FROM CHUWAN’S PERSONAL DIARY
[1162.07.20]
Upsetting day. More so than usual, which says a lot. I was ambushed as I was leaving the Halls of Justice. It was dark—I’d stayed late doing busywork, the details of which have been entirely purged from my mind. I was walking past that row of peony bushes that line the path and litter it with slippery flowers. A white hand shot out and seized my wrist. Of course I screamed, and a second hand clamped itself over my mouth. My mind went blank. I was sure I was going to be murdered. So much for all that Tensorate training! When it came to the crisis point, all I’d learned was for nothing. I couldn’t open my mindeye. I couldn’t see the Slack. All I could think was “I can’t die now.” I froze up like a fawn in the talons of a naga. No—worse, actually. At least fawns kick.
The person who grabbed me was a woman, broad-shouldered and dressed like a worker. She didn’t introduce herself at first, and in my panic, I thought she was a demon, a jiangshi, the angry spirit of one of the institute dead, come to take revenge. Wild thoughts consumed me.
She asked, “Are you Tensor Chuwan Sariman?” In my fear, I couldn’t think of a lie that would save my life, so I nodded like a damn fool.
Her name was Cai Yuan-ning, and her brother Cai Yuanfang had died in the institute. I remembered his name. He had been the youngest member of the staff, a mere twenty-four.
The madness I saw in Yuan-ning was not a devouring inferno of vengeance, untamable by reason. Rather, it was a furnace—desperation burning bright and terrible, driving her forward. “Your report is wrong,” she kept saying. When I pressed her about what she meant, she said, “There’s more you don’t know.”
How naive did she think I was? I was frankly insulted she thought she needed to tell me this. By that time, I had calmed down a little, but not entirely. And in that dangerous zone—the heartbeat-sharp floodplain between animal panic and cold rationality—I decided she was worth questioning anyway. “So, tell me. What do you have that I don’t?”
She got nervous then, licking her lips, struggling for words. I could see her regretting the choices she’d made coming here. But she had my attention, and I wasn’t going to let her go so easily. “What did you come to tell me?”
She leaned toward me. “Did you read my brother’s letters? Did you see what we discussed?”
I told her there were no letters. No journals, no personal writings from any of the staff. I told her the Tensors who swept the institute found nothing. “Either they were destroyed, or someone else took them.” Foul lies. I am rock-certain that the Tensorate was hiding these letters from all of us.
“No letters? That’s not possible,” she said.
I grabbed her hand. “Tell me what was in those letters. You must have kept the ones he sent you. Where are they?”
She tried to pull away. I tightened my grip. The tides had turned: now I was the hunter, and she the soft morsel in flight. I assailed her with questions. What had her brother told her? What did he know? Had he seen something that shouldn’t have been there?
“I’m sorry, I don’t know,” she stuttered. “Please, don’t kill me.”
Her words jarred me out of the fit I’d fallen into. I wasn’t going to hurt her—what an absurd thought!—but she didn’t know that. She was a peasant, and peasants are raised to fear Tensors. I should know: I used to be a peasant too.
Guilt slapped me. I was fighting her when we should have been natural allies.
This dive into decency cost me. The moment I spent feeling remorse undid my focus, and Yuan-ning took full advantage. She jerked from my grasp and ran.
I shouted after her. She sped up in panic, fleeing down the white stone of the path. But then something happened that I swear must have been decreed by the fortunes: I fell. I tripped over something on the ground, but there was nothing there. And maybe I can blame my bad nerves, but I’ve never fallen like that in my life—ever!—so why would I start now?
By the time I regained my footing, Yuan-ning was gone. Which was just as well, because two guards arrived, alerted by my shouting. They were very concerned. If Yuan-ning had been there still, she would have been arrested on the spot. As it was, I told the guards that I had been startled by a cobra slipping into the grass. Searching for it kept them occupied for long enough.
I don’t know where Yuan-ning went. I don’t know what she wanted to tell me. Idiot. If only I’d stopped to listen.
I came home and drank half a bottle of rice wine and lost myself to sleep for an entire sun-cycle. Of course I had another strange dream. This time, the ghost my mind chose was Yuwen, my roommate from the Academy. I haven’t thought about her in years: a fussy, watery girl with thin wrists and no convictions. She was saying, over and over, as she poured red liquid into a cup, “Things will go where they like. But you can change the flow.” What the fuck did that mean?
The sun has come and gone since I woke from that dream, and those words are still looping in my mind like a siren. Like the call of the gravesent birds that wake me at first sunrise every morning.
I keep running the encounter with Cai Yuan-ning through my head, and I can’t shake the thought that her sudden appearance—and fortuitous getaway—are connected to these strange dreams I’m having. It makes no literal, material sense, but every time I think of one and then the other, something clicks pleasingly into place in my mind. Maybe it’s instinct at work here, or all the years I’ve spent picking puzzles apart. My unconscious mind sees patterns before my rational self notices them.
Or maybe I’m being sent a message. Maybe something or someone is telling me that the investigation is not done yet. Some kind of bizarre, unknowable slackcraft is being used to plant ideas and images in my head, to manipulate the fabric of the world so that strange things keep tumbling into my path. But who would be capable of doing this, and what do they want? Whose side are they on?
I just reread that entire last paragraph. It sounds like the ravings of a madwoman. And that madwoman is me.
Time for more rice wine, I think.
[Some hours later]
Mad as it is, I can’t shake that line of thought. I think I know what I must do.
I’ll never get peace otherwise.