Under Heaven

was approaching. You called it chaos.”

“I did.”

“I think you are right. I think it is almost certain.”

“And you want to do something? That is what troubles you? Shen Tai, we need to remember what we are, our limitations.”

And so Tai did end up saying, after all, what he’d been thinking (or trying not to think). “I could have killed him. In the carriage. He is not young. He is in great pain, all the time. I had my knife. Do you understand? I was there, and I listened to him speak and I thought: this is what I must do! For the empire. For all of us.” He looked away. “I have never had such a feeling in my life.”

“Well, you spoke of killing someone, while we rode.”

He had. He’d meant Xin Lun. “That was about Yan’s death. A response. This was different. It felt as if I owed Roshan’s death, and my own, to … to everyone else. That it was required of me. Before it is too late.”

He saw that he’d disturbed the other man, finally.

“What does he intend?”

“He’s left Xinan, going back northeast. His son has already gone. He feared remaining in the city. Says Wen Zhou was forcing him. He has Xin Lun’s letter. It shows the first minister tried to kill me.”

“Will anyone believe it?”

“I think so. Roshan has people, including the Gold Bird Guards, who saw that Zhou had Lun killed. Because he knew too much.”

He had never seen the poet look like this. “He went northeast to do what?”

Tai just looked at him.

“You’d have been killed immediately,” Zian said, finally. “Surely, you know it.”

“Of course I do! Sometimes you have to accept that, don’t you? Isn’t that what courage is? In a soldier? I think I was a coward, today.”

Tai drained his cup again.

The poet shook his head. “No. Ending a life, two lives that way? And other people on that road. You weren’t ready to pretend to be a god.”

“Perhaps. Or I wasn’t ready to accept my own death. Offer it. It might have been that.”

The poet stared at him. Then said:

Full moon is falling through the sky.
Cranes fly through clouds.
Wolves howl. I cannot find rest
Because I am powerless
To amend a broken world.

Sima Zian added, “I love the man who wrote that, I told you before, but there is so much burden in Chan Du. Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea we can know what must be done, and do it properly. We cannot know the future, my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it always, always is.”

Tai looked at him and then away, across the room.

Wei Song had gone. He didn’t know where. The music continued. It was very beautiful.

PART THREE

CHAPTER XV

He woke from another dream that escaped him, slipping away like a salmon from his childhood grasp in a cold river. Awareness of morning came.

It was not a dream of a fox-woman, not this time. No desire, no sense of desire spent. Instead, wistfulness, loss, as if something, someone, was leaving, was already gone, like the dream itself. A path in life, a person, a shape to the world? All of these?

I am powerless to amend a broken world.

It occurred to him, still half asleep, that the way Chan Du had phrased that celebrated grief, it suggested other worlds than this. Others that might need mending—or amending. The two words were not the same, Tai thought, though they glided into each other, in the way the best poetry did.

Then that thought, too, fled from him as a rapping came at his door, and Tai understood that he had heard it already, asleep, that it was the knocking that had awakened him, sending the dream away down the river of night with the moon.

He glanced over. The second bed was empty, had not been occupied—as usual, although the poet’s manner had been sombre when Tai had left him after their talk last night.

Wei Song and two of the soldiers had been in the courtyard when he’d crossed it to go to bed. They’d walked him to the door of his room. It was clear they were going to stay outside. Three guards now. Roshan had warned him to be cautious. Tai hadn’t told that to Song but she’d made changes anyhow. He’d said nothing, not even a good night.

Another knocking. Not imperative or demanding. But it was also—he knew this from the courtesy of that sound—not his Kanlin summoning him.

From outside came a voice, carefully pitched, exquisitely cultured: “Honourable Shen Tai, be so gracious as to acknowledge a humble servant’s presence and request.”

Tai sat up in bed. “You haven’t made any request, and I don’t know whose presence I am acknowledging.”

“I bow twice in shame. Forgive me, noble sir. My name is too unworthy to be offered. But I am entrusted with the office of second steward in the household of the Shining and Exalted Companion. You are invited to present your honourable self.”

“She is here?”

The steward said, with the faintest hint of asperity, “No, no, she is at Ma-wai. We are sent to bring you there, with all courtesy.”

Tai began dressing very quickly.

It was beginning. You could say it had begun by Kuala Nor, when Bytsan sri Nespo had brought him a letter. Or at Chenyao, when the governor of the Second and Third Military Districts had sought to claim him and his horses, had even sent a daughter to him at night. A sign, in silk, of what might come.

You could say there never was a clear beginning to anything in life, unless it was the moment you drew your first breath in the world.

Or you could say it was beginning now.

Because the Shining and Exalted Companion was also called Precious Consort and Beloved Companion, and her name was Wen Jian. The court hadn’t waited for him to get to Xinan. It had come for him.

He splashed water on his face at the basin. Tied his hair hastily and then did it again to marginally better effect. Rubbed his teeth with a finger. Used the chamber pot. Put his swords on, his boots.