The Embers of Heaven (34 page)

As though her thought had leaped straight into his head, he relinquished the sword, grasped her package of notebooks firmly, and pushed back the cowl of his hood.

“I am Xuan,” he said. “I live in Siqaluan Street, at the back of the Temple. It is the house with the blue roof.”

She pushed back her own concealing scarf. “I am Amais. Lichan Street, by the University.”

They stared at each other, their features indistinct in the dim street lighting but instantly memorable in that moment. And then he lifted his free hand, in farewell.

“Until we meet again, then,” he said, “Amais.”

He turned, and let the shadows of the street swallow him. Amais watched him go, motionless, holding the Imperial sword with both hands.

There was a
yuan
in this too—fate—a meeting meant to be. It was not the fire from the heart of a sun that had burned in the hour of her first meeting with Iloh—but it was something, nonetheless, a quiet wash of starlight, an odd sense of living a memory of a love yet to come.

Cradling the sword against her body, Amais turned and retraced her steps, back through the empty streets of Linh-an in the night.

Four

Amais did not go home after her midnight rendezvous, after all. Walking back to the rooms she shared with her stepfather—who was now gone—she was seized by the same fear that had gripped her before—
what if they do come? And they tear the place apart? Where am I supposed to hide a sword that they won’t find it? It is not a needle! And it is not mine to lose—I must find a safe place—a place they would never think of looking for a sword…

In the end, the choice was obvious, but when she detoured via the back streets until she found her way to what she knew as the Street of Red Lanterns it was with a sense of real shock that she halted and stared at the place where the street name had been scoured away with a dagger and a new name daubed onto the wall with sloppy calligraphy, presumably until such time as a more permanent marker could be installed—the Street of the Rising Sun of the Revolution.

“Ah,
Cahan
…” Amais breathed. “Am I too late…?”

But nothing else appeared to have changed in the quiet street—yet—unless the quietness of it was a change, at this time of day, during the hours of darkness in which it usually came alive plying its trade. There were lights in the houses, but the doors were closed, not open as they customarily were; the lights spilled almost shyly, from half-shuttered windows, from chinks in drawn drapes. The Street of Red Lanterns had turned furtive and afraid; the glittering courtesan turned back into the basest incarnation of her art, the street harlot, pulling a concealing hood over her face even as she beckoned into the shadows.

Amais made her way carefully down the sidewalk. She saw muffled figures slipping in and out of various houses, but they kept their heads down and their footsteps quick and light and if they had to pass anywhere close to her they averted their faces, instinctively, just as she averted hers. She might have been worried that somebody might notice that she was armed, in a manner of speaking, and raise the alarm—but tonight all that mattered was anonymity and obscurity. She might have been in full armor and nobody would have reacted—because that would have meant acknowledging
her
presence as well as the whistle-blower’s own. Nobody wanted that. Not tonight.

The side door of the House of the Silver Moon was locked, unusually, which as and of itself was enough to give Amais a bad feeling—but the lacquered red main door that opened onto the street was ajar, just a little; a thin sliver of light limned it along one side. Muffling her sword as best she could in her wraps, Amais crept to the main door and pushed it open just wide enough for her to slip through, restoring it to its previous condition behind her.

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.