The Secrets of Jin-Shei. Alma Alexander

      Nhia had wanted nothing more than to bolt into the midst of the marketplace and to lose herself in the crowds – but she could not run. She could not ever run. Not from this; not from anything. The irony of this made a wry grin touch her lips. The woman interpreted this as acceptance, or dismissal – in any event she had backed away, bowing, accompanied by her brood.

      Several other customers at the fishmonger’s stall had been witness to this exchange, and the fishmonger himself, who had known Nhia from babyhood, stood with her intended purchase still in his hand.

      ‘So you are a Sage, now, young NhiNhi,’ the fishmonger had said. There was an attempt at levity there, but there was something else also – a curiosity, a careful interest. The marketplace lived by gossip and rumour, this was how the news was spread from one corner of the sprawling city that was Linh-an to the next. There was, maybe, a story here.

      ‘I am no such thing,’ Nhia had said, very firmly, and had brought the subject of the conversation back to the fish.

      But another woman had stopped her in the street two days later, asking a very specific question. The question concerned the child whom she held by the hand and who stood staring at Nhia with the blank obsidian gaze which was very familiar to her. She had worn that mask herself. The child’s other arm and hand, not the one held by her mother, were thin and withered, her fingers bent into a pitiful claw which she held folded into her belly. This was another Nhia, a cripple whose mother was driven to ask for help where she thought she could find it.

      Perhaps it was this that made Nhia speak to her. There had been a parable to fit. Then she had told another tale, directly to the child, another Han-fei story but one aimed at the old pain so familiar to herself, trying to ease the little one’s burden. She had been rewarded with a softening of the eyes, a shy smile. The mother noticed, and her own eyes lit up. She took the incident away with her, cherished it, spoke of it.

      After that, more came.

      Somehow, before she reached her fifteenth birthday, Nhia had found herself sitting in an unoccupied booth in the First Circle one morning, telling teaching tales to a gaggle of children at her feet. At first it was an irregular thing, just every so often – when sufficient numbers of young disciples accumulated around her, Nhia would sit down somewhere, they would all subside on the ground around her, and the cry ‘A story! A story!’ would be raised. But it quickly grew into something more. Something that became striking enough to warrant the attention of the Temple priestly caste. Several times, in the middle of one of her tales, Nhia would look up and catch the glimpse of a discreet observer, an acolyte draped in Temple robes, who would stand with eyes downcast and hands folded into his sleeves and listen intently to what she was saying. When she caught their presence, Nhia tried to be careful and tell only the tales she knew she had heard before here in the Temple, told by the Temple Sages and teachers. But it was sometimes hard to remember which ones she was sure about. All of the stories she told sounded so old and familiar to her. Which ones were old and venerable teaching parables, and which ones had she just invented?

      Li, Nhia’s mother, had been wary of the whole thing, and afraid that the Temple would take exception to Nhia’s activities – especially since she often told her stories in the Temple’s own precincts.

      ‘These are games,’ Li had said, ‘and they can be dangerous. You are setting yourself up above the people. You have had your Xat-Wau, and you are no longer a child, Nhia – think about what it is that you want to do with the rest of your life.’

      ‘But perhaps I am already doing that,’ Nhia had said slowly.

      No marriage; no children; she had come to terms with that. But perhaps these could be her children, the ones who came to her and whose lives she knew she could touch, could sometimes heal. She had much to learn – but already, it seemed, she had much to teach, also. A part of her gloried in it. Her body could not run – but her spirit could fly.

      But Li had not been entirely convinced of her daughter’s calling. She had even gone so far as to approach one of the higher-ranked Temple priests, and ask for absolution if Nhia presumed.

      ‘We considered chastisement,’ the priest had told Li, ‘but first we listened to what she had to say. She makes the children hear her. She has said nothing to which we have taken exception. We think that it has gone far enough that, if she did not do it here, she would do it elsewhere – out in the marketplace, or in the streets.’

      ‘Not if you forbade it, sei.’

      ‘But why would we forbid it? Those she touches come straight home to us. She does the Temple’s work,’ the priest had said. There had been something complacent in his smile, but the priests of the Temple had always been pragmatic about their religion. A Temple which had an entire thriving outer Circle devoted to the commerce of faith could not be other. ‘But I understand your concern – we will make sure she is taught.’

      So Nhia’s life had started to turn around the Temple, more and more. She taught the young, and in her turn she learned the meditations and the mental purifications of the zhao-cha, reaching out to touch the edges of the luminous, following Han-fei into the gardens of the Gods in search of the Fruit of Wisdom.

      Khailin, daughter of Cheleh the Chronicler, had made it her business to keep the crippled girl who had attracted the attention of Sage Lihui under observation. In the months following that encounter in the Temple, Khailin had found out that Nhia frequented the Temple Circles, and had many friends there. She also found out that she and Nhia had more in common than she had thought. Although their focus and their ultimate desires were different, coloured in part by their differing stations in life and their place in Linh-an society, they shared an interest in the Way and in the manner in which it functioned. Nhia’s interest was more in the wisdom and the purity of the path – the zhao-cha, the internal alchemy of the mind and spirit, the calling of the sage, the seer, the wise-woman. Khailin was more attracted to the yang-cha – its rituals, its mathematical magic, its chemistry, its eminently practical nature. They had both been driven to learn, to understand. This was something which Khailin could build on. This could even be part of the reason the Sage Lihui had been interested in Nhia; perhaps he had been drawn to the fierce flame of curiosity, intelligence, yearning to learn. Perhaps, Khailin thought, she and Nhia could be useful to one another.

      So she had started keeping an eye out for Nhia at the Temple. A part of Khailin marvelled at how Nhia had found a way of gaining access to all the disciplines of the Way. And she had done it all without reading a single hacha-ashu manuscript about forbidden things. Khailin was uncomfortably aware that her own time was running out.

      She had already rejected several suitors whose representatives had come bearing the so ji, the carved jade marriage proposal token. All it had taken, as tradition had it, was her refusal to accept the small sculpture into her own hands from the formally attired elderly aunts and cousins who had been entrusted with its delivery. As my beloved wishes, the words had originally meant. If the bride or groom being courted accepted the token, the marriage proposal was deemed to have been accepted, and the betrothal was official from that moment. Khailin’s suitors had not been to her liking – one had come from a large and tradition-hidebound family, which would have trammelled her like a wild bird in a cage; another had been a man quite a few years her senior, with whom she already had a passing acquaintance at Court and whom she could have accepted except for her utter inability to get past his constantly sweaty palms which, upon reflection, she decided she could not bear near her on a regular basis.

      When two emissaries of a prince of Syai came calling just before her Xat-Wau ceremony was due to take place, Cheleh had made it clear to his wayward older daughter that another refusal would have been severely frowned upon. The Prince was young, positively callow, precisely the kind of vacuous young man Khailin had no wish to marry. She could see herself delivered into the soft life of the noble houses, being an obedient young wife, having to obey endless rules of protocol and decorum, having to endure the hated ritual baths with the rest of the pampered ladies – perhaps never again to have access to the kind of arcane information she craved or the opportunity to test her knowledge …; but, on the other hand, she would be a princess,