ending, and six others, you can save all those who follow you, and Kitai, from this.”
He ended. Five Kanlin scribes, their hands dipping brushes, shaped words. Otherwise, there was a stillness in the pass.
“Why would I do that?” Roshan said.
He sounded genuinely puzzled. He scratched at the back of one hand. “He drove me to this. Wen Zhou was stripping me of choices, poisoning the emperor against me, erasing anything I might offer my sons. What should a man with any pride in what he leaves behind do in the face of that?”
“Is that it?” said Xu Bihai. “Legacy?”
“It is different for you,” said Roshan, dismissively. “You have only daughters.” He shifted in his chair. “If this is all you came to say, we have wasted a morning. Unless it is of importance to you to understand that I do know of your daughters, and I will find them, to their very great regret. You may trust me in this.”
The thin man appeared undisturbed. “I thank you,” he said. “You turn the duty of destroying you into a pleasure, rare and delicate.”
That last word,
The yellow-backed throne was carried out of Teng Pass. Roshan waited in the kingfisher-feathered sedan chair, curtains drawn, respecting—perhaps surprisingly—formalities. It may have been the case that, having named himself an emperor, these mattered more to him than they might once have done.
Eventually, three hooded Kanlins walked over, two escorting the one carrying a scroll that preserved the record of what had been said. The Kanlin extended the scroll. A hand reached through the curtain and took it.
The sedan chair was lifted and carried away into sunlight.
LI-MEI IS DEEPLY DISTURBED, not even close to working through all the reasons for this. One of them, however, is surely the savage intensity of what has just happened in Teng Pass, the words spoken, violence embedded—and with more to come. Surely, now, to come?
Another reason, on an infinitely smaller scale, shameful, almost unworthy of acknowledging, is that she’s still recovering from the effect of the heavy, too-sweet smell that had come from An Li’s sedan chair when she’d accompanied the Kanlin carrying the scroll to him. She’d been next in line when he was given the completed record. They’d motioned for her, and one other, to go forward.
A sweetness of perfume overlaying, thickly, an odour much darker, something corrupt. She feels ill in the aftermath of it, and the air in Teng Pass is too still, too dense, when she tries to breathe deeply. It will be very hot outside the pass, where the rebels are camped in the sun.
She remains shaken by a thought that came to her, walking towards Roshan, standing by, watching the scroll being extended to him.
She isn’t remotely capable with a sword or knife, but there was surely a chance that, armed as she was— as a Kanlin for today—she could have stabbed him, ending this.
Ending all safety and tradition and respect for the Kanlin Warriors, too, mind you.
Hundreds of years of being judged worthy of trust, destroyed in a moment by Shen Li-Mei, only daughter of General Shen Gao—after they’d welcomed her on Stone Drum Mountain, given her shelter and guidance and even a way to make her way home through civil war.
Not to be thought of. Or, if thoughts cannot be barred, not to be permitted to be more than that.
Roshan is dying, in any case. That was the odour she smelled. The thin-bearded man who’d faced him down (she knew who he was, remembered her father speaking of him) had said it in blunt words. Words she’d watched being recorded in swift calligraphy by the scribes.
Killing him, she thinks, wouldn’t have ended anything, necessarily. The sons—the one standing here, and there are two others alive (she believes)—and, probably, the five men whose names are carried on a second scroll, the ones whose deaths are required: these would carry on, even if An Li died.
Rebellion might not always be tied to one man’s will and life. Perhaps it took on its own force, after a given point was reached and passed. You could turn back, and turn back, and then you couldn’t.
Has that happened here?
She’d like to ask someone, but can’t. She is disguised as a Kanlin, no one is to know who she is, and a Warrior would not be asking questions like that, of anyone.
They’d made her carry twin swords on her back during the ride south so she wouldn’t look awkward and inept, moving with them when the time came. They’d been heavy at first, the swords, painful against her spine in their back-scabbards. She’s more accustomed to them now.
A person—a woman—can adapt to more than she might have thought she could. What she’s unsure about is when that stops being a virtue and turns to something else, leaving you too much changed, undefined, unanchored, like a fisherman’s empty boat drifting on a river, with no way to be returned to where it belongs.
Thinking so, ashamed to be dealing with thoughts of her own life at such a time, Li-Mei sees three riders racing towards them up the pass from the western end.
The leading one carries a banner, the imperial insignia. These are couriers, she’d seen them often enough in her days with the empress. The second rider is a Kanlin. He is the one who dismounts from his lathered horse before the stallion has even entirely halted. He approaches General Xu, bows. He is perspiring from the heat. The black robes are soaked with sweat. He extends a small object. It is a seal, broken in half. Li-Mei knows what this signifies, though she’s never actually seen one. The courier also extends a scroll to the general.
Xu Bihai accepts both. He hands the half-seal to one of his officers. This man reaches into a leather satchel he carries and extracts a similar object, rejects it, pulls out another. No one speaks. The man holds this second piece to the one the courier has brought. He looks at the fit, examines the back, nods his head.
Only then does Xu Bihai untie the scroll and read.
Li-Mei sees him grow older before her eyes. He leans on his stick for a moment. Then he straightens. “When was this given to you?” he asks the couriers. His voice is thin. Li-Mei is suddenly frightened, hearing it.
The courier bows before speaking. He is clearly exhausted. “Three nights ago, my lord. We left in the middle of the night.”
“And it came from?”
“From the first minister himself, my lord general. His hand to my own, the scroll and the half-seal.”
Rage appears in Xu Bihai’s features; it is impossible to miss. He breathes in and out, slowly.
He says, very clearly, “He is afraid. He has decided that the longer we are here holding them back, the more likely it is that someone might decide this can be ended by delivering him to An Li.”
No one says a word in Teng Pass. Li-Mei is remembering someone else this morning:
After a moment, General Xu says, quietly this time, as if to the stillness of the air, not to anyone beside him, “If I were a different man, and Roshan were, I might even have done it.”
What Li-Mei feels, hearing this, standing so near, is fear. It chases away, as wind chases fallen leaves, all thoughts of her own destiny. There is too much more here now.
NOT LONG AFTER THAT, eight Kanlins ride west out of the pass, through the assembled armies of the Second and Third Districts. The armies are stirring. Orders have been given.
The eight riders go swiftly once beyond the canyon, with the wide river on their right and hills to the left— the features that make Teng Pass what it is, vital for so long in Kitai.
Two of these riders are bound for the Kanlin sanctuary at Ma-wai with three of the records of the morning. From there, two scrolls will be sent on to other sanctuaries, for greater security.
Two of the other riders will go only as far as Xinan, with the scroll for the Ta-Ming Palace, along with newer ones: the just-dictated words of General Xu Bihai, sent to the imperial heir and the Beloved Companion, but not to the first minister.
Three of the riders are escorting the last one farther west, and south, because of a promise made at Stone Drum Mountain. These four will branch off halfway to Xinan.
That last one, wrapped in fear and doubt as they ride, is the daughter of General Shen Gao.
