Guy Gavriel Kay - Under Heaven

“Well, that’s true enough.”

Tai drank his wine.

“They think you used them? Tricked them?”

Tai was beginning to regret mentioning it. “I just understand them a little now.”

“And they don’t like that?”

“No. I’m not a Kanlin.”

“What are you?”

“Right now? I’m between worlds, serving the dead.”

“Oh, good. Be Kitan-clever again. Are you a soldier or a court mandarin, fuck it all?”

Tai managed a grin. “Neither. Fuck it all.”

Bytsan looked away quickly, but Tai saw him suppress a smile. It was hard not to like this man.

He added, more quietly, “It is only truth, captain. I left the army years ago, have not taken the civil service exams. I’m not being clever.”

Bytsan held out his again-empty cup before answering. Tai filled it, topped up his own. This was beginning to remind him of nights in the North District. Soldiers or poets—who could drink more? A question for the ages, or sages.

After a moment, the Taguran said, also softly, “You didn’t need us to save you.”

Outside, something screamed.

It wasn’t a sound you could pretend was an animal, or wind. Tai knew that particular voice. Heard it every night. He found himself wishing he’d been able to find and bury that one before leaving. But there was no way to know where any given bones might lie. That much he’d learned in two years. Two years that were ending tonight. He had to leave. Someone had been sent to kill him, this far away. He needed to learn why. He drained his cup again.

He said, “I didn’t know they would attack her. Neither did you, coming back.”

“Well, of course, or we wouldn’t have come.”

Tai shook his head. “No, that means your courage deserves honour.”

Something occurred to him. Sometimes wine sent your thoughts along channels you’d not otherwise have found, as when river reeds hide and then reveal a tributary stream in marshland.

“Is that why you let the young one shoot both arrows?”

Bytsan’s gaze in mingled light was unsettlingly direct. Tai was beginning to feel his wine. The Taguran said, “She was flat against the cabin. They were going to crush the life from her. Why waste an arrow?”

Half an answer at best. Tai said wryly, “Why waste a chance to give a soldier a tattoo, and a boast?”

The other man shrugged. “That, too. He did come back with me.”

Tai nodded.

Bytsan said, “You ran outside knowing they’d help you?” An edge to his voice. And why not? They were listening to the cries outside right now. And screams.

Tai cast his mind back to the desperate moments after Yan died. “I was running for the shovel.”

Bytsan sri Nespo laughed, a quick, startling sound. “Against Kanlin swords?”

Tai found himself laughing too. The wine was part of it. And the aftermath of fear remembered. He’d expected to die.

He’d have become one of the ghosts of Kuala Nor.

They drank again. The screaming voice had stopped. Another bad one was beginning, one of those that seemed to still be dying, unbearably, somewhere in the night. It hurt your heart, listening, frayed the edges of your mind.

Tai said, “Do you think about death?”

The other man looked at him. “Every soldier does.”

It was an unfair question. This was a stranger, of an enemy people not so long ago, and likely again in years to come. A blue-tattooed barbarian living beyond the civilized world.

Tai drank. Taguran wine was not going to replace the spiced or scented grape wine of the best houses in the North District, but it was good enough for tonight.

Bytsan murmured suddenly, “I said we had to talk. Told Gnam that, remember?”

“We aren’t talking enough? A shame…a shame Yan’s buried out there. He’d have talked you to sleep, if only to find a respite from his voice.”

Buried out there .

Such a wrong place for a gentle, garrulous man to lie. And Yan had come so far. Carrying what tidings? Tai didn’t know. He didn’t even know, he realized, if his friend had passed the exams.

Bytsan looked away. Gazing out a window at moonlight, he said, “If someone sent an assassin they can send another—when you get back or while you are on the way. You know that.”

He knew that.

Bytsan said, “Iron Gate saw them come through. They will ask where the two of them are.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“And they will send word to Xinan.”

Tai nodded. Of course they would. A Kanlin Warrior coming this far west as an assassin? That had significance. Not empire-shaking, Tai wasn’t important enough, but certainly worth a dispatch from a sleepy border fort. It would go with the military post, which was very fast.

Bytsan said, “Your mourning’s over, then?”

“It will almost be, time I get to Xinan.”

“That where you’ll go?”

“Have to.”

“Because you do know who sent her?”

He hadn’t expected that.

It was Xin Lun who suggested it to me . Yan’s last words on earth, in life, under nine heavens.

“I might know how to start finding out.”

He might know more than that, but he wasn’t ready to think about it tonight.

“I have another suggestion, then,” said the Taguran. “Two of them. Trying to keep you alive.” He laughed briefly, drained another cup. “My future seems to be bound up with yours, Shen Tai, and the gift you’ve been given. You need to stay alive long enough to send for your horses.”

Tai considered that. It made sense, from Bytsan’s point of view—you didn’t have to think hard to see the truth of it.

Both of the Taguran’s suggestions had been good ones.

Tai would not have thought of either. He would need to get his subtlety back before he reached Xinan, where you could be exiled for bowing one time too many or too few or to the wrong person first. He accepted both of the other man’s ideas, with one addition that seemed proper.

They’d finished the last of the flask, put out the lights, and had gone to bed.

Towards what would soon enough be morning, the moon over west, the Taguran had said softly from where he lay on the floor, “If I’d spent two years here, I would think about death.”

“Yes,” said Tai.

Starlight. The voices outside, rising and falling. The star of the Weaver Maid had been visible earlier, shining in a window. Far side of the Sky River from her love.

“They are mostly about sorrow out there, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“They would have killed her, though.”

“Yes.”

Tai recognized the guard above the gate; he’d come to the lake at least twice with the supplies they sent. He didn’t remember his name. The commander was named Lin Fong, he knew that. A small, crisp man with a round face and a manner that suggested that the fort at Iron Gate Pass was only a way station, an interlude in his career.

On the other hand, the commander had come to Kuala Nor a few weeks after arriving at the fort last autumn, in order to see for himself the strange man burying the dead there.

He had bowed twice to Tai when he’d left with the soldiers and cart, and the supplies being sent had remained completely reliable. An ambitious man, Lin Fong, and obviously aware, during that visit to the lake, of who Tai’s father had been. Traces of arrogance, but there was honour in him, Tai judged, and a sense that the commander was aware of the history of this battleground among mountains.

Not someone you’d likely choose as a friend, but that wasn’t what he was here to be at Iron Gate.

He was standing, impeccable in his uniform, just inside the gate as it swung open. It was just after dawn. Tai had slept through the first night travelling but had been awakened by wolves on the second. Not dangerously near, or hungry, as best he could judge, but he had chosen to offer his prayers for his father in the darkness and ride on under stars instead of lying on high, hard ground awake. None of the Kitan were easy with wolves, in legend, in life, and Tai was no exception. He felt safer on horseback, and he was already in love with Bytsan sri Nespo’s bay-coloured Sardian.