“Immortality,” Liudan had said, “in the name of jin-shei.”
“You’ve had a scare,” Khailin said after a heartbeat of silence. “Immortality will not protect you from stray arrows, Liudan. And there are several kinds of immortality anyway. And besides, it’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible,” Liudan said, “and anything asked in the name of jin-shei is a sacred trust.”
“So you aren’t ordering me to do it,” Khailin said, her mouth quirking. “You’re just demanding the impossible in the name of the unrefusable bond. What if I cannot?”
“Nhia seems to think you can,” Liudan said.
“Nhia?” Khailin said, astonished. “What has Nhia to do with this?”
“She said you had been working on something like this.”
“Only because I want to know how to destroy it,” Khailin snapped. “With Lihui still on the loose …”
“What did you mean about different kinds of immortality?” Liudan said. “What kind does Lihui possess?”
“No, Liudan. Not that,” Khailin said, frowning. “You do not want to be Lihui. Trust me on this. What he is, is unnatural, and evil. What he has is only sustainable because he drinks other people’s souls, I guess, if I were to put it simply. He is old, immensely old, unnaturally old. And very powerful. When he gets tired, he simply slakes his physical thirsts in some nubile young thing’s body, and he makes no distinction between male and female when choosing his victims, and then drinks their vitality until there’s just a shell left. Just as he did to Nhia.”
“But she’s alive and well,” Liudan said stubbornly.
“Only because I was there,” Khailin whispered. “He left the job half-done that night. He would have been back to finish it. And you know, you know, how long it took her to come back to us.”
“How is it that he didn’t so use you in this manner, then?” Liudan said.
Khailin flinched. “I don’t know,” she said. “Part of it was a game to him, making me learn the hard way what an utter young and naive fool I was. He enjoyed seeing me suffer far more than he would have enjoyed inhaling my spirit to prolong his own unnatural life. That, I guess, and the fact that he had access to other sources. There were plenty other young and virile peaches from the tree of immortality that he could reach out and pluck when needed to. He therefore felt no urgent need for me in that manner.” She shuddered. “Not even in the name of jin-shei will I even think of that path.”
“You said there were other forms of immortality,” Liudan persisted. “Tell me.”
“One is the spiritual immortality,” Khailin said reluctantly, “of the sort that the Temple confers—the Holy Immortals, the Sages, and the Emperors whose statues crowd the niches and who are not in Cahan, Immortals who listen to the prayers of the people. But you achieve that through great deeds, and only after your physical shell is gone. This is not what you want of me.”
“Is there another choice?” Liudan was not going to let go of the idea willingly, or easily.
Cornered, Khailin scowled. “Yes, but that also isn’t what you had in mind when you …”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Liudan said.
“There are ancient records,” Khailin said carefully, “which speak of a method … I don’t know, I haven’t studied it in depth. I am not sure. I cannot explain things I do not understand myself.”
“But you can learn,” Liudan said. “What do you need to begin your study?”
“Liudan, there are far easier ways of getting yourself an heir,” Khailin said with some asperity.
“Not one who will be myself,” Liudan said, her eyes glowing. “If, as you say, going the route that Lihui took is such total abomination, then I will try this other way. And you will help me do this, Khailin. In the name of jin-shei, you will.”
“And you agreed?” Yuet asked, when Khailin had finished recounting the incident.
“I’ve already started doing it, damn her,” Khailin snarled. “If it had been a direct order, I could have refused … maybe. But she asked it, in the name of the sisterhood.”
She paused, and rubbed her fingertips against her closed eyelids in a weary motion.
“But there is more to it than that,” Tai said, interpreting the motion, seeing the conflict—the guilt?—which hung around Khailin. “She also sparked off something else.”
“Curiosity,” Khailin said, with an air of admitting defeat. “That has ever been my weakness. I am doing it for a jin-shei sister, but it’s put down roots into that wretched curiosity, and now … now I want to know. Find out for her, and for myself. All I know is that the knowledge is forbidden and trammeled in arcana, and all that ever did for me is make me itch to dig deeper. To find the answers. Damn her! I can’t not try and solve this now. But I can’t do it alone—I need things. I need … Yuet, I need your help.”
A part of Tai, looking on with cold detachment, shivered at those words with an odd prescience. Her mother used to describe that strange feeling as “a wind on your ashes,” as though someone’s breath disturbed the remnants of a funeral pyre.
Her own poem came back to haunt her; an image of autumn-bare branches, awash in clear spring sunlight but dead, dead, dead. It is coming, Tai thought dispassionately. It is coming, the storm …
“What do I have to do with it?” Yuet said, surprised.
“You are a healer. You have access.”
“Access to what?”
“To bodies. To bodily fluids. To living tissue, or even the newly dead. I need to understand life before I can understand how to perpetuate it. I tried using myself, but I cannot bleed myself every day. I need … oh, Cahan, why did she have to set me on this? I need something to work with.”
“Where do you expect me to get you dead bodies?” Yuet asked, aghast. “I can’t have them delivered to your back door like dirty laundry!”
“That is exactly how you need to have them delivered,” Khailin said, “as disguised as you can. I can’t let word of this get out.”
“Have you done anything so far?” Tai said, her voice unnaturally calm, as though she was keeping it under a tight control.
“Some,” Khailin said, and bared her arm, showing a new lint bandage. “These are the scars of battle. I have used my own blood. There are works that hint that the essence of a person can be used to animate a … a thing, a statue, a likeness of the original, and then bring that to life. There are elixirs, concoctions passed down through generations.”
“Khailin!” Yuet burst out, appalled. “That is a worse abomination than even Lihui’s brand of ghoul-feeding! You would be usurping the powers of the gods themselves, handing out life or withholding it.”
“In the name of jin-shei, Yuet,” Khailin said, her eyes bitter.
“What?”
“What she asked of me, I ask of you. In the name of jin-shei. I cannot do this alone.”
“Maybe it was never meant to be done,” Tai said.
Khailin rounded on her. “Fine. You go tell Liudan.”
“And you’d go on, anyway, wouldn’t you? Now that you’ve got this far?”
Khailin grimaced. “I have to know.”
“Khailin, you don’t need to know why a star shines to enjoy its light. You don’t need to raise the dead to understand the breath of life.”
“That’s poetry, Tai. I’m doing science. I do need—I have always needed.”
“That’s what delivered you to Lihui in the first place,” Tai said quietly, stubbornly.
“That is true,” said Khailin, unwilling to admit defeat but forced to concede the point.
“Don’t let your pride drive you to …”
“Pride has nothing to do with it anymore,” Khailin said. “Nhia will tell you that all of us have our own Path in the WayTai—this is mine. Liudan pushed me onto it, but now I have taken the first steps there and I need to know, for myself. I need to learn the forgotten secrets. That is all I have ever wanted to do with my life. And now I am compelled to it, by stro
nger things than just curiosity—I am charged with doing it, in the name of the sisterhood. It’s like … it’s like this is something I knew was coming for me.” She turned back to Yuet. “Will you help me?”
“Khailin, I can’t …”
“Will you help me?” Khailin’s voice vibrated with intensity.
Yuet was actually trembling. “I can’t do this, Khailin. It’s against the spirit of the healers’ oath. I have sworn that I will not do harm.”
“You will not be,” Khailin said. “If harm is done, that responsibility lies with me. All you have to do is …”
“Deliver people into that harm,” whispered Yuet.
“We are talking dead people.”
“You said living tissue!”
“Well, newly dead people. With the energies still clinging to them. I can come with you if that is easier and collect a sample.”
“No!” Yuet said, recoiling. “That is not …”
“You’re cheating someone’s soul out of Cahan,” Tai said softly.
“What are you talking about?”
“Their spirit crosses over into the Fields of Heaven in the smoke of their pyre,” Tai said. “And their ashes are scattered to return their essence to the land. And you would take the body and deny it this passage. Prod it, slice it, take it from the repose where death has taken the soul and drag it back into the world. It’s horrible, Khailin.”
“I can’t bring someone who is dead back to life,” Khailin laughed, but the laugh was brittle and sharp. “But I am taking only a small part of the physical being. When I have taken what I need, the rest can be disposed of according to prescribed rites. I have no wish to cheat anyone of their chance of paradise.”
“Ask Nhia,” Tai said. “She will tell you. She understands.”
“Nobody else knows about this,” Khailin said, her voice intense again. “Even you, Tai, were probably better off not knowing it. It was to be a covenant between me and Yuet, as it was between Liudan and me.” She looked up, and her eyes were burning. “I tell you, it has to be done! Now, it has to be done!”
“You are going to create another Lihui,” Yuet said, shaking her head. “Why can’t you leave well enough alone? Have you talked it over with Maxao? What does he think of this?”
“I told you, nobody else knows of it. None but you two, myself, and Liudan. And that is the way it has to be.”
“Why? Doesn’t it give you pause that the work has to be so shrouded in secrecy?”
“People won’t understand,” Khailin said.
“I’m not sure I do,” Yuet said slowly.
“But will you help me?”
Khailin had asked it in the name of jin-shei. She did not bring that claim up again, but it hung between them, like a bright and shining thing, the holiest of vows, the sisterhood which demanded that the impossible and the unthinkable be attempted if asked in its name.
The day at the Summer Palace, the day of death which had made Yuet offer the vow of jin-shei to Tai, seemed a lifetime ago. She had done it then in the wake of losing lives, of saving lives. Now she was being asked, in the name of that same vow, to break the law of life itself.
She could not do this thing that Khailin asked. She could not. It was against every principle she had ever lived by. And yet … and yet … it had been asked in the name of the unrefusable.
The battle that raged within Yuet’s heart and mind, the battle between her obligations as a healer and her duty to the vow of jin-shei, was written in the expression on her face as she gazed at Khailin. And then, finally, after what seemed like hours but lasted perhaps only a handful of minutes, something bleak came into her eyes.
“I will … do my best to do what you ask,” Yuet said at last, her hands clasped tightly in her lap.
Khailin must have known how much this had cost Yuet. She had paid a similar price herself. Perhaps that was why she merely nodded at the acquiescence she had wrung out of her jin-shei-bao, and said no more.
Tai lingered after Khailin left, worried by Yuet’s drawn face and glittering eyes.
“This will destroy you, if you do it,” she said softly.
“It will destroy me if I do not, because of how it was asked,” Yuet said. “I have to at least try.”
“I’m afraid, Yuet.”
“You? What of?”
“That this is the beginning … of something. That we will not all come out of it. I feel the hot wind on my face.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Nhia, or listening too hard to those fools at the Temple,” Yuet said, with a harsh little laugh. “Don’t turn into a doomsayer on me, Tai.”
Tai said no more.
But her instincts were true, because it was less than ten days later that Maxao flung open the door to Khailin’s laboratory and strode in, his face thunderous, waving his cane about more as a weapon than a support.
“What is this I hear about your work?” he demanded. “Is it true?”
“I was asked to investigate this problem,” Khailin said quietly. “By the Empress herself.”
“Has it ever occurred to you,” said Maxao in a low, dangerous voice, “that just because you can do a thing is not a sufficient reason for doing it?”
“Now you sound like Tai. One of my other jin-shei-bao. The one who has taken on the mantle of a rather pessimistic prophet lately. She sees nothing but disaster …”
“She is wiser than you give her credit for, then,” Maxao said. “So she has tried to stop you?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Khailin said. “But so long as I don’t make a noise about this.”
“Well, I will,” said Maxao decisively. “I will drag what you are doing out into the light of day. If your sister cannot make you stop it, and I cannot make you stop it, the people will.”
“They will not understand the first thing about it!” Khailin protested hotly.
Maxao gave her a strange look. “You do have a lot of Lihui in you,” he said. “In the days when he was the youngest of my students—when he was what I believed to be the youngest of my students, when I saw him as merely young and hotheaded, and he was yet to show me the blackest of his evil. You are certain you want to follow this path? Look where it has led him—hubris and arrogance and selfishness bring their own reward.”
“But I am doing it for Liudan,” Khailin said.
“And what Lihui does is done for what he considers good reasons, too,” Maxao said. “I stood by then, and watched it, and because I said nothing, did nothing, Lihui grew strong enough to take my sight, my position in life, everything. And now he is poised to reach out for the throne of the Empire. Should he succeed in that endeavor we might all still have to pay the price. But I was foolish once, I will not be so again. You will not do this thing. Not while I am able to act to stop you.”
“Wait! Don’t you know that anything you do to undermine Liudan now plays straight into Lihui’s hands?” Khailin cried, raising a hand to stop him, but she was already talking to Maxao’s back as he swept out of the room.
At first it was only distorted rumors that swept the bazaars. Khailin already had a reputation in the city as a scholar, a student of the more empirical paths of the Way, an alchemist, a seeker of knowledge. Her pursuits were known, if now always wholly approved of, but she had always been treated with the respect due to her station. In the days following Maxao’s abrupt departure from her rooms the city’s mood seemed to change, to darken. Khailin’s cook came back in tears one morning and disclosed that she had been pelted with rotten fruit because she worked for “the witch.” Crowds gathered before the gates of the Imperial Palace, and there was a dark murmur that rose from them, and the eyes raised to the palace walls were smoldering with fury and resentment.
Immortal … she wants to be immortal … she wants to rule forever.
But it was still only thoughts, only words, only high emotion.
When it exploded into action, it took everyone by surprise.
Yuet had never been easy
with what Khailin had charged her to do, but she had tried to do it in keeping both with the dictates of her conscience and the fulfillment of her jin-shei obligations. If a patient was beyond her help and she knew that death was a matter of maybe only hours away, she asked the next of kin in the household if she could help with making the funeral arrangements. She did all the required rites, but often they took place some time after death, when Khailin was done with the earthly remains, and the families remained unaware that the body on the funeral pyre may not have been entirely whole when finally consigned to the flames.
Things simmered amid mutters and murmurs for some time. The weeks stretched into months, and even the months began to add up, like beads on a yearwood. But the lull could not last.
The tide turned when Yuet, for once entirely innocently and with no ulterior motives whatsoever, was seen helping an elderly man into a mule-drawn cart in order to transport him back to her own house for treatment. This was something that she had often done for cases which required her constant care and attention. On this particular occasion, however, a woman passing on the street stopped, and pointed a bony finger at Yuet and the half-loaded patient.
“Look!” the woman screeched. “This is how the witch gets us! This is how she gets the warm bodies she cuts up to seek the juice of immortality for the Ghoul Empress! That one is the witch’s assistant—she takes us and gives our bodies to her, still warm, still breathing! Look where she goes, taking yet another! Old he might be, but he is still one of us!”
“One of us!” shrieked someone else.
“Stop her! Stop her stealing the old man!”
“Stop the witch’s handmaiden! Stop her!”
“We won’t be sliced and studied so that the Empress can live forever on our blood and sinews!”
“Stop her!”
Yuet had no idea where all the people had come from, but a sudden mob had coalesced around her, and they were angry. Their voices were sharp, shrill, furious.
Perhaps the wisest course of action would have been to climb into the back of the cart with her patient and urge the driver of the cart to move on, quickly and without fuss. But Yuet knew the woman who had originally spoken, and others in the neighborhood—many of the faces she could glimpse, now contorted with hate, in the gathering crowd she had healed of sores and fevers and tended in childbirth and old age. These were her people, her patients, her charge. She was fatally moved to stop, to explain, to soothe, to make good.
The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 48
