Under Heaven

It had also put Liu even more in his debt.

His adviser nodded, though with something less than his customary crispness.

“What else do I need to know?” the prime minister asked. Relations within the Shen family were not his most compelling problem. He needed to dismiss his adviser. He had someone else to summon tonight. “Who will know of this?”

Liu lifted his eyes. “Who will know? Everyone,” he said. “Tonight, or by mid-morning. It was a military dispatch, two copies, one to the Grand Secretariat, one to the Ministry of War, and nothing in the Ta-Ming stays secret.”

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