Candles burned in the reception room, as usual, and there were two couples engaged in whispered conversations in shadowed corners. A slightly unsteady customer, apparently a little too deep into his cups, suddenly lurched up from a seat—Amais, who had taken him for a pile of robes carelessly dumped on the chair, stifled a small cry as he staggered towards her, both arms outstretched.
“Ah! Beauty!” he slurred, his eyes unfocussed and a little crossed. “Come to me! I’ve been waiting for you all night!”
Another form, slighter, steadier, sheathed in a body-hugging blue silk gown slit to the thigh, intercepted him before he could grab hold of Amais. One of Xuelian’s girls; they all knew Amais by sight.
“Over here, my sweet one, you’ve been promised tonight,” she murmured. She glanced over her shoulder at where Amais still stood rooted to the spot, and then made a swift, economical little gesture with her head in the direction of the stairs. “Up,” she hissed, “quickly, before someone else assumes the wrong thing. It’s a bit late for you to be here, isn’t it?”
“Is she awake?” Amais asked, breaking stasis and taking long urgent strides towards the stairs.
“Is she ever asleep?” the other girl responded softly as she allowed her male companion to subside back onto his seat. “Go. Quick.”
Amais took the stairs two at a time and gave only the most perfunctory of knocks on Xuelian’s door before she pushed her door open and slipped into the old courtesan’s room.
Xuelian, sitting at her make-up table, turned her head a regal fraction.
“Is it day?” she inquired, with a touch of theatrical surprise.
“You know it is not,” Amais said.
“You are not a guest in this house at this hour, usually, Amais-ban.”
“I have, “Amais said, “a favor to ask of you…”
The story came tumbling out, in all its strangeness—Aylun’s note, the jin-ashu warning, the helpless terror of what might happen to the things that Amais considered her most precious treasures, the rush into the Linh-an night in search of a hiding place, the strange meeting with the young man bearing a sword. And the need to have the sword hidden.
“I have questions,” Xuelian said.
“There seems to be very little time for them,” Amais said. “Did you know they renamed the Street tonight?”
“Child,” Xuelian said, “the fact that they scrawled a different name on an arbitrary wall means nothing. It is not in the power of the Golden Wind to rename this street. You will see. As for time… time is what we make of it. As I said, I have questions. Why did you not simply bring the journals here in the first place if you thought they needed a safe sanctuary?”
“Because they are…” Amais began, and then stopped. She had no real idea, at that. It had seemed to her that she needed to hide the journals somewhere… somewhere else, somewhere other, somewhere that had no connection with her life, a place where nobody would ever think of looking for them. And besides… there was…
Amais looked up, met Xuelian’s eyes. “They were jin-ashu,” she said. “If they came here, and searched this place, they would be looking for women’s things. It was not safe. Not for them, not here, where I knew the last roots of jin-shei lived—where everything could be destroyed at once, when they… when…”
She suddenly realized that she spoke of certainties—that she had switched from if to when, that she knew that the Golden Wind were coming, that time was running out.
“You did not think,” Xuelian said, “that they would look for a sword in a house of pleasure.”
Amais stared at her mutely. Instinct had brought her here, now; as to why the same instinct had not driven her to the same place before, with the other treasure, she could only guess at.
“All right, you may be right, at that,” Xuelian said. “Give me the sword.”
Amais fumbled with the unwieldy thing, handed it to Xuelian hilt first. She opened her mouth to speak as Xuelian drew the blade out of the scabbard—not all the way, just a little, enough for candlelight to glitter on the flat of it.
“Old,” she said, inspecting the blade with an educated eye. “Valuable. Even without the legacy of which you speak. Very well, I will have it hidden under the floor of the cellar of this house. But that brings me to my sharpest question. What are you thinking of doing next?”
“What do you mean?”
“An anonymous warning told you that they were coming for you—and you plan on doing what? Going back to your quarters and waiting for them like a sacrificial lamb?”
“I have to go and find Aylun,” Amais whispered.
“No,” Xuelian said, with infinite gentleness, infinite sadness. “You don’t.”
“What? Why? What do you know?”
“I know of what happened tonight, while you were out in the streets of the city trying to find a place to hide,” Xuelian said, and her eyes were suddenly full of tears. “These ‘special units’—the outsiders, the ones to whom your sister has chosen to belong—they were given a choice tonight. They were given a chance to prove their loyalty, to do a task that nobody else wanted to sully their hands with—and if they did that, then they would be pure again, ready to be Golden Wind, to belong fully and completely and without question.”
Amais felt as though a fist had suddenly been driven into her solar plexus. She found it hard to breathe, and took a couple of shaky steps backwards to collapse into the nearest chair. “What happened?” she asked, through suddenly bloodless lips.
“They sent them in,” Xuelian said, turning her head away marginally so that her aristocratic profile was turned to Amais, “to kill the Emperor, and his family. They thought a signal needed to be sent, the point made that there would be no going back, no return. Tang had the family brought back to the city—back from the years of comfortable exile, out in the country house—Cahan knows what his plans for them were. But they were here, now, tonight… helpless. And Iloh seized the chance.”
“Iloh would not have…” Amais began.
Xuelian shook her head, a tiny gesture, barely noticeable, but it was enough to make Amais bite down on whatever she had been about to say.
“Iloh, or Iloh’s minions,” Xuelian said. “It did not have to be his hand, it was his word. The rest is semantics. The important thing is…they are dead. All of them, all the Imperial family. At the hands of the outsiders whose job it was to prove their loyalty to the cause before they could be considered good enough to join the ranks of the true revolutionaries. Your sister was among them.”
“How can you know that?” Amais whispered, holding both hands against her stomach as though it hurt there, as though she had been stabbed and was trying to keep the life from oozing out of her.
Xuelian lifted a piece of paper from her desk, let it flutter back down. “I had word,” she said. “I still had friends in that family. Did I ever tell you that she sent for me again, the Empress who gave me away—she sent for me, years later, when her son was twelve years old, so that I could be his first, that I could initiate him into the way of a woman’s body? I, his father’s concubine. She thought it would be… wise. I already belonged to them, after all.”
“And you did it?” Amais asked, her own eyes suddenly brimming with tears.
“She commanded. She was my Empress. And that little boy… was my Emperor’s blood,” Xuelian said.
There was a pounding in Amais’s temples, as though twin anvils had been set up there and a pair of blacksmiths were in full swing. “Oh, Cahan, what a night,” she said despairingly.
“So,” Xuelian said, turning back to her protégée. “I repeat my question. What do you intend to do next?”
“I did not think that far,” Amais admitted.
“For what it is worth, here is my advice—do not let the sunrise find you in your house. If the warning was true, you are damned in their eyes in too many ways to count—you are foreign-born, your mother was found guilty of sufficient crimes to die in a reform camp, you have no idea what
happened to your stepfather who was also accused, and for all I know they may be aware of your visits here and use that against you in any number of ways. Go to ground, until the madness passes. Unless you can get your Iloh to…”
“No,” Amais said.
Xuelian raised an eloquent eyebrow.
“No,” Amais repeated. “I already considered that. I can’t do it. It would be a death of a different kind.”
“Ah,” Xuelian said softly.
There was a silence, a heavy sense of time passing, too swift, too slow, quicksilver and molasses all at the same time, and they caught upon its flow like flotsam, unable to find anchor or peace.
Xuelian sighed, at last, and reached out to pat Amais on the cheek tenderly as though she were a child.
“Then I cannot advise further,” she said. “I will keep the sword safe.”
It was a sort of dismissal, gentle but nonetheless firm. Xuelian had work of her own to do before the night was over.
On impulse, Amais leaned over and hugged the old woman, wrapping both arms around her, leaning her cheek against Xuelian’s shoulder—held her for a brief but eloquent moment—let go, stood up, smoothed down the legs of her cotton trousers.
“What was that for?” Xuelian said, patting her carefully dressed hair back into place as though annoyed, but her eyes were bright under the lowered lashes.
“Good night, baya-Xuelian,” Amais said.
“Oh, get on with you, I am nobody’s grandmother,” Xuelian said. “Child… stay safe. However you choose to do that. Find shelter from this Wind.” She groped on the makeup table with one hand until it closed—with a painful instinct, with a need—on the kingfisher comb that lay there. The last link with a man who had died that night, whose entire seed was now ghost and memory.
She was there, with him, in that memory—in happier times. Not here. Not now. Not waiting for the ax to fall.
Amais backed out of the room quietly, so as not to disturb her, leaving her the solace of that dream—for however long she could still hold on to it.
She managed to get out of the House without further mishap with any of its clientele, and slipped out into the street. Hesitating for a moment in a deep shadow by the House, she weighed her options—Xuelian might have been right, if Amais’s visits to this place had been noted it might be inviting further disaster if she were observed here tonight, especially in the light of the treasure she had left for the House to guard. But the shortest way home lay down the Street, and then across the mercantile quarter, back into the University neighborhood. If she went the other way, out of the Street, she would only be treading deeper into the warrens—where the Beggar Guild still held sway, where danger lurked even without the chance of a stray Golden Wind cadre stepping in her path. The hesitation was brief, and she turned into the Street, hurrying past dark houses, aware that the sky was starting to lighten, however imperceptibly, in the eastern sky above the rooftops.
But there was something different about the street than when she had come here not so long ago—then, it had been full of furtive silence, of waiting, of tense expectation. But that was then. It seemed, during her brief visit to the House of the Silver Moon, that the waiting had come to an end.
At the far end of the street, between her and safety, Amais could see lights, and commotion. There were shouts, screams, scuffles—people spilled on the front steps of houses and in the road, some dressed in the bright colors of the courtesans, others dressed in the drab gray or blue of uniforms.
With yellow bands on their sleeves.
“Oh, no,” Amais whispered, freezing into immobility behind a set of steps leading into a nearby House. Even as she did so the lights in the house were doused; its windows sank into a brooding darkness, in a hope, perhaps futile, that it might look dead and abandoned and that the avengers might pass it by.
But they were being thorough. That much was obvious even from Amais’s hiding place. They had gone from house to house, on both sides of the street, emptying them out, guns pointed at cringing men who had had the bad luck to be caught within, the occasional Golden Wind cadre in the process of removing the wide army-issue belt they all wore and starting to whip the screaming, cowering women with it, buckle end down.
“Oh, Cahan, no,” Amais whispered.
And then the stasis broke, and she turned and raced back the way she had come. Back, back to the House of the Silver Moon, and the woman who had been one of the few people in this world whom she had loved, who had truly loved her.
Five
A tiny red lantern hung on the hook by Xuelian’s door, the time-honored signal for privacy although Xuelian herself had long since ceased to require it for the purposes to which it was usually put. But she had her own needs, and it was the easiest, most obvious sign for her girls to leave her alone.
But the time for courtesy and manners was long past. Amais spared the lantern—it had not been there when she had left these rooms, not that long ago—the barest of glances as she flung the door aside and all but fell into the room, cheeks flushed, gasping for every breath as fear closed her throat.
“They’re coming!” she managed to gasp out, staggering into the room, reaching for the dressing table to steady herself. “I am barely ahead of them! There are torches in the street! They’re already in half a dozen Houses!”
“Of course they’re coming,” Xuelian said, very calmly.
“Xuelian, you don’t understand! They’re maybe two doors away! You have to get out of here now, before they…Aren’t you afraid?”
“Child,” said Xuelian gently, and her voice trembled only a little bit, “of course I am afraid. But there is nothing I can do to stop what’s coming. I live in a house of silk and paper and it was never built to withstand a storm. I go where the storm blows me.”
“But they will…” Amais finally paused to take stock, and closed her mouth. She had looked at Xuelian, really looked at her, for the first time since she raced into her room, and she suddenly realized that the old courtesan was dressed in her best finery. Her face was made up in the traditional way, with her magnificent eyes touched with kohl and her lips with rouge; her hair, silver-gray, was looped and coiled in a complicated court style that had gone out of fashion decades before, and glittered with gems—and, set high like a crown, she wore the kingfisher comb. Its jeweled edges caught the light, and the delicate blue feathers, wrought into the shape of a flower, trembled as though with life itself when Xuelian turned her head.
Which she did, now, favoring her young protégée with a serene smile. It almost, but not quite, reached her eyes—those were serious, fully aware of what was coming, touched with an edge of apprehension, but not enough of it to be real fear.
“You knew they were coming?” Amais whispered.
“I’ve been waiting for them. Every night for weeks. It was only a matter of time.”
“But you are…”
“I am one of the ones they will most particularly wish to gather into their net,” Xuelian said. “I stand for too much that is now forbidden, rejected or despised. I would be an excellent figurehead.”
“For what?” Amais whispered, suddenly choked with tears.
“Time will tell,” Xuelian said. She rose from where she had been sitting at her dressing table and crossed over to a rosewood writing desk set against the window. There were several leather-bound books on it. The journals. Amais recognized them: Xuelian had taken them out for Amais any number of times, reading from their elegantly calligraphic pages as though she was passing on myths and legends from a time long gone, the woman who had once been a passionate Emperor’s concubine turned into an icon of peace and serenity.
“I want you to take care of these,” Xuelian said.
Amais stared at them blankly. There had been another set of journals that she had barely managed to save—if she had done it at all—Cahan alone knew what the man named Xuan would do with them. And here, now there was another legacy, another treasure to protect.
“But if you hide them in the strongbox…” she said. “Or… or … with the sword…?”
“They will look in the strongbox,” Xuelian said. “That is the first place they will go… after they are done here, in this room. And you don’t want to draw attention to that sword, do you?”
“But they can’t…” Amais said desperately, trying to force herself to believe in a place that would be inviolate, safe from harm. “They would not know where to look… they…”
“But they will know that a safe place exists, and if they have to tear this house down around our ears, they will find it,” Xuelian said. “There is always someone who thinks they know, where the treasures lie and who will offer up the keys to the kingdom of Heaven itself if it will spare them a moment of pain or the merest thought of suffering. Besides, I’ve already taken care of that—I have put your sword in its secret place myself, and none of the girls can be forced to give it up, and most of the gold that was in the strong box is already gone. So are most of the older journals, in fact. Only these are left here now, and I give them to you. I have written in here where I have left the sword… and where the treasure of the House of the Silver Moon is to be found. If you can get there. After the storm. Take them.”
The Embers of Heaven Page 33
