Under Heaven (9 page)

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.
They didn't sweat blood, the Heavenly Horses--that was legend, a poet's image--but if anyone had wanted to recite some of the elaborate verses about them, Tai would have been entirely happy to listen and approve. He'd ridden recklessly fast in the night, the moon behind him, borne by an illusion that the big horse could not put a hoof wrong, that there was only joy in speed, no danger in the canyon's dark.
You could get yourself killed thinking that way, of course. He hadn't cared, the pace was too purely intoxicating. He was riding a Sardian horse towards home in the night and his heart had been soaring, if only for that time. He had kept the Taguran name--Dynlal meant "spirit" in their tongue--which suited, in many ways.
Exchanging horses had been Bytsan's first proposal. Tai was going to need some mark of favour, he'd pointed out, something that identified him, alerted people to the truth of what he'd been given. One horse, as a symbol of two hundred and fifty to come.
Dynlal would also get him where he was going faster.
The promise of Sardian horses, to be claimed
only
by him, was what might keep him alive, induce others to join in tracking down those who obviously did not wish him to remain alive--and help Tai determine why this was so.
It had made sense. So also, for Tai, did his modification of the suggestion.
He'd written it out before they parted in the morning: a document conveying to Bytsan sri Nespo, captain in the Taguran army, his free choice of any three horses among the two hundred and fifty, in exchange for his own mount surrendered at need and at request, and in grateful recognition of courage shown against treachery at Kuala Nor, arriving from Kitai.
That last phrase would help the captain with his own commanders; they both knew it. Nor had the Taguran argued. He was clearly relinquishing something that mattered a great deal to him with the big bay horse. Moments after starting into the sunrise, running with the wind, Tai had begun to understand why this was so.
Bytsan's second suggestion had involved making explicit what might otherwise be dangerously unclear. The Taguran had taken his own turn with ink and paper at Tai's desk, writing in Kitan, his calligraphy slow and emphatic.
"The below-named captain in the army of Tagur has been entrusted with ensuring that the gift of Sardian horses from the honoured and beloved Princess Cheng-wan, offered by her own grace and with the lordly blessing of the Lion, Sangrama, in Rygyal, be transferred to the Kitan, Shen Tai, son of General Shen Gao, to him and to no one else. The horses, which presently number two hundred fifty, will be pastured and maintained ..."
There had been more, stipulating location--in Taguran lands near the border, close to the town of Hsien in Kitai, some distance south of where they were--and detailing the precise circumstances under which the horses would be handed over.
These conditions were designed to ensure that no one could compel Tai to sign instructions against his will. There were, in Xinan, men trained and often gifted in methods of inducing such signatures. There were others equally skilled in fabricating them.
This letter would go with Tai, be handed to the commander at Iron Gate to be copied, and the copy would proceed ahead of him by military post to the court.
It might make a difference. Might not, of course, but losing the empire those horses would very possibly cause any new assassin (and those who paid him, or her) to be hunted down, tortured for information, and creatively disembowelled before being permitted to die.
Tai had been aware, even as he rode east, and certainly now as he cantered Dynlal through the open gate of the fort and reined up before Lin Fong in the main courtyard, that a second assassin might be sent when word came back that the first one had failed.
What he had not expected was to see one waiting here at Iron Gate Pass, walking up behind the commander, clad in black and bearing crossed Kanlin swords in scabbards on her back.
She was smaller than the first woman had been, but with the same lithe movements. That walk almost marked someone as Kanlin. You learned those movements, even a way of standing, at Stone Drum Mountain. They made you dance there balanced on a ball.
Tai stared at the woman. Her black hair was unbound, falling to her waist. She had just risen from sleep, he realized.
Didn't make her less dangerous. He pulled his bow from the saddle sheath and nocked an arrow. You kept arrows and bow ready in the mountains, for wolves or the cats. He didn't dismount. He knew how to shoot from the saddle. Had been in the northern cavalry beyond the Long Wall, and had trained at Stone Drum after. You could find irony in that last, if you were in a certain state of mind. Kanlins were being sent after him. By someone.
The commander said, "What are you doing?"
The woman stopped, fifteen paces away. She had wide-set eyes and a full mouth. Given what she was, fifteen paces might be too close if she had a dagger. Tai danced his horse backwards.
"She's here to kill me," he said, calmly enough. "Another Kanlin tried, by the lake."
"We know about that," Commander Lin said.
Tai blinked, but never took his eyes from the woman. Moving slowly, she shrugged her leather straps off one shoulder and then the other, keeping her hands visible all the time. The swords dropped behind her into the dust. She smiled. He didn't trust that smile.
A crowd of soldiers had gathered in the courtyard. A morning adventure. There weren't many of those here at the edge of the world.
"How do you know about it?" Tai asked.
The commander glanced briefly at the woman behind him. He shrugged. "This one told us last night. She came pursuing the other. Arrived at sunset. Would have ridden on by night towards you. I told her to wait until this morning, that if something unpleasant had happened at Kuala Nor it would have done so already, since the others were days ahead of her." He paused. "Did something happen?"
"Yes."
The commander was expressionless. "They are dead? The fat scholar and the woman?"
"Yes."
"Both of them?" The woman spoke for the first time. Her voice was low but clear in the dawn courtyard. "I regret to hear it."
"You grieve for your companion?" Tai was holding in anger.
She shook her head. The smile had gone. She had a clever, alert face, high cheekbones; the unbound hair remained a distraction. "I was sent to kill her. I grieve for the other one."
"The fat scholar," Lin Fong repeated.
"The scholar was my friend," said Tai. "Chou Yan came a long way from the world he knew to tell me something that mattered."
"Did he?" The woman again. "Did he tell you?"
She stepped closer. Tai lifted a quick hand as he held the bow with the other. She stopped. Smiled again with that wide mouth. A smile from a Kanlin Warrior could be unsettling in and of itself, Tai thought.
She shook her head. "If I were here to kill you, you'd be dead by now. I wouldn't have walked up like this. You must know that."
"You might want questions answered first," he said coldly. "And you know that."
Her turn to hesitate. It pleased him. She'd been too sure of herself. At Stone Drum you were taught how to disarm a person with words, confuse or placate them. It wasn't all blades and bows and spinning leaps that ended with a kick to the chest or head and, often as not, a death.
His friend was dead, killed by one of these Warriors. He held that within himself, a hard fury.
Her gaze was appraising now, but not in the way the other woman's had been. She wasn't sizing him up for a fight. Either she was biding her time, at a momentary disadvantage, or she was telling the truth about why she was here. He needed to decide. He could just shoot her, he thought.
"Why would you be sent to kill another Kanlin?"
"Because she isn't Kanlin."
The fortress commander turned and looked at her.
The woman said, "She went rogue half a year ago. Left her assigned sanctuary near Xinan, disappeared into the city. Started killing for a fee, then was hired by someone, we learned, to travel here to do the same."
"Who hired her?"
The girl shook her head. "I wasn't told."
He said, "She was a Kanlin. She wanted to fight me, said the only reason she didn't was strict orders."
"And you think those orders could have been given to someone still serving the Mountain, Master Shen Tai? Really? You were at Stone Drum. You know better."
He looked from her to Lin Fong. The commander's expression was alert. This was all news to him, of course, and news was bright coinage this far west.
Tai really didn't want his life discussed in an open courtyard. She probably knew that, he thought. She had ignored his question about why she'd been sent here. That could be discretion, or a way to get him into a smaller space.
His life had been very simple, just a few days ago.
"The commander can have someone search me," she said in that low, crisp voice. It was as if she'd read his thoughts.
She added, "I have a dagger in my right boot. Nothing else. They can also tie my wrists so we can talk in a private place, with the commander present or not, as you wish."
"No," said Lin Fong, glaring. He wouldn't like a woman being so decisive. No military officer would. "I will be present. You do not set conditions here. You are both under my jurisdiction, and it seems people have been killed. I have questions of my own, there are reports to be filed."
There were always reports to be filed. The empire could drown in the reports that were filed, Tai thought.
The woman shrugged. Tai had the feeling she'd anticipated or even intended this. He needed to make a decision.
He sheathed his arrow and bow. Looked up to his right. The gap-toothed, balding guard was still on the wall, looking down. Tai gestured. "That one to look to my horse. Walk, water, feed him. I remember that he knows horses."
The man's expression of joy would have been gratifying, at any easier time.
HE HAD A FEW MOMENTS ALONE to wash and change his clothes. He switched from riding boots to brocaded slippers they provided. A servant--one of the border people serving the soldiers--took his clothing and boots to clean them.
It had occurred to Tai many years ago that one usually expected important decisions in life to emerge after long and complex thought. Sometimes this was so. But on other occasions one might wake in the morning (or finish drying one's hands and face in a dusty border fort) with the abrupt, intense realization that a choice had already been made. All that was left was putting it into effect.
Tai could see no clear pattern in his own life as to this. Nor was he able to say, that morning, why he was suddenly so sure of something.
A waiting soldier escorted him through two courtyards to the commander's reception pavilion at the eastern end of the compound. He announced Tai's presence and drew back a canvas flap that covered the doorway, blocking the wind. Tai walked in.
Lin Fong and the Kanlin woman were already there. Tai bowed, then sat with them on a raised platform in the centre of the room. He settled himself on a mat, crossing his legs. There was tea, unexpectedly, at his elbow, on a blue, lacquered tray decorated with a painting of willow branches and two lines from a poem by Chan Du about willow trees. The pavilion was sparely decorated.
It was also more beautiful than any space Tai had entered in two years. There was a pale-green vase on a low side table behind the commander. Tai stared at it for a long time. Too long, probably. His expression, he thought wryly, was probably something like the soldier's on the wall had been, looking down at the horse.
"That is a very fine piece of work," he said.
Lin Fong smiled, pleased and unable to hide it.
Tai cleared his throat and bowed at the waist without rising. "Untie her, please. Or don't bind her on my account."
Folly, on the face of it. He was alarmingly certain it wasn't.
He looked at the woman, who had been carefully trussed at both ankles and wrists. She was sitting placidly on the other side of the platform.
"Why?" Commander Lin, however happy with a compliment to his taste, evidently didn't like making adjustments.
"She isn't about to attack me with you here." He'd realized this while washing his face. "The Kanlins exist because they can be trusted, by both court and army. They have lasted six hundred years because of that. But that trust is badly damaged if one of them kills the commander of a military fort, or someone under his protection. Their sanctuaries, their immunity, could be destroyed. And besides, I think she's telling the truth."
The woman smiled again, large eyes downcast, as if the amusement was private.
"The commander could be part of my plot," she said, looking down.
In the intimacy of the room, out of the courtyard wind, her low voice was unsettling. It had been two years since he'd heard this sort of voice, Tai thought.
"But he isn't," he said, before Commander Lin could express outrage. "I'm not important enough. Or I wasn't, before."
"Before what?" the other man said, distracted from whatever he'd been about to say.