Under Heaven

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.

Tai leaped from bed, scrambled into his trousers, didn’t bother knotting them, or with a shirt or boots or tying his hair.

He did take his swords. He jerked open the door, noting that he hadn’t barred it the night before, though he remembered intending to.

There was a man on the threshold. He was dead. Sword wound, right side.

Tai heard fighting to his left, the garden. He stepped over the dead body, ran towards the sound of swords, barefoot down the portico, his hair swinging free, sleep gone, the dream gone, in this first light of morning. He reached the end, leaped over the railing without breaking stride.

Wei Song was in the courtyard, spinning Kanlin-style—fighting five men.

It had been six, at least, with the one behind Tai. She was battling in a deadly, whirling silence. Tai swore savagely under his breath: she could have shouted for help! He had an idea why she hadn’t. He didn’t like it.

Sprinting towards them, he screamed: a release of pent-up rage, as much as anything else, directed at anyone and everyone and everything just then. At all of these people acting upon him, and for him, and even through him—from the moment Bytsan sri Nespo had given him a rolled-up parchment at Kuala Nor with a gift of too many horses.

It had gone far enough, this passiveness, this acceptance, absorbing the designs of others—benign, or otherwise. It was not what he was, or would allow himself to be, under the nine heavens. Perhaps he could declare that, with two swords in his hands.

One of the men facing Song half turned towards Tai’s sudden cry. That turning closed the scroll of his life.

Song’s left-hand sword took him on the side he’d exposed. The blade was withdrawn, as cleanly as it had entered, drawing life away with it.

She dropped and rolled through a flower bed, peonies crushed under her. They sprang back up as she did. A sword stroke from the nearest man, meant to decapitate, whistled through air.

Tai was among them by then.

The essence of Kanlin training, as he saw it (others might differ), was the continuous, patient, formal repetition of the movements of combat. Without swords, with one blade, with both, over again, every day of one’s life, ideally, the movements becoming so instinctive that the need for thought, awareness, planning in a fight disappeared. The body knew what it needed to do, and how to do it.

So it was without anything resembling deliberation, without a thought given to how long it had been since he’d done this, that Tai planted his right-hand sword in the earth, left it quivering there, and hurled himself into a twisting dive. A movement which—when properly executed—let the left-hand sword slide under one’s own flying body and sweep like a scythe, parallel to the ground, at someone facing him, or turning to do that.

His blade caught the nearest man, biting deep, just above the knee, sending blood spurting like some primitive sacrifice to the rising sun.

Tai landed (a dangerous moment, with a blade in one hand) and, from his knees, killed the wounded, falling man with a straight thrust to the chest.

Three left. All three turned to him.

“Get away!” Wei Song screamed.

Not likely, thought Tai, anger-ridden.

You each chose a man on either side when there were three lined up straight against two—if they made that mistake.

He switched his single blade to his right hand. Took the man farthest from Song: that was routine. He parried a slash from the bandit, and rolled again through the air to his left, a different move, one he hadn’t realized he remembered. You needed to be careful not to cut yourself with your own sword doing this one, too— that awareness came back in mid-air—but as he completed the movement, before he landed, he slashed at the bandit, and felt the sword bite.

The man screamed, went down. Tai landed in flowers, was up (almost) smoothly, and dispatched this one, too, on the ground. He looked quickly over, dropping down in anticipation of an attack, then stepping back.

No immediate danger. The middle figure was also down.

Song had adapted to what they had given her. She’d used both her swords, slicing as the man turned towards Tai. You could call it elegant, though there was a great deal of blood.

The last of the bandits turned, not surprisingly, to flee.

Unfortunately for him, his way was blocked by a rumpled, irritated-looking poet with grey hair untied and askew.

Sima Zian looked for all the world like one of the grotesque guardian statues placed by the doorway of a house or the entrance to a tomb, to frighten away demons.

“You took me from my first cup of wine,” he said grimly. “Let fall your weapon. Doing so offers you a small chance of living. Otherwise there is none.”

The bandit hesitated, then—evidently—decided that the “small chance” wasn’t real. He shouted what sounded like a name and hurtled full tilt towards the poet, blade swinging. Tai caught his breath.

He needn’t have bothered. He knew the tales, after all. Sima Zian had been an outlaw himself for years in the wild country of the gorges, and his sword—the single one he carried—was famed.

He sidestepped the wild charge, dropped, leaning away, and thrust out a leg. The running man tripped and