The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  The clean water took care of the grime, the soot, the blood, the ashes—all that was left of the ruin of the Temple on the outside of her, on the skin, on the hair. That which remained on the inside… needed other cleaning, other healing. That was still to come.

  Amais opened the door a crack when she was done, and pulled in the neatly folded cotton robe that had been laid just outside on top of a pair of felt house slippers. She wrung her wet hair dry as best she could, re-braided it into a damp rope, slipped into the robe and pulled its sash tight around her waist, thrust her feet into the slippers which fit as though they were her own. She inspected the basin in which she had, according to instructions, soaked her own clothes; the water was turning a coppery red-brown, and Amais turned away, suddenly aware of whose blood that was, the bile rising to the back of her throat. For a long time she stood there, her forehead between the palms of her hands laid flat against the door, and then she mentally shook herself and told herself sternly that she could hardly repay the kindness that had been shown her by never coming out of her hosts’ bathroom again.

  The corridor outside the bathroom door was empty, but a round doorless arch led off to the right. She followed the rich smells of vegetable soup and sesame cookies through that doorway, across an empty sitting room, and into a kitchen at the back where two women, a young one and an old one, were chopping up a meager haul of vegetables. They looked up as Amais stepped into the doorway, paused there, suddenly and overwhelmingly unable to utter a single word.

  The old woman laid her knife down, wiped her hands, and crossed to where Amais waited.

  “My son said you had been through an ordeal,” she said. “Have you eaten?”

  It was the traditional Syai greeting, a variation of the same words with which Vien and her daughters had been greeted when they first set foot here. But this time, the words appeared to be meant quite literally.

  “I can bring nothing to the table,” Amais said. It was customary, a guest always brought an offering—but she was here as little more than a refugee, empty-handed, a burden and not a gift.

  “Who can, these days?” the old woman returned. “I am Lihong; this is my daughter, Xinqian. My son, Xuan, you have met.”

  Amais only then became aware that Xuan had entered through a different door, bearing a bowl in his hands and stood a few paces away, a slight smile on his face. She dropped her eyes, aware that the color had risen in her cheeks, that they could all see that, that there was nothing she could do about it.

  “Be welcome,” Lihong said, taking Amais’s hands and drawing her into the kitchen.

  The daughter, Xinqian, glanced up from her work; her eyes were not friendly, but they were resigned. If there was one person in this house to whom Amais’s presence was not agreeable, it was the woman whose clothes Amais now wore, whose shoes were on her feet.

  The meal was simple, but a great deal had been done to make the occasion seem cheerful, as though ancient laws of hospitality still prevailed and Amais were really a guest at this family’s table. There was even a sprig of greenery arranged artfully in what looked like it had once been a bottle of rice wine. The household had a sense of a vanished grandeur, of people who knew and could understand beauty and grace but from whom it had been torn—but who dared, however covertly and full of symbolism, to express their dreams of seeing it return someday. A vase made of porcelain or fine glass would normally have been in the place of the bottle of rice wine—but although those precious things were gone now, Lihong, the matriarch, did not relinquish the idea of such a vessel being necessary for a festive table.

  After they had eaten, Xinqian murmured something about needing to see to her child, and Lihong busied herself with clearing the table, dismissing offers of help. Amais and Xuan were left alone in the sitting room, with only a couple of cheap lanterns with painted rice-paper shades casting light into the shuttered room.

  “They were here, weren’t they,” Amais said, looking down at her folded hands. “The Golden Wind.”

  “The morning after I gave you the sword,” he said. She glanced up at that, a swift glance she quickly hid by dropping her eyes again, but he had seen the fear there, and interpreted it correctly. “They are safe,” he said, “your journals. Not even my mother or my sister knows where they are bestowed. But for the rest… they took everything, and wrecked what they could not take—and my sister’s husband they took with them when they left. I was not here when they came, else I, too, might have been taken. You must forgive Xinqian, for tonight. She is still broken with that loss.”

  “Do you know why? Where they took him?”

  “No,” he said. “I have tried to find out, but I haven’t had much time—and then, the Temple, and all that… It is my mother who has gone out to ask, because she fears what would happen if I were to show up at some overzealous official’s desk—but nobody has told her anything, and I think it will be a long time before anybody will. Tragedy has made her selfish, and she will not let me walk the streets and perhaps be seen, recognized, taken—but my sister only sees, right now, that I am here and safe and being kept safe and her husband is gone. I am afraid she resents that, and me.”

  “But you walked the streets today,” said Amais.

  “Yes, when the bell began to toll,” Xuan said. “I could not… I could not stay inside like a rat. Not with that echoing across the city.”

  “There is nothing you could have done.”

  “I know.”

  They both glanced at each other at the same moment, caught each other’s eye; Xuan looked away first.

  “They are all I have now, my mother and my sister and my little niece,” he said, words that connected to nothing that he had just been saying, but everything made sense in this conversation, in this shattered world, where one clung to spars where one could find them.

  “I don’t even have that much,” Amais said bleakly. “My father died long ago, the sea took him, far away from here, in a different land… in a different world. My mother is buried in what is by now probably an unmarked grave, and my stepfather is somewhere in the clutches of the Golden Wind. And my little sister… is in the Golden Wind…”

  “I can’t promise you miracles,” he said. “I was not able to keep even my own family safe… but I will do what I can, if you will let me help you.”

  There was bitterness in that last sentence, as well as sincere concern, kindness, hope. Amais suddenly and vividly remembered the feel of his hand around her own.

  As she opened her mouth to speak, a flash of light rippled through the shutters followed by a loud crash of thunder. There had been rumblings, distant and muted, for a while—in the background, but easy to ignore. This was suddenly very close, demanding attention. Both of them looked up, startled, as the thunder continued to roll ominously; and then, without warning, as though someone had upended a bucket over the roof, there was a sudden noise of rushing water. Rain.

  They both spoke in the same instant.

  “It’s really coming down…”

  “Storm was all day in coming. It might help…”

  Amais suddenly realized something, something that had been niggling at her ever since she had left Iloh’s last rally on the Emperor’s Square—something had not been ‘right’ with that rally, something had been missing, and it was only now that she realized what that had been. For the first time since he had stepped onto the podium on the Square to speak to the people of the city, Iloh had done so dry. There had been no rain. There had been no rain then—and it was now, only now, when the rain would come and put out the fires of the Golden Wind’s scouring…

  Suddenly, incongruously, she laughed. Xuan looked at her in mute astonishment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and the laughter had turned into a hiccup, and then into a sob, and then back into a wild, fierce chuckle again. “I had been told a story, by… by a friend. It doesn’t matter now. But I think… I think that he has lost the Mandate of Heaven…”

  “Who?”

&n
bsp; “Iloh,” Amais said. “I’m sorry, I know I sound insane. There’s a lot to explain, but before I can do that…”

  She suddenly sat up, her eyes wide, her mouth parted.

  Suddenly it all seemed to fall into place for her. All of it, all the things that baya-Dan had tried to teach her, the cryptic words that Nhia seemed to have sent to her across the centuries, Jinlien’s dying incense burners, Xuelian’s lessons on the women’s language and the way in which Syai’s women had always had a gentle hand in guiding the land’s history. Tai’s poems. The vow that changed so many lives, when Xinmei stayed in the world and sent her jin-shei-bao to the holy crag of Sian Sanqin. The young Amais’s certainty, back when she was heartsick at leaving the land of her childhood behind for the strange and unknowable thing that Syai had still been for her—the insight, the firm knowledge, that there would be something for her to do in the land of her ancestors, a task that waited for her hand and no other.

  All of it.

  In two words.

  In a single thought.

  Xuan stared at her for a long moment, and then drew a long shaky breath, running a long-fingered hand through his hair.

  “You have no idea,” he murmured, “what you look like in this moment. Armies would follow you through fire without question.”

  Amais blinked, looked at him; her expression softened, and she actually reached for his hand, folding both of hers around it.

  “Please,” she said. “There is something… I have to do. You said you wanted to help me…”

  He heard her out, and then protested vigorously at the plan she laid out. She had to concede that he had a point. Going back into the Temple, going back that night, with the remnants of the fires still possibly smoldering in dangerous spots and the wild storm lashing the streets, with roving Golden Wind bands giddy with their recent triumph roaming the city, did seem insane. But that was what her heart was telling her to do, clearly at last, with her path laid out before her—and she was trusting it, just like Nhia had told her to do.

  “All right, but I will come with you,” Xuan said at last, having run out of protests and remonstrations, watching them all break on the steel of her resolve.

  “You cannot,” she said, “you can’t see this…”

  “Is this about the journals?” he asked. “Something in your women’s language? But I won’t even understand…”

  “Trust me,” she said. “Please, trust me. I will come to no harm. You can come with me to the Temple, if you need to, but not inside. What I do there I need to do alone.”

  So he acquiesced, in the end, and when night fell they both retraced the steps they had walked earlier that day, back to the Temple. They walked in the driving rain, both of them soaked to the skin in the space of only minutes, with great jagged sheets of lightning tearing at the sky and thunder crashing deafeningly around them. Everything looked different, changed; the shape of the street, the city, was altered. Most of the Temple’s great walls were standing but fire and the cudgels of the Golden Wind had eaten at the rest; there were places where supports were damaged or destroyed and the walls were leaning precariously or had even sagged into near collapse. Some smoldered angrily as embers hidden in deep crevices and unreached by the rain burned still. The familiar silhouette of the Tower was gone from the skyline. Amais and Xuan slipped into the grounds through the same door which Amais had used to escape, still abandoned and ajar, and picked their way across fallen masonry towards the Temple proper and the gardens which Amais had left full of blood and fire only that morning. And then she halted, and turned to Xuan.

  “No further,” she said. “There, that arch is still standing. At least you’ll be out of the rain.”

  “Amais…”

  “I will be all right,” she said. “I promise.”

  He reached out for her, helplessly, but she slipped out of his arms and walked away with quick light steps, her way illuminated by the lightning.

  It was gone, the great sacred building that she had known—melted into chaos, retaining no trace of the shape or form that she recalled. She realized that she must have crossed the Fourth Circle only when she found herself in the remnants of the gardens of the inner court—and even that, the lightning showed her, was a shattered mess of churned sand and ashes, littered with shapes that might have been fallen trees, piles of masonry, charred bodies. Amais finally got her bearings when she saw one of the ancient willows which she knew had been shading one of the entrance gates. It was still standing, but it had obviously burned, and it creaked and groaned now in the driving wind and rain. Underneath it, revealed by another blinding lightning flash, Amais saw a snapped dagger, with its point gone but a couple of fingers’ width of the blade remaining in the hilt.

  She picked her way across to the tree, knelt beside it with one hand on a miraculously unburned patch of bark, reached out for the broken knife with the other.

  She was foreign-born, her blood mixed with that of a foreign people; she knew that, understood that, accepted that. Perhaps it had been that trace of foreignness in her that had both kept her from understanding before this moment what Syai would ask of her, and now, when the hour had come, understanding it with a clarity that only an objective outsider looking in could possibly recognize. Perhaps it had been that foreignness that had allowed her to see beyond the old traditions, to bring an ancient glory out into the light of a new day in a guise entirely new and unlooked for. Kneeling there on Syai’s earth, her face turned up to the water from heaven, one hand resting on wood scarred by fire and the other on the broken steel of the dagger, she was one with the elements of her ancient kin, as purely and wholly a part of Syai as it was possible for a mortal woman to be. She was spirit, she was its spirit, she was what Xuelian had seen in her eyes and called Syai’s soul.

  Xuelian had also said something else—had always referred to Syai as ‘she’.

  And there they were, the mortal woman and her immortal land, both wounded needing each other.

  There had, after all, been only one choice to make.

  Amais folded her hand around the hilt of the broken dagger, dug with it into the rain-soft sand at her feet, hollowing out a narrow, shallow trench. She dropped the dagger into it, laid her hand across it so that her palm was on the metal and her fingers dug into the dirt on the sides of the hole, let the currents of the land course through her from her toes to the crown of her head, across her from the fingertip of one little finger to the fingertip of the other—earth, water, fire, metal, wood and spirit.

  And spoke the ancient vow into the storm—just two words—softly, because her land didn’t need her to shout to be heard.

  “Jin-shei.”

  There were shadows. Deep shadows.

  The woods were thick and dense—there was little undergrowth, but the trees grew close together, sometimes so close that Amais had to slip between them sideways, scraping the backs of her hands and her cheek and getting her hair caught and tangled in the low-growing twigs and branches.

  There were trees. Everywhere she looked.

  And then she looked harder, and they weren’t trees at all.

  Every tree, every trunk, every bole—if she peered past the illusion of bark and bough, she could glimpse what was inside—faces, fingers, eyes sometimes closed and sometimes open and glittering and frighteningly aware and staring straight back at her through the veil of their illusion.

  The forest started thinning a little just as she became aware of what it really was—people, it was all people!—and younger trees started appearing, and saplings, and mere sprouts of soft stems and one or two leaves trembling on top. And if Amais looked into those, they contained children—teenage boys with their hands in fists at their sides, little girls with their hair in braids, toddlers sucking their thumbs, babies with downy heads curled up asleep… even, in those barely sprouted plants, things that might have been in the process of becoming babies, tiny translucent pink things with dark alien eyes floating in a rosy glow like a halo, their pe
rfectly formed but impossibly small hands held up near a face wearing an expression of dreamy serenity.

  Amais stopped, carefully, watching where she placed her feet so that she would not hurt any living thing that might have curled near them, and simply stared.

  “Where am I?” she whispered.

  She had not meant to speak out loud; this was a question that swirled in her mind, fluttered around the sleeping people in their trees, trembled for long curious moments at each plant before going on to the next.

  “Where it all begins,” a voice said in reply. Amais could not see the speaker, but she recognized the voice—it was that of the little girl with whom she had always shared these dreams.