The Secrets of Jin-Shei

Three

Summer wrapped Linh-an, the capital city of Syai, like a shroud. The walls of the city shimmered with it well before the bells of noon from the Great Temple. But summer or winter, the Imperial Guard compound had its routine. The trainees traditionally found something to whine about in every season of the year. Come late autumn they would complain about being expected to do their drills in the cold rain; in winter they would carp about chilblains and frostbite; now, with summer just beginning to settle in, they did their manoeuvres in the cobbled practice yard, the heat reflecting off the grey compound walls, the straw-covered cobbles warm through the thin soles of their practice boots in which their feet slid and sweated. The orderly hierarchies were observed here as everywhere in Linh-an – the élite cohorts practised in the cool of the early morning, or in the early evening when the evening breezes would start to cool their bare arms, sheened with sweat. They made it all look so easy – the choreographed fights with single blade, double blades, iron-tipped staves, unarmed wrestling in the corner of the yard where the ground was left unpaved to lessen risk of injury. They wore black pants, tucked into their boots, and black sleeveless practice singlets, men and women alike; a bandanna tied low on their forehead mopped up the sweat dripping into their eyes. These were the old pros, the survivors, their arms tattooed with the insignia of several Emperors. The oldest of them wore up to three or even four – the tusk for the Ivory Emperor, currently on Syai’s throne, then the sigils that had belonged to the Sapphire Emperor, the Serpent Emperor. Two even wore the sign of the Lapis Emperor, the oldest of the Guard, the best.

The current cadre, Guardsmen and Guardswomen with a single tattoo or maybe two, trained straight after the élite forces while the mornings were still as cool as they were going to be in that molten summer, or just before them, in the shimmering heat which pooled in the courtyards in the late afternoon. That left the practice yard free for the rest of the day for the young ones, the children raised by the Guard to fill their ranks.

Often these were the sons and daughters of the Guard, but these children were not forced into their parents’ profession, and there were always gaps to be filled. With the unwanted, the orphaned, the abandoned – the ones adopted, clothed and fed by the Guard, the ones who owed their life to the Guard. It wasn’t indenture, quite, but in some ways it was worse. Although there was always a theoretical way out for a child like this, they were never allowed to forget their debt to the Guard, and by the time they were old enough to choose for themselves they could not choose other than the only life they had ever known. Sometimes barely weaned babies, still in their swaddling clothes, were found abandoned on the doorstep of the Guard compound – orphans or children from families too poor to raise them. That had been Xaforn’s lineage.

The only thing Xaforn knew about herself was that she belonged to the Guard. There had been nothing left with her when she was found – no amulet, no word, not even a name. All of what she was, all of who she was, she owed to the Guard. She had started watching the élite forces at their daily drills when she was barely five years old, and by the time she was seven and her own cadre of youngsters had been started out on the basic falls, rolls and gymnastics training she had been practising a few things on her own and shone out like a diamond. She was tough and wiry, long-legged, with promise of height; hard daily physical exercise kept her lean and limber. Within six months of starting training she had been plucked from the novices who were still stumbling around getting no more than bruises out of their early training and started as the youngest trainee in the cadre two levels above raw beginners. She was two, even three years younger than everyone else in her ‘class’, and the fact that she was better than many of them earned her few friends in the cadre. She preferred it that way. She was one of the few to take whatever the season threw at her without a word, without a whimper – summer sweats or winter chills, she was Guard, and she trained with a focus and a silent concentration which sometimes scared even her teachers.

‘That one will kill early, or be killed,’ they’d tell each other, watching Xaforn go through her exercises.

‘Be killed in training,’ they’d add, as they watched her challenge much more advanced opponents to practice fights, and lose, and challenge again with her strategy and her movements changed from one fight to the next, learning from every defeat, every mistake.

‘She scares me,’ one of the three-tattoo élites had murmured once, watching Xaforn trying to perfect a particularly difficult kick, doing it again and again, losing her balance, refusing to accept defeat. ‘Give her a few more years in the practice yard, and I’d send Xaforn to guard the Palace alone against an invasion of barbarians from the plains. They’d be dead of exhaustion before any of them got close enough to wound her.’

Xaforn didn’t know about that remark, but she trained as though she was trying to live up to it. She trained as though she was preparing for some imminent war that only she could see coming.

Her only vanity was her hair. Most of the women in the Guard cut theirs short; it fit better under helmets and took less care. Xaforn’s was in a long braid which she usually wore wrapped tightly around her small head; but sometimes, when practising alone, it was left to hang down her back and it whipped as she whirled and kicked and rolled her way through the fight exercises. For some reason this made her look even more dangerous. She was due to turn ten at the end of this long, hot summer, and already they were talking about promoting her up to yet another level in the coming autumn. She would be training with the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, the class only a year away from full induction into the Guard.

She fully intended to join the Guard at the first opportunity offered to her. When she was fourteen, maybe; thirteen, even. There could be uses for someone as young and light on her feet as Xaforn was.

But, for now, she was still young, she was still a trainee, she was still fair game for chores and message-running if someone more senior managed to collar her before she gave them the slip. Leaving the practice yard, braid swinging, mopping the sweat glistening in the hollow of her throat, an equally sweaty and flushed Guardsman stopped her at the entrance to the compound.

‘Ah. Good. You can run the errand for me, and I can get back to my business,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Captain Aric is needed at the Palace. See that the message reaches him.’

‘Where is he?’ Xaforn shouted at the Guardsman’s retreating back.

‘How should I know? That’s why I’m sending you,’ he retorted, trotting away back to the group fencing with sword and dagger out in the yard.

Muttering imprecations under her breath, Xaforn broke into a jog and made for the inner compound where the living quarters were. She didn’t like that part of the compound – perhaps it reminded her too much of all that she had never known. Foundlings and orphans, the children left to the Guard to raise, were housed separately in their own dormitories; the closest they came to experiencing actual family life was observing the family compound, watching children sired or borne by individual Guards tumbling around the inner courts while the women of the household squabbled and cooked and chased toddlers intent on finding trouble. There was a part of Xaforn that fiercely desired the closeness, the sense of belonging, that seemed to cling to these walls – and another part of her despised it for its weakness, its vulnerability, for being the soft underbelly of the Imperial Guard. For Xaforn, family meant only the cadre – the group of warriors that she had been raised to become a part of. She had never known a mother or a sibling; her life had been lived under discipline, not affection. She was incorruptible, unbribable, there was nobody whose welfare mattered to her enough to tempt her into betraying her calling – and she could see a Guardsman father hesitating at the threat of a knife held to the throat of one of these cherished children.

At a cursory glance the courtyard appeared to be full of only the vulnerable ones, just the women, the children, the families. But then she noticed Aric’s daughter, Qiaan of the long face – few people could lay claim to ever having seen that girl smile – and veered off to intercept her.

‘I’ve been sent to look for Captain Aric,’ Xaforn said without preamble. ‘Do you know where he is to be found?’

‘He was here earlier,’ Qiaan said, with studied unhelpfulness. Her eyes were hooded, her expression carefully blank. As a child of an Imperial Guard captain, she was steeped in Guard traditions – but Xaforn, the foundling, belonged to the Guard far more comprehensively than Qiaan, its daughter, had ever done. Qiaan could not, had never been able to, understand the devotion to duty, to being a honed weapon. She didn’t know what she was, but she knew what she wasn’t – and she wasn’t Xaforn’s kind of animal at all.

Xaforn would have been tearing the eyes out of anyone who would attempt to make the grave error of turning her into a lady who wore silks and reclined gracefully in Palace luxury; Qiaan had likewise snarled at the merest suggestion that she might consider the Guard as her path in life. All the children were asked; only a few of them accepted, but even those who did not were still Guard enough to admire or at least appreciate the Guard and the lineage it gave them.

Qiaan, however, was different.

Qiaan’s father was a high-ranking Guard captain, and his duties frequently kept him away from his family, but at least he was affectionate to his daughter when he was with her. But her mother, Rochanaa, veered between a kind of despairing affection and an inexplicable coolness; sometimes it seemed that it was all she could bear to just look on Qiaan’s face. Bounced between these reactions, the child had never known what reception her overtures to her mother would receive, and had, in the end, stopped making any. By the time Qiaan turned eleven her relationship with her mother had soured and solidified into something scrupulously correct and curiously formal. With her father all too often physically absent, and her mother abdicating emotional closeness, Qiaan was adrift, detached from her own immediate kin and incapable of belonging to the often insular ‘family’ of the Imperial Guard. If anyone had asked her, she would have dismissed the idea of ever having wanted to achieve this distance from the Guard and all that the Guard meant – but she was reminded of her failures, her possible inadequacies, when she met up with someone who truly belonged, like Xaforn.

The two of them reacted to each other like two explosively opposite chemicals in an alchemist’s alembic, aching to absorb the best they saw the other as possessing. They were still too young to understand the reasons why.

Face to face in the courtyard, Xaforn, the younger by fully a year, managed to draw herself up and give every impression of looking down on Qiaan as someone clearly younger or inferior. ‘The captain is wanted at the Palace,’ she said, ‘and I will go in search of him myself. But you ought to have enough respect for his position and his duty to make sure the message reaches him as soon as possible, if I do not find him.’

‘Oh, I know all about duty,’ said Qiaan, a little acidly. ‘Good hunting, Xaforn.’

‘Soft,’ hissed Xaforn, just before she swept out of earshot.

‘Besotted,’ Qiaan returned, making sure she had the last word. She was rather good at that.

Both girls departed, pursuing their own errands, equally stung. It was the summer, it was the heat. Tempers were frayed everywhere.

But this was the summer of trial for both of them.

Xaforn was intent on becoming. All her life she had been a chrysalis, and this was the last summer she would have to wait for her metamorphosis. If she was good, if she stayed ahead of the pack, autumn would bring promotion, and the next year would, maybe, bring more than that. Xaforn knew, knew with a passion born of yearning, that once she was a full-fledged Guard she would always have a place to belong, she would know who she was, she would have a home.

Qiaan was equally focused on being. She was cast in a role, but one which she found it difficult to interpret. She was young, but she was not unobservant – and there was a coolness between her parents, a coolness which she could sense deepen when she entered the presence of both of them at the same time, a coolness which her mother then passed on to her when her father departed once again to take up his duties at the compound and the Palace. Qiaan was an unwitting pawn in some adult game – but that was just an instinct, not a knowledge, and she had no idea how to act in order to lessen the impact of the situation on her own life. She tried to be a dutiful daughter, to the best of her ability. When her mother, a transplanted Southerner who was sometimes fiercely homesick for her own people, thawed far enough to share some aspect of her childhood or her culture with Qiaan, the child tried to listen, to learn – but those times were rare, and it was more common by far to be rebuffed by a cool word or a refusal of a touch. Rochanaa did her duty and passed on to Qiaan all that a mother should teach a daughter – but no more than that.

They were both, Guard foundling and Guard daughter, fiercely lonely.

In the third week of Chanain, with summer coming to a boil and the skies bleached white with the heat within city walls, Xaforn turned a corner in the Guard compound and discovered four boys surrounding a hissing and bedraggled cat. They appeared to be passing something from one to another, laughing, keeping it from the cat which was trying to get at whatever it was, ears flat, fangs bared, howling.