Guy Gavriel Kay - Under Heaven

And so, speaking formally now, almost invisible in the room, a voice in blackness, she said, “I was instructed to convey to you the respect and the humble greetings of the newest concubine in the household of the illustrious Wen Zhou, first minister of Kitai.”

He closed his eyes. Spring Rain.

It had happened. She had thought it might. She had talked to him about it. If Zhou offered the demanded price to her owner, whatever it was, Rain would have had essentially no choice. A courtesan could refuse to be bought by someone privately, but her life in the North District would be ruined if she cost an owner that much money, and this was the first minister.

The sum offered, Tai was quite certain, would have been more than Rain could have earned from years of nights spent playing music for or slipping upstairs with candidates for the examinations.

Or slipping towards loving them.

He was breathing carefully. It still didn’t make sense. Neither his brother nor the first minister had had any reason to want—let alone need—Tai dead. He didn’t matter enough. You could dislike a man, a brother, see him as a rival—in various ways—but murder was extreme, and a risk.

There had to be something more.

“There is more,” she said.

He waited. He saw only an outline, the shape of her as she bowed again.

“Your brother is in Xinan. Has been since autumn.”

Tai shook his head, as if to clear it.

“He can’t be. Our mourning isn’t over yet.”

Liu was a civil servant at court, high-ranking, but he would still be whipped with the heavy rod and exiled from the capital if anyone reported him for breaching ancestor worship, and his rivals would do that.

“For army officers mourning is only ninety days. You know it.”

“My brother isn’t…”

Tai stopped. He drew a breath.

Was all of this his own fault? Going away for two years, sending no word back, receiving no tidings. Concentrating on mourning and solitude and private action shaped to his father’s long grief.

Or perhaps he’d really been concentrating on avoiding a too-complex world in Xinan, of court, and of men and women, dust and noise, where he hadn’t been ready to decide what he was or would be.

Autumn? She’d said autumn. What had happened in the fall? He had just been told today that…

There it was. It fit. Slid into place like the rhyme in a couplet.

“He’s advising Wen Zhou,” he said flatly. “He’s with the first minister.”

He could see her only as a form in the dark. “Yes. Your brother is his principal adviser. First Minister Wen appointed Shen Liu as a commander of one thousand in the Flying Dragon Army in Xinan.”

Symbolic rank, symbolic soldiers. An honorary palace guard, sons of aristocrats or senior mandarins, or their cousins. On display, gorgeously dressed, at parades and polo matches, ceremonies and festivals, famously inept in real combat. But as a way to shorten mourning with military rank, to bring a man you wanted to the capital…

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

Tai realized he’d been silent a long time.

He shook his head. He said, “It is a great honour for our family. I am still not worth killing. Wen Zhou has power, and Spring Rain is his now. My brother has his position with him, and his rank, whatever it is. There’s nothing I could do—or would do—about any of this. There is another piece here. There has to be. Do you…did Rain know anything more?”

Carefully, she said, “Lady Lin Chang said you would ask me that. I was to tell you that she agrees, but did not know what this might be when she learned of the plot to have you killed, and sent for a Kanlin.”

Lin Chang?

She wouldn’t have a North District name any more. Not as a concubine in the city mansion of the first minister of the empire. You weren’t called Spring Rain there. He wondered how many women there were. What her life was like.

She’d taken a tremendous risk for him. Hiring her own Kanlin: he had no idea how she’d done it. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to figure out who might have sent this woman after the other if…

“Perhaps it is best you didn’t reach me in time,” he said. “There’s no easy way to trace you back to her now. I found and hired you on the road. The assassin was killed by Taguran soldiers.”

“I thought that, as well,” she said. “Although it is a mark against my name that I failed.”

“You didn’t fail,” he said impatiently.

“I could have somehow found out, come straight here.”

“And given her away? You just said that. Kanlin honour is one thing, foolishness is another.”

He heard her shift her feet. “I see. And you will decide which is which? Your friend might be alive if I’d been quicker.”

It was true. It was unhappily true. But then Rain’s life would be at risk.

“I don’t think you are meant to talk to me that way.”

“My most humble apologies,” she said, in a tone that belied them.

“Accepted,” Tai murmured, ignoring the voice. It was suddenly enough. “I have much to think about. You may go.”

She didn’t move for a moment. He could almost feel her looking towards him.

“We will be in Chenyao in four or five days. You will be able to have a woman there. That will help, I’m sure.”

The tone was too knowing for words, a Kanlin trait he remembered. Wei Song bowed—he saw that much—and went out, a creaking of the floorboards.

He heard the door shut behind her. He was still holding the bed linens to cover his nakedness. He realized that his mouth was open. He closed it.

The ghosts, he thought, a little desperately, had been simpler.

Some decisions, for an officer accustomed to making them, were not difficult, especially with a night to consider the situation.

The commander of Iron Gate Fort made clear to his guest from Kuala Nor that the five guards being assigned to him were not to be seen as discretionary. His premature death, should it occur, would be blamed—without any doubt—on the incompetent fortress commander who permitted him to ride east with only a single (small, female) Kanlin guard.

In the courtyard, immediately after the morning meal, the commander indicated, courteous but unsmiling, that he was not yet ready to commit an ordered suicide and destroy the prospects of his children, should a tragic event overtake Shen Tai on the road. Master Shen would be properly escorted, military staging posts would be made available to him so that he might spend his nights there on the way to the prefecture city of Chenyao, and word of the horses—as discussed—would precede him to Xinan.

It was possible that the military governor would wish to assign further soldiers as escorts when Shen Tai reached Chenyao. He was, naturally, free to make his own decision about sending the five horsemen back to Iron Gate at that time, but Commander Lin presumed to express the hope he would retain them, having come to see their loyalty and competence.

The unspoken thought was that their presence, entering into the capital, might be some reminder of the priority of Iron Gate in the matter of the horses and their eventual safe arrival, one day in the future.

It was obvious that their guest was unhappy with all of this. He showed signs of a temper.

It might have to do, Commander Lin thought, with his having been solitary for so long, but if that was it, the man was going to have to get out of that state of mind, and the quicker the better. This morning was a good time to start.

And when the Kanlin guard also made clear that she could not be held accountable for guarding Shen Tai alone, especially since the Sardian horse he himself was riding was so obvious an incitement to theft and murder, the late general’s son acceded. He did so with—it had to be admitted—grace and courtesy.