Khailin, getting to her feet and keeping her face inscrutable enough to hide her curiosity, placed her hands palms together and bowed to them with the reverence due to their station. The one who had spoken bowed back. The mandala-maker had risen too, making obeisance to the Lord Sin in his alcove before stowing the half-finished mandala under the altar for further work when he returned. Then all four of them, with the one who had dismissed Khailin speaking to his companions in a low voice, departed for the gate to the Fourth Circle in some haste.
Left alone, Khailin considered hauling out the mandala for a closer inspection, but happened to glance up first and met the blind stone eyes of the scowling carved effigy of Lord Sin. A superstitious dread stirred in her, and she offered a hasty obeisance in appeasement, trying to scotch any such irreverent thoughts as she backed away. She might not believe in the power of the mandalas to do any practical good, but other people did, and that did invest them with some power. Khailin had already learned to respect power.
Respect it enough to crave it.
When she tried to return to the Fourth Circle to rejoin her mother and sister, Khailin was politely but very firmly refused admittance.
‘But my mother, the lady Yulinh, is in there,’ Khailin said. She was not above pulling rank if she could not get her way by any other means, and in this place it was Yulinh’s rank that mattered to those in power.
‘I think not, sai’an. The Fourth Circle has been cleared for a very special occasion. If your lady mother was indeed here with her devotions, she has no doubt already been escorted elsewhere to complete them.’
‘But …;’
‘I am very sorry, sai’an.’
‘Where would they have taken her?’
‘Perhaps the shrine of Ama-bai,’ suggested the guard.
Khailin turned away, frustrated. The Third Circle was a little more crowded than usual, with a low murmur of voices in the usually hushed garden, but her mother and sister were not at the shrine of Ama-bai. Khailin continued her circumnavigation of the Third Circle, hoping to run into them. She took her time. Something was going on here, she could smell it, and her curiosity was twitching at the undercurrents like a cat watching the mousehole for movement. Her first circumnavigation yielded no Yulinh and no Yan. Other people were standing around, their own devotions obviously interrupted, whispering softly to one another and looking faintly puzzled, and one serene-looking girl of about her own age sat on a bench in the gardens, contemplating the fish meditatively. But there were no answers.
Until, on her second circumnavigation, now prowling restlessly in search of clues rather than her family, Khailin happened to come in line with the girl on the bench again. The girl rose to her feet as Khailin watched, took a few awkward steps to reach a paved pathway of one of the corridors leading through the Circles, and then collapsed in an ungraceful heap as her leg appeared to give way beneath her – almost precisely as an honour guard of acolytes had passed by that particular spot in advance of a man clad in a rich robe and looking like he walked in power.
Every instinct in Khailin quivered at the sight of him. Here was the embodiment of the knowledge she was seeking. It clung to him like an invisible cloak.
How she knew this she did not know, but she watched hungrily as the man bent to raise the crippled girl – for her foot was crippled, Khailin was close enough to see this clearly – and then guide her gently to a seat in the garden, allowing her to subside onto it. They exchanged a few words, very low, too low for Khailin to make out – and then he bowed lightly to the girl and signalled to his escort of acolytes, who moved forward once again. Khailin manoeuvred herself closer, and was in earshot when a young acolyte came hurrying up to the girl in the garden.
That was Lihui, the Sage Lihui.
Khailin’s family was part of the inner Court. She knew of the death of one of the Nine Sages, and of his successor. Nobody had yet seen Lihui in the Palace; it was rumoured that he was waiting for the Autumn Court, at which he would be formally presented to the Emperor, to mark his official entry into society.
And he had spoken to this plainly dressed, crippled child.
What had he said to her? Who was she? How was it that she had caught the eye of one of the most learned and most powerful men in Syai – just by choosing the precisely correct moment to collapse on the path at his feet?
Khailin did not know who this girl was, the one on whom fortune had smiled here in the Great Temple under the eyes of the Gods.
But she would find out. She would make it her business to find out.
In the meantime, she turned and left the Third Circle, rejoining the buzzing throng in the Second where the passing of the Sage was still being loudly and gleefully discussed. Yan had a particular favourite among the lesser spirits of the Second Circle, an ugly little figure made of mud and rushes; it was at this shrine that Khailin hoped to find her missing family. The provenance of this deity, and thus his power and his ability to accede to prayer, appeared to be a mystery to everyone Khailin knew, including her own mother – but the hideous little effigy of the unknown spirit obviously had more worshippers than just Yan because his altar was always overflowing with offerings. Nobody ever saw anyone actually place anything on that altar, or admitted to it, which had made Khailin say to Yan once, baiting her little sister deliberately, that it was a distinct possibility that the little spirit simply worshipped himself. But Yulinh had thought the idea sacrilegious and had made her displeasure at such remarks plain.
Now Khailin wore a small smile as she went in search of the mystery spirit’s shrine. She thought she might have at last – finally – found a use for the ugly little thing. She’d light an incense stick in front of the mystery God, and ask him to help her solve a mystery.
Help her find the crippled girl.
Nhia mulled over her encounter at the Temple as she limped home. It was something she hugged close. She might have told little Tai, the daughter of the widow seamstress who lived a block up from Nhia’s compound, because Tai had a knack for listening and for both making something a big thing and for keeping it in its place at the same time. Tai was young enough to be impressed and old enough to know why she was impressed. But Tai and her mother were at the Summer Palace, helping primp the Imperial ladies for the coming Court, and Nhia was stuck in the sweltering city enduring the season as best she could. She found herself a little surprised to find what a dearth of choices she had for a confidante; with Tai absent, it had narrowed down to …; to herself. Herself and the things that people who gave her their instinctive trust gave her. But that was different – that was her being talked to, instead of doing the talking.
On the way home through the streets that shimmered with heat and swirled with dust-devils in the alleys, she allowed herself a brief bitter moment of self-pity. Would it have been different if she had been able-bodied? Would the miraculous cure of her gimpy foot also bring her a friend or two she could share her dreams with?
The day was far advanced; Nhia had spent too long at the Temple, even by her mother’s admittedly biased measure.
‘You’re late,’ Li said. ‘Did you find what you sought at the Temple?’
She always asked that. As though there could be a different answer than the one she always got. Her tone, however, was a little pointed this time, leaving unspoken the barbed implication that whatever Nhia had been looking for there could have taken considerably less time.
‘Yes, Mother,’ said Nhia, gritting her teeth, coming up with the customary reply to the usual question, choosing not to respond to the undercurrents. ‘The