Guy Gavriel Kay - Under Heaven

Yan felt like a hero. He was a hero. He’d had a nosebleed earlier, from the altitude, but you didn’t have to talk about that. He only wished his tidings weren’t so grave. But then he wouldn’t be here, would he, if they weren’t?

Tai bowed twice, formally, hand in fist. His courtesy was as remembered: impeccable, almost exaggeratedly so, when he wasn’t in a fury about something.

Yan, still on horseback, smiled happily down at him. He said what he’d planned to say for a long time, words he’d fallen asleep each night thinking about. “West of Iron Gate, west of Jade Gate Pass / There’ll be no old friends.”

Tai smiled back. “I see. You have come this long distance to tell me poets can be wrong? This is meant to dazzle and confound me?”

Hearing the wry, remembered voice, Yan’s heart was suddenly full. “Ah, well. I suppose not. Greetings, old friend.”

He swung down stiffly. His eyes filled with tears as he embraced the other man.

Tai’s expression when they stepped back and looked at each other was strange, as if Yan were a ghost of some kind himself.

“I would not ever, ever have thought…” he began.

“That I would be one to come to you? I am sure you didn’t. Everyone underestimates me. That is supposed to confound you.”

Tai did not smile. “It does, my friend. How did you even know where…?”

Yan made a face. “I didn’t think I was coming this far. I thought you were at home. We all did. They told me there where you had gone.”

“And you carried on? All the way here?”

“It looks as though I did, doesn’t it?” Yan said happily. “I even carried two small casks of Salmon River wine for you, given me by Chong himself there, but I drank one with your brother and the other at Iron Gate, I’m afraid. We did drink to your name and honour.”

The ironical smile. “I thank you for that, then. I do have wine,” Tai said. “You will be very tired, and your companion. Will you both honour me and come inside?”

Yan looked at him, wanting to be happy, but his heart sank. He was here for a reason, after all.

“I have something to tell you,” he said.

“I thought that must be so,” his friend said gravely. “But let me offer water to wash yourselves, and a cup of wine first. You have come a long way.”

“Beyond the last margins of the empire,” Yan quoted.

He loved the sound of that. No one was going to be allowed to forget this journey of his, he decided. Soft? A plump, would-be mandarin? Not Chou Yan, not any more. The others, studying for the examinations, or in the North District laughing with dancing girls as a spring day waned, listening to pipa music, drinking from lacquered cups…they were the soft ones now.

“Beyond the last margins,” Tai agreed. All around them, mountains were piled upon each other, snow-clad. Yan saw a ruined fort on an isle in the middle of the lake.

He followed his friend into the cabin. The shutters were open to the air and the clear light. The one room was small, trimly kept. He remembered that about Tai. He saw a fireplace and a narrow bed, the low writing table, wooden ink-block, ink, paper, brushes, the mat in front of them. He smiled.

He heard Wan-si enter behind him. “This is my guard,” he said. “My Kanlin Warrior. She killed a tiger.”

He turned to gesture by way of proper introduction, and saw that she had her swords drawn, and levelled at the two of them. His instincts had been dulled by solitude, two years away from anything remotely like blades pointed towards him. Keeping an eye out for wolves or mountain cats, making sure the goats were penned at night, did nothing to make you ready for an assassin.

But he’d felt something wrong about the guard even as Yan had ridden up with her. He couldn’t have said what that feeling was; it was normal, prudent, for a traveller to arrange protection, and Yan was sufficiently unused to journeying (and had enough family wealth) to have gone all the way to hiring a Kanlin, even if he’d only intended to go west a little and then down towards the Wai.

That wasn’t it. It had been something in her eyes and posture, Tai decided, staring at the swords. Both were towards him, in fact, not at Yan: she would know which of them was a danger.

Riding up, reining her horse before the cabin door, she ought not to have seemed quite so alert, staring at him. She had been hired to get a man somewhere, and they’d come to that place. A task done, or the outbound stage of it. Payment partly earned. But her glance at Tai had been appraising, as much as anything else.

The sort of look you gave a man you expected to fight.

Or simply kill, since Tai’s own swords were where they always were, against the wall, and there was no hope of notching arrow to bowstring before she cut him in two.

Everyone knew what Kanlin blades in Kanlin hands could do.

Yan’s face had gone pale with horror. His mouth gaped, fish-like. Poor man. The drawn sword of betrayal was not a part of the world he knew. He’d done something immensely courageous coming here, had reached beyond himself in the name of friendship…and found only this for reward. Tai wondered what his tidings were, what had caused him to do this. He might never know, he realized.

That angered and disturbed him, equally. He said, setting the world in motion again, “I must assume I am your named target. That my friend knows nothing of why you really came here. There is no need for him to die.”

“But there is,” she said softly. Her eyes stayed on him, weighing every movement he made, or might make.

“What? Because he’ll name you? You think it will not be known who killed me when they come here from Iron Gate? You will have been recorded when you arrived at the fortress. What can he add to that?”

The swords did not waver. She smiled thinly. A beautiful, cold face. Like the lake, Tai thought, death within it.

“Not that,” she said. “He insulted me with his eyes. On the journey.”

“He saw you as a woman? That would have taken some effort,” Tai said deliberately.

“Have a care,” she said.

“Why? Or you’ll kill me?” Anger within him more than anything now. He was a man helped by rage, though, steered towards thought, decisiveness. He was trying to see what it did to her. “The Kanlin are taught proportion and restraint. In movement, in deeds. You would kill a man because he admired your face and body? A disgrace to your mentors on the mountain, if so.”

“You will tell me what Kanlin teachings are?”

“If I must,” Tai said coolly. “Are you going to do this with honour, and allow me my swords?”

She shook her head. His heart sank. “I would prefer that, but my instructions were precise. I was not to allow you to fight me when we came here. This is not to be a combat.” A hint of regret, some explanation for the appraising look: Who is this one? What sort of man, that she was told to fear him?

Tai registered something else, however. “When you came here? You knew I was at Kuala Nor? Not at home? How?”

She said nothing. Had made an error, he realized. Not that it was likely to matter. He needed to keep talking. Silence would be death, he was certain of it. “They thought I would kill you, if we fought. Who decided this? Who is protecting you from me?”

“You are very sure of yourself,” the assassin murmured.

He had a thought. A poor one, almost hopeless, but nothing better seemed to be arriving in the swirling of these moments.

“I am sure only of the uncertainty of life,” he said. “If I am to end here by Kuala Nor and you will not fight me, will you kill me outside? I would offer my last prayer to the water and sky and lie among those I have been burying. It is not a great request.”