Guy Kay - Under Heaven

The commander gazed up at him. He didn’t look triumphant or vengeful, Tai thought. The man said, almost regretfully, “There are … eight of you? We have better than seventy men. Why would you wish to kill your Kanlins, or yourself? Do you not have tasks in the war upon us now?”

Tai shook his head, aware again of anger. He fought it. The man was telling only truth. Tai could kill a great many people with the wrong thing said or done here. Even so: “I have no task greater than stopping this. If you wish to move into that posting station, you will have to kill me and my guards, and deprive Kitai of two hundred and fifty Sardian horses.”

He was willing to play that card, too.

There was a short silence.

“If we must,” said the dui commander. “Eight more deaths will not change what is to come, along with however many of us fall, including myself. I don’t matter. I know enough to know that. And the horses are your duty, not ours. Stand aside, my lord. I am asking you.”

“Tai,” said Sima Zian softly, at his elbow, “they are not going to stop for you.”

“Nor I for them,” said Tai. “There comes a point when life is not worth enduring if one steps back.”

“I agree, Master Shen.”

A woman’s voice, from the open doorway to the posting station.

She had come out.

Tai turned and he looked at her. Their eyes met. He knelt, near the blood of her cousin where it was spreading on the porch. And, with a shiver, he saw that not only did his Kanlins also kneel, and the poet, but every soldier in the inn yard did the same.

The moment passed. The soldiers stood up. And Tai saw that the archers still held their bows, arrows to strings. It was only then that he accepted that this was going to happen and he could not stop it.

In part, because he saw in her eyes that she willed it to be so.

“Poet,” she said, looking at Zian with the mocking smile Tai remembered, “I still grieve that you chose to be ironic with your last verse about me.”

“Not more than I do, illustrious lady,” said Sima Zian, and Tai saw that he had not risen from his knees, and there were tears on his face. “You brought a shining to our time.”

Her smile deepened. She looked pleased, and young.

Tai stood up. He said, “Will the emperor not come? He can stop this, surely.”

She looked at him for what seemed a long time. Those in the courtyard were waiting, motionless. The posting station of Ma-wai felt to Tai as if it were the centre of the empire, of the world. All else, everyone else, suspended around it, unknowing.

“This is my choice,” she said. “I told him he must not.” She hesitated, holding Tai’s gaze. “He is no longer emperor, in any case. He gave the ring to Shinzu. It is … the right thing to do. There will be a hard war, and my beloved is no longer young.”

“You are,” said Tai. “It is too soon, my lady. Do not take this brightness away.”

“Others are taking it. Some will remember the brightness.” She gestured, a dancer. “Shen Tai, I remember sharing lychees with you on this road. I thank you for it. And for … standing here now.”

She wore blue, with small golden peonies (royalty of flowers) embroidered on the silk. Her hairpins were decorated with lapis lazuli and two of her rings were also of lapis, he saw. She wore no earrings that morning. Her slippers were silk, and golden, with pearls. He was near enough to tell that she had not left the Ta-Ming in the middle of the night without the scent she always wore.

Nor had she left without considering the Sardian horses at the border, and sending a messenger through the night city for the only man who could claim them for Kitai.

“You must let me go,” Jian said softly. “All of you.”

He let her go. He dreamed of it, and saw it in his mind’s eye waking, all the rest of his days.

He watched her turn, poised, unhurried, stepping lightly past her fallen cousin who had brought them all to this. She went down the steps alone—lifting her robe so it might not catch—and into the yard, and she went forward there, in morning sunlight now, to stand before the soldiers who had called her out to kill her. It was a dusty inn yard, filled with fighting men, not a place for silk.

They knelt. They knelt down again before her.

She is too young , Tai thought. In the room she had left, an old emperor and a new one remained out of sight. Tai wondered if they were watching. If they could see.

With mild surprise, he saw tears on Song’s face, too. She was wiping at them, angrily. He didn’t think she’d ever trusted or liked Jian.

Perhaps liking was without importance sometimes, with some people. The dancers, like summer stars. You didn’t say you liked a star in the sky.

He moved to the top of the steps leading down. He had no idea what he was doing, he was living inside sorrow.

Jian said, clear as a temple bell sounding across fields, “I have a request, dui commander.”

The officer was still kneeling. He looked up for an instant, then lowered his head again. “My lady?” he said.

“I would not like to die as my cousin did, to have arrows disfigure my body, or perhaps my face. Is there a man here kind enough to kill me without marring me? With … with a knife, perhaps?”

That faltering, her first since coming out.

The commander looked up again, but not directly at her. “My lady, such a man would be too clearly marked for death. It is not proper for me to name anyone in my company to that.”

Jian seemed to consider it. “No,” she said. “I understand. I am sorry to have troubled you with such a request. It was … childish of me. Do as you must, dui commander.”

Childish . Tai heard a footfall behind him. Then a voice by his side.

“I will do it,” said the voice. “I am marked in any case.”

The tone was precise. Not beautiful as a temple bell, but firm, no uncertainty.

Tai looked at his brother.

Liu was gazing at the commander in the yard, his posture and expression defining authority, a man accustomed to being heard without raising his voice. He wore his mandarin’s robe and a soft hat, and the belt and key of his rank, as always. The man he had served was lying in blood at his feet.

That was it, of course. Add Wen Zhou’s death to the emperor’s abdication, a new emperor for Kitai. Consider Liu’s position as the first minister’s principal adviser, and …

And you had this, Tai thought. Added to the other moments unfolding here one by one, a morning tale.

The dui commander nodded his head jerkily. He seemed, for the first time, overawed by what they’d set in motion. Not so as to falter (his soldiers would not allow it by now), but by the weight, the resonance of this.

Liu lifted a hand in a practised gesture. “One moment, then, dui commander, and I will be with you.” Jian had turned, was looking up at the two brothers. “My lady,” said Liu, and bowed to her.

Then he turned to Tai. “This needs to happen,” he said crisply, quietly. “I was the prime minister’s man. There is a price to be paid for a failure such as this.”

“Did you have anything to do with that order? Teng Pass?”

Liu looked contemptuous. Tai knew that look. “Am I such a fool in your eyes?”

“He never spoke of it?”

“He stopped seeking my counsel on some things from the time you returned to Xinan, Second Brother.” Liu’s thin, superior smile. “You might say your return caused all this.”

“You mean my failure to die at Kuala Nor?”

“Or Chenyao, if I understand it rightly.”

Tai blinked. Stared. Anger slipped away.

Liu’s smile also faded. They looked at each other, the sons of Shen Gao. “You didn’t truly think I had anything to do with that?”