The Secrets of Jin-shei

by Alma Alexander

  Tai flushed. “I did little.”

  “You cherished and protected, sometimes by no more than your example,” Qiaan said.

  “But I have failed,” Tai said, her eyes brimming. “For a long time now I have had this fear—that it was all ending, somehow, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it. And then Tammary fled, and Yuet died, and Khailin vanished, and now Xaforn.”

  “And me,” Qiaan said gently. “I am being preserved for some harsh fate, I don’t know what yet but that much I do know. Liudan can’t let me live. It would have been better if I had died in that courtyard and Xaforn was still here, who always shone so much brighter than I.”

  The guard outside the door opened it a crack. “Time,” he said.

  “I’ll come back and see you every day,” Tai promised.

  “Thank you,” Qiaan whispered. “For as long as you are able,” she added, as Tai embraced her one more time and was escorted out of the cell.

  But it was Nhia who came to see her next, and Nhia was a little more knowledgeable, and a lot more pragmatic.

  “She has been heard to mutter that she will not execute a convalescent,” Nhia said. “In other words, don’t hurry to get well. Your wound is what is keeping you alive.”

  “Did she say how?” Qiaan asked, steadily enough, but Nhia saw her hands tremble on the coverlet, and reached out and took one, squeezing it gently

  Qiaan returned the pressure, but with little strength.

  “I know,” she said, “that I probably deserve everything she has planned for me. But in my defense.”

  “Your defense requires nothing else but the knowledge that it was Lihui who stood behind you,” Nhia said intensely. “Nobody understands that part of it better than I do. I’ve tried talking to Liudan about it, but so far she seems to be listening only to the voices inside her own head. She’s been reading up on ancient forms of punishment, I know that much, because I know that she has taken the scrolls from the libraries—and the jin-ashu transcripts never pulled punches when it came to describing atrocities. If anything, the women described a myriad of ways to kill someone with a great deal more relish and attention to detail than any man could have done.”

  “So she plans on a spectacle?”

  “The Guard is muttering against it,” Nhia said, “but …”

  Qiaan found this strangely touching. “Xaforn of the Imperial Guard died because of me, and yet when the Empress wishes to destroy me they balk at it?”

  “You were both their own,” Nhia said, “and they take pride in protecting their own. They would take the matter of discipline on for themselves, if they could, but Liudan has called it high treason and thus made it the business of the Throne, not Guard law.”

  “What is she planning?” Qiaan asked, her hand trembling again, ever so slightly. “I am not good at enduring things, I will make a poor spectacle for her, Nhia. I have always hated pain.”

  “Yes, and that is why you were always trying to help others when you saw them suffering,” Nhia said. “That, too, the city is beginning to remember—what came before all this. But Liudan doesn’t listen, and she doesn’t talk to any of us anymore.”

  But it was Liudan herself, swept into the holding cell when Qiaan’s wounds were almost healed, who came to tell the prisoner what awaited her.

  “I had considered merely hastening your passage to Cahan, by providing you with a pyre of your own before you were too dead to enjoy it,” Liudan said, “but on reflection it would be too fast a death—so I went looking in the old books. Oh, we can still do the pyre, at the last—and you’ll still be aware enough for it—but before that, I thought we could reinvent the kind of scourge which flays flesh until bones show, and follow that with a slow and careful reduction of the flesh. It all has to be on the pyre, I know, in order for a good passage to Cahan—but nothing I have read leads me to believe that the passage in question would be significantly impaired if your feet, your hands, your eyes, your breasts and perhaps a few other choice pieces arrived at the pyre independently of the rest of you.”

  It was a litany of horrors so long and delivered in such detail that Qiaan was left white and shaking under the stream of words.

  “You will live for as long as I can make you live before I will allow you to die,” Liudan said. “After this, few will rise against me again. They will know what awaits them at the end of that road.”

  “I sought my place in this world,” Qiaan said. “I never wanted yours.”

  “Oh? So in whose name was this rebellion wrought, then? Did I imagine your name on the banners?”

  “Lihui’s name was all over those banners, all over that rebellion,” Qiaan whispered. “Cahan! How could I have let him? How could I have believed him?”

  “Were you hoping to bear his bastard and put the child on my throne?” Liudan said, and her voice was edged with a rage bordering on madness. “I am the Dragon Empress, and I will not let it happen!”

  Qiaan stared at her for a long moment, and then let her eyes drop to where her folded hands, quite steady now, lay on top of her coverlet.

  “May the gods be merciful to you, then,” she murmured.

  Liudan laughed. “You wish that on me?”

  “Yes,” Qiaan said, without lifting her eyes. “Because you have not touched Cahan in a long time.”

  Liudan’s silence was brittle, as though she had been contemplating a reply and then thought better of it. Instead, she turned and swept out of the cell.

  That evening, an unexpected visitor slipped into Qiaan’s cell.

  “Nhia? What are you doing?”

  “Shhh, quiet.” Warm, gentle hands folded a small glass vial into Qiaan’s palm. “Now we know. We all know. There has been a public announcement. It is all to take place the day after tomorrow. This … this is for you, if you wish it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Release,” Nhia said, her voice thick with tears. “You have never deserved what she will inflict on you, and Lihui is already dead, removed from justice. If you wish it, this is a release from pain. You will sleep, that is all. You will sleep, and not wake.”

  Qiaan’s hand closed on the vial. “Thank you.”

  Nhia, although she could not possibly have known that she did it, echoed Xaforn’s last gesture and kissed Qiaan gently on the brow. “Sleep in peace, jin-shei-bao. I cannot grant you life. I can offer you a death less savage than what has been planned for you.”

  And then she was gone.

  Qiaan rose from her bed, and lifted her eyes to the sky she could glimpse through her small window, segmented by the iron bars. It was deep night, the clear sky shimmering with bright stars, like the storied heavens of Cahan.

  Forgive me, Xaforn.

  Closing her eyes against a hot rush of tears, Qiaan lifted the vial of oblivion to her lips.

  Seven

  “Nhia?”

  “Shhh. It is late. Go back to sleep,” Nhia said, slipping back N into her bed.

  Nhia’s current lover turned his head, rubbing his eyes. “I woke, and you were gone—and then I must have dozed off again. Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere, Weylin. Go back to sleep.”

  Weylin sat up abruptly, spilling the soft cotton sheet that had been covering him from his flat, sculpted abdomen. He was a builder’s apprentice; toting bricks and lumber all day had made his muscles hard as whipcord. He was much younger than Nhia, and far from the social circles she moved in these days, as all her recent flames seemed to be. She seemed to go out of her way to pick up men at best inappropriate, at worst disastrous. Weylin’s predecessor, before taking up briefly with Nhia, had been working some of the city’s less than salubrious “water teahouses,” the ones that Tammary had been frequenting before circumstances and Zhan had rescued her from that life.

  “You’ve been crying,” Weylin said. For all his youth and brashness, he was not entirely insensitive. “I can hear it in your voice. What happened?”

  “I said, go to sleep!” Nhia said,
but her voice broke on the last word, and all of a sudden she was sobbing violently into her pillow, her shoulders heaving.

  Weylin gathered her into his arms, turning her face into his chest, smoothing her hair with a gentle hand. “Tell me,” he said. “I can help, perhaps, and even if I can’t it helps to talk about it. Or are you going to tell me again it’s all a state secret?”

  “I’ve lost too many of them, too fast,” Nhia sobbed. “Too many of them. Oh, my sisters!”

  “I saw the Empress’s proclamation,” Weylin said. “Is it Qiaan? Are you thinking of how Qiaan is to die?”

  “She will not die like that,” Nhia said, her voice muffled against his chest.

  “No,” he said thoughtfully. “She won’t die …” Something about Nhia’s words suddenly changed shape, however, and Weylin did a rapid double take. “‘Like that’?” he questioned. “Like what?”

  “I can’t let it happen,” Nhia said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand like a child. “It would be a betrayal of everything. Liudan could not even contemplate doing this if she stopped to think about the fact that she was doing it to one of her own jin-shei-bao”

  “She has always been a user,” Weylin murmured.

  “No,” Nhia said. “She has always been Liudan. She was lonely, and she was insecure, and she acted to take as much power as she could so that she did not ever have to depend on anyone else’s goodwill for anything—she was Empress, and her word would be law. But she was also kind. She gave me a life when my own didn’t seem worth living. And now she has forced me to take a life because it was worth more than the value she put on it.”

  “Nhia,” Weylin said, after a brief pause, his hand frozen on her hair, “just what did you do?”

  “I can’t tell you,” she said, pulling away from him.

  “State secret?” he said, sighing.

  “No. Mine. What I did is my responsibility, nobody else’s.”

  “She won’t die, Nhia,” Weylin said, choosing his words very carefully. “Listen, there is something I have been wanting to tell you for some time. I know some people … people who are involved, who had been involved with the rising.” He stumbled to a halt, groping for words. Nhia, suddenly very still, sat with her eyes steadily on him, watching, offering no help.

  “There was a faction,” Weylin continued helplessly, unable now to halt his confession, “that wanted Qiaan dead.”

  “They nearly succeeded,” Nhia said. “My jin-shei-bao Xaforn to whom I just bade farewell on her journey to Cahan was there.”

  “I know,” Weylin said. “But there were others … there are others … who did not agree. They might have been too late then, but they are ready now, ready to act.”

  “What are you saying, Weylin?”

  “Oh, Cahan. I suppose this is treason, too,” Weylin said, runing a long-fingered hand through his long hair. “I am not part of this group, but I have friends, good friends, who are. And I know that they … I should not be telling you this, but damn it all, it’s all getting out of hand now. For what it’s worth, you’re torturing yourself unnecessarily—Qiaan will not die in two days. I know because … you won’t go straight to Liudan with all this, will you?”

  “Telling me what?” Nhia said.

  “Liudan was waiting for her to recover from her wounds, was she not? Before she took any action?”

  “Yes.”

  “So were they, Nhia. They were waiting until they could snatch a well woman. It’s hard enough to take a prisoner from that place if that prisoner is cooperating and hale and hearty, it’s near impossible if that prisoner is slowed by a stab wound and is unable to move fast, or move quietly, or move at all, damn it, without being carried.”

  “You left a very slim window of opportunity,” Nhia said, and now she sounded distant, frozen.

  “I know. But it was necessary. But it’s all in place now, and we have plans.”

  “Tell them to stand down,” Nhia said. She turned away, very suddenly, and lay down on the bed with her back to Weylin, curled up on her side, eyes wide and staring into nothingness.

  “Nhia …? What are you …?”

  “You’re too late,” she said. “I took her a vial of poison tonight, to sleep, if she will. I could not bear to see her tortured and flogged and put on show just because Liudan needs to feel secure. So I gave her an escape.”

  “But, tomorrow! Tomorrow we would have …” gasped Weylin.

  “It’s probably too late,” Nhia said, “even tonight. Go. Tell them.”

  “But I told you, I don’t know …”

  “You have friends,” Nhia said, laying ironic emphasis on the last word. “In my experience people with friends in situations are not infrequently discovered to share that situation themselves.”

  “Your friend is about to die!”

  “Qiaan is not just a friend; she is my jin-shei-bao. I have done what I need to do, to protect my sister in the name of the vow that binds us. Go, Weylin. Go now.”

  After a stark silence, she felt the bed shift as he swung his legs out and stood up.

  “You might have slain the future for all of us,” he said.

  “I might have,” Nhia agreed, suddenly weary beyond bearing, beyond hope. “Leave me alone.”

  “If Liudan finds out, she will flay you alive instead,” Weylin said.

  “Liudan is my jin-shei sister, too, remember,” Nhia snapped, raising herself on one elbow.

  “That didn’t seem to stop her from passing that horrifying sentence on Qiaan,” Weylin said. “But one more thing I will tell you, then, and it’s free—I happen to know that they will try again to kill the Empress.”

  “Again? Have they tried before?”

  “Several times, and once came close.”

  “The arrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “The Empress is well protected against arrows these days.”

  Weylin gave a sharp bark of a laugh. “Do you think they are stupid enough to try the same trick twice?”

  “How, then?” Nhia said, after a beat of silence.

  “Poison,” Weylin said. She could hear him slipping into his trousers, elbowing his arms into his tunic. “And that is really all I know. If I had details I would give them to you. All I know is that the poison had been procured, and they were waiting for a good opportunity—and chaos is always a good opportunity. That’s why I’m telling you this now. You may not realize this yet but you have just created chaos. The perfect timing for that poison will be within the next two days. Or as soon as the news breaks that Qiaan cheated Liudan’s executioner.”

  “What kind of poison?”

  “I have told you all I know. Good night, Nhia.” He paused, the merest beat of silence, and then added, very softly, “Good-bye.”

  She sat up, seeking him with her eyes in the twilight of the bedroom, but all she saw was the door already closing behind him. He would not be back, she felt that in her bones. All of Nhia’s recent relationships seemed to last only for a short while—a few months, often just a few weeks, once or twice no more than a couple of sizzling days. She had been the one to end it, every time. Sometimes she regretted the severing, a few times she actually mourned her loss, but mostly she was left feeling hugely relieved that she would not be expected to give any more than she had already done, that she had escaped something which, if she had let it run its natural course, could have destroyed her.

  Weylin had been quiet, kind. With him, it might have been different. If she had done things differently. If she had only tried harder. If only life was not such a mess.

  Had he been speaking the truth? Had she really killed Qiaan, helped her die, perhaps only hours from rescue? She had hardly been able to believe the tortures that would be inflicted upon Qiaan, the bile had risen to the back of her throat at the very thought of it, and as the Chancellor of Syai it would have been her duty to be present when the sentence was carried out. Was it Qiaan I was trying to save, or myself? Is it too late?

  Her m
ind was a chaotic whirlpool, awash with painful memories, with guilt, with fear, agitated by concern for Liudan, by mourning for Xaforn, by grief for Qiaan. There was a time that she had known how to calm her spirit, how to slip into a meditative state, how to sit quietly for hours and become part of the light of Cahan and emerge refreshed and renewed—but she could not seem to remember how to do that anymore. It was as though it had been centuries since she had last called upon that ability, not the handful of years that had truly passed.

  Nhia closed her eyes, pummeled her pillow into submission with both fists, tried to burrow into it and sleep, but it was useless—she could not seem to find a comfortable position, turning restlessly in her bed, getting the sheets all tangled around her twisted foot. Everything ached—her withered leg, her bones, her shoulders taut with tension, a throbbing pain behind her eyes.

  Yuet might have told her trenchantly that the first thing she needed to do was get some sleep—but Yuet was gone, ashes now. Xaforn would have … Qiaan would have …

  “Oh, Cahan!” Nhia moaned despairingly. There were too many ghosts sharing her bedroom with her this night. None of them had come to demand reparations, or to accuse, or to lay blame. But they were there, thick around her; Nhia’s skin prickled at their presence.

  This room was no haven for her, not tonight.

  She rose and dressed again, wincing as she forced her aching crippled foot back into its special shoe. It was well past midnight, and the city was quiet in the night as she slipped out of a postern door and into the streets, hurrying past shuttered houses, past the big market square where already some stir was evident, the air perfumed by fresh-baked bread as the baker fired up his oven in preparation for the first customers of the day

  Tai’s house was silent and dark except for a lantern lit by its gate as Nhia, pulling the concealing hood of her mantle closer around her face, beat on the door with her fist.

  She had to do it several times before a sleepy servant emerged to answer her knock.

  “I need to see your mistress,” Nhia said, allowing her mantle to slip back a little so that the servant could catch a glimpse of her face in the light of the lantern he carried. “I know it’s late. It’s urgent.”