The Secrets of Jin-Shei. Alma Alexander

to know.’

      ‘Jin-ashu,’ Qiaan said. ‘The women’s language.’

      Taught from mother to daughter. Rochanaa had done her duty by this, at least – Qiaan knew the script of the women’s language, the secret language. But who had there been to teach foundlings like Xaforn? Qiaan stared at the other girl, curious and oddly astonished by this discovery. Did none of them know it? Were all the female Guards who had come here as foundling babies illiterate in this secret that the women of Syai had cherished and passed down from generation to generation for a thousand years?

      She could not believe that. So much of her world was built on its existence.

      Or was it just Xaforn herself – did Xaforn slip through the cracks, so intent on belonging to the Guard that she never learned how to belong to herself and her heritage?

      ‘It says “Ink”,’ Qiaan said, her voice completely free of sarcasm or mockery, the twin weapons with which she often faced the world. She picked up the brush again, dipped it into the ink, sketched out a new set of letters on a shred of paper which had been lying underneath the sketch she’d handed to Xaforn. She handed over this, too, without a word to the other girl. Xaforn took it, stared at it.

      ‘So I can’t read it,’ she said. ‘So?’

      ‘It says jin-shei,’ Qiaan said, suddenly a little unsure of herself, of the impulse that had made her offer this sacred trust to the one person in Linh-an who apparently had neither knowledge nor appreciation of it.

      Xaforn may have been ignorant of the secret language; she could hardly have grown up female in Syai, foundling or not, and not be aware of the existence of the jin-shei sisterhood itself. But this was a female mystery, a women’s secret, and it was something that Xaforn had dismissed as irrelevant to the life she chose to lead.

      ‘What use do I have for that?’ she said, raising as shield the brashness and the roughness of her warrior training – the male attributes thrown up to parry the insidious attack by the softness of the feminine in her, ruthlessly suppressed since she had taken up weapons and chosen to learn how to kill. ‘And what’s in it for you? You, of all people, and me?’

      ‘Do you think there are no jin-shei sisters in the Guard?’ Qiaan said. ‘You are ignorant, then. This is every woman’s heritage, be she princess or the lowest urchin in the beggar guild.’

      ‘The beggar women know jin-ashu?’ Xaforn said sceptically. ‘I don’t believe it.’

      Qiaan shrugged. ‘The beggars may be largely illiterate but their women will have enough jin-ashu to communicate with someone like me,’ she said. ‘You can believe it or not.’

      ‘I’ll think about it,’ Xaforn said abruptly, coming to her feet.

      ‘You can choose to accept it, or not,’ said Qiaan. ‘But jin-shei is not something that can be unsaid. You have the paper.’ She glanced at the kitten, which was contemplating the twitching of its own tail with a hunter’s deep concentration, and smiled. ‘We share the cat. And someday – jin-shei-bao – there may be a better drawing of the cat. And you can write her name on that yourself.’ She met Xaforn’s eyes, squarely, without flinching. ‘Or your own.’

      ‘I’ll think about it,’ Xaforn repeated, backing away. Her eyes slid off Qiaan, lingered for a last moment on the kitten, and then she stalked out of the courtyard, her shoulders hunched.

      ‘Temptress,’ she muttered as she departed, clutching the drawing of the cat, trying not to let her eyes stray constantly to the mysterious symbols on the paper. Letters. Writing. Language. Sisterhood …;

      ‘Coward,’ Qiaan responded.

      Xaforn had to clench her teeth against the sudden urge to laugh out loud.

       Five

      Nhia had started out thinking of the Great Temple of Linh-an as a deliciously confusing maze, a labyrinth, a box within a box.

      To the child that she had been, the place was enormous, layered like a lotus flower, and full of mystery. Its outer walls were whitewashed with lime, like some of the poorest houses in the city; its three massive gates, cut into this white expanse, were old and scarred wood and had no air of holiness or even magnificence except maybe for their immense size. But they always stood open – except for one single night of the year on the Festival of All Souls when the Temple was closed to be purified – and they were gateways to a constant stream of worshippers hurrying in and out.

      Nhia, who had practically grown up on the Temple’s doorstep, knew the outer rings of the Great Temple intimately.

      The First Circle, running right around the inner perimeter of the whitewashed walls, was primarily taken up with Temple vendors and the stalls of diviners and soothsayers – and Nhia claimed the acquaintance of most of them, at least by sight. Some had been there for as long as she had been coming to the Temple – old Zhu, and his incense booth so meticulously devoted to one particular scent a day (‘It only confuses the customers when you show off everything you’ve got,’ he had confided to Nhia once, nodding sagely); the Rice Man, whose name she had never learned but whose family of eight children and their ailments and joys Nhia and her mother had known for years; So-Xan the yearwood bead-carver and his young son and apprentice, Kito.

      Trestles within individual booths were neatly laid out with such merchandise as incense sticks suitable for individual deities or specific prayers, bowls in appropriate colour or pattern, flasks of rice wine or tea, grains of rice or of corn and powdered dyes. When Nhia was a curious toddler only just starting to lisp questions – before life had made her mother taciturn and edgy – she had demanded explanations for all of these mysterious offerings and paraphernalia.

      ‘Why yellow bowls, Mother? Why only thirteen grains, Mother? Why tea and not rice wine, Mother?’

      ‘Yellow bowls for Lord Sin, because he is Lord of the East and that’s where the yellow sun rises. Thirteen grains because of the thirteen lessons of Ama-bai. Tea and not rice wine because the Sages are lower than the Emperors.’

      Nhia was to remember those times with a pang of regret. It had been years since she had asked her mother a question like that. Years since she had expected a reply from her.

      Other stalls in the outer cloister housed the makers of carved yearwood sticks, or sold funeral arrangements, preparation of the paper effigies of the things the deceased needed to take with them into the next world, amulets or talismans, marriage and betrothal tokens, or – slightly clandestinely, because the Temple officially frowned on these – low-level alchemical potions guaranteed to increase fertility, virility or long life. Ganshu diviners elbowed one another for space here, their clients waiting in patient queues for their turn inside the screened booth where the diviner performed his or her work.

      An open corridor cut across this cloister from each of the three gates, and led through into the courtyard. Beyond a narrow strip of grass rose a clay wall with three arched openings in line with the three gates; it was painted a ghost-blue, a colour which was almost white except for the wash of blue that made it look like the sky of Linh-an in the full blaze of the summer sun. The wall surrounded a perimeter precisely one flagstone wide around the next level of the Temple, the Second Circle, a building painted the same colour as the wall around it, itself boasting an inner cloister surrounding an open court. But this cloister was clear of anything requiring an exchange of money. It was two storeys high, with an open balcony above the lower cloister. The entire inner wall of the building, on both floors, was a catacomb of wall alcoves and niches, with space for incense and offerings; each niche held an image or a figurine before which some devotee was praying with a fragrant incense stick smelling of cinnamon or flower essence or rain grass in one hand and a bowl with precisely counted rice grains in the other.

      Many niches were empty, their own particular deity yet to appear. These were