Dorje didn’t seem to notice Jon’s expression. “...Balidor has been looking for this shadow group for many years,” he said. “He had wanted Dehgoies to help him with this, once upon a time. But now, of course—”
“Dorje,” Jon cut in. Turning to face him, he caught hold of the seer’s arm. “Why are you still here? Why haven’t you left yet?”
Dorje looked at him, a little surprised. His expression had some hurt in it, too.
“You want me to leave the Bridge too?”
“I want you to not be dead!”
Dorje didn’t look away from his face. Then he shrugged with one hand. “If I leave, who will play chess with me?” He touched Jon’s face with the back of his fingers, his eyes softening. “You want me to leave you, too, cousin?”
Jon felt his mouth harden. “You did it once already.”
“I had orders then.”
“But you know he’s coming!” Jon burst out. “...You don’t need to be one of your ‘true prescients’ to know that! You were with Balidor when he took her. Do you think he won’t know that?” His jaw hardened. “Do you think anyone around Balidor is safe right now?”
Dorje clicked at him, dismissing this with another gesture. “He wants his wife back. He doesn’t care about me...”
“Bullshit. He’s pissed as hell. Even Allie wants you to leave!”
“She does?”
“Ask her!”
“I will.”
Jon felt his frustration worsen as he stared at the Tibetan-looking seer. “Why won’t you just go? For me?”
“If I go,” Dorje said, tugging his hair playfully. “Will you come with me, cousin...?”
Hearing the teasing in his voice, Jon shook him off, his mouth hardening.
“I can’t,” Jon said. “Not now...you know I can’t. I’m probably one of the only people in this whole complex he won’t hurt...” His voice sharpened again. “Dorje, please. Please go. You can come find me in a few months...or I’ll ask one of the other seers to help me look for you. Don’t just stay here, waiting for him to kill you...”
Dorje’s eyes grew serious.
After a pause, he sighed, clicking softly as he gazed up at the cherry tree once again. He laid a hand on Jon’s, clasping it on his leg.
“Jon,” he said, looking at him with those serious, dark eyes. “If you think you can find me, don’t you think Dehgoies can, too?” Before Jon could speak, Dorje shook his head, clicking at him softly. “...I cannot live with one eye always open. I will not live that way. If he wants to kill me, so be it. I am in the Adhipan. I follow the orders of my leader, or he is not my leader.”
His smile grew wry.
“Besides, death by Syrimne...that is not such a bad death, do you think? It is historical. Mythic. A very interesting death...”
Jon’s lips pressed together tighter.
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Jon...” the seer chided softly.
“Just how many people do you expect me to lose?”
There was a silence while Dorje watched his face.
Realizing the seer could see him crying, Jon wiped his eyes angrily, refusing to look up from where he stared at the stream running by his feet. The seer’s clicking grew softer, until it was nearly a purr...right before he slid closer on the bench, tugging at Jon’s arm. Reluctantly, Jon allowed the seer to pull him up against his chest, and wrap his arms around him.
“You will be okay, cousin,” he soothed. “...He won’t care about me, you’ll see. If he comes at all...to this place...I will be the last thing on his mind.”
The soft words brought up another surge of anger in Jon.
He almost made a cutting remark about how no, Revik wouldn’t care about Dorje...he’d just abduct his sister and kill Dorje’s boss, and maybe kill Dorje for the hell of it on his way out the door...but he didn’t. He didn’t push the seer away, either, or loosen his arm’s grip around his waist.
Dorje tugged on Jon’s longish blond and brown hair. “...And I like the longer hair, cousin,” he said, softer. He paused then, and his voice came out angry once more.
“Stay away from Feigran,” he said. “I think he likes it too much, too. Balidor thinks so, also. I am asking you, Jon...”
Jon grunted from his lap.
“I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “...I don’t think I’m his type.”
“What does that mean, cousin?”
But Jon only glanced up, giving him a wry smile.
I FOUND MY restlessness returning within an hour of having been awake. Maybe it was all of that time being drugged and lying down on trains and in cars and vans and gods knew what else, but I needed to get outside, to stretch my legs...come out of the damned trance I’d been in, seemingly for weeks now.
Of course, in thinking that, I hadn’t really consciously known where I was yet, or what going for a walk on the grounds circling our new accommodations would actually mean.
Once I left the confines of the kung fu movie bedroom, however, I found myself in an even more surreal Chinese fairyland, one that appeared to be almost entirely frozen in time. It was so beautiful it made me want to remain outside for as long as I possibly could, if only to inhale that beauty like a scent.
That first day, even weakened from no exercise and little food, I walked the grounds for hours. Longer than I counted really, or even wanted to count. It was easy to get lost in that place, to feel transported to another world, a completely different reality even. The construct helped that along, of course, but that wasn’t all of it.
That restlessness underlying my need to move didn’t dissipate, however, even after a full day of walking. It remained the length of that first day, as well as the day after...and the day after that...and the next ones, too.
But I knew, now, what at least some of it stemmed from...why all of us were so on edge.
Revik knew exactly where we were.
I’d known that, in some part of my mind, but now I saw it reflected in every seer’s face as I wandered the palace’s breathtaking grounds. I saw a similar tension etched into the faces of humans I encountered during those walks, as well.
I, of course, knew exactly where I was by then, too.
They hadn’t even tried to disguise the location of this particular hiding place from me...for a number of reasons. One, the presence of Voi Pai alone should have rendered the question moot pretty much right off. If I hadn’t been so spaced out and drugged the first time I woke up in that box-like bed, I would have known where we were within minutes of being introduced to her.
The truth was, the fancy bedroom I’d been housed in resided inside the walls of the Forbidden City. In fact, it was in one of the larger residential halls in the Imperial Quarters, or a side segment of those quarters, anyway.
In essence, I was a guest of the People’s Republic of China.
Vash told me once, months before, that the Lao Hu still lived inside the City’s walls, as they once had lived alongside the royal family. To this day, even with the royal family expelled and the communists in power, the Forbidden City remained one of the few places in the civilized world where seers truly lived side by side with humans...albeit with very strictly defined roles.
That wasn’t to say the balance of power was all one-sided. Seers worked both for and with humans, which was the difference between the Forbidden City and most human-seer arrangements. The Lao Hu weren’t prostitutes, nor even infiltrators in the strictest sense.
More importantly, to seers anyway, they wore no collars...nor did they ever, at any point, lose the power to refuse to offer a single one of their services. That included for any of the sight work they performed for the Chinese government, as well as any use of their bodies or aleimi whatsoever. Lao Hu would no sooner be asked to function as the sex slaves of their human patrons than they would be required to cut off one of their own hands. Instead, they acted more like family...or perhaps trusted house servants.
Paid house servants.
They receiv
ed generous wages and also lavish living quarters, as well as some measure of authority over the grounds...particularly the seer side, but also the human side of the City, for security purposes. Under the communist regime, the seer side had even grown.
If a danger presented to one of their extended family, which included both the humans and seers residing within the City’s walls, the seers had absolute authority to take measures against that threat. In that sense, they operated as a quasi-military force, and also had emergency powers in the larger city of Beijing in the event of a hostile incursion.
From the beginning, and despite Voi Pai’s somewhat less than gracious welcome, they treated me like royalty, too.
I wandered the grounds not in my increasingly worn jeans and t-shirts, but in silk dresses left for me each day on a chair in the ornate bedroom assigned to me by the Lao Hu.
I had a private garden. An elaborate wash area, also private. Servants. Morning breakfast and steaming baths conducted by more servants...all women, thank the gods. Massages, pedicures...even pets, if I wanted a dog to play with, or a bird who would perch on my finger and sing to me when I asked. Lizards also wandered the grounds on leashes, and tigers and some larger cats lived in pens beyond the secondary walls. The clothes I wore all appeared to be hand sewn, and of silk, fine linen or the lightest of cottons...and fit me as if someone had measured my every body part while I slept.
Hell, for all I knew, they had.
The dress I wore that third day was a variation of those I’d worn the two days before that. Dark green with black trim, silk so fine it felt like water on my skin, adorned with flowing sleeves and fabric covered with embroidered gold cranes, it flattered my figure enough that I forgot for that day how skinny I’d gotten from my time in the tank.
With it on the chair, someone had folded a black, silk sash like I’d seen on Voi Pai. I found out later that to include it with my dress had been meant as an honor...the black sash was the insignia of the Lao Hu, and giving it to me signaled their acceptance of me as a member of that family of seers, as well.
Knowing Voi Pai, it could have been a test of some kind, too, but I didn’t ask.
No one told me I couldn’t explore the grounds, so I immediately did just that, pretty much day in and day out for over a week. I ate a lot...whenever I could, really, if only to purge from my memory the image of me with those bony wrists and knees.
Some areas of the grounds were gated of course, and at least two of the larger buildings had guards stationed outside that I decided not to test. But I could walk for miles without anyone bothering me, at any time of day.
Even at night, lamps swung from tall metal poles and wall fixtures, lit by servants at a designated time each evening. They walked around with long lit sticks at the end of poles just as the last of the sun began to bleed down the walls of the palace, reflecting deeper flashes of orange and red. Wearing all red themselves, those seers went about their work almost silently, but they smiled at me when I met their gazes directly.
It got dark that first day, and still no one protested at my wandering feet, so I continued to walk across the endless expanse of stone floors dotted by ornate gates, potted trees and plants, gently curving walkways leading to large and small courtyards, garden alcoves and stairs with odd animal statues and flowering fruit trees.
I walked until my unused muscles gave out and I was too tired to walk any further. My wandering didn’t exactly fix anything, but it kept me in my body and out of the Barrier, at least for a short time. The grounds themselves were so stunningly beautiful they couldn’t help but lift my spirits, at least while I roamed there.
During the daytime, my walks gave me a glimpse into the life of the average palace-dweller. Many of the servants didn’t go outside the City walls at all, I discerned, from reading a number of the humans. Those who did generally left only on errand of the palace itself...to pick up some item of interest or need, or to bring someone or something to the palace that was desired. Human and seer “employees” left to hand-deliver messages that the seers did not wish to send electronically or through the Barrier...or to pay respects to some dignitary among the humans where etiquette required that the recitation or gift-giving be conducted in person.
I also found out that the gated area in which we resided had several other gates around it as well; like one of those Russian dolls, we were wrapped in layers, each larger and higher than the one inside. The largest of those walls surrounded field-like gardens where they even grew some of their own food, I was told. They kept domestic animals, as well as the wilder varieties, and had their own flower gardens. The City had been designed and then redesigned again to withstand emergencies from without, even if it meant locking the nations’ masses outside its high walls. It felt created for that very purpose, in fact...a world within a world, built to withstand sieges or maybe even the Displacement itself, when and if it came.
I also saw more of the grounds under the cold sunlight, and art that seemed to live in every nook and corner of every building, garden and gate.
Pottery, shrines, lamps of various kinds, fountains, rock sculptures, paintings, tapestries, semi-precious carvings, statuary and mosaics, kites and artificial landscapes seemed to be scattered around everywhere that wasn’t an open walkway. The palace had its own markets too, where they sold everything from flowers to food, art to Buddhist blessings, even some Christian artifacts and Communist Party symbols. Ancient and ornate screens lit up in multiple colors under the sun, along with tile roofs and gold paint gilding the edges, stone and wood carvings of dragons and smaller, cottage-sized buildings that looked like brightly painted bird cages.
It wasn’t empty of people...not even close.
And yet, it was somehow quiet.
Even the markets, despite the hawkers and bargaining servants and the children who ran between legs, some of them squealing, didn’t seem to break that quiet in any way that mattered.
I understood, too, why Voi Pai felt ownership over this place. It had the feel of a seer-designed sanctuary, shared by their human hosts...who were the real guests inside these walls.
Whatever the Communists told themselves, the City I experienced belonged to seers; I felt it with every touch of the dense construct walls, every person I met and piece of art I encountered. The Chinese history remained there, too, of course...but seers had altered it somehow, making it their own even as they shifted its symbols and imprints in subtle ways.
I knew there had been attempts to open the Forbidden City to outsiders in the earlier part of the twentieth century, when the Communists first rose to power. It had been seers who thwarted that change, arguing that the sanctuary was required for them to be able to live among humans...and therefore to maintain the safety and purity of the Chinese nation. They named themselves guardians of that ancient culture, and claimed allegiance to the Communists and Mao as a function of that role.
The Communists eventually backed down, even allowing the Royals to live at the Lao Hu’s request...providing they renounced their thrones, and be expelled from the City proper.
When presented with their alternatives, the Emperor and his family agreed to Mao’s terms.
Mao needed seer support too badly in those early decades to feel inclined to antagonize them, whatever their ties to the Royals. The Lao Hu constituted a keystone to his bid for global power, so the idea of leaving them locked inside the City...potentially breeding and proliferating quietly behind its high walls while the West killed off their own seers in greater and greater numbers...appealed to him greatly.
The Emperor and most of his family, on the other hand, left.
Behind them, the gates remained locked. None of the other humans were asked to leave. Because humans reproduced much more quickly than their seer cousins, the numbers evened out between the two groups in a matter of several human generations. Now, young humans occasionally left, too...encouraged to do so to keep their numbers from overpowering those of the seers, thus upsetting the delicate balance
that formed a part of the harmony of the inner sanctum.
I knew that some seers of the Seven believed that the Lao Hu had possibly abused their position in this, by pushing the humans into compliance. Others thought the Lao Hu would be the seers to survive the Displacement, thus evolving to the next stage of development as the First Race had done all those generations earlier.
I didn’t really have an opinion, frankly.
Looking around the pristine landscape of the palace, I had trouble seeing the locked gates as a bad thing, however.
I’d only glimpsed the rest of Beijing in photos and barrier jumps, but what I remembered was an odd mishmash of dilapidated and modern, traditional and soul-less, modern corporate along with so much pollution and dust that the skyline could be difficult to see at all during the day. Greater Bejing still wore vestiges of its past, but the quality maintained by the construct of the Lao Hu inside the Forbidden City had been lost to those Chinese who lived on the outside. Likely it had been many years ago...possibly even before Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution and destroyed half the country’s most treasured historical artifacts.
Now the Communists embraced the seers living inside the City’s walls, in part because Mao’s bet had paid off. The Lao Hu earned fame among humans and seers, providing the Chinese with strong military leverage in regard to the West and security from any one of a dozen ambitious neighbors in the East, including Japan and Korea.
No other country had such a large number of seers willing to fight for them so loyally. No other country managed to create conditions where seers would breed without coercion at all, at least not while in captivity...if you could call being paid to live inside a gold palace “captivity” in any meaningful way at all.
So the Maoists enfolded the seer presence into their philosophy of collectivity and brotherhood and left the Forbidden City alone, as a “respectful residence” for their seer friends, overseen by the Lao Hu.
I found myself reminded of those ornately tiered wooden cages made to house crickets because they were believed to be good luck.
Allie's War Season Two Page 26
