The Secrets of Jin-Shei. Alma Alexander

      ‘No, the jin-shei bond doesn’t mean you have to take Liudan on,’ Antian had said with a smile. ‘Not like that. She is my blood-sister, and that makes it different from the jin-shei bond. And she is wrong, in that I am not going to abandon her just because I have found a jin-shei-bao to share my heart with. But she has always felt the edge of the Court turned at her, and she has always been angry at the world. And she has grown up alone, for all that these halls are teeming with brothers, sisters, and women who had been her mother’s companions.’

      ‘She is very pretty,’ Tai had said.

      ‘So was Cai,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t remember her, not really – but there is a portrait that the Emperor had done, on ivory – the miniature stands in the Palace back in Linh-an. I’ll show you some time. She was very beautiful.’

      ‘It was a pity she was not loved,’ Tai had said.

      Antian had given her a strange look. ‘Yes,’ she had said slowly. ‘It was a pity.’

      It was the custom of the Court that one of the heirs always had to stay behind in Linh-an when the rest of the Court came away to the Summer Palace – just in case of some calamity. In the year that Tai and Antian entered into jin-shei, the third sister, Second Princess Oylian, had been the one to have remained in the sweltering capital city over that long hot summer. The year after that it had been Antian herself. This third summer it was Liudan’s turn – and Tai, despite a guilty cast to her sense of relief, was not entirely unhappy that she did not have the angry Third Princess watching her and Antian together with smouldering, jealous eyes. Her feelings for Liudan ran the gamut from pity to deep resentment that she should be the focus of so much undeserved hatred for no better reason than that she was Antian’s chosen companion.

      Second Princess Oylian was a gentle, pliant, pleasant girl who drifted through life – she was a stream of water which flowed around obstacles rather than try and shift them.

      ‘The worst thing that could ever happen to Oylian and to Syai,’ Antian had said to Tai once in a low whisper one early morning out on their balcony on the side of the mountain, ‘would be for her to ever become Empress. Whoever her Emperor proved to be, he could make her do whatever he said and she would do it to keep the peace. She was born to a family, not an Empire.’

      But the Second Princess would smile at Tai, even if she didn’t have much to say to her. Liudan would simply sweep past and ignore her whenever she could. Tai was the danger – Tai was, like Liudan’s own mother had been, of common stock, only one step removed from Liudan’s own now-high station, a reminder of what she could easily have been if she had not been born royal. The Third Princess was a complex mixture of insecurities – left adrift because she was the second spare heiress and therefore less urgently needed than Oylian, left alone because of her mother’s fall from grace for reasons that even Liudan herself did not really understand, afraid of the thin veneer that separated her royalty from the land-grubbing poverty from which her mother’s family had come. Liudan wanted the royalty, needed it as a shield against all kinds of terrors – and it was a thin shield, barely there. She was only Third Princess, after all.

      But this summer, the summer that Antian had invited Tai up to the Summer Palace as her guest, Liudan was mercifully absent, back in Linh-an, suffering the summer heat in the Imperial Palace – and probably doing it with better grace than the other two would ever have done because at least it was a signifier of her status, an indication that she was important enough in the hierarchy to be preserved and sheltered against the potential of disaster. And her absence meant that Antian and Tai could laugh more freely, more often, without waiting for Liudan’s brooding presence to cut the laughter short when they met her eyes.

      In a way, though, Liudan’s hostility was what made Tai aware of her own status in this Court – although Liudan’s presence was uncomfortable, she and Tai were two points of the same star, both sisters to Antian after a fashion, balancing one another. Without the unconcealed hostility of that one amongst all the Imperial women, it was somehow harder for Tai to winnow the genuine from the sycophant in the rest of the Imperial royal women in the Summer Palace. It was as if, with Liudan there, Tai was on her guard against Liudan alone. With her gone, Tai was on her guard against everybody else.

      But she was here, now, in the royal quarters, bent over her journal by candlelight even while the sky lightened in the east. She and Antian were to meet at their balcony that morning, later, but Tai had woken early, uncomfortable about something, not sure what had woken her – until she had picked up her inkwell and her brush and her journal and it had come into focus for her.

       It is very quiet out there tonight.

      She stared at the line she had written down, and became preternaturally aware of the stillness that had broken through the depths of sleep to wake her, the silence that surrounded her, the world holding its breath. She thought she heard, far away in a kennel somewhere, the despondent howl of a trapped dog, but even that was there and gone almost before she had had a chance to identify the sound. The silence was absolute.

      And then the mountain shuddered, and crumbled.

       Two

      In less time than it took to blink, silence was a memory. Masonry groaned; things skittered across the surface of the lacquered table, or fell to the ground, leaving the floor strewn with debris. Above it all there was an indescribable sound that was half heard and half absorbed directly through bone and muscle – the roar of wounded stone.

      Instinct had taken over in the first moment of terror, and Tai had streaked out of her room and into the garden, out under an open sky. She felt the ground shake under the soles of her bare feet, staggered to keep her balance, lost the battle, fell sideways into a bed of swaying flowers still closed in the pearly pre-dawn grey darkness. Before Tai’s horrified eyes the tiered Summer Palace folded into itself as though it had been made of sticks and leaves, walls falling inward, tiles falling in slow motion and tumbling end over end before shattering into dust, columns snapping in two or falling sideways and knocking out the next column in line, collapsing them in turn like dominoes. Graceful arched windows and doorways became piles of broken brick and crumbs of plaster; wooden window frames snapped like matchsticks. Glass was a precious thing and not often found outside the Imperial Palaces, and even there rare and used sparingly; now, with the wooden frames bending and breaking, the night was alive with the eerie sound of breaking glass, like fairy chimes.

      A tree groaned and began to fall over, in slow motion, pulling its old roots out of the ground.

      Lifting her eyes to the top of the mountain whose peak had always towered above the Summer Palace, Tai became aware with a shock that the peak had vanished. It was partly the huge rocks from the disintegrating mountainside that had helped wreak this havoc – smashing down on top of buildings, flattening structures in their path, rolling onward in destructive fury. One had levelled a fountain in the gardens, and the spilled water, still dark as the night it reflected, saturated the flowerbeds and flowed into the courtyards whose cobbles looked as though they had been ploughed.

      Somewhere in the ruins of the Palace a spark started, then a fire. Then another. And another. Columns of smoke rose into the sky; the air tasted acrid with dust and ashes and fear.

      When the noise of tumbling rocks and crashing buildings had subsided at last, leaving an echo ringing in Tai’s ears, she began hearing another sound – human voices, groaning, screaming, weeping. She became aware that she was herself uttering small whimpering sounds. Curled up in the middle of a once-graceful flowerbed, now sodden and blighted out in the shattered gardens, she was barefoot, an almost translucent nightrobe all that she wore – but she was whole, and unharmed, and still clutching the red leather-bound journal that had been Antian’s gift.

      Those who had been deeper into the warren of the Palace and had no way to get out …; those who had not woken to the silence before the wrath of the Gods …; those who had tried to run but had not made it