, in a different voice, "But I'm not a concubine, Tai."

"Hardly," he murmured.

He felt her head lift. "What does that mean? I lack the skills you are accustomed to?"

"You could possibly acquire them," he said judiciously. "With effort and time enough to—"

He made a sharp, strangled sound.

"I didn't hear that last," she murmured sweetly.

He made an effort to compose himself. "Oh, Song. Will I survive a life with you?"

"If you are more cautious about what you say," she said, sounding meditative, "I see no reason why not. But I'm not a concubine, Shen Tai."

"I said I know that," he protested. "Before you bit me."

He cleared his throat. He felt amazingly sure of himself. Sure of the world, or this small part of it.

He said, "It would be a great honour if, Mistress Wei Song, before you took my horses north, I were permitted to learn your father's name, and your mother's, and the location of their home, that my mother might correspond with them as to possibilities for the future."

She stopped moving. He had a sense she was biting her lower lip.

She said, "Your servant would be pleased if your honourable mother were willing to initiate such a correspondence."

Which formality, given where she was just then, and what she now resumed doing, was remarkable.

He reached down and drew her up (she was so small), and laid her upon her back, and shifted above her. She began, shortly thereafter, making small sounds, and then more urgent ones, and then, some time after, with the bird still singing outside, she said, halfway between a gasp and a cry, "Did you learn that in the North District?"

"Yes," he said.

"Good," she said. "I like it."

And twisting her body the way he'd seen her do springing up a wall in Chenyao or fighting assassins alone with two swords, she was above him again. Her mouth found his, and she did something with her teeth that made him realize, suddenly, that it hadn't been any fox-woman he'd been dreaming about so vividly those nights on the road from Chenyao. It had been her.

The strangeness of the world.

There was a brightness growing within him, vivid as the first spring flower against snow, and a sense that this was all deeply undeserved, that he was not worthy of such a gift.

There was also now—and Tai would not let himself turn away from it—a farewell taking place inside himself, a painful one: to green eyes and golden hair, music, and her own courage.

You were surely allowed to remember these things? It would be wrong not to remember, Tai thought.

Branching paths. The turning of days and seasons and years. Life offered you love sometimes, sorrow often. If you were very fortunate, true friendship. Sometimes war came.

You did what you could to shape your own peace, before you crossed over to the night and left the world behind, as all men did, to be forgotten or remembered, as time or love allowed.