Most certainly not someone to think about bedding at night. He had little doubt what she’d say if he raised that matter, and less doubt she’d break a bone or two if he tried to give effect to the desire that had begun to assail him, aware of her lithe body lying near him under stars, or curving and stretching in her exercise rituals—those elegant, slow movements at sunrise. The Kanlin were fabled for discipline, and for how efficiently they killed when need arose.
Need hadn’t arisen as they’d journeyed down the river road to Shen Tai’s family home. One twilight encounter in light rain with three rough-looking men who might have had theft in mind had they not seen a black-clad Kanlin with two swords and a bow. They’d absented themselves quickly down a path into dripping undergrowth.
Once they started west, however, everything began to feel different for Yan. He was at pains to light candles or burn incense and leave donations at any and all temples to any and all gods from the morning they left the Shen estate and began following a dusty track northwest, and then farther west, towards emptiness.
North of them, parallel to their route, lay the imperial road through the prefecture city of Chenyao, and beyond that was the easternmost section of the Silk Roads, leading from Xinan to Jade Gate and the garrisons in the Kanshu Corridor.
The imperial highway had lively villages and comfortable inns at postal stations all the way along. There would have been good wine, and pretty women. Maybe even some of the yellow-haired dancing girls from Sardia, working in pleasure houses, perhaps on their way to the capital. The ones who could arch their bodies backwards and touch the ground with feet and hands at once—and so elicit arresting images in the mind of an imaginative man.
But Shen Tai wasn’t up there, was he? Nothing so sensible. And it didn’t make sense to go five or six days north to meet the highway, when their own path was to Iron Gate by Kuala Nor, not Jade Gate Pass.
That left his friend Yan, his loyal friend, feeling every hard-boned movement of his small, shaggy horse towards the end of a day’s silent ride through late-spring countryside. He wasn’t going to drink that wine or hear music in those inns, or teach fragrant women how he very much liked to be touched.
It was Wan-si who decided how far they’d ride each day, whether they’d reach a village and negotiate a roof under which to sleep, or camp outside. Yan ached like a grandfather each morning when he woke on dew-damp ground, and the village beds were hardly better.
For anything less than the tidings he was bearing he wouldn’t have done this, he told himself. He simply wouldn’t have, however dear his friend might be to him, whatever parting verses and last embraces they’d exchanged at the Willow Inn by the western gate of Xinan, when Tai had left for home to mourn his father. Yan and Lun and the others had given him broken willow twigs in farewell and to ensure a safe return.
The others? There had been half a dozen of them at the Willow Inn, fabled for the partings it had witnessed. None of the others were with Yan on the road, were they? They’d been happy enough to get drunk when Tai left, and then praise Yan and improvise poems and give out more willow twigs at that same inn yard when he set out two years later, but no one had volunteered to go with him, had they? Not even when the expected journey was only ten days or so, to Tai’s family home.
Hah, thought Chou Yan, many hard days west of that estate. At this point, he decided, he himself could fairly be called heroic, a testament to the depth and virtue of friendship in the glorious Ninth Dynasty. They would have to admit it when he returned, all of them: no more wine-cup jests about softness and indolence. It was too pleasing a thought to keep to himself. He offered it to Wan-si as they rode.
As idle an expenditure of mortal breath and words as there had ever been. Black clothing, black eyes, a stillness like no one he’d ever known, this warrior-woman. It was irritating. A tongue was wasted on her. So was beauty, come to think of it. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen her smile.
That night she killed a tiger.
He didn’t even know it until morning when he saw the animal’s body, two arrows in it, at the green edge of a bamboo grove, twenty paces from where they’d slept.
He gaped. Stammered, “Why didn’t …? I didn’t even …”
He was in a sweat, hands shaking. He kept looking at the slain beast and quickly away. The dreadful size of it. Fear made him dizzy. He sat down, on the ground. He saw her walk over and reclaim her arrows. A booted foot on the tiger’s flank, twisting the shafts free.
She’d already packed their bedding and gear on the third horse. Now she mounted up and waited impatiently for him, holding his horse’s reins out for him. He managed to stand, to get up on the horse.
“You never even told me last night!” he said, unable to take his eyes off the tiger now.
“You complain less when you’ve slept a night,” she said, which counted as a long sentence. She started off, the sun rising behind them.
They reached the fort at Iron Gate Pass two evenings later.
The commander fed them for two nights (mutton stew and mutton stew), let Chou Yan entertain with gossip from the capital, and sent them west, with advice as to where to spend three nights on the way to Kuala Nor, so as to arrive at the lake in the morning.
Yan was entirely content with this counsel, having no interest at all in encountering ghosts of any kind, let alone angry ones and in the numbers (improbably) reported by the soldiers at the fort. But Wan-si disdained belief in such matters and did not want to spend an unnecessary night in the canyon among mountain cats, she said bluntly. If his friend was alive by the lake, and had been there for two years …
They pushed on through two long, light-headed days (Yan was finding it difficult to deal with the air this high), past the commander’s suggested stopping places. On the third afternoon, with the sun ahead of them, they ascended a last defile between cliffs and came suddenly out of shadows to the edge of a meadow bowl, of a beauty that could break the heart.
And moving forward through tall grass, Chou Yan had finally seen his dear friend standing at the doorway of a small cabin, waiting to greet him, and his soul had been glad beyond any poet’s words, and the long journey came to seem as nothing, in the way of such trials when they are over.
Weary but content, he brought his small horse to a halt in front of the cabin. Shen Tai was in a white tunic for mourning, but his loose trousers and the tunic were sweat- and dirt-stained. He was unshaven, darkened, rough-skinned like a peasant, but he was staring at Yan in flattering disbelief.
Yan felt like a hero. He was a hero. He’d had a nosebleed earlier, from the altitude, but you didn’t have to talk about that. He only wished his tidings weren’t so grave. But then he wouldn’t be here, would he, if they weren’t?
Tai bowed twice, formally, hand in fist. His courtesy was as remembered: impeccable, almost exaggeratedly so, when he wasn’t in a fury about something.
Yan, still on horseback, smiled happily down at him. He said what he’d planned to say for a long time, words he’d fallen asleep each night thinking about. “West of Iron Gate, west of Jade Gate Pass / There’ll be no old friends.”
Tai smiled back. “I see. You have come this long distance to tell me poets can be wrong? This is meant to dazzle and confound me?”
Hearing the wry, remembered voice, Yan’s heart was suddenly full. “Ah, well. I suppose not. Greetings, old friend.”
He swung down stiffly. His eyes filled with tears as he embraced the other man.
Tai’s expression when they stepped back and looked at each other was strange, as if Yan were a ghost of some kind himself.
“I would not ever, ever have thought …” he began.
“That I would be one to come to you? I am sure you didn’t. Everyone underestimates me. That is supposed to confound you.”
Tai did not smile. “It does, my friend. How did you even know where …?”
Yan made a face. “I didn’t think I was coming this far. I thought you were at home. We all
did. They told me there where you had gone.”
“And you carried on? All the way here?”
“It looks as though I did, doesn’t it?” Yan said happily. “I even carried two small casks of Salmon River wine for you, given me by Chong himself there, but I drank one with your brother and the other at Iron Gate, I’m afraid. We did drink to your name and honour.”
The ironical smile. “I thank you for that, then. I do have wine,” Tai said. “You will be very tired, and your companion. Will you both honour me and come inside?”
Yan looked at him, wanting to be happy, but his heart sank. He was here for a reason, after all.
“I have something to tell you,” he said.
“I thought that must be so,” his friend said gravely. “But let me offer water to wash yourselves, and a cup of wine first. You have come a long way.”
“Beyond the last margins of the empire,” Yan quoted.
He loved the sound of that. No one was going to be allowed to forget this journey of his, he decided. Soft? A plump, would-be mandarin? Not Chou Yan, not any more. The others, studying for the examinations, or in the North District laughing with dancing girls as a spring day waned, listening to pipa music, drinking from lacquered cups … they were the soft ones now.
“Beyond the last margins,” Tai agreed. All around them, mountains were piled upon each other, snow-clad. Yan saw a ruined fort on an isle in the middle of the lake.
He followed his friend into the cabin. The shutters were open to the air and the clear light. The one room was small, trimly kept. He remembered that about Tai. He saw a fireplace and a narrow bed, the low writing table, wooden ink-block, ink, paper, brushes, the mat in front of them. He smiled.
He heard Wan-si enter behind him. “This is my guard,” he said. “My Kanlin Warrior. She killed a tiger.”
He turned to gesture by way of proper introduction, and saw that she had her swords drawn, and levelled at the two of them.
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.