Tsun-ju Jian, the pearl diver’s son, became Daechen Jian in the four hundred and ninety-ninth year of Illumination, during the reign of Daeshen Tiachu. The emperor’s historians maintain that under his golden fist the rivers flowed with milk and honey. Jian would later recollect that the rivers—and the streets, and the walls—ran not with milk and honey, but with blood.
The emperor bade his people rejoice and so they had, flocking to the city in twos and tens and by the hundreds, a shrieking mad-eyed mass of humanity pooling about Khanbul, staking out territories, posturing, breeding and eating and making a mess of the place until the tenth day of the Feast of Flowering Moons. On the eleventh day, the hung-over, penniless, and exhausted population abandoned Khanbul. They threw salt and worried looks over their shoulders as they hurried away, and with good reason. On the twelfth day, the emperor would hunt. Any citizen-slave too sick, or old, or drunk to flee—and there were always a few—would disappear on that day, never to return.
Or so the stories claimed. The son of a Bizhanese pearl diver had never really believed. Daechen Jian soon would.
“It was a fine, fat harvest this year.” Xienpei informed them over bowls of golden rice and salted fish. “The Yellow Palace will be filled to bursting.” One of the lashai ladled tea into a tiny porcelain cup and offered it to her, bowing low. She accepted the cup without acknowledging the servant’s existence, the last two fingers of each hand tipped delicately away from her face as she breathed in the heady fumes.
“When will we be moving to the Yellow Palace?” Perri accepted his tea and glanced up at the servant with a smile, and then flushed and looked away. “Now that our… now that the commoners have all left, there is nothing for us to do here but rattle around in the walls and fight.” The boy was slight for his age, and his round yellow eyes were even stranger than Jian’s. Jian had stepped in when he found Perri cornered by a pair of pig-farm boys from Hou, and the smaller boy had dogged his heels ever since.
Naruteo scowled. He was taller than any boy there save Jian, and muscled like an ox. Naruteo had grown up in Huan, close to Khanbul, and considered the rest of them to be far beneath him.
“We will leave when the emperor wishes us to leave, and not a sandspan earlier.” Peasant, his eyes added.
Xienpei laughed, displaying every gem-studded tooth in her head. “The emperor does not know you exist, little Daechen. Nor does he care. You are less than ants in the shadow of a dragon.”
“When will we leave, then?” Jian asked. “If it please you, Yendaeshi.”
Xienpei favored him with a nod. “When we have separated the dirt from the wheat, and then the wheat from the chaff, those who remain will be allowed to move on to the Yellow Palace.”
“Not all here are Daechen.” Naruteo did smile, then, and his flat eyes reminded Jian of a snake’s. “And not all Daechen are worthy. Most of you will not make it.”
Some of the other boys shifted and muttered, exchanging worried glances. Jian caught Naruteo’s gaze and held it, but addressed his words to their yendaeshi.
“What happens to those who are not chosen? Will they be allowed to return home?” The room stilled at that, and most eyes turned toward Xienpei, some worried, others hopeful.
Xienpei reached out one long, lacquered fingernail and touched the pearls at Jian’s neck. “Your mother is tsun-ju, is she not? A pearl diver?”
Jian nodded, wary.
“Does every oyster she finds contain a pearl?”
“It would be nice if every oyster had a pearl in it, but most do not. Some have sand, or pebbles.”
“Or nothing.”
He nodded.
“What of the pearls? Are they all as fine as these?” She tapped his necklace again.
“No, Yendaeshi.”
“Ah, so those lesser pearls, what happens to them? Does your mother return them to the sea?”
Jian shifted, uncomfortable as the other boys began to stare at him. Perri was white as a gull, and Naruteo smirked into his tea.
“No,” he answered at last. “She sells them at market.”
Xienpei nodded and sat back. “So. Some will be used to make jewelry, and some will be sewn into clothing, or used to decorate masks. Or given to a small boy to play with.”
Jian stared at her, the tea he had drunk curdling in his belly like sour milk.
“Others will be ground into powder and used in medicines, will they not, Daechen Jian?”
“Yes, Yendaeshi.” He wanted to vomit.
“Every pearl your mother finds belongs to the emperor. Every pearl serves a purpose, even if that purpose is to become something less than what it thinks it is. So.” She set her cup down with a clack for emphasis, and the lashai hurried over to fill it.
Xienpei turned her head and looked deliberately at the gray servant, and then back to Jian. Her smile was kind, but her eyes cruel as a hawk’s.
“Even if that purpose is to be ground into dust.”
* * *
That night Jian dreamed that giant hands strung him on a fine thread with hundreds of other pearls, as his mother began to pluck them loose and, one by one, drop them into a mortar. She was humming under her breath as she worked, and as her hands worked their way closer and closer Jian found himself unable to move, or call out, or do anything at all to save himself.
Then came the day of winnowing.
It began well before dawn. Jian was roused by one of the ubiquitous pale servants and ushered from his room still yawning and rubbing his eyes and wishing for some hot tea and a toothbrush. The hallway was packed with other boys, shuffling and jostling one another, some of them demanding to know what was happening to them. He was reminded, uncomfortably, of goats in a meat pen.
They were herded through the halls, down the stairs, and outdoors, trotting along barefoot and packed shoulder-to-shoulder, chest-to-back, a sea of yellow silk, bobbing dark heads and frightened eyes. The yendaeshi emerged from the lower rooms, carrying long poles with hooked blades at either end, some with merry faces and some looking grim. Jian saw Xienpei poke a boy back into place with the end of her staff, laughing, and was not reassured.
Finally they were marched and prodded and jogged into a large square and allowed to stand in place, steaming in the cool morning air. Jian juggled from foot to foot, grimacing at the cold hard ground and rubbing his arms as he looked around. He recognized this place. During the Feast of Flowering Moons, it had served as a marketplace for meat animals and child slaves.
Someone tugged at his sleeve. He looked down to see Perri, dancing from foot to foot and shivering. “I do not like this.”
“Hsst.” Jian warned. “Neither do I.”
The yendaeshi had been all friendly smiles and kind words before this day, though Jian had suspected them of a darker motive. On this morning each was resplendent in a silken robe of deepest gold, with a stooping black hawk upon the breast and the snowy white bull of the emperor embroidered across the back. The hooked staves they carried were put to good use, striking out here at a face, there at a leg, until the boys were huddled together like livestock in truth, and no few of them bled or wept in fear.
“Stay close,” Jian whispered.
Naruteo stood a bit in front of them and off to one side, dressed in silks that made Jian feel shabby in comparison. He turned to stare at Jian and Perri, and drew one finger slowly across his throat. Then he dismissed them utterly, squaring his shoulders and turning to face what was to come.
Never before that day had Jian felt so vulnerable, as if he were but one of a thousand fish in a bait ball waiting to be picked off by the sharks. He glanced at Perri, shivering in wide-eyed fear beside him, and for the first time in his life caught the peculiar burned-sweat scent of fear.
That decided him. His heart might be racing, but he did not have to meet his fate cowering like a rabbit in a snare. He would bring honor to his mother’s name, though he felt like a rabbit wearing the wooden mask of a sea-bear.
“Hsst,” he whispered to Perri, and gave him a sharp nudge with his elbow. “Courage.”
Perri stared right through him, mouth trembling. Courage, he mouthed back. He dropped his skinny arms to his side and clenched his fists.
Then the seven gates of Yosh opened, and there was no more time for courage.
Doors slid open all around them, silent as mouths, and disgorged an army of lashai. Each gray-clad, white-faced servant bore a tray of steaming cups, and the sharp tang of bitter tea washed toward them. Jian felt his stomach clench, and his gorge rise. Whatever was in those cups, he did not want to drink it.
Xienpei looked over her shoulder at him as if she had heard the thought. Her eyes were lit with amusement and her red lips curled in a cruel smile. She covered her mouth with a dainty hand and winked at him before turning back to witness the spectacle.
The lashai drifted closer, so smoothly they seemed to float on a current of air, bearing the enormous trays as if they weighed nothing. They reached the edge of the crowd of wide-eyed boys, and held up their trays, and waited.
The bald man who had been laughing with Xienpei spoke. His voice was surprisingly deep, and powerful enough that it bounced off the walls surrounding them. “Each of you take one cup,” he said, “only one. And drink.”
No one moved.
“Now.”
The lashai pressed closer, and one boy reached out toward the trays. His hand hovered for a moment before snatching a cup. Then he brought it to his mouth, hand shaking so hard Jian could see it from such a distance, and drank.
Nothing happened.
The boy made a face, shook his head a little, and returned the cup with a grimace. The boys to his left and right began reaching out for their cups and downing the contents as well. Some of them made a face or gagged at the taste, but that seemed to be the worst of it.
“Maybe it is some sort of ceremony?” Perri whispered under his breath. Jian remembered Xienpei’s smile, and shook his head fractionally.
“I think not.”
The first rank of boys was peeled aside by the yendaeshi with their hooked poles, so that the second rank could drink, and the third, and the fourth. By the time the lashai reached the middle ranks, where Jian stood ready, the first boys had begun to look pale. Jian took the cup with his fingertips, trying to tell himself that it was dragonmint tea, nothing more. As he brought the cup to his lips and the scent hit him full in the face his whole body disagreed and he hesitated. He tried to make eye contact with the lashai, but those brown eyes were half-lidded and empty—there was nothing there at all. Those eyes frightened him more than whatever was in the tea.
Xienpei stood behind him, her lips at his ear. He had not seen her move.
“Drink,” she said. Her breath was hot and smelled of mint, and Jian could see the flash of metal as she brought the wicked curved blade of her staff to rest against his cheek. “Drink. If you spit out so much as a drop, I will gut you like a fish.”
Jian drank. From the corner of his eyes, he saw Perri do the same. Naruteo reached for the tray almost eagerly and shot them a look of spite as he tossed his drink back and dropped the delicate cup, and then he crushed it with his bare foot.
Xienpei chuckled and removed her blade. “Courage,” she mocked. Then she was gone.
I am Tsun-ju Jian, he told himself, son of Tsun-ju Tiungpei, the pearl diver of Bizhan. I have braved deep waters and sharp teeth. I have seen the face of shongwei. In my veins flows the blood of the Issuq…
One of the first boys to drink the tea dropped to his knees with a shout, a cry that became a gargling shriek as he bent over double and began to vomit bright splashes of red upon the gray cobblestones. Another succumbed, and another. The air grew thick with the smell of sickness and blood and panic. There was a commotion off to one side as a boy near the walls tried to break away and flee. Jian watched in horror as two of the lashai took his arms and a third grabbed him by the jaw and forced him to drink. Though the boy struggled and screamed, the three pale servants were no more moved than adults holding onto a small child, and their faces remained as blank and still as smooth waters.
This scene was repeated over and again as someone tried to escape or to fight back, and always with the same result—a boy defeated, sometimes bloodied, with his belly full of tea and his eyes full of fear. One boy, a larger youth that Jian recognized with a shock as one of the pig-farm boys from Hou, thrashed his head from side to side and howled, fighting the servants who held him down. The noise was cut abruptly short as one of the yendaeshi stepped forward. The bladed staff licked forward and down like a lizard’s tongue and opened the pig-boy’s belly like a sack of grain, then up again and sidewise across his throat. Red bloomed against yellow silk, like a dream poppy in a field of buttersweet, and the boy fell forward to thrash in a spreading pool of his own blood and entrails.
Two more boys met similar fates as the lashai and yendaeshi swept through the ranks subduing, dosing, and occasionally butchering boys as they went. As they were finishing up, Jian felt the first pangs in his gut, pains like those he had experienced once after eating the wrong kind of eel.
It is not so bad, he thought as the pain bloomed and receded first in his gut, then in his chest, and finally in his kidneys before starting up in his gut again. Not so bad. I can handle this.
Then the pain had its way with him.
One time, when he was very small, Jian had pattered down the moons-lit path from his mother’s house to the sea. The gulls were calling to him, and the waves, and the low and mournful voice of some great beast far out to sea, lifting its head above the waters to sing for him. It sang of loneliness, and need, and of home far away. Little Jian had waded into the sea in search of the song’s owner, and the sea had claimed him.
The tide had been cold, unflinching, an unnatural greedy mouth that sucked at his feet, his legs, and finally opened to swallow him whole. Jian would remember for the rest of his life how it felt to be sucked in and rolled about by the water, end-over-end with his arms and legs flailing like an abandoned rag doll, utterly without control.
Now, as Jian fell to his knees and then toppled to his side, boiling from the inside out as if he had swallowed a cup full of sea nettles and slag, he was gripped by the same feeling of helplessness. He would die, or he would not die, and there was nothing he could do about it either way.
The cool rock felt good against his cheek. He smelled blood and shit and death, and he smelled the bilious stink of the thick black stuff he retched up. People were screaming, people were dying, but the stone was cool and quiet, so Jian pressed closer and closed his eyes with a sigh.
He heard the creaking of heavy wooden wheels, very near, and footsteps hurrying back and forth, so close he was kicked and tripped over any number of times. The pain came in like the tides, advancing and receding, advancing and receding, taking small bits of him away with every wave. During one of the moments of relative calm he had enough left of himself to wonder whether Perri had died, and whether he would die as well, alone on the stones with vomit in his hair. But he could not rouse himself to care.
Soon enough the pain claimed the last of him, and he was gone.
* * *
Eventually the pain came to an end. It was not a sudden end, a shock of bliss and blessed numbness, and neither was it a fading end like sunlight gone to the moons. It was a violent end, full of death and anger as the pain tried to keep its claws in him, to take one more bite, to wrest one more scream from his bloody throat.
As soon as Jian understood that he was screaming, he stopped. His had been the last voice. No one else screamed, or wept, or moaned. It seemed as if his harsh and labored breathing, the pounding of his heart, and the scrape of his fingernails against stone were the last sounds in the world.
Then something grunted, and snuffled, and grunted again. Jian could hear the sound of claws dragging along the ground. Hot breath seared his face and wet flesh touched his skin. Jian tried to recoil, to cry out, to escape, but the best he could manage was a shadow-thin wail as his eyes cracked open.
His vision wavered and danced as if he stood behind a waterfall in the dim light, and what he saw made no sense. Golden slippers and gray, a forest of slippers, soaked in blood and worse. Standing between the slippers and his face was a smallish creature in a golden harness, some breed of tusked dog, or maybe a kind of pig. It had thick, wiry-looking gray hair, and a long naked tail like a rat’s, and a long flat snout with curling flat tusks that clacked and gnashed together as it peered at him with round, bright eyes. It nuzzled his face again with a flat, wet pink nose, and squealed, and wagged its tail, as pleased with itself as a lady’s lap-dog that had just learned a new trick.
“Dahwal, Jinjin, good girl.” Jinjin, if that was indeed the creature’s name, whipped its tail back and forth so hard the hindquarters danced along with it. “This one is Daechen. And,” the voice sounded surprised, “it is awake.”
Gray slippers glided close. Hands grasped Jian under the arms and hauled him upright until he stood, supported by a pair of the lashai. He swayed and would have collapsed had they not been holding him upright, yet the servants—both considerably shorter and slighter of build than he—seemed to bear his weight without effort.
“Ah, young master Jian.” Xienpei’s face swam into view. Jian felt a shudder run through him, and the servants gave him a shake that set his head lolling to the side. “I am so pleased to see you alive. And awake. I am claiming this one,” she added to someone behind her. “I have the sea things this turn and this boy is pure Issuq. Look at those eyes.”
She turned back to him. Something glittered in her hands. “Hold him still,” she snapped to the servants who bore his weight. “I will not have him damaged.” She stepped close, so close he could smell the sandalwood and cinnamon of the oils she used in her hair, and something cold touched the side of his face. He would have pulled away if he could, but it was all Jian could do to breathe in and out, in and out. There was a kachunk, and fresh pain blossomed in his ear, but it was a small and warm kind of pain, almost comforting after all he had been through.
His mouth tasted of bile, and bitter herbs, and of blood. Jian tried to spit, wishing he could get away from the taste and the horrors of the day, wishing he had the strength to spit into the round and smiling face of the yendaeshi. But his tongue felt thick, and his mouth would not work properly. The best he could do for now was drool disgustingly down the front of his ruined yellow silks.
“Charming.” Xienpei laughed, a sweet and girlish sound that made the hairs prickle at the back of Jian’s neck. “Strip him, wash him, make him presentable,” she told the lashai. “Daechen Jian will be riding back to the palace with me.” Her smile was honey and poison. “I have plans for this one.”
The servants half-led, half-dragged him across the market square. He stumbled over the stones, and his own feet, and once he stepped on an outstretched hand. It was cold underfoot and did not move, and as Jian slipped and staggered through the bloody ruin he realized that he was crying.
This is what it means to be a Prince of Khanbul, he thought, weeping. A Prince of the Forbidden City. How his mother would tear her hair to see him now. How the bullies of Bizhan would laugh to see Daechen Jian, blessed by the emperor himself. He did not stop weeping as they stripped the silks from his body and threw them in a growing pile of gold and yellow rags that had been the finest clothing of a thousand young men.
Jian tried to pull free from their hands as they led him to the wash racks that had served to bathe meat animals before they were sold, but they were too strong. He stood as little chance against his handlers as a yearling steer.
In the end he stood stripped of clothing and pride as they dumped buckets of cold salted water over his head, over and over again, and the tears continued to wash down his cheeks as they scrubbed him with handfuls of salt and sand, dried him with less care than the butcher might show a slab of meat, and rubbed scented oils into his skin. One of them pried his mouth open and scrubbed his mouth out with something that tasted of mint but stung his cheeks and tongue where he had bitten them earlier. Strangely, this new pain, and the throbbing in his earlobe, helped him to gain control of the sobs that wracked his body. The tears still spilled over, now and then, but he was no longer heaving and gasping like a child.
Other boys were dragged and carried over for much the same treatment. They were stripped, scrubbed, dried and oiled like so many redjaw during a spawn. Jian saw Naruteo being carried by three of the lashai, and to his relief he recognized Perri as they dragged him past, limp and bloodied but apparently alive. None but Jian were awake, however, and as he looked around he realized that the boys being washed and laid aside represented only a small fraction of those who had drunk the tea.
“Where are the others?” he asked. His voice was a broken whisper. “The other boys… where are they? Where have they gone?”
He hardly expected the lashai to answer. They never had, before. One of them turned his head—or her head, it was hard to say—and some strange emotion flickered behind those dull eyes. Jian thought that behind its impassive mask, the lashai was laughing at him. It lifted one hand, slowly, and pointed.
It was then that Jian saw the covered wagons. There were a score of them, or more, enormous things crudely fashioned from dark wood and bound in iron, each pulled by a team of surly-eyed, stub-horned ghella. All in a line and facing the gates, they were piled high and covered with ugly brown sacking. Jian’s gut clenched and he would have been sick again, had there been anything left to sick up.
Beneath the covers, something was moving. Some things were moving, and Jian knew what those cloths concealed, just as clearly as if he had seen them beaten and cut and tossed like offal upon the carts. As if he had put them there himself.
The carts began to roll, drivers swearing and shouting and cracking their whips over the heads of the sullen ghella with no more concern that they would have shown had they been hauling barrels of salted meat. They rolled through the gate one by one as an oily black smoke began to rise somewhere in the distance, and Jian could no more stop the wagons and save those boys than he could stop the trembling in his legs, or save himself.
The lashai stared. Jian dove deep, deep into the cold depths of his terror, and there he found a perfect black pearl, big as the last joint of a man’s thumb. A prince’s courage. He closed his fingers about the pearl. It was warm to the touch, and smelled of the sea. In the back of his mind he heard the gulls cry, and his mother singing as she mended the nets. He surfaced, looked into the servant’s dead eyes…
And smiled.
It was a small gesture of defiance, a candle against the dark night, but later Jian would remember that moment and think, That is when it really began.
The lashai turned and led him away from the wagons. His defiance spent, Jian sagged with relief at that and nearly stumbled over his own feet. They walked across the stones and through a small doorway tucked away in one corner. He found himself in a plain room of gray-and-white stone. A long, low counter ran along one wall and a bench along the opposite. Jian swayed dangerously on his feet and the lashai pushed him to sit on the bench before picking up a small brass bell from the counter and ringing it, startling him with the pretty little sound.
A small door opened and a young woman stepped into the room. She stopped and blinked at the sight of Jian.
“Ah,” she said. “You have brought me a live one. How… unusual.”
Jian was painfully aware of his nudity. The bench was cold, and he fought not to weep. He was finished with weeping, with feeling like a mewling babe exposed to the elements and left to die. Unfortunately, it seemed, the world was not finished with him.
The lashai only waited. The girl began pulling wrapped bundles off the shelves, never once looking at Jian. Each package was shown to the lashai, and then the girl would make a mark on the rice paper wrapping and set it aside in a growing pile. Jian watched it all from a great distance, and wished he dared lie down on the bench and sleep. He was so weary, and so tired of being frightened, and the thought occurred to him as he watched the girl and the lashai that if by killing them both he might make an escape, he would do so.
At long last the girl turned to him and snapped her fingers. “You,” she said, “stand.”
He tried to obey, tried and failed. How had he thought to kill them and make an escape? His strength, as his defiance, had come to an end.
“I cannot.” His voice was raw, his eyes were raw, and tears began spilling down his cheeks again.
The girl stared and for a moment her face went slack with pity. Then she glanced at the lashai, set her mouth, and shrugged before reaching for one of the larger bundles. She unwrapped it as she crossed the room, set it on the bench next to him, and pulled him to his feet. The room lurched dangerously.
“Stand,” she told him again, and he found that he could. Barely.
She dressed him as if he were a child, or a corpse to be laid out for burial. Yellow silk again—Jian found that he had come to loathe the sight of it—a long robe, fine in quality and make but plain and unadorned, falling well past the knees. Black silk trousers, loose through the leg and gathered at the ankle, and tall boots of pressed felt with upturned toes and leather soles. A shorter robe of sheer black spidersilk went over all, and a wide belt that tied at the back.
When she had finished the girl stood before him, fussing with the belt and the lay of the cloth. Jian glanced at the lashai. The gray servant seemed indifferent. Still, he kept his voice low.
“What is this? What is happening?”
She would not meet his eyes.
“Do you know?” He caught her arm. “Please tell me. Please.”
She shrugged away from his grip and shot him a look that mixed anger and fear and guilt in equal measure. “I cannot say.”
“Please.”
“I cannot say.” She put her hand against his chest and gave him a little shove, so that he staggered backward and half-sat, half-fell upon the low bench.
The girl turned to the lashai and bowed low. “He is finished. I will have the rest sent up to the Yellow Palace.” She barely waited for the servant’s nod before turning to flee through the door by which she had entered.
The lashai looked down at Jian with mocking eyes. When it turned to leave he staggered to his feet and followed, defeated.
* * *
Xienpei was waiting for them.
“Leave us,” she said. The servant bowed and walked away without a backward glance. Xienpei turned to Jian and smiled. “Let me look at you. Up and walking about as if nothing had happened. Oh, these are yours.” She reached into the pocket of her robe and drew out Jian’s necklaces of jade, and amber, and pearl, and looped them over his head. None of it felt real. “Come, walk with me. It will help move the tsai-si through your blood.”
A tremor passed through Jian, and he thought his legs would collapse from beneath him. Xienpei put her hand on his shoulder to steady him, and then took his arm and led him away. The market square was dotted with kneeling servants, each with a bucket and brush and paddle, washing away every trace of the day’s events. He realized with fresh horror that this place was the scene of such slaughter every year, this place he had visited with his mother time and again to buy honeyed ice from the mountains and laugh at the fools’ plays. He should have known. Somehow, he should have known. Next year, in the very place he had fallen, people would laugh, and flirt, and bid on livestock, and watch the jugglers…
“Is it not a beautiful day?” Xienpei’s eyes were bright, and her jeweled smile blinding. “Come, come, I want you to see something.” Together they crossed the square and walked through the gates, which had been flung wide and left unguarded, and into the Princes’ District of Khanbul. The black smoke still rose in the west, but she took his arm and pointed eastward, toward the palaces of the Daechen rising yellow and white and black. Beyond that he could just make out the shining walls of the Forbidden City and the golden dome of Taizhen Dao, the Palace of the Last Dawn.
“Do you see this path?”
It was more of a road than a path, cobbled and well kept, wide enough for five carts to drive abreast. He nodded.
“This path is five thousand years old,” she told him. “Five thousand years ago, our first emperor had these very stones set down, that those few who were worthy might one day find their way to the palace. To learn the ways of Daechen, to walk the paths of day and night, of roses and moonlight, to pass through the courts of the soul and kindle the fires,” she touched one hand to her heart in an odd gesture, “and add to His Illumination. You cannot understand what I am saying yet, but you will. I am telling you, Daechen Jian, that five thousand years ago the emperor laid this path for you.” Her smile turned inward.
“This is not a foretelling. Perhaps I am mistaken, and you will die before the sun goes down. I will still be here, either way. Oh, do not give me that look. You should be thanking me—you are still alive, after all. Come, come, we must not be late.”
As she led, so Jian followed, head spinning and occasionally seized by a spasm of pain that would leave him gasping and weak. Xienpei urged him to walk, and walk faster. The shadows that filled his mind were receding, only to be replaced by a blinding headache. When they came to a place where two paths met and turned toward the center of the city Xienpei bade him sit, and settled herself down beside him.
They did not wait long. Dust rose in the distance, and before long Jian could see shapes moving toward them. A low rumble grew into the rattling cacophony of wooden wheels against stone. Jian thought the carts had come for him and tried to stand, to flee. Xienpei clamped a hand down on his arm.
“Stupid boy,” she hissed at him. “Sit.”
So he sat, and waited, and before too long he could see that these were not the corpse-wagons. These were smaller and more finely made, white and gold in the sunlight and pulled by teams of graceful white horses. They moved at a brisk trot, high-stepping and smooth. Each cart carried a score or more of young women, girls the same age as Jian, dressed in yellow and white silk. Most lay asleep, or senseless, and those few who sat upright clung together, or wept, or stared numbly into the distance. Jian looked up into their faces as the wagons slowed and passed, and knew they mirrored his own pain.
“Who…” he began.
“Hush! Look. Look!” Xienpei pinched his arm. He looked.
Then he saw her.
She was seated at the back of a wagon, slumped against one side, boot-clad feet dangling behind as if she would jump from the wagon and run off if only she could gather her strength. Her face was a perfect oval, high cheekbones marking her as mountain-born. Her hair was black and glossy, and her eyes… her eyes. Jian knew those eyes, had seen them staring at him from his mother’s mirror, from every still, deep pool he had ever looked into. She saw him as well, and sat bolt upright, staring with her mouth open in a perfect little O as they drove past and dwindled into the distance. Jian gaped after the girl long after she was gone from his sight.
“She is Daezhu,” Xienpei said, satisfaction coloring her voice. “You did not think only boys were ever born during Nian-da, did you?”
“I…”
Xienpei stood and hauled him to his feet. “This is your road, the only one open to you now. The paths lead on, and none leads back to the life you had before. That way lies only death.” For the first time since Jian had met his yendaeshi, she was not smiling. “The choice is before you. Remain where you are, and die. Look behind you, and die. Or move forward… and live.”
Jian looked to the east, down the path to the girl and the palaces and a life he had never wanted.
“That is not much of a choice.”
Xienpei laughed without a trace of humor. “It never is.”