He knew that last. Nothing in the Ta-Ming stays secret.
A man was coming, a troubling man, with control of an impossible number of Sardian horses and a profoundly exalted stature, for so-very-virtuous actions in the past two years.
He would be received by the Son of Heaven.
There was no way to prevent it. And depending on what Shen Tai wanted, he could become an immediate, unpredictable factor in a game already too complex for words.
Although, possibly, he’d be killed, or had already been killed, on the road from Iron Gate. But that had different implications now, given the horses. The court would investigate, undoubtedly. And First Minister Wen knew altogether too much about those chances of death on the road.
It had been such a small, private matter when set in motion. An impulse as much as anything, a casual flexing of power. But now … if it emerged that the empire had lost two hundred and fifty Sardian horses because of someone’s recklessness, pursuing entirely personal interests …
It could happen, if someone talked.
There was a man who absolutely needed to die before he arrived at the same conclusion regarding his own risks—and tried to protect himself. By speaking to someone in the palace, for example. Tonight. Possibly even right now.
Or—the prime minister felt himself growing pale at the thought—perhaps by attending upon a certain military governor with what he had to say, asking for guidance and protection.
A scenario too terrifying to even contemplate.
He sent his adviser home.
Too abruptly, perhaps, given a shrewd man, but there wasn’t time to be subtle here and he was not about to share this story with Liu. He’d have to rely on the fact that Liu was distracted and uneasy. Because of what he’d done with the sister, of course, and the brother’s return.
This was all because of the same man, Zhou thought bitterly. The one coming back along the imperial road from beyond the border. He might have the power—and the desire—to ruin them both.
When he was alone, except for the still-cowering servant who did not matter, Zhou began to swear aloud. The person he cursed—without speaking the name, he was hardly so great a fool—was the seventeenth daughter of the celestial emperor, the serene and beautiful, the White Jade Princess, Cheng-wan.
Who, from far-off Rygyal on its mountain-ringed plateau, had capriciously, irresponsibly, altered so much. The way a woman could.
He heard the pipa music begin again.
She’d have been told of Liu’s departure. Would assume Zhou was free now, the toils of the day falling away. He wasn’t. They weren’t. He could not go to her. He couldn’t slake or assuage or channel fear or anger yet. He needed to deal with something immediately, and that meant trusting another man. And hoping it was not already too late.
He knew the man he needed, gave orders for him to be brought. As to trust, he could always have this one killed as well, after. These matters rippled outwards, the prime minister thought, like the waters of a still pond after a single stone fell.
There. Think of that image! He was an accursed poet, after all.
He lifted his cup, the servant hastened to bring him wine. He tried not to picture someone riding, or being carried from the Purple Myrtle Court in a litter, even now, across the night city. Arriving before the doors of the new mansion of Roshan. Being admitted. Telling him …
The guard he’d summoned was announced. Zhou bade him enter. A big man. A scar on his right cheek. His name was Feng. He bowed in the doorway.
Wen Zhou dismissed his servant, then said what had to be said. He did so with precision, his voice calm. Feng accepted the orders with another bow, no flicker of response in his face.
Which was all as it should be. You simply could not guide and govern an empire this vast, with so many challenges from within and without, while being the sort of gentle-souled person who might be deemed worthy of admission to holy orders.
And any fair-minded man evaluating the times would agree that this was even more the case if one’s emperor was no longer young, no longer the driven, brilliant leader he had been when he seized the throne himself (killing brothers, it needed to be remembered) and began shaping a reign of glory.
If the late Prime Minister Chin Hai, at the emperor’s side for decades, had taught the court anything it was that sometimes the darker, disturbing deeds of government needed to be shouldered by the first minister. Why else were there said to have been those soundless rooms underground, or the secret tunnels in and out of the city palace, that now belonged, as of tonight, to the most dangerous man in Kitai?
And if a beleaguered, overburdened first minister, directly responsible for no fewer than nine ministries, forswearing his own best-loved pleasures and diversions in the tireless service of his emperor, should have invoked the power of his office in the trivial matter of a chosen woman and an irritating man she’d known too well … well, were there to be no benefits attached to dealing with so many tasks? To the sleepless hours, for example, that lay ahead of him tonight while he waited for the return of the man he’d just sent out?
In their nine heavens, Wen Zhou decided, the gods would understand.
SHE HAS NEVER ACCEPTED the name he chose for her when he bought her from the Pavilion of Moonlight Pleasure House and had her brought here.
Lin Chang means nothing to her, it has no weight at all. Neither had Spring Rain at first, but she has at least grown accustomed to her courtesan name, and was even offered choices when they proposed it, asked if it felt right.
Zhou hadn’t done that. He hadn’t needed to, of course, but neither had the women at the Pavilion of Moonlight when she’d arrived there. He hadn’t even told her the source of her new name, what it meant to him, if anything. It certainly wasn’t Sardian. No acknowledgement of her origins. He’d wanted something more dignified than a North District pleasure girl’s name, and there it was.
And it isn’t worth hating. It really isn’t. That is the change in her. You did need to decide what mattered, and concentrate on that. Otherwise your life force would be scattered to the five directions, and wasted.
A woman needs to accept some truths in the world.
Wen Zhou is immensely powerful. He is not cruel to his servants or his women, certainly not by the standards of Xinan. Or those of Sardia, as it happens.
He is young, not unpleasant to be with in most humours. And his needs with women, though he likes to think they are decadent (men are often that way), are hardly so, for a girl from the pleasure district.
No, if she hates him now—and she does—it is for a different reason. The intensity she brings to bear upon this anger is extreme.
He had not needed to order a rival killed.
Tai wasn’t even a rival, in any way that signified. He had gone away for his mourning years, leaving her where she was, and what man—what student, having not yet even taken the examinations—could set himself against the first minister of the empire, the Precious Consort’s kinsman?
You could, if you wished, draw upon your knowledge of how fragile men were, even the most powerful. How much they could be shaped, or guided, by women and the needs they aroused. Was not the august emperor himself the clearest illustration?
You could understand how even a man of the stature of Wen Zhou might dislike remembering nights in the Pavilion of Moonlight when he’d arrived unexpectedly and discovered her already with another, and perhaps too obviously enjoying that.
But you could also draw a line in your own mind, straight as string, as to what you’d accept in the way of actions following upon that—and killing was on the far side of such a line.
It had not been difficult to shape a space for herself when she’d arrived here in the compound. She had been able to render two of the servants infatuated with her. Had she been unable to do that she’d hardly be worth desiring, would she? She’d begun working on the task of gathering information as soon as she’d come, without any purpose in mind. It was just … what you did.
r />
She’d made it clear (let them appear to deduce it, which worked with most men, high or low) that her reasons for wanting to learn the current mood, conversations, comings and goings of their lord had to do with her sustaining desire to please him, to know his needs at any hour.
She behaved—behaves still—impeccably, in the compound, or when she leaves it in a litter, guarded, to shop at one of the markets, or accompanies Zhou to banquets or polo games.
No one here has cause to hate her, unless it is the other concubines, and she has been careful with them. She still calls herself Spring Rain among the others, to avoid seeming to put on airs.
Her real name, from home, is hers to keep, and hasn’t been spoken by anyone in a long time. She put it aside when she crossed the border at Jade Gate years ago. It is possible that there is no one in all of Kitai who knows it. An unsettling thought.
Zhou’s wife is of little consequence, a woman of extreme breeding—selected for that—and even more extreme piety, which means she and her husband lead widely divergent lives. One of the concubines has offered the view that she might have been less virtuous if more attractive. An ungenerous thought, though not necessarily an untrue one.
The first minister’s wife is often away at one sanctuary or another. Her generosity to holy men and women is well known. Her husband encourages it. She also frequents astrologers, but is careful about it. The School of Unrestricted Night has an ambiguous place in the court of the Emperor Taizu.
Tonight, Rain knew that Adviser Shen had come to their doors before Zhou was even home, and that he’d been nervous about something. Normally, Shen Liu would be admitted to wait inside, but he had declined that invitation, staying in the street under the lanterns, watching for Zhou. The nervousness—reported by Hwan, her primary source of information—was unusual.
Shen Liu does not know of her connection to his brother, Rain is almost sure of that. She is less confident of some other things about him. She will need a certain Kanlin Warrior to return and report before she knows—if any sure conclusion is possible. Shen Liu is a cautious man.
It is unlikely to be obvious if he’s been part of a plan to kill his brother.
Rain has been waiting in Number Two Pavilion, elegantly attired. She wears no perfume, as usual. That makes it easier for her to cross dark courtyards, linger on porticos. Perfume is an announcement, after all.
Only when she knows Zhou is coming to her will she use her scent. It has become a gesture she’s known for here, a signature, like a calligrapher’s brush stroke. Another way his newest concubine honours her master.
These devices are not difficult for a woman who can think, and with men who don’t realize she can.
She’d heard the two men come in to the chamber across the small courtyard. Had begun playing her pipa then, to let Zhou know she was here. She stops when she hears—too faintly to make out words—that they have begun to talk. They will, she knows, think it a courtesy of hers.
She crosses the wet courtyard, barefoot, to save her slippers, carrying her pipa. That is her excuse: if anyone sees her, she is on the portico, out of sight, to offer music to her lord and his adviser if a request for it arises. Music is her domain here.
The sliding doors are open on a spring night and silk-paper windows block little sound. She hears, quite clearly, what they are saying.
Her heart begins pounding. Excitement, and there is fear, but she has made her peace with that, and her own decisions, some time ago. Betrayal, it can fairly be called. It will be called that, if what she’s done emerges from night into bright day.
But he’d sent a trained assassin, a false Kanlin, and arranged for two more, in an excess of casual, murderous inclination, and Rain would have called it a betrayal of herself to do nothing about that.
Tai wasn’t at his father’s home, it seemed, even in their mourning period. Wen Zhou, evidently, knew where he was. Rain did not. It was maddening. She was too isolated here—the city, the empire, the world beyond these stone walls were all wrapped in a cloud of not-knowing.
She had done what she could. Hwan, usefully in love with her by then, had arranged for a Kanlin, a real one this time, to come to her from their sanctuary at Ma-wai. The woman—she’d asked for a woman—had come over the wall at the back of the compound for a night meeting in the garden.
Rain had told Hwan it had to do with a threat she needed to quietly guard against—and that much had been true. She had paid the Kanlin, and sent her to Tai’s family, which was the only place to begin. Surely there they would know where he was, and why he was away?
Tonight, listening from the portico, Rain finally knows where Tai had gone. It is a wonder.
Walking back to the Number Two Pavilion, having a maidservant wash her feet, beginning to play her instrument again for the man now waiting for someone else to return tonight, Rain tries to decide if she wants the guard—his name is Feng—to succeed in killing Xin Lun.
She remembers Lun: quick, irreverent company in the Pavilion of Moonlight. A good singing voice, a loud, high laugh, generous with money. None of that matters. What concerns her is if it will be better if Tai is able to find the man alive when he returns. If he survives, himself.
She tries to make her heart be calm. There is no place here for desire, or dreams, though dreams are difficult to control. Whatever else might be true, she cannot be his now.
He should not have gone away without her. She had told him what might follow. Men didn’t listen enough. A truth of the world.
But … what he had done at Kuala Nor. What he had done.
And now two hundred and fifty horses from her own land. It is beyond words, it reaches past music, and it can change so much—though not for her.
It is extremely late when Zhou comes to her. She has been certain he will, though not what his mood will be. Hwan and her maidservants had been asleep when Feng returned to the compound.
Zhou seems almost cheerful when he crosses the courtyard to her. She believes she has an idea what that means.
He takes her with some urgency. From behind first, against the wall, and then more slowly, face to face on the wide bed while she touches him in the ways he likes. He does not awaken any of the other women to play with them, or to watch.
After he is done, she washes his body while he sips wine her maidservant has readied. She is careful about his wine.
She is thinking hard, hiding it, as ever.
Xin Lun is dead. Zhou will have protected himself, ended that risk of exposure. She will need to consider this, she thinks, her hands moving over the body of the man, lightly, then strongly, then lightly again.
She will be wrong in some of her guesses and conclusions. There are limits to what a woman in her position can know, however intelligent and committed she might be. There are too many constraints on someone confined to the women’s quarters of a compound or a curtained sedan chair, relying for information on infatuated servants.
There have always been such limits. It is the way of things, and not all men are foolish, though it might seem otherwise at times.
Tonight, she wonders—caressing him, smiling a little as she does so, as if in private pleasure (he likes this)—if he will order the guard slain now.
He’ll probably send Feng away first, she decides. South, to where his family and power base are. Raised in rank, to disguise the purpose, make it appear a reward, then accidentally dead in a far-away prefecture.
Alternatively, he might decide he needs a man like Feng in Xinan, with events unfolding as they seem to be.
Either is possible, Rain thinks, singing for him now, a song of the moon reflected in the Great River, autumn leaves falling in the water, floating past the silver, moored fishing boats, drifting towards the sea. An early verse of Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, set to music, a song that everyone knows, only ever sung late at night, bringing peace with it, carrying memories.
CHAPTER XIII
It was possible, Tai knew, to be asleep, and dreaming,
and somehow be aware you were dreaming, entangled, unable to wake up.
After the night he’d had: intense in the White Phoenix, violent earlier, and with unsettling tidings given him, he found himself alone in a bedchamber in Chenyao, dreaming himself lying on his back, bed linens scattered around him, while he was mounted and ridden by a woman whose face he could not see.
In the dream he could hear her breathing become more rapid, and could feel his own excitement. He was aware of his hands on her driving hips as she rose and fell upon him, but try as he might, in the darkness of dream (heavier than any in the waking world), he couldn’t see her, didn’t know who this was arousing in him such a fever of desire.
He thought of the fox-spirit, of course he thought of that, even in dream. Perhaps especially because this was a dream.
He tried to say the word again: daiji. But words, even the one word, would not come to him, just as clear sight was not given. Only movement, touch, the scent of her (not perfume), her quickened breathing—small gasps now—and his own.
He wanted to reach up and touch her face like a blind man, find her hair, but his dream-hands would not leave her hips, the smooth skin there, the muscles driving.
He felt wrapped and gathered, cocooned like a silkworm in this enclosed, indeterminate space of not-waking-yet. He feared it, was aroused and wildly excited by it, wanted never to leave, wanted her never to leave him.
Some time later he heard a different sound, and woke.
He was alone in the room, in the bed. Of course he was.
A hint of light through the slatted doors to the garden. The bed linens were in disarray. He might have tossed them off in restless sleep. He was confused, tired, not sure why he was awake.
Then he heard again the sound that had reached him: metal on metal, from the portico past the door.
Something heavy fell, hitting the wall outside.