Guy Gavriel Kay - River of Stars

He was startled, again. Stared at her.

“She is a disgrace,” Yu-lan went on. “An offence to decent women. She offered to teach our daughter to write poetry!”

“What? I did not know this.”

“They met at a banquet. Ti-yu told her that poetry was no proper thing for a woman. The other one, this Lin Shan, laughed at her.”

“I did not know this,” he said again.

“And now … now she writes a letter that sends catastrophe to us!”

That wasn’t entirely true, Kai Zhen thought, but his sleek, glittering wife had taken another step. Light fell upon her now.

“Indeed,” was all he managed to say.

“Leave this to me,” Yu-lan murmured. Meaning, he realized, many things.

With those words she had come right up to him, not so much smaller that it was difficult for her to draw his head down with her slender hands. She bit his lip, the way she often did when they began. Often, she drew blood.

“Here, wife? In our reception chamber?”

“Here. Now. Please, my lord,” whispered his wife in his ear. Her tongue touched him. Her hands became busy, with him, with his clothing.

Please, my lord . Across the courtyard, young and beautiful concubines, bodies washed and scented for him, were wailing for the fate that had overtaken all of them. The autumn light came into the room through the western windows. It had become late afternoon. It would be cold tonight in Hanjin.

KAI ZHEN WOKE. It was dark. He realized he’d fallen asleep among the scattered pillows. He tried to rouse himself. He felt languid, eased. He had scratches on one arm. He felt them on his back as well.

He heard a bird singing, a thin sound in the cold. The concubines were silent now. Yu-lan was gone. He knew what she had left him to do. She was making a mistake and he knew that, too. He just didn’t feel he could do anything about it.

He was an immensely assured man, competent, calculating, subtle. There were only two people alive he felt he could not control.

His wife, and an old, almost-blind man.

He stood up, adjusted his clothing. The room needed lamps lit. The one bird continued to sing, as if bravely denying the cold of the world. He heard a discreet cough from a doorway.

“Yes, enter,” he said. “Bring light.”

Three servants came in, carrying tapers. They would have been waiting outside the chamber. They’d have stood there all evening if necessary. He was—he had been—on the cusp of being the most powerful man in Kitai.

One of the servants, he saw it was his steward, was holding a lacquered tray, standing just inside the room. Kai Zhen nodded. The sorrows of the day descended upon him again, but he would not hide from them. He opened the sealed letter on the tray, read it by the light of a lamp, lit now, on his writing desk.

He closed his eyes. Opened them.

“Where is my lady wife?” he asked.

“In her chambers, my lord,” his steward said. “Shall I request her presence here?”

There was no point. He knew her. It was done by now.

Two people in the world. Yu-lan. And the old man who had written him this letter.

The day gone, the evening, the night to come. The bird outside, he thought, was not brave or gallant. It was foolish, beyond words. You couldn’t deny the coldness of the world just by singing.

He didn’t know a great deal about them, they had been gone from the world for two hundred years or something like that, but Sun Shiwei often thought he’d have liked to be a Kanlin Warrior.

He’d have trained with them, wearing black, at their sanctuary on Stone Drum Mountain, now lost to Kitai, part of the surrendered Fourteen Prefectures.

He’d have done whatever rituals they did, slept with the women warriors among them (hard, lithe bodies!), been taught their secret ways of killing people.

He was good at that, killing people, but only a fool would believe there weren’t ways to be better, and from what he’d always understood, legend and story, the Kanlins had been the best. They’d been couriers, emissaries, witnesses to treaties, custodians of documents and treasures, guides and guards … many things.

The killing part was what he liked, though. A shame they were gone. A shame there were no proper records. They’d never written anything down, the Kanlins. That was part of what made something a secret. Stood to reason.

He’d have liked to be able to run right up a wall and onto a roof. Who wouldn’t like that? Leap down into a courtyard and knife someone who thought they were safe in their compound because the doors and windows were barred and the walls high. Then up another wall and gone before an alarm could even be raised.

“It was Sun Shiwei!” the terrified whispers would run. “Who else could have done this? The doors were locked!”

He’d have liked that.

It was necessary to stop these drifting thoughts. He was on a mission, he had a task.

It was dark inside the compound of the imperial clan. The compound might be big, but it was also crowded. Everyone complained in here. It wasn’t Sun Shiwei’s task (or his inclination) to assess the living conditions of the emperor’s kin, but it did help him that many people continued to mill about between individual residences and courtyards in here, even after darkfall.

They went in and out, too. None of the compound gates was closed yet. Mostly it was younger men slipping out. It was formally forbidden but generally allowed, except when there had been trouble. They went in search of wine and girls, mostly. Sometimes to dinner parties at the houses of friends in the city. Women were brought in here, and musicians. The guards at the four gates weren’t especially concerned, as long as their share of whatever coins were changing hands was forthcoming.

All the better for him, of course. He’d come in with a group of giggling girls. Had even managed to feel up one or two of them. Got a saucy laugh from one. He couldn’t afford those women, of course—not the kind that got invited here. For the Sun Shiweis of the world, a squeeze through silk was as good as it got with courtesans of this class.

He’d been in the imperial compound before, knew his way around. He’d escorted his employer and her daughter to women’s gatherings, remained inside to take them back. He’d used the opportunities to get his bearings, in case he ever needed them. In case this evening ever came. He was skilled, even if he couldn’t scale walls on the run or do some sacred, mystical spinning movement that killed four people at once. He could probably manage three if he had a wall at his back, Shiwei thought. He wouldn’t have kept his job if he wasn’t good. His employer was exacting. She was hard and cold, chary with anything resembling praise, and disturbingly desirable.

He’d had many nights awake, truth of it, imagining her coming to him in the dark, slipping inside, closing the door quietly behind her, her scent in his own small room … There was fire inside her, he was sure of it. Some things a man could see.

Man could also get himself cut in half, sharing that sort of thought anywhere.

His thoughts seemed to be running away again. What happened when you had to wait in shadows for too long. He was in a covered passage between courtyards, dressed for a chilly night (part of being good at your job), and had an excuse prepared if anyone stopped to ask. They were unlikely to do that here. People came and went. The imperial clan was honoured, after a fashion, sequestered and kept track of, but ignored in almost every other way—unless they made trouble. In that case they were often killed.

Far as Shiwei was concerned, not that anyone had ever asked, they could all be drowned or used for archery practice, and Kitai would be better off. The clan cost the empire a huge amount of money every year, everyone knew it. Some of the women he’d keep, maybe. Aristocratic women had their own way of being, and he liked it, what he’d seen.