Under Heaven (7 page)

His instincts had been dulled by solitude, two years away from anything remotely like blades pointed towards him. Keeping an eye out for wolves or mountain cats, making sure the goats were penned at night, did nothing to make you ready for an assassin.
But he'd felt something wrong about the guard even as Yan had ridden up with her. He couldn't have said what that feeling was; it was normal, prudent, for a traveller to arrange protection, and Yan was sufficiently unused to journeying (and had enough family wealth) to have gone all the way to hiring a Kanlin, even if he'd only intended to go west a little and then down towards the Wai.
That wasn't it. It had been something in her eyes and posture, Tai decided, staring at the swords. Both were towards him, in fact, not at Yan: she would know which of them was a danger.
Riding up, reining her horse before the cabin door, she ought not to have seemed quite so alert, staring at him. She had been hired to get a man somewhere, and they'd come to that place. A task done, or the outbound stage of it. Payment partly earned. But her glance at Tai had been appraising, as much as anything else.
The sort of look you gave a man you expected to fight.
Or simply kill, since Tai's own swords were where they always were, against the wall, and there was no hope of notching arrow to bowstring before she cut him in two.
Everyone knew what Kanlin blades in Kanlin hands could do.
Yan's face had gone pale with horror. His mouth gaped, fish-like. Poor man. The drawn sword of betrayal was not a part of the world he knew. He'd done something immensely courageous coming here, had reached beyond himself in the name of friendship ... and found only this for reward. Tai wondered what his tidings were, what had caused him to do this. He might never know, he realized.
That angered and disturbed him, equally. He said, setting the world in motion again, "I must assume I am your named target. That my friend knows nothing of why you really came here. There is no need for him to die."
"But there is," she said softly. Her eyes stayed on him, weighing every movement he made, or might make.
"What? Because he'll name you? You think it will not be known who killed me when they come here from Iron Gate? You will have been recorded when you arrived at the fortress. What can he add to that?"
The swords did not waver. She smiled thinly. A beautiful, cold face. Like the lake, Tai thought, death within it.
"Not that," she said. "He insulted me with his eyes. On the journey."
"He saw you as a woman?
That
would have taken some effort," Tai said deliberately.
"Have a care," she said.
"Why? Or you'll kill me?" Anger within him more than anything now. He was a man helped by rage, though, steered towards thought, decisiveness. He was trying to see what it did to her. "The Kanlin are taught proportion and restraint. In movement, in deeds. You would kill a man because he admired your face and body? A disgrace to your mentors on the mountain, if so."
"You will tell me what Kanlin teachings are?"
"If I must," Tai said coolly. "Are you going to do this with honour, and allow me my swords?"
She shook her head. His heart sank. "I would prefer that, but my instructions were precise. I was not to allow you to fight me when we came here. This is not to be a combat." A hint of regret, some explanation for the appraising look:
Who is this one? What sort of man, that she was told to fear him?
Tai registered something else, however. "When you came here? You knew I was at Kuala Nor? Not at home? How?"
She said nothing. Had made an error, he realized. Not that it was likely to matter. He needed to keep talking. Silence would be death, he was certain of it. "They thought I would kill you, if we fought. Who decided this? Who is protecting you from me?"
"You are very sure of yourself," the assassin murmured.
He had a thought. A poor one, almost hopeless, but nothing better seemed to be arriving in the swirling of these moments.
"I am sure only of the uncertainty of life," he said. "If I am to end here by Kuala Nor and you will not fight me, will you kill me outside? I would offer my last prayer to the water and sky and lie among those I have been burying. It is not a great request."
"No," she said, and he didn't know what she meant, until she added, "It is not." She paused. It would be wrong to call it a hesitation. "I would have fought you, had my orders not been precise."
Orders.
Precise
orders. Who would do that? He needed to shape time, create it, find some way to his swords. The earlier thought really was a useless one, he decided.
He had to make her move, shift her footing, look away from him.
"Yan, who suggested you hire a Kanlin?"
"Silence!" the woman snapped, before Chou Yan could speak.
"Does it matter?" Tai said. "You are about to kill us without a fight, like a frightened child who fears her lack of skill." It was possible--just--that goaded enough she might make another mistake.
His sheathed blades were behind the assassin, by his writing table. The room was small, the distance trivial--unless you wanted to be alive when you reached them.
"No. Like a Warrior accepting orders given," the woman amended calmly.
She seemed serene again, as if his taunting had, instead of provoking, imposed a remembrance of discipline. Tai knew how that could happen. It didn't help him.
"It was Xin Lun who suggested it to me," Yan said bravely.
Tai heard the words, saw the woman's hard eyes, knew what was coming. He cried a warning.
Yan took her right-hand sword, a backhanded stroke, in his side, angled upwards to cut between ribs.
The slash-and-withdraw was precise, elegant, her wrist flexed, the blade swiftly returned--to be levelled towards where Tai had been. No time seeming to have passed: time held and controlled. The Kanlin were taught that way.
As it happened, he knew this, and time
had
passed, time that could be used. Timelessness was an illusion, and he wasn't where he'd been before.
His heart crying, knowing there was nothing he could have done to stop that stroke, he had leaped towards the doorway even as she'd turned to Yan--to kill him for speaking a name.
Tai shouted again, fury more than fear, though he expected to die now, himself.
A hundred thousand dead here, and two more.
He ignored his sheathed swords, they were too far. He whipped out the open door and to his right, towards the firewood by the goat pen. He had leaned his shovel on that wall. A gravedigger's shovel against two Kanlin swords. He got there. Claimed it, wheeled to face her.
The woman was running behind him. And then she wasn't.
Because the faint, foolish, desperate idea he'd had before entered into the sunlit world, became real.
The wind that rose in that moment conjured itself out of nothing at all, without warning. From within a spring afternoon's placidity, a terrifying force erupted.
There came a screaming sound: high, fierce, unnatural.
Not his voice, not the woman's, not anyone actually alive.
The wind didn't ruffle the meadow grass at all, or stir the pine trees. It didn't move the waters of the lake. It didn't touch Tai, though he heard what howled within it.
The wind poured
around
him, curving to either side like a pair of bows, as he faced the woman. It took the assassin bodily, lifted her up, and hurled her through the air as if she were a twig, a child's kite, an uprooted flower stalk in a gale. She was slammed against the wall of his cabin, pinned, unable to move.
It was as if she were nailed to the wood. Her eyes were wide with horror. She was trying to scream, her mouth was open, but whatever was blasting her, claiming her, didn't allow that either.
One sword was still in her hand, flattened against the cabin. The other had been ripped from her grasp. She had been lifted clean off the ground, he saw, her feet were dangling in air. She was suspended, hair and clothing splayed against the dark wood of the wall.
The illusion, again, of a moment outside of time. Then Tai saw two arrows hit her, one and then the other.
They struck from the side, fired from the far end of the cabin, beyond the door. And the wild ghost-wind did nothing to mar their flight, only held her pinned to be killed like a victim for sacrifice. The first arrow took her in the throat, a flowering of crimson, the second went in as deep, below her left breast.
In the instant of her dying the wind, too, died.
The screaming left the meadow.
In the bruised stillness that followed, the woman slid slowly down the wall, crumpled to one side, and lay upon the trampled grass beside his cabin door.
Tai drew a ragged, harrowed breath. His hands were shaking. He looked towards the far side of the cabin.
Bytsan and the young soldier called Gnam were standing there, fear in their eyes. Both arrows had been fired by the younger man.
And though the wild wind-sound was gone, Tai was still hearing it in his mind, that screaming, still seeing the woman pinned flat like some black-robed butterfly, by what it had been.
The dead of Kuala Nor had come to him. For him. To his aid.
But so had two men, mortal and desperately frightened, riding back down from their safe path away, even though the sun was over west now, with twilight soon to fall, and in the darkness here the world did not belong to living men.
Tai understood something else then, looking down at the woman where she lay: that even by daylight--morning and afternoon, summer and winter, doing his work--he had been living at sufferance, all this time.
He looked the other way, towards the blue of the lake and the low sun, and he knelt on the dark green grass. He touched his forehead to the earth in full obeisance, three times.
It had been written by one teacher in the time of the First Dynasty, more than nine hundred years ago, that when a man was brought back alive from the tall doors of death, from the brink of crossing over to the dark, he had a burden laid upon him ever after: to conduct his granted life in such a manner as to be worthy of that return.
Others had taught otherwise over the centuries: that survival in such a fashion meant that you had not yet learned what you had been sent to discover in a single, given life. Though that, really, could be seen as another kind of burden, Tai thought, on his knees in meadow grass. He had a sudden image of his father feeding ducks in their stream. He looked out over the lake, a darker blue in the mountain air.
He stood up. He turned to the Tagurans. Gnam had gone to the dead woman, he saw. He dragged her away from the wall, ripped his arrows out of her body, tossing them carelessly behind himself. Her hair had come free of its binding in that wind, spilling loose, pins scattered. Gnam bent down, spread her legs, arranging them.
He began removing his armour.
Tai blinked in disbelief.
"What are you doing?"
The sound of his own voice frightened him. "She's still warm," the soldier said. "Do me as a prize."
Tai stared at Bytsan. The other man turned away. "Do not claim your own soldiers never do this," the Taguran captain said, but he was staring at the mountains, not meeting Tai's gaze.
"None of mine ever did," said Tai. "And no one else will while I stand by."
He took three strides, and picked up the nearest Kanlin sword.
It had been a long time since he'd held one of these. The balance was flawless, a weight without weight. He pointed it at the young soldier.
Gnam's hands stopped working his armour straps. He actually looked surprised. "She came here to kill you. I just saved your life."
It wasn't wholly true, but close enough.
"You have my gratitude. And a hope I can repay you one day. But that will be prevented if I kill you now, and I will do that if you touch her. Unless you want to fight me."
Gnam shrugged. "I can do that." He began tightening his straps again.
"You'll die," said Tai quietly. "You need to know it."
The young Taguran was brave, had to be, to have come back down.
Tai struggled to find words to lead them out, a way to save face for the younger man. "Think about it," he said. "The wind that came. That was the dead. They are ... with me here."
He looked at Bytsan again, who seemed strangely passive suddenly. Tai went on, urgently, "I have spent two years here trying to honour the dead. Dishonouring this one makes a mockery of that."
"She came to kill you," Gnam repeated, as if Tai were slowwitted.
"Every dead man in this meadow came to kill someone!" Tai shouted.
His words drifted away in the thin air. It was cooler now, the sun low.
"Gnam," said Bytsan, finally, "there is no time for a fight if we want to be away before dark, and, trust me, after what just happened, I do. Mount up. We're going."
He walked around the side of the cabin. He came back a moment later, on his magnificent Sardian, leading the soldier's horse. Gnam was still staring at Tai. He hadn't moved, the desire to fight written in his face.
"You've just won your second tattoo," Tai said quietly.
He looked briefly at Bytsan, then back to the soldier in front of him. "Enjoy the moment. Don't hurry to the afterworld. Accept my admiration, and my thanks."
Gnam stared at him another moment, then turned deliberately and spat thickly into the grass, very near the body of the dead woman. He stalked over and seized his horse's reins and mounted. He wheeled to ride away.
"Soldier!" Tai spoke before he was aware he'd intended to.
The other man turned again.
Tai took a breath. Some things were hard to do. "Take her swords," he said. "Kanlin-forged. I doubt any soldier in Tagur carries their equal."
Gnam did not move.
Bytsan laughed shortly. "I'll take them if he does not."
Tai smiled wearily at the captain. "I've no doubt."
"It is a generous gift."
"It carries my gratitude."
He waited, didn't move. There were limits to how far one would go to assuage a young man's pride.
And behind him, through that open cabin door, a friend was lying dead.
After a long moment, Gnam moved his horse and extended a hand. Tai turned, bent, unslung the shoulder scabbards from the dead woman's body, and sheathed the two blades. Her blood was on one sheath. He handed them up to the Taguran. Bent again and retrieved the two arrows, gave them to the young man, as well.
"Don't hurry to the afterworld," he repeated.
Gnam's face was expressionless. Then, "My thanks," he said.
He did say it. There was that much. Even here, beyond borders and boundaries, you could live a certain way, Tai thought, remembering his father. You could try, at least. He looked west, past the wheeling birds, at the red sun in low clouds, then back to Bytsan.