four

Chung took the message from the general himself, from his hand. It came with a scowl attached, as though the general anticipated the same response to this as to the dozen that had gone before. If he did, he was probably right.

Chung had carried several of those messages. Which the general knew. It was never a good idea to let the lords of life come to know your face. Chung’s mother had told him that, when he was chosen to serve in the jademaster’s palace. He had listened attentively, he had tried to be wise; he was sure the jademaster could never have picked him out from any line-up of the kitchen staff.

But things had changed, one extraordinary night. The jademaster had been displaced by the emperor, the palace had filled with soldiers and servants and officials, and it was suddenly so much harder to stay out of notice and out of trouble. Impossibly hard, it seemed, for Chung.

Now the emperor was gone too, and the soldier who sat beside the empty throne and governed in his name, General Ping Wen, knew Chung’s face well. And what Chung meant to him was messages sent but not replied to, or not satisfactorily; and it was all too easy for a great man to blame the messenger.

This particular great man was said to have executed an entire squad of soldiers because they had claimed to see a dragon and so lost sight of an enemy boat. Ping Wen had not believed in their dragon, and so the men had died. Now almost everyone believed in the dragon, even perhaps Ping Wen, but the men were still dead.

If Chung was grateful for one thing in this new life, it was the yellow sash he wore, that said he was the emperor’s own man. It wasn’t true, not quite, but it said so none the less; and even a general could not touch an imperial runner. Which was definitely something to be grateful for today, to judge by the depth of the general’s scowl.

There was this also to be grateful for, that he could put the general’s message into his satchel and back away, bowing, shuffling his soft boots across the wonderful floor, leaving the great empty throne and the great man on his footstool; and when he reached the door he could turn and trot out into the air, and the guards there would simply stand and watch him go.

Across the courtyard to the imposing gate, which couldn’t impose on him. More guards here, and he could ignore them all—gratefully—and run out onto the road.

The Jade Road they called this, or they used to: running as straight as a road might, from the harbor to the mountains and the mines. These days, as often as not it was called the Palace Road, because so much traffic came and went from the jademaster’s palace here to the vast site in the foothills where they were building the emperor’s new Autumn Palace, a second Hidden City.

Where most people believed the emperor was living now, and were wrong.

Chung knew.

OF COURSE Chung knew. How could he carry the general’s messages, else?

HERE THE road was always busy, like a fish-dam in a stream. There was no city wall, no gate, but the general’s soldiers funneled all the traffic into two queues, coming and going. They searched wagons and interrogated peasants at their own unhurried pace. Assassins had come after the emperor, and had barely been defeated; of course the authorities were more alert, more wary now. Quite what the soldiers searched for so assiduously, though, once they’d seen that no assassin was hiding in the wagonback; quite what questions they asked—and why they would believe or not believe the answers—Chung couldn’t fathom. He knew what things they kept. He saw them piled by the roadside, the piles growing as the day passed. Quite how a rice pot or a string of garlic might be contraband, how a bolt of silk might pose a risk to the emperor’s person, he chose not to speculate. It was wiser not, with their general in the emperor’s throne-room, if not quite yet on his throne.

Chung himself was neither searched nor questioned. The imperial sash was good for that; he could trot straight by the queues, straight through the roadblock. Something to be grateful for.

The road beyond was still full of soldiers, but none of them was interested in him. An alert sergeant or an officer might even move a troop out of his way, not to delay an imperial messenger. Mostly, the men held the crown of the road and Chung ran easily around them.

Soldiers never ran. Going out to the palace site or coming back, they idled as much as they were allowed to. If they had civilian conscripts with them, the civilians carried the soldiers’ bags.

Chung was safe from conscription too, but they weren’t taking palace servants anyway. City workers, rather, laborers and clerks. Breadwinners. Nothing was easy anymore, and the levies made it harder. Chung might be untouchable, but he wasn’t blind. Nor deaf. The general seemed to be deaf to the general complaint, unless his stool at the throne’s foot lifted him too high to hear.

Chung thought someone ought to tell him, but nobody would. With the emperor in the mountains, who could criticize his general?

Only one name came to mind, and she was in the mountains too.

He had a stone in his boot, a sharp pain in the ball of his foot. One more thing to be thankful for: that he could sit on the side of the road with his legs overhanging the ditch, shake out the stone, and then sling the boots around his neck and have done with them for now. Like the sash, his running-boots with their emphatically yellow lacings marked him out as a messenger, untouchable. But Chung was a boy of the lower town, who had never seen a pair of shoes before he was brought into the palace as a scullery lad. Who wore shoes, except for mandarins?

He hated them. At their best they were a definition of discomfort, tight and hot; and they were seldom at their best, either rubbing up blisters or else attracting stones. Or both.

He was knotting the laces together to make a handy sling when he felt a buffet on his shoulder: “You, boy! Up, and come with us. And carry this …”

A large pack, dropped by his side. A soldier, just beyond the pack: just a random trooper spotting an idle civilian and seizing the chance.

Chung stood, so that his sash came into clear view.

The soldier was twice his age, perhaps, but that meant he had the wisdom to blanch, to step back, to lift his hands in apology. He might have done more, might have dropped to his knees and kowtowed, because an insult to an imperial messenger was an insult to the emperor himself and a man might die for that; but Chung just smiled and turned away, trotted on barefoot and grateful.

IT WAS hard work on a hot day, but he’d never minded work and he’d learned to love the sense of moving on. A person on the road ahead became a person on the road behind. The land unrolled like a banner of silk horizons at a puppet-play; only the sea never seemed to shift, those times that he could see it, those times he turned his head as the road rose.

It was a joy to be away from the palace, away from walls and doors and a formality that was like another door always closed in his face, but that was not what put lift in his feet and power in his legs. It was a joy to be heading for the hills, the high hills and what waited there, that even the general barely knew about and did not understand. That was a promise and a lure, but not a reason for the pulse of contentment he felt at every pounding step and every sweat-soaked breath.

This was where he was made to be, this narrow ribbon world, this rolling treadmill that only rolled because he ran, he kept it moving on. Running, he was at the core, he was the steady beating heart of what was true.

HE CAME TO the spur at last, the junction on this road that had no junctions before the emperor came this way. This was what emperors did, apparently: they brought changes, choices, risks. Chung’s life had been quiet and easy and monumentally dull until the emperor came. Then even in the palace there was danger, even to a kitchen hand; and now—

NOW THE soldiers and their wagons, their conscripts, their horses and mules and all else turned aside, to follow the new road that last mile or so to where the new palace was rising slowly on its hill. Chung had been there, he had seen the great workings, the mud and the labor and the endless spread of the encampment around. No doubt the emperor must move there soon enough, or else go back to the city, with all his court in train and Chung too.

But not yet. For now Chung could follow the Jade Road a little farther, where it climbed into the foothills; now he could leap the ditch and run through tall grasses and into the shadow of the encroaching trees.

There was a path, but barely so. It looked little more than a hog trail winding through the forest, muddy in the valley bottoms and hard to find on the high ridges, easy to lose. The mud was cool and welcome to his feet, though, the heights were a challenge and an achievement.

One valley and another, yet one more: and at every ridge there were two or three watchers idling beside the path, wearing little and apparently doing less. Hard bodies, hard eyes. Sharply green in the shadows, those eyes would track him remorselessly, though their hands waved him on. It wasn’t the sash that passed him through this scrutiny. They knew him, so they let him by; no reason else. This path led directly to the emperor, who was in their charge. They took that charge quite seriously, although they were new to it. General Ping Wen had sent his own men, day by day more senior, to learn just exactly where the emperor was; word in the palace said that every one of them had been turned back. Those who had drawn weapons and tried to force their way by had been found next day on the road, too hurt to walk.

Officially, the general was said to be increasingly anxious at the emperor’s staying somewhere so remote, in the hands of people not known to the court. Privately, he was said to be furious. Personally, Chung had seen hints and edges of that anger: enough to worry him, perhaps, if it weren’t quite so impossibly presumptuous to worry about the welfare of the emperor …

The general was officially concerned only for the Son of Heaven’s safety; and nowhere, truly, could be safer than here. No man could be safer than he was, in this hidden valley with lethal guards on every height around. Chung had tried to explain that to the general, the time he’d been called on to describe and then to draw the route from the Jade Road to the emperor’s camp. That was one time he’d seen the general angry, because he was no good with words, nor with a brush and ink.

That was also the day that he’d seen a soldier’s anger utterly eclipsed by a mother’s. The empress had been there too, and oh, she was scathing. He thought that her vicious contempt was simply a by-blow, that her true fury was aimed at her son; but Chung was the one at hand, and he had suffered for it, and might have suffered worse. An imperial sash was no defense against an empress. Blessedly, she had remembered in time that her contact with the emperor depended on him and those few like him, messengers who were trusted. Trust was a fragile commodity in the hills just now. Let her execute even one of the emperor’s runners, and she would be unlikely to see another.

Wise in her age, even in her temper, she had understood that; and so he had preserved his head, this long at least. There were other dangers on the road and in the forest, but nothing felt so risky as a palace empty of its emperor, in the heat of the summer of his absence.

NOW CHUNG came down into the last valley, near journey’s end. He stopped at the bitter river to wash, to cool his skin and startle his tiring body into one last effort; then he kicked on along the river path, to the settlement at the head of the valley.

The clans were mining folk and they guarded their valleys jealously, from one another more than from the world beyond. The world beyond generally had better sense than to trespass. Here, though, a simple compound had outgrown its own palisade, sprouting tents and ruder shelters like fungus around a tree stump.

Not all the inhabitants were clansfolk. A mixed group of men and women stood in a circle on the only open ground, down at the river’s edge. As Chung emerged from the trees, a voice greeted him: “Ha! Where’s your cleaver, kitchen boy?”

He stiffened, and sighed; pushed a hand through dripping hair; tried a smile, knowing it would fail. “Not now, Shen. I have a message for the emperor …”

“Of course you do. Why would you be here else? No kitchens for the scrubbing, and you’re not much use otherwise, except for running. Will you run away from me?”

He was a short, stocky young man, a soldier, stripped now to his trousers. He didn’t have the lean scarred hardness of a miner. What he had instead were fighter’s muscles, slabs and cables beneath his oiled skin.

“If you’ll let me by, sure, I’ll run. If you want me to.” There were fighters, and there were runners; never the two should meet, if the runner could only get a head start.

“I don’t want you to run,” the soldier said softly, working his shoulders. “I want you to fight. Will you fight, kitchen boy?”

He wasn’t really offering a choice. He stood between Chung and the compound, and the circle of his friends was re-forming around them both, to make an arena. This wasn’t the first time. Chung’s hand lifted involuntarily toward a seamed scar on his lip, where Shen had left his mark at their first encounter. Shen saw, and smiled. A point to him, if this had been a game played for points.

It wasn’t. It was played for blood. Around the circle people were betting sweets and trinkets, duties, whatever they had to gamble with. Chung knew how few of them would be betting on him.

“The emperor won’t be happy,” Chung said, “if I go to him with blood on my sash.”

“Take the sash off, kitchen boy. It buys you nothing here.”

He knew that, but he’d had to try. He lifted it over his head, along with his satchel and his boots; a woman took them from him with a glance he couldn’t read. One of the clanswomen; there were no women in the army. He ought to know her name, but he was never here long enough to learn them all.

“If I go to him hurt, I meant.” And he hadn’t quite meant the emperor, but Shen knew that.

“Oh, I won’t hurt you. Much. You’ll still be able to run. That’s all he cares about.”

That was neither true nor relevant. Chung ignored it. “I’m tired, Shen …!”

Shen grinned. “Then I’ll just knock you over quicker, won’t I? Don’t beg, it’s boring.”

He had emphatically not been begging. He was angry now; which of course was what Shen wanted, but there was nothing he could do about that. He chided himself for being weak even as he made a darting move forward, as Shen’s hands came up swiftly in a defensive pose, as the circle fell into silence.

Near silence. There was the sound of the river behind him, but he could ignore that. There was the sound of his own breathing, and he could ignore that too. Shen’s breathing: that mattered. And Shen’s feet as they slid through the grass, that too. A master of the art might claim to hear the creak of his joints, the groan of his muscles as they worked. Chung was no master; he had no hope ever of mastering Shen.

He backed off and they circled each other slowly. Shen’s foot lashed out in a high kick; Chung blocked that with a forearm, and the fist too that followed it. And countered with an elbow to the face, except that Shen’s face wasn’t quite there to be elbowed. His knee slammed into Chung’s thigh and made him stagger, almost knocked him down.

He went back instead, far enough—just—to duck the follow-up kick and make a snatch at the ankle as it fell away. And astonished himself by catching it: only with a half-hand grip, but enough to drag Shen off-balance, enough to follow with jabbing fingers to the belly that the young soldier had no time to block.

That knocked the air out of him, stilled him for a moment; just time enough for Chung’s favorite elbow again, aimed at the throat and not quite making that, driving hard into Shen’s shoulder.

Which should have been good enough, but somehow wasn’t. Chung saw Shen’s face twist in pain. What he didn’t see was Shen’s left hand, slamming upward under his chin.

After that, he saw nothing at all for a while.

WHEN THE WORLD came back to him, when his eyes opened, he saw a dizzying blur that resolved itself slowly into Shen’s face, upside down and grinning.

Then there were Shen’s hands, holding something, a water-skin. Tipping it, squeezing …

A hard spatter of water in his face: Chung sat up suddenly, spluttering, mocked.

Then the laughter stilled, all of a rush. There was a strong arm under his to haul him to his feet, and that was Shen’s as well; and right in front of them, pushing through the circle, there was Mei Feng. The Lady Mei Feng, the emperor’s favorite and only choice of concubine, the small force of nature that ruled this compound and the imperial heart together …

She was, predictably, furious.

“You, Chung. Why are you here?”

“I, uh,” touching his hand to his lip and finding blood, again, “I brought a message, lady. For the emperor.”

“Don’t call me that! You know my name. But why are you here, fooling with this fool Shen—again!—when you have a message for my lord?” And then, when he shrugged, when he obviously had no answer, “And you, Shen—what do you think you’re doing, knocking him unconscious? Again? When you knew, you must have known, he was here with letters for the emperor?”

Shen shuffled his bare feet in the dust. She snorted roundly at both of them, snapped her fingers for the satchel and set off back up to the compound; and paused before she’d gone half far enough, and turned back, and said, “At least get yourselves cleaned up, both of you, before the Son of Heaven sees. You know he’ll want the story if he finds his own runner covered with blood and dust, and he won’t be happy when he hears it.” A pause, just long enough for the world’s heart to beat once, and she went on, “It’s past time you learned to defend his messages better than that, Chung, getting knocked flat every chance. Perhaps we’d best keep you here longer, send someone else to the court and let Shen work on you some more?”

Chung grinned dizzily, and never mind the blood on his teeth. “Yes please, lady.”

“My name is Mei Feng,” but her own smile broke out at last, backed with an exasperated wave. “Go. Wash. Find clean clothes. Both of you. Then you come and speak to my lord, Chung, he’ll want to know how things are at the palace, and in the city.”

“Yes, lady,” but he said that to her retreating back, so that she could pretend not to hear it.

Then Shen’s arm was around his shoulders, and, “Did I hurt you?”

“Of course you hurt me,” wincing, feeling his jaw for soreness. “Did I hurt you? At all? It’ll be okay to lie, if you feel like it …”

“No lie. You got me right in the gut, and I wasn’t ready for it. Nor the shoulder, either. Yes, that hurt.”

Which was triumph for Chung, who had barely managed to lay a hand on Shen the last time they’d sparred, which was the last time they’d seen each other. In the palace, he had no one to train with; he was diligent in exercise and shadow-boxing, but it was never the same as having a solid body to work against. Preferably this particular, this very particularly solid body that he leaned against now, that half held him up as they made a slow path down to the riverbank.

This was the body that had hurt him badly, maliciously, when Shen was a palace guard where Chung was only a servant, when Shen was newly come from the long march with a year of brutalities at his back and Chung was an innocent, a fool with a hot temper and a stupid pride.

When Mei Feng had seen them fighting and saved Chung’s life and Shen’s as well, with some brilliant improvisation under the nose of General Ping Wen. As a result of which, Shen had been co-opted into the emperor’s personal service, to train his guards in ways of fighting hand to hand; and Chung had been co-opted body and soul by Mei Feng, to be her personal messenger.

Her slave, Shen said, which was another reason to learn how to hit him.

Her spy, Chung thought, these days. It was the emperor’s sash he wore and the emperor’s messages he carried, the emperor he would speak to when he made his report; but it was Mei Feng who listened, dictated, demanded, instructed. If she had slaves, they numbered at least one more than one, and that one extra was the Son of Heaven, who was as delightedly devoted as Chung so fiercely denied himself to be, whenever Shen accused him.

Bare feet in cold water, that was good, as he sat gratefully at the river’s edge and let them dangle. Rough fingers pressing on his neck, digging into his shoulders, working the taut strings of his body with a savage intimacy: that was another kind of good, cruelly good, as he leaned back into the groaning, painful pleasure of it. These same hands, that had so delighted in hurting him the first time—well, they did still hurt him, and it was still deliberate, and now at least some of the delight ran the other way. Chung had been remade, from the outside in; the changes had reached his head and heart and belly, and were insinuating themselves deep into his bones.

He closed his eyes and tipped his head back and found Shen’s shoulder exactly there to support it, which put Shen’s ear right here next to his lips, where he need only whisper to say anything he wanted …

There was nothing he could think of. Head to head, skin to skin, that said it all. These same brutal hands were an adjunct, the river in the valley: good to have, but it was the jade in the mountain that mattered.

They had talked to each other, he and Shen: awkwardly, reluctantly, because they had that one thing in common now, that they were alive by Mei Feng’s courtesy when they might both have been stupidly, pointlessly dead. And because she had decreed that Chung too must learn to fight by Shen’s odd northern methods; if he was running her messages, she said, and her lord the emperor’s also, he should be able to defend them. And because it was hard to sweat and hurt and learn at another’s hands and yet not speak to him, not want to know who he was, this swift young man with the black stare and the sudden laugh, the inaccessible skills and the deep shadows at his back. And because …

Because of this, in the end: because one young man and another could slip their clothes off and wash a fight away, shuck all the evidence of difference, be nothing more than two bodies in the stream with no intent to harm, no wish in the world.