The Embers of Heaven (37 page)

“Backup is always better,” one of the newcomers said. “Lead the way.”

One of the Temple’s own
, thought Amais, mourning. It had been one of the Temple’s own, a novice, by her garb, who had done this—who had committed the sacrilege against the ancient burners, had spilled blood on this sacred ground.

The young one turned, vanished through the gate into the Fourth Circle, and the rest followed. Amais waited for another moment, but nobody else came; shedding the concealing altar cloth, she raced over to where Jinlien’s blood was already pooling by the cooling incense burners, already slowly dying, losing their immortal fire.

“Amais…” Jinlien said, her eyes only half open, her breathing shallow, her hand red with her own blood where she held it pressed against her chest. “Oh, Gods, that I should… see this happen…go… be safe… they will return…”

Amais dropped to one knee beside her, her eyes full of tears. “What can I do…?”

Jinlien’s eyes flickered towards the burners and then closed with a pain that was far more profound than the merely physical. “It is already too late,” she said. “Go. Go now…”

She did not open her eyes again. Perhaps she could not bear to, could not die with her last sight being those beautiful ancient things she had so lovingly cared for all of her days in this place fading into nothingness, could not bear the sight of so much that was so unconditionally beautiful being destroyed simply because it existed. The shallow breathing slowed, became quieter, was stilled. The hand that Amais held in her own became limp.

From somewhere else in the Temple Amais could clearly hear the roar of fire, a fire that had taken hold, that was already out of control.

“May your path to Cahan be gentle,” she whispered over Jinlien’s lifeless body. In a way this would be like a grand old funeral of ancient times—and Jinlien would cross into Cahan with these incense burners, and they would all live again on the other side, in the gardens of the Gods. It seemed fitting.

Amais bent to place a gentle farewell kiss on Jinlien’s brow, and stumbled to her feet and then raced back the way she had come. If she had had any intention of finding her way back to the abandoned second tier teaching room where she had been hiding—where Xuelian’s journals still were—she quickly realized that this was no longer possible—there was a fire behind her, and people, possibly Golden Wind, in front of her. Sparing one anguished thought for the loss of those notebooks, touching with grateful fingers the embroidered handkerchief that she had managed to save, the instructions for finding Xuelian’s treasure still sharp in her mind—Amais ducked sideways into another doorway, out of the Second Circle, into the back of the Temple and its vegetable plots and chicken coops. There was commotion here, too, but by this stage nobody was paying too much attention to anyone else. Nobody challenged or stopped her; she found the outer wall, an unguarded door, ajar from where someone else had undoubtedly made their escape this way. She slipped outside, into the street, and plunged into the warren of streets behind the Temple.

Eight

No pictures had ever been sanctioned by the Temple of the inside of the Tower, the heart of the Great Temple, the earthly home of the Lord of Heaven—only those who had been there knew what it felt like to walk on that holy ground, to feel the cool smoothness of marble under one’s bare feet, to breathe in the air scented with the costliest and rarest of incenses, to see the flames of the holy fire dancing in the stone bowl of the highest altar, always carefully tended, always burning, in respect to the God. Those fortunate people sometimes described the experience to others. But for the invaders, the children of the Golden Wind who had been born in war and raised in revolution, such accounts had never been either interesting or necessary. They knew nothing of the intricacies of the layout of this innermost Temple, nothing of its meaning or of its intent—they did not want to know. All they knew was that it was a symbol—perhaps, next to the living Emperor of Syai, the most powerful of symbols. It
was
the old Syai.

Perhaps it might have survived longer—perhaps it might even have survived intact—if the Emperor and his family had not been slaughtered, and thus the first real and substantial link in the chain to the past been broken by it. Iloh’s reforms had certainly not been illusory and his Syai was very different from that of the old Emperors—but while the Emperor lived, while any who bore that blood breathed, that ancient land lived and breathed with him. Now the Emperor was gone, and there had been no retribution. The Golden Wind, maddened by its actions, the lack of censure by anyone at all and Shou’min Iloh’s tacit and, as they saw it, continuing approval, escalated its impulse to devastate and destroy—and the Great Temple stood squarely in their path.

They burst into the Tower, their shoes still sacrilegiously on their feet, their torches in their hands, led by the novice acolyte who had broken with her past and had chosen the now of the Golden Rising over the future of the promise of Cahan. A barked command saw them split up into groups, going from gate to gate, throwing down the nine small altars that guarded the entrances to this place, three to a gate; they smashing the oil lamps on the three inner altars, the oil spilling like blood, the flames licking down the oozing oil which took the fire across the stone floor, pouring itself across the stone flags until it reached the base of the wooden stair that led to the catwalk which ringed the tower. It pooled there, the tiny tongues of flame licking at the wood until it started to char, to smolder—but the invaders had already turned their backs on that, and had converged, all of them, on the central altar and its holy flames.

One of the three Tower priests, the youngest, was up on the catwalk by the great brass bell that hung there, rung every noon by these priests, the holy duty passed from one generation of the God’s people to another. He could see the fire spreading in the Temple room below. The catwalk was wooden, and would burn—was already burning. There was no way out of this for the priest by the bell, no way down, no way of surviving. He looked, and understood. Closing his eyes, he reached for the rope that rang the bell, and pulled it, over and over and over again, a knell, chanting quiet prayers for his soul and the souls of others who would cross to Cahan on this day.

The remaining two Tower priests stood at bay there, with quarterstaves in their hands, but they had been frozen into shock by the vandalism, brazen and without the least regard to their own presence, in this holiest of shrines. One of them collected himself so far as to call out, his voice surprisingly firm given the expression of blank and bewildered astonishment on his face

“Stop!” he cried, raising his staff.

One of the Golden Wind shot him point blank.

Even as he crumpled, and the other priest dropped his staff and, covering his face in either terror or shame, ran from the place, the leader of the Golden Wind group was thrusting his sacrilegious torch into the holy fire in the bowl, scattering the embers to the far walls.

“Make him stop,” he commanded, having to raise his voice to a shout above the deep booming echo of the ringing bell.

A couple of his companions emptied out their guns at the priest in the Tower, but the bullets went wide, deflected by the great swinging bell. A few of them finally resorted to other, more primitive, methods when the modern weaponry failed, and shoved their own burning torches, this time deliberately, against the wooden railings and stairs of what parts of the catwalk were within their reach.

“It won’t take long,” one said to the leader, wiping his hands on the seat of his trousers.

“Down with old customs and traditions!” the leader shouted, brandishing his torch high. “We will build a monument to the revolution on the ashes of this place! Long live Shou’min Iloh!”

Down with the old…

They retreated, then, leaving death and chaos in their wake, pulling back across the quiet serene calm that had been the Fourth Circle, torching altar cloths of ancient silk and to the altars themselves, those that had been carved of sandalwood and ebony and cedar. Back, through the gardens, some of them lingering there to touch the fire to the helpless fruit trees and ornamental shrubbery. Many of the Temple people had fled before this onslaught, shedding their robes and any other thing that could identify them as ever having been a part of this place—but, curiously, it was these gardens that drew most of those that remained to a rally in their defense. The Golden Wind cadres killed without thought the women and the serene old men who had stood their ground in the Temple gardens, protecting some particularly beloved or ancient tree that had featured in generations of Temple teaching tales. But they fell, and their blood spattered the walls of the inner Temple, soaked the raked sands of the meditation gardens, murked up the carp pools. Some of the Golden Wind people had come armed with more than guns or knives—a few of the brawnier amongst them had brought axes, and used them to hew, indiscriminately and viciously. The axes were there to bring down altars and statues and anything inanimate and old and holy that was too hard to break by hand—but the living limbs of the old willows and the summer-crowned green cherry and plum and peach trees which lent these gardens their ethereal beauty with their delicate white and pale pink blooms in springtime were targets just as tempting, if not more so. Whole limbs of trees were hewed off, and left where they fell; deep hacks were made in the trunks of most, ensuring that their chances of survival were almost nonexistent even if they managed to retain a spark of life in the inferno.

The Golden Wind cadres sang while they did their work. Songs of revolution that told of fire and then of rebirth. They destroyed the things they believed stood in the path of their rising again, washed clean in the blood of the revolution, re-enacting in every word and every deed a belief in one of the oldest legends of their race, the bird of rebirth, the phoenix which immolated itself only to begin again, young and new.

Down with the old…

Dozens of bodies littered the colonnade and the upper terrace of the Third Circle—the acolytes and priests who had been devoted to the deities which had once reigned here, the Rulers of the Four Quarters and other gods of Early Heaven. Their Gods had not protected them, and they had not protected their Gods; the place was strewn with the rubble of broken masonry, shattered idols, scattered implements for the mysteries of the sand paintings and various arcane things that were required—had been required—for worship in this Circle. A coppery smell of fresh-spilled blood lingered in the air, mixed with twenty different kinds of incense all burning together, and the more pungent smell of scented wood altars beginning to really catch the flames.

The Second Circle was always the most populous one, being the cheapest one to buy into with a simple offering to a simple god or spirit, dealing with everyday problems one request at a time. There were more bodies here, some of them Temple people;, others simply devotees who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time—women, children, twisted limbs, staring eyes. Here an old woman lay prostrate before a desecrated niche; there a bewildered three-year-old survivor insistently pulled at the sleeve of her dead mother, begging to go home. Whimpers from survivors trying to crawl through the outer gates to any kind of safety at all, wails from the lost and the hurt and the abandoned, moans from the wounded and the dying—all mixed with the sound of the singing as the Golden Wind went about its work, coldly and methodically. Those that stood in their path—no matter if that was done as a deliberate act or was an appalling accident of ill fortune—were simply swept away.

The Second Circle niches had been emptied of their Gods and their offerings—all of them—the spirits of Later Heaven as well as those mortal souls who had been granted status there, the generations of Emperors, the Holy Sages. The niche of Nhia, once
jin-shei
to Empress and to a poetess of Syai, the woman who rose from beginnings every bit as humble as the revolution might have demanded to become a power in her land, was only one among many—an axe-scarred hole in the wall. The Golden Wind could spare no thought to making exceptions. Nhia, like all of her Holy Sage companions, was part of the old, simply by virtue of being enshrined here in this place—therefore she was obsolete, with nothing left to give to the new Syai. The Golden Wind had no time to ponder the wasteland that this sweeping mandate to destroy was leaving of their history and their culture, leaving their country’s past an uneasy, empty void, tearing up their own roots and cheering as the young leaves of a future yet unborn withered on the branch.

And the flames were here, too, licking in from the Third Circle, and from the First, too, where the booths had been indiscriminately put to the torch.

Amais could see it all, sense it all, by the physical senses given by the Gods, with her mind’s eye full of vision. Even as she paused in her headlong flight to turn around and look behind her, the Tower of the Lord of Heaven was pouring smoke into the sky, and open flames licking up high enough above the walls of the Inner Circles for Amais to see them from where she stood.

Fire had a sound—a rumble, a thunder, not so much heard as sensed through the air, through the tremble of the ground beneath one’s feet—an animal-like roar, something primal and visceral that stripped the veneer of civilization from a person just as easily as it melted lacquer off a painted door, laying bare before destroying. What churned in Amais was indescribable, inchoate, all of her outer layers burned away, the raw core of her exposed to the flames. She did not know what to do with this—she could not move, could not think, stood staring at the inferno with the pupils of her eyes dilated with shock, almost obliterating their color, leaving two huge black holes in her face. She had blood on her clothes and her hands—not hers, Jinlien’s; her hair was falling out of its braid, curling wildly around her face and her neck; her face was streaked and smudged with dirt, soot and blood; the roar of the fire obliterated all other sound. She was aware of nothing else, nobody else, only those flames, only the sight and sound of those flames, nothing inside or outside of her except fire. Broken open; scoured clean.

It took a stinging slap across her face to bring her awareness of the world back to the human level, the everyday world, the place where other people shared the air that she breathed. One of those other people was speaking to her, asking impatiently, and apparently not for the first or even the second time, her business in that place.

Amais registered the uniform, the yellow armband, the thunderous scowl on her assailant’s face—but she was slow to react. Too slow. Through air that felt like molasses, she started to turn, to refocus, to open her mouth to speak, but before she could do any of those things another slap flung her head back, sent her disheveled hair snapping across her face.

“I said, what are you doing here?” the cadre snarled.

“I was…” Amais began, and then hear another voice cut in—a voice vaguely familiar, firm, just sufficiently humble to appease but not so humble as to be fawning.

“Please,” that voice said—a man’s voice, calm and measured, matching the firm hand that descended on Amais’s arm and gave it an imperceptible warning squeeze. “She is with me.”

“What is she doing out here?” the cadre demanded suspiciously. “Look at her—she is no bystander. Her clothes and her face betray her.”

“She was in the Temple, with her child… She escaped, as you see. But the child…the child is still in there, Somewhere. Please, forgive her, she is a mother grieving.”

“The Party is our mother,” said the cadre, shifting a gun in his free hand. “Get her out of here,
ximin
. This was the retribution of the Golden Wind—let your wife be proud that her child is now one of the martyrs of the Golden Rising. Long live Shou’min Iloh!”

“Come,” the man whispered into Amais’s ear. “Quickly.”

She had recognized him by then, remembered him—the man with the sword, the one whom she had collided in the Linh-an’s deserted streets only a couple of nights before. Xuan, from the house with the blue roof in Siqaluan Street, at the back of the Temple. She bent her head and followed him, without question; she could feel, and from the increased pressure of his fingers on her arm she knew he did too, the weight of the cadre’s suspicious stare on the two of them as they walked away, until they rounded a corner, slipped out of sight.