River of Stars. Guy Gavriel Kay

let him live? Really?”

      There was no reply. The man might have nodded his head or shaken it—there was no way to tell. Sun Shiwei seized on this, though, through pain in his head and both feet.

      “I will fight for Kitai!” he rasped. “I will go to the northwestern war!”

      You could escape from the army, you could rise in it, you would be alive!

      “Might he be castrated?” the woman asked, musingly. “That might be acceptable.” She didn’t sound like Lady Yu-lan, but she didn’t sound the way a woman should, either.

      “For others to decide, gracious lady. A magistrate is on his way. Maybe others of rank. I am not certain.”

      There came a sound from the corridor. Footsteps stopping at the doorway, a shadow across one lamp’s light.

      “There’s a dead guard across the courtyard, sir. Someone found the body. Stabbed, probably a knife.”

      Inwardly, Sun Shiwei swore viciously. He took a ragged breath, trying to think through pain and panic. You needed to be loyal to those who paid you, but if you were dead, loyalty didn’t help much on the far side, did it?

      “Ah. That’s why he came in so early.” The woman again! How was she so assured, and how would she know that? She added, “That body is what will prove he isn’t just an angry drunk looking to rape a woman while her husband is away.”

      He’d been planning to say that! No one had been killed, no one even harmed. Put me in the army, he’d say again. The army needed soldiers, any soldiers.

      Harder now, with the dead guard out there. In fact, it became impossible.

      “Mind you,” the woman added thoughtfully, “we did know what he was really doing. You will allow my husband and me to thank the prime minister, later, I hope? He saved my life.”

      “You did much of that yourself, Lady Lin.” The unseen man’s voice was respectful. Shiwei still couldn’t see any of them. He’d been—it was now clear—deceived and knocked unconscious by a woman.

      “Only with your warning,” she said. “I grieve for the guard. That will have been unintended. It forced this one to change his plans.”

      Exactly! thought Shiwei. It did!

      “He’d have intended no other harm, only to kill me, then rape me after,” the woman went on. She was unnaturally composed.

      “After?” said the man.

      “To ensure silence. The indignity to my body would have been to hide the reason for my death.”

      Fuck you, thought Sun Shiwei. Fuck you and your gelded husband!

      Though that last thought brought him back to his present circumstance, and words just spoken, about castration.

      “I will tell everything,” he muttered, still trying to look around enough to see what he was dealing with.

      “Of course you will,” said the man behind him. “Everyone does under questioning.”

      Shiwei felt as if he was about to choke on what was suddenly lodged in his throat. His heart was pounding. His head hurt. He said, urgently, “It was the deputy prime minister! It was Kai Zhen who—”

      He screamed. She’d slashed him across the back of the calves.

      “A lie. You are the wife’s instrument, not his,” she said. “Kai Zhen is many things, but not this foolish. Not the same day he is exiled.”

      “You’ll tell us the truth later,” said another person, speaking for the first time. A colourless voice. A civil service figure? The court, someone with rank?

      “I … I can tell you right now! What do you need me to say?”

      The man laughed. He laughed.

      “You don’t need to torture me! I will tell. Yes, it was the wife. Lady Yu-lan. It was. You don’t need torture!”

      A longer silence. The woman, for once, said nothing. It was the third person who spoke again, finally.

      “Of course we do,” he said gravely. “No one will believe a confession if there isn’t any torture. And then you will probably die. Under interrogation, a regrettable accident, the usual way. This was all extremely foolish, as Lady Lin says. And too predictable.”

      He sounded almost regretful, Sun Shiwei thought. Not for the torture to come, but as if for the folly of men and women in the world.

      The woman said, “If that is the case … if he is not going to be gelded and sent to the army, may I be permitted to strike him again? I am afraid I do feel angry. It may also be foolish, but …”

      Sun Shiwei squeezed his eyes shut. The cold-voiced man spoke, judiciously. “He was here to destroy your honour and end your life. I think it can be permitted, gracious lady.”

      “Thank you,” he heard her say.

      Then she said, leaning over, speaking directly to Shiwei, close to his bleeding head, “This is for my father. For what they tried to do to him. Know that.”

      She straightened. He saw her shadow. Then the most appalling pain crashed over him, one foot then the other, struck full force this time, bones splintering, and he lost awareness of all things again.

      CENTURIES BEFORE, the last Kanlin Warriors of Stone Drum Mountain had died on the wide, flat top of their holy mountain in the north. The Long Wall had earlier been breached in many places.

      The last of them held out a considerable time, but eventually were overrun by barbarians—the emerging Xiaolu people.

      The mountain sanctuary was plundered and burned.

      The Kanlins on Stone Drum—about eighty of them, it was believed, at the very end—had elected to be slain there, to die fighting, rather than retreat south and surrender their sacred mountain to the steppe.

      It was a complex incident in history and those who shaped and recorded the official doctrines in this Twelfth Dynasty had difficulty with it.

      The black-clad Kanlins had been mystics with esoteric beliefs, and notoriously independent. They allowed women to train and fight and live freely among them. Many of their practices (not only concerning women) diverged from acceptable behaviour. They were also a military group as much as a religious one, and everyone knew what had happened in the Ninth because of military leaders. The Kanlin Warriors might have been permitted their secluded, untaxed sanctuaries back then, but this was a different era, a different world.

      On the other hand, they had been honourable, loyal, and unquestionably brave, and the last ones on the summit of Stone Drum, men and women both, had died for Kitai in one of the lost and longed-for Fourteen Prefectures.

      That had to be allowed to mean something.

      It had been decided that no one would be punished or criticized for making reference to that last stand on Stone Drum Mountain—for writing a song or a poem or a street theatre performance about it. But the last defence of the mountain would not become an officially sanctioned mourning ritual of any kind. It was seen as preferable that the Kanlins slip quietly from history into folk tale, peasant belief, akin to fox-women or those spirit worlds said to be hidden under oak-tree roots in forests.

      Good governance, in any time, required delicate decisions of just this sort.

      SHE IS FINALLY ALONE. All the men have left: the one who’d come to kill her, the guards, the soldiers, the senior official from the Ministry of Rites (a bleak, cold man). The house is hers again. She tries to decide if it is the same house.

      She is waiting for tea to be brought to her. No one is asleep. She is downstairs, in the small reception room—made smaller by bronzes they’ve collected.

      Servants are cleaning her bedchamber, discarding the knife-shredded silks and