He’d have become one of the ghosts of Kuala Nor.
They drank again. The screaming voice had stopped. Another bad one was beginning, one of those that seemed to still be dying, unbearably, somewhere in the night. It hurt your heart, listening, frayed the edges of your mind.
Tai said, “Do you think about death?”
The other man looked at him. “Every soldier does.”
It was an unfair question. This was a stranger, of an enemy people not so long ago, and likely again in years to come. A blue-tattooed barbarian living beyond the civilized world.
Tai drank. Taguran wine was not going to replace the spiced or scented grape wine of the best houses in the North District, but it was good enough for tonight.
Bytsan murmured suddenly, “I said we had to talk. Told Gnam that, remember?”
“We aren’t talking enough? A shame…a shame Yan’s buried out there. He’d have talked you to sleep, if only to find a respite from his voice.”
Buried out there.
Such a wrong place for a gentle, garrulous man to lie. And Yan had come so far. Carrying what tidings? Tai didn’t know. He didn’t even know, he realized, if his friend had passed the exams.
Bytsan looked away. Gazing out a window at moonlight, he said, “If someone sent an assassin they can send another—when you get back or while you are on the way. You know that.”
He knew that.
Bytsan said, “Iron Gate saw them come through. They will ask where the two of them are.”
“I’ll tell them.”
“And they will send word to Xinan.”
Tai nodded. Of course they would. A Kanlin Warrior coming this far west as an assassin? That had significance. Not empire-shaking, Tai wasn’t important enough, but certainly worth a dispatch from a sleepy border fort. It would go with the military post, which was very fast.
Bytsan said, “Your mourning’s over, then?”
“It will almost be, time I get to Xinan.”
“That where you’ll go?”
“Have to.”
“Because you do know who sent her?”
He hadn’t expected that.
It was Xin Lun who suggested it to me. Yan’s last words on earth, in life, under nine heavens.
“I might know how to start finding out.”
He might know more than that, but he wasn’t ready to think about it tonight.
“I have another suggestion, then,” said the Taguran. “Two of them. Trying to keep you alive.” He laughed briefly, drained another cup. “My future seems to be bound up with yours, Shen Tai, and the gift you’ve been given. You need to stay alive long enough to send for your horses.”
Tai considered that. It made sense, from Bytsan’s point of view—you didn’t have to think hard to see the truth of it.
Both of the Taguran’s suggestions had been good ones.
Tai would not have thought of either. He would need to get his subtlety back before he reached Xinan, where you could be exiled for bowing one time too many or too few or to the wrong person first. He accepted both of the other man’s ideas, with one addition that seemed proper.
They’d finished the last of the flask, put out the lights, and had gone to bed.
Towards what would soon enough be morning, the moon over west, the Taguran had said softly from where he lay on the floor, “If I’d spent two years here, I would think about death.”
“Yes,” said Tai.
Starlight. The voices outside, rising and falling. The star of the Weaver Maid had been visible earlier, shining in a window. Far side of the Sky River from her love.
“They are mostly about sorrow out there, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“They would have killed her, though.”
“Yes.”
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