The Secrets of Jin-Shei. Alma Alexander

the wreck of the Summer Palace.

      In the piles of still settling dust and rubble, under the weight of a mountain.

       Antian.

      The sky was lightening in the east, and dawn crept over the ruined Palace, brighter, faster now that the mountainside which had reared up against the eastern sky was gone.

      Dawn. Early morning.

      The balcony on the mountain.

      Her rigid fingers wrapped tightly around the red book that had been Antian’s gift, Tai scrambled to her feet and stood, indecisive, torn, in the shattered garden. Her nightrobe was streaked with mud, her feet and her face smeared with mud and with dust; she had an urgent need to go and do something – help those buried in the rubble, dig with bare hands until she found someone whom she could haul out of the wreckage – and knew that the only one she wanted to find was Antian, the Little Empress, lost somewhere in this chaos. And unable to move – because if she ran to the Palace Antian could be out on the balcony, and if she chose the balcony Antian might die buried under the weight of the broken Palace.

      She saw someone running towards the buildings, a weeping servant, followed by another who clutched an awkwardly bent arm and had a face smeared with blood. It might have been this that decided Tai. There would be others coming to the Palace soon – not everything had collapsed, surely, and there had to be people who could move, who could help – but nobody else knew that Antian was going to the balcony that morning. If she was there, then nobody knew to go to her aid.

      She turned, and ran.

      Somehow the gate that led to the outer balcony was still intact – its capstone in place, the wall surrounding it deceptively innocent and peaceful in the early morning light. But taking a step through it, and looking up, Tai realized for the first time the extent of the catastrophe that had touched the Summer Palace that day.

      The mountain above the Palace wore a different shape. Half of it was gone, vanished. The mountain peak had disintegrated, and a lot of it had fallen down into the buildings and the courtyards of the Palace. The rest of the mountainside had sheared off in a layer of stone and mud and simply slid down the slope, taking a large chunk of the Palace with it.

      The lacy pattern of open balconies hanging over the river that flowed golden when the sun was setting was no more. The mountain’s face was a gaping wound of broken balustrades, platforms teetering over nothing, piles of shattered stone a long way below, all the way down to the river. Some balconies had been ripped off completely, and gaping holes in the walls opened from the Palace courts directly out into the abyss. Others were hanging on by a narrow ledge only a single flagstone wide, or by part of a balustrade. Yet others were crazy, broken, multi-levelled wrecks with holes where flagstones had smashed or been ripped in half, looking as though they were being observed with a mirror put together from glass shards, each reflecting a different angle, different aspect.

      Tai stood at the edge of this devastation, eyes wide with shock. If Antian had been out here …;

      She tried calling, but her voice seemed to have died in her throat, and all that came out was a soft wail. But the sound seemed to have triggered some response, for the broken stones sighed and whimpered and a familiar but very weak voice replied.

      ‘Who is there?’

      Tai’s first reaction was a rush of relief, a fierce joy, the sheer euphoria of hearing that voice at all. And then that soft voice dropped, fading into almost a whisper. ‘Help me.’

      No! screamed Tai’s mind. But she stifled it, tried to cling to the happiness she had felt a bare moment before, batted at the sudden rush of tears with the back of her hand. Almost unwillingly, not wanting to see what lay beyond the ruined balcony, not wanting to know the inevitable, Tai crept carefully forward towards the edge, peering over.

      Just out of arm’s reach, on a ledge of broken flagstone caught on a rocky protrusion on the mountainside, lay Antian, the Little Empress. One of her long braids had curled on her breast in a long black rope, like a living thing that had come to comfort her; the other had slipped down her shoulder and now hung over the edge of her resting place, swinging out into the chasm below her. She held a hand – always graceful, still graceful! – to her side in a fragile kind of way, as though she was trying to staunch a wound with no strength left to do it with, and indeed there was a dark stain that was spreading into her robe underneath her fingers. Her hand was smeared with red; so was her face, with a gash on her forehead oozing a thin stream of blood into the corner of her eye and down her temple and another graze red and bleeding along the line of her jaw. One of her legs seemed bent at an unnatural angle.

      But her eyes were lucid, and she tried to smile when Tai’s face appeared over the edge of the ruin above her.

      ‘Don’t move,’ Tai said, her voice catching a little. ‘I’ll go get help.’

      ‘Wait …;’

      But Tai was already gone. There had been something about Antian that she could hardly bear to watch – a kind of brightness, an aura that was more than just the first fingers of the dawn’s golden glow, an otherworldly light that told her that Antian had already taken that first irrevocable step into the world beyond, the world of the Immortals.

      Tai skidded into the courtyards, panting, her eyes wild, her feet bleeding from scratches and gashes delivered by the broken cobblestones she had stumbled over in her haste. There were people in the courtyards now, but only a few of them were actually moving about or doing something constructive. Bodies were laid out in the garden, and a handful of bloodied survivors had been taken to a sheltered area where one or two servants, themselves bandaged and bleeding from scratches or hobbling on makeshift crutches, tried to tend to them. Someone was crying weakly for water. Somebody else was weeping, a curiously steady sound, as though she did not know how to stop.

      A young woman in a white robe streaked with dust and blood was leaning over a woman’s body, gently probing with long fingers, but even as Tai watched she straightened with a sigh, closing her eyes. Her expression told it all.

      Her face was familiar, underneath its coating of grime, and Tai fought her own panic and fear to dredge the name from her memory – this was someone who could be useful – who was it – she knew her, it was precisely the person she had come looking for …;

      Yuet. The name swam into her mind, followed by another – Szewan – the healer woman who had tended Tai’s mother that spring. Yuet had tagged at Szewan’s heels. Yuet was the healer’s apprentice.

      Szewan was in Linh-an. Yuet was here. Yuet was the healer.

      Tai ran to the older girl and snatched at the sleeve of her robe.

      ‘Come! Oh, you must come! It’s Antian – it’s the Little Empress – she needs your help.’

      The young healer turned her head, blinked in Tai’s direction for a moment, the words not sinking in. Then, as she parsed the sentence, as she realized what had just been said, she sucked in her breath.

      ‘Is she alive?’

      ‘Yes. Yes! Hurry!’

      Yuet drew a shaking hand across her forehead. ‘The Gods be thanked for that, at least!’ She showed no sign of having recognized Tai, although they had met several times during the spring, but right now Yuet would have been hard put to recognize her own mother. All she could see was the death all around her, the death written in the broken women they were scrambling to dig out of the ruins, the despair written in the faces of those who had come to the call for help, themselves bruised, cut, bleeding. The death written in the toppled mountain that had annihilated everything.

      The Emperor and the Empress were both dead. The rescuers digging in the rubble of the Palace knew that much already. Oylian, the Second Princess, they had not found yet – and that could not be a good sign. And now, this …;

      ‘Take me to her,’ Yuet said, turning away from the body at her feet and starting out towards the ruined Palace.

      ‘This