Under Heaven

Tai slowed the black drumming of his thoughts. The poet held his gaze with those wide-set eyes.

At length, Tai shrugged his shoulders. “No. He wouldn’t.”

Sima Zian smiled. “So I thought. Incidentally, there’s someone on the portico, keeps crossing back and forth, looking in at us. Small person. Wearing black. It may be another Kanlin sent after you …”

Tai didn’t bother to look. “No. That one is mine. Kanlin, yes. I hired a guard at Iron Gate. A Warrior who’d been sent by someone in Xinan to stop the assassin.”

“You trust him?”

He thought of Wei Song in the laneway tonight, when the governor’s men had come for him. He did trust her, he realized.

Once it would have irritated him, to have someone post herself so visibly on guard: the loss of privacy, the assumption that he couldn’t take care of himself. Now, with what he’d learned, it was different. He was going to need to think that through, as well.

Not tonight. He was too tired, and he couldn’t stop his thoughts from going to Li-Mei. And then to Liu. First Son, elder brother. They had shared a room for years.

He pushed that away, too. More sentimentality. They were not children any more.

“It is a woman,” he said. “The Kanlin. She’ll have seen the governor’s soldiers leave with their prisoners, decided someone needed to be on watch. She can be difficult.”

“They all can. Women, Kanlin Warriors. Put them in one …” The poet laughed. Then asked, as Tai had half expected, “Who is the someone in Xinan who sent her?”

He had decided to trust this man, too, hadn’t he?

“The courtesan I mentioned. Wen Zhou’s concubine.”

This time the poet blinked. After a moment, he said, “She risked that? For someone who’s been away two years? Shen Tai, you are …” He left the thought unfinished. “But if it is the first minister who wants you dead, even costing the empire your horses might not change his mind.”

Tai shook his head. “Killing me now, after word of the horses has arrived, Zhou or my brother runs the risk of someone—you, Xu Bihai, even the commander at Iron Gate—linking it to him. The loss of so many Sardian horses would make my death important. His enemies could bring him down with that.”

The poet considered it. “Then what is this about? There was nothing you could do for your sister from Kuala Nor, was there? You were much too far, it was already too late, but an assassin was sent. Was this about eliminating a new enemy before he returned?” He hesitated. “Perhaps a rival?”

There was that.

Her hair by lamplight.

And if someone should take me from here when you are gone?

He said, “It might be.”

“You are going on to Xinan?”

Tai smiled, first time since coming back down the stairs. Mirthlessly, he said, “I must, surely? I have sent word. I will be anxiously awaited!”

No answering smile, not this time. “Awaited on the road, it might also be. Shen Tai, you will accept an unworthy friend and companion?”

Tai swallowed. He hadn’t expected this. “Why? It would be foolishly dangerous for you to put yourself …”

“You helped me remember a poem,” said the one called the Banished Immortal.

“That’s no reason to—”

“And you buried the dead at Kuala Nor for two years.”

Another silence. This man was, Tai thought, all about pauses, the spaces between words as much as the words themselves.

Across the room someone had begun plucking quietly at a pipa, the notes drifting through lamplight and shadow, leaves on a moonlit stream.

“Xinan is changed. You will need someone who knows the city as it has become since you left. Knows it better than some Kanlin pacing back and forth.” Sima Zian grinned, and then he laughed, amusing himself with a thought he elected not to share.

The poet’s hand, Tai saw, reached out to touch his sword.

Friend was the word he had used.

A journey does not end when it ends.

The well-worn thought comes to her in the chill of night as she waits in her yurt alone. Li-Mei is not asleep, nor under the sheepskin blankets they lay out for her at night. It can grow cold on the steppe under stars. It is black as a tomb inside, with the flap closed. She cannot even see her hands. She is sitting on the pallet, fully clothed, holding a small knife.

She is trembling, and unhappy about that, even though no one is here to see her weakness.

The doctrines of the Sacred Path use the phrase about journeys and destinations to teach, in part, that death does not end one’s travelling through time and the worlds.

She does not know, there is no way she could know, but Bogu belief lies near to the same thought. The soul returns to the Sky Father, the body goes to earth and continues in another form, and then another, and another, until the wheel is broken.

Li-Mei understands something else tonight. She knows something else. And this was so in the moment she saw the wolves on the slope and the man with them, and watched the nomads behind her hurled into chaos and panic—these hard, fierce men of the steppe whose very being demands they show no fear to anyone, or to themselves.

Something is about to happen. A journey, one sort of journey, will end, possibly right here.

She is awake and clothed, waiting. With a knife.

So when the first wolf howls she is unsurprised. Even with that, she is unable to keep from jerking spasmodically at the lost, wild sound of it, or stop her hands from beginning to shake even more. You can be brave, and be afraid. She fears she’ll cut herself with the blade and she puts it aside on the pallet.

A lead wolf by itself at first, then others with it, filling the wide night with their sound. But the nomads’ dogs—the great wolfhounds—are silent, as they have been since the first wolf sighting towards sundown.

That, as much as anything else, is why she is so certain something strange is happening. The dogs should have gone wild at the sight of the wolves before, and hearing them now.

Nothing. Nothing at all from them.

She does hear movements outside, the riders mounting up. They will be happier on horseback, she has come to realize that. But there are no shouts, commands, no warlike cries, and no dogs. It is unnatural.

The wolves again, nearer. The worst sound in the world, someone called their howling, in a long-ago poem. The Kitan fear wolves more than tigers. In legend, in life. They are coming down now. She closes her eyes in the dark.

Li-Mei wants to lie on her small pallet and draw the sheepskins over her head and wish this all away, into not-being-so.

There was a storyteller in the town nearest their estate who used to offer a marketplace tale, a fable, of a girl who could do this. She remembers extending to him a copper coin the first time, then realizing he was blind.

She wants so much to be there, to be home, in her own bedchamber, going back and forth on the garden swing, on a ladder in the orchard picking early-summer fruit, looking up to find the Weaver Maid in the known evening sky …

She realizes there are tears on her face.

Impatiently, with a gesture at least one of her brothers would have recognized, she presses her lips together and wipes at her cheeks with the backs of both hands. In her own way, though she might wish to deny it, showing distress disturbs her as much as it would the nomads outside on their horses.

She forces herself to stand, makes certain she’s steady on her feet. She’s wearing riding boots. She’d