Because this was a farce, and all of them knew it. And they had relied on her not to say so until it was too late.
It occurred to her that there was no purpose to these thoughts. For what did she need awareness, or bitter clarity, when all would be lost? Her fingers clenched around the vial: a merciful end. She might drift to sleep while sunlight still peeked through the cracks in the box. The thought had an undeniable allure.
But she had left it too late. The tiny shafts of light outside were dimming, and the box tilted as the servants carried it down. Panic seized her. It was coming, it was close. Why was she struggling? Was a woman’s mind truly so weak, as they said, that she could not comprehend her own death in the tramp of these feet? She took a deep breath and flipped the lid of the vial up.
She could not be sure if what happened next, happened on purpose. The crate was jostling, but her hands also, it seemed, would not move to bring the vial to her lips. The liquid spilled down over her robes and she closed her eyes—fruitlessly, for who could see her? What could she see? A moment of grieving for what had been lost, for the painless death without fear, and then she uncurled her fingers and let the vial roll away with a clink; there was nothing for her here any longer.
Movement stopped, and she froze. There was no light, only the breathing of the men and the sudden, surprising impact as the box was set down. Even knowing they could not see her, she closed her eyes. The top of the box came away with a ripping creak, and fingers quested blindly over her nose, her lips, and down, to press at her throat.
There was a pause. They could surely feel the racing of her heart, and yet Meilang did not move, terrified by the unknown. This man, she sensed, did not want to kill her. He had never killed before. But, if he had—as she suspected—been ordered to kill those who made it this far, would he?
Yes.
After a moment, he withdrew his hand, and she squeezed her eyes shut. She had begged fruitlessly for mercy when she should have been silent and now, when she should run, she was frozen with fear. She was not ready to die, and she knew what would come if she tried to escape.
She was not ready.
But in a small mercy, no blow came. They lifted her out, cradling her gently, and someone laid her on a bed. Her hands were folded over her breast, and her legs straightened. She let them move her, though blank horror threatened to make her muscles rigid. What should she do?
There was nothing to do. She should never have gotten into the box. She felt a new tear make its way down the side of her face. She would have died running, but she would have died in her rooms, with birdsong and the scent of summer flowers, and she would have made them see what they had done.
She wished them a life of agony and the slow twisting of guilt, every day, draining the joy from their hearts until they were shells of men. She wished them sickness and sons that looked like the stable boy. She wished them bitterness and defeat and a shameful end in the court.
Her wishing gained her nothing. When she heard the creak of the heavy doors, she cried out, leapt from the bed, but it was too late: even the light itself fled to escape the slam of the double doors, and the seven locks flipped into place with precision. Meilang felt herself falling, hitting the floor with a gasp of pain, and then there was nothing. No way for any to come in, and rob the treasures that should accompany the Emperor to his life beyond death.
No way out.
She had to get out of the room. Meilang scrabbled, fingers meeting nothing in the darkness but flagstone floor tiles. The bed had been soft, but the floor was nothing more than rough slabs. She should have known that there would be nothing other than the barest of necessities for the consorts. They had all been commanded to dress very finely as they processed through the city, carefully wailing for the benefit of the peasants—none of whom had come to her aid, had they?—and then, at the end of the procession, returned to their chambers and hoping for clemency, they were put into the rough wooden boxes.
Please, my lady, lie here.
She had seen fear in their eyes. They were afraid that she would break the illusion. They had seen her balk at the little coffin. But it was not meant to seal her in forever, so they had spent no time on it.
She should hear breathing, shouldn’t she? Meilang crawled until her head bumped into the edge of one of the beds. It occurred to her now how absurd that was, her on all fours, scrabbling forward blindly in the dark in her fine clothes and her done-up hair with its jeweled pins. The bracelets she wore dragged across the ground with a clank, but she heard no response.
She felt up along the bed and flinched back when her hand met a foot. But the foot did not move. Meilang traced her way up the brocade skirts to the woman’s waist, and from there past her face, to her hair. She remembered what the others had been wearing, and her fingers picked out the graceful whorls and spikes of Nuying’s headdress. The First Consort. Had lowly Meilang truly been placed in the same room with those of such high esteem?
It was almost as if none of it mattered at all.
She scrabbled away. What she was looking for, she did not know. She did not go to the big double doors that led to the outside. They would find her and they would kill her and she would not stand for that. She would not go out just to be slaughtered.
It occurred to her dimly that if she stayed here, she would die, too, and yet her anger burned hotter at the idea of staying here—a companion. Almost she might have said her anger was a living thing, sustaining her, nurturing her. She could have said it made a song in her blood, that it walked beside her in the shape of a man or a god, like herself. She stumbled her way toward the center of the tomb, the way opposite the door they had brought her in. When she crashed into a chest and upended it, she stopped to haul it upright.
And that gave her the truth she needed.
The emperor would leave her in here, would he? He would bring women so that when the tomb was opened there would be a wealth of beauty and gold and jewels to show the world that he had saved all the things that were never his doing anyway, he would show her off as if her own legacy did not matter in the slightest and his was paramount, when all he had done was wipe away everything she had worked for?
She would destroy what he was.
She shoved the chest over once more, hearing pottery and jewels cascade onto the ground. Something shattered and she felt a savage pleasure at it. The anger was singing to her, fury bright and hot, and she laughed with it. Heat coated her teeth, her skin. She stumbled blindly forward until she came to a brazier, unlit: she shoved it and it flew away from her with a clang. Did she hear stirring from the beds? Should she go back to check?
No. They had taken the poison, damn them. Let them die alone in the darkness if that was what they wished, slipping away mercifully. She would destroy everything she could and die in fire and anger, and leave the tomb in dust around her.
Stone and wood met her fingers. The door lay here, and she knew it would be locked. Seven upon seven seals to go further. How much time had they spent planning the locks that lay here? Or had they brought his own doors from his palace in the imperial city?
None of it mattered. Meilang threw herself against the doors and felt them shudder against her weight. Impact came next, piercing pain as the traps went off and spears and arrows thudded against her body. She was thrown from her feet with the force, landing on the floor with the shafts of the arrows still protruding from her body. Her fingers felt along the wood, disbelieving.
Why she got up, she did not know. She understood that she was dying. She understood that she was feeling pain—more, that she should be. She could feel, in fact, nothing at all. And she had been going to die, anyway, so there was truly nothing lost, was there?
She threw herself against the doors once more and felt them shake, deep within. Iron-banded and gold-covered, they were heavy and solid, but she could move them. Her fury knew no bounds, and the traps were unleashed now. Again she threw herself, and again the doors heaved. Again, again.
; The doors came down with a rip and a shatter, falling into the hallway that led beyond with a clang and a hollow boom, and Meilang fell with them, landing with an impact that drove the arrows deeper. She pushed herself up and wrenched the arrows free. Did she scream? It must have hurt.
She could not tell. She did not care. Blood poured over her hands and she threw the shafts of the arrows to the side contemptuously. It would serve him right if they found his consort’s ruined body in his chambers. If they could see what he had done, if she was not lying peacefully there to destroy the illusion. As for the cave robbers, the ones he had hoped to dissuade…well, let them have everything. He would arrive in the afterlife with nothing at all, to wander as a beggar amongst his ancestors. That would serve him right.
She stumbled onwards, hands out, tipping braziers and chests and throwing vases away from her to shatter against the walls. Where was she? What was this place? She could see nothing. The light of Heaven had been blocked away; Heaven did not want to see this. Heaven did not want to know what her most blessed child had ordered for his death.
When he fell ill, never had Meilang thought it would come to this. Stupid, stupid, stupid. When he had summoned her…
Best not to think of that. A scream ripped from her at last, fury and pain and rage and grief. This was how it was ending: here, at twenty-seven, alone, dead before she could do anything she had wanted to do.
Never another poem. Never another song. She would not wake to birdsong even one more time. She tore the jeweled combs out of her hair and threw them with the rest of the Emperor’s riches. A column met her hands, marble and immovable, but she pummeled at it anyway, swearing she felt skin break and bones crunch and shift with the impact. She hit and hit, beyond logic in her fury, and beyond her the crackle and flare of her anger, she felt the column crack.
It was not possible. But she reached out with both hands and pushed, and the column came away in chunks, shattering to the floor nearby.
Perhaps she was dying, and all of it was an illusion. Meilang felt her along stomach, questing downward to the gaping wounds that lay there, feeling her fingers slide awkwardly as fractured finger bones came in contact with one another. She should hardly be able to move for the pain, should she not? The Emperor had told her of such things when he revealed what happened to traitors.
Had he wanted to scare her, or had he wanted her reassurance as he tortured his subjects? He had been a kind boy, the sort one would think would never drop to tyranny, but he had been unprepared for the demands of kingship. He had spoken to Meilang of his fear. He had told her what he had done, and her poetry had become a thing of beauty after that: a desperate grab at grace and hope, touched by a shadow she had not known existed in the world before that.
And it was that which had entranced him.
Best not to think of that.
Perhaps she was dying. But she did not feel the cold or the pain. There was only anger, like liquid gold, the finest, sweetest mead heady on her tongue. Could her blood feel sweet? Could her bones feel like weapons? They did.
She was still standing. Meilang swept her fingers through the air where the column should be and stumbled onwards.
The corridor was thin, lined with alcoves, each with a precious vase. She threw them all to the floor to shatter there: chips of jade and shattered wrecks of delicate gold vases, dull clangs and sharp tinkles of glass. Her slippers ripped along the sharp lines of glass and stone, and she felt the scoring lines of pain on her feet where the shards broke the skin. She walked on, oblivious. It was not that she did not feel, for even the wound in her belly gave a deep, low ache if she paid enough attention. It was that the pain connected to nothing: she wanted not to sit down and tend to her injuries, but to press onwards, to destroy in the way that gave her such pleasure. The god of anger and steel and fury walked so close that almost she might say its outlines met hers in the darkness, its arms reaching out as she tried to reach herself.
Another door. It occurred to her as she let loose with a strike and the stone shattered before her touch that she should never have been able to undo either door. Perhaps this was indeed a dream. Had she taken the poison after all? Was she still lying on the bed?
Surely not. She felt real. The blood drying on her hands was sticky.
For the first time, she felt cold. It crept in around the anger, and it was as chill and eerie as the first breath of winter on the autumn winds. Autumn reaped the muted promise of Summer, which had been too hot and too harsh to give true life. Autumn, she had loved. The peaches ripened with the held heat of the sun, and the wheat was carted away to be stored.
And she had loved winter once, when the drifting snows covered tree branches, and the Emperor’s court dances to sweetly bright tunes on stringed instruments, and warmed spiced wine was a perfect companion to the chill.
She had never understood winter as a death until now. For anger, as it was, was all that remained to her, all that kept her alive. This stab of cold, as her blood ebbed away, was the ending of her life.
She slid down the wall, scrabbling weakly with her ruined fingers and cursing as the pain began to penetrate the haze of her mind. She wanted more of the anger and it seemed to have fled her. Death was coming fast on the wings of the chill, and she was overcome with panic. Would this be her legacy? A smashed room, a column, a hallway? Was this all that she would leave behind?
She would not live to see if any would love her poems, if they would survive her in the living elegy she had wished them to be. She felt a sob building and pressed her bloody palm against her mouth, not wanting even the silent darkness to see her shame and her defeat. For long moments in the dark she waited, little sobs escaping her at last as the pain tore through her, and then she felt it once more: fury, hot and bright.
What had brought it to light, when she was so consumed with her own death? She did not know. She did know that it seemed to carry to her feet with strength she had not known she possessed, and carried her forward to the open doors at the end of the room.
She knew the stench of death and it lay here. The Emperor’s body, embalmed, was nearby. There was something morbid in his death now, to know that she had lain with this man—or he with her, while she had lain with silence and regret and anger—and that now his body lay preserved for all time while the world crumbled around him and the gold and jewels were covered in a darkness so thick that they could not even glitter.
She made her way to the bed unerringly. Was it only a flight of fancy, or did she know the layout of the room? There was no light for her eyes to grow accustomed to, but she seemed to know the obstacles that lay around her. Meilang dragged her fingertips over the silk and embroidery of the emperor’s covering and over his cold hands, rings with the phoenix and the dragon, the jewels and pearls on his cuffs. Her fingers trailed up to his face.
She cherished, in bright hatred, the thought of ruining his body so that he might arise in the afterlife without anything at all. An afterlife she did not believe in, and yet how could she resist the chance that it might be real?
No. No, she had different plans. Let him arrive amongst his ancestors as a pauper, as a beggar. Let him learn, in his loss, the value of treating his servants without anger and cruelty. She could not wrap her mind around it. The emperor had known what was the most important to her, of everything in the world, and he had taken it, but he did so as if the facts had never joined together in his head. Was that cruelty?
It did not matter. Meilang turned lightly on her bleeding feet and her arms spread out in grace of a dance, fingers catching at a brazier and tipping it; scented oil spread across the ground and she leaped lightly across it. She could not see and yet her balance never faltered. She knew where to direct her hands, graceful as they had never before been, to topple a stand and a vase. She ripped wall hangings down to lie in the oil, she toppled the stone and gold and clay figures of soldiers that guarded the Emperor’s dead form. If he could wipe away what she had been with nothing but desire, then sh
e would wipe away everything he had ever been with the anger he had given her.
Memory came now, unstoppable, unwilling to be pushed aside. Her anger called it forth as a reason, as fuel for itself—as if the anger had come first and sought now something to sustain itself:
The first moment, receiving the summons alone in he little pavilion and studying the paper. He had sent it to her alone, not to be read by a servant; was he ashamed? She wondered.
He was a man who could not see beauty but that he must possess it. Foolishly, she had shown him beauty when she thought he would not want it, thinking that a plain face would be a fine cloak for the elegance of her poetry. The man was surrounded by the greatest beauties of the age, all scented with roses and jasmine, chrysanthemums in their hair, lychee and peaches on their breath, offering golden goblets of wine. Never would Meilang be such a woman, and so she had offered without reserve the words that flowed from her pen.
Her undoing.
The thought, in the pavilion that night, was sudden and irrelevant: that of all her life, of all the things she had done and would do, of all that she had loved fiercely and fought to achieve, none of it would matter at all. This was how she would be remembered, as a woman the emperor lay with. One night a man felt desire, and summoned a woman. And so her legacy was wiped away in an instant. She became dead, walking and yet a ghost already, a shell. Undone, forgotten: she did not know which, and could not bring herself to care.
Powerful men destroyed the legacies of those they touched, and did not see it, and if they did see it, they did not care.
He wanted her mind, she wanted to say, and she knew even then that such a thing was useless. The Emperor would do what he willed, and she would be killed by his command or by another’s if she did not. He had enough lackeys that might think to remove his shame before he even thought to complain of it.
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