THE WIND-BLOWN MAN

by Aliette de Bodard

* * * *

Aliette de Bodard lives in Paris, where she works as a computer engineer. In between coding sessions, she writes speculative fiction: her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, and Realms of Fantasy. Aliette was a Campbell Award finalist in 2009. Her first novel, the Aztec fantasy Servant of the Underworld, was recently released by Angry Robot. She tells us her first story for Asimov’s began “as a thought experiment on what science and space travel would be like if the Chinese had become the dominant culture on Earth—and then sort of morphed along the way.”

On a clear day, you could almost see all the way into Heaven.

That was what Shinxie loved about White Horse Monastery: not the high, lacquered buildings scattered across the mountain’s face like the fingerprints of some huge Celestial; not the wide courtyards where students sat like statues, the metal of their second-skins gleaming in the sun; but the clear, crisp air of the heights, and the breathless quiet just before dawn, when she could see a flash of light overhead and imagine it to be the reflection of Penlai Station.

In those moments, she could almost imagine herself to be free.

That was, of course, before the first bell-peal echoed across the mountains, calling all the students to the meditation halls; when the stillness of dawn was shattered by the sound of dozens of bare feet, and the smell of incense and cinnabar wafted down to where she sat, a perpetual reminder of her exile.

That morning, as on all mornings, she pulled herself up, wincing at the ache in her calves, and began the climb upward. Soon, she’d have to begin her examinations. By the looks of it, there were at least one or two students who might have achieved the perfect balance: fire and wood, earth and water and metal in perfect harmony within—two more, ready to take their gliders and transcend into Penlai Station.

She was thinking of the second one—Fai Meilin, a short, skeletal woman whose bruised eyes looked almost incongruous in her serene face—when she saw the glint of sunlight.

Penlai Station, winking to her again? But no, the glint came again, and it was larger, spinning itself out of nothingness, layer after layer carefully superimposing itself on reality, until a glider flew out of the singularity in the sky, the slender silhouette underneath shifting to accommodate the strong headwinds with the liquid grace of a Transcendent.

She stood, stared at the glider—hoping it would go away. But it did not. It remained stubbornly there, floating toward the monastery, a patent impossibility. One transcended—became one with the universe, knowing, for a brief moment, how to be everywhere at once before dematerializing on Penlai Station, in the company of peers. One did not, could not descend. That was impossible.

The glider was coming closer to her, its rider maneuvering the metal wings with casual effortlessness. His face, shining under the second-skin, tilted toward her, and somehow the faceted eyes met her, and pierced her like a spear.

For a moment more, she hung indecisive; and then, with a shudder, she broke the contact and ran up the mountain, abandoning all protocol and decorum, calling out for the guards.

* * * *

Shinxie pressed her hand to the door, waited for the familiar tingle of recognition that traveled through her palm—and slid it open.

Inside the holding cell, the Transcendent was sitting cross-legged in a pit of sunlight, showing no inclination to move or escape. He’d abandoned his glider soon after landing, and now looked oddly bereft, as though something vital had been torn from him. But, of course, that was only illusion. The gliders were more for the protection of White Horse than for the Transcendents: no one wanted to take the risk of a failed singularity opening within the monastery.

Shinxie sat cross-legged in front of the Transcendent, unsure of what to say. The faceted gaze rose to meet hers, incurious—following her movement as if by instinct. His aura saturated the air: the five elements in perfect balance, nothing standing out, no emotion to be read or perceived.

She couldn’t help shivering. She’d grown too used to the implants in her palms, relying on her ability to read auras to understand people. But he ... he was a Transcendent, through and through: nothing remained, no desire, no interest, no care for anything. He’d let go of his self—the only way he’d be able to open a singularity and lose himself into it.

“I know who you are,” she said. Carefully, she laid the papers she’d been holding on the floor between them. “Gao Tieguai, from the Province of Anhui.”

The eyes blinked, briefly; the head was inclined, as if in acknowledgement.

“Your family was outlawed after you wrote memorials against the Tianshu Emperor, may he reign ten thousand years.” She closed her eyes. “You came here in the fifteenth year of the Tianshu reign. I—helped you transcend.”

She should have remembered him better, but even the faded likeness on the file hadn’t brought back any memories. She’d have been newly appointed as Abbess of White Horse, still bitter at her expulsion from the Imperial Court: she’d done her work like a chore, laying hands on students every morning, reading the balance of their humors as if in a butterfly-dream—and forgetting them as soon as they’d left her office.

The head bowed to her again. “You did help me, Honored Abbess,” the Transcendent—Gao—said, the first words he’d pronounced since returning.

His voice was low, broken by disuse; and yet, in the pauses between the words, lay an abyss of untapped power.

“Why have you come back?” Shinxie said. And, when the eyes still did not move, “It’s not possible, to do what you did. You cannot descend...”

Gao’s hands moved, as if to a rhythm of their own. His second-skin stretched between the fingers, creating a softer transition like a webbed foot. “Do you presume to know everything?”

She was no Westerner or Mohammedan, to view the world with boundless arrogance, presuming that everything must cave in to reason. “No. But some things among the ten thousand have explanations.”

“This isn’t one of them.” Gao smiled, vaguely amused—she’d seen the same expression in her terminal students, except not quite so distant and cold. She hadn’t thought she could feel chilled—by a former student, of all people—but then she’d never been made so aware of how different the Transcendents were.

Shinxie reached for the paper, steadied herself with its familiar touch. “You’re going to have to explain it to me.”

“I fail to see why.”

Had he lost all awareness of Earth? But no, she knew the answer. To transcend was to detach oneself from the real world, measure by measure—until no other destination remained but Penlai, where all desires, all emotions had lost meaning.

“You’re a child,” she said, feeling cold certainty coalesce within her. “With the powers of a Celestial. You could will yourself anywhere in the world—within the Censorate, the Forbidden City—even in the Imperial Chambers...”

“If I willed it so.”

For a moment, she stared at him. His face under the iridescent second-skin was almost featureless: only the eyes, protected by their thick facets, retained a semblance of life. His mouth—a bare slit—was impassive, expressionless.

“You’re never going to make them believe that you don’t want to do this.”

“To want, even the smallest thing, is to desire.” Gao inclined his head. “And desire is impure.”

Shinxie shivered—thinking of the Sixth Prince’s touch on hers, of the hands stroking the curve of her back—before they were found out, and the Imperial Edict shattered her life. “You’re—” she started, and then realized that he was right. Desire, love, tenderness—it was all an expression of the self, and only those who had no self could open the singularities.

“You haven’t changed, then,” Gao said.

He said it so matter of factly that it took his words a moment to sink in. “What do you mean?” she asked—though she knew, like ice in her guts, that he already knew.

“You have never transcended.”

And she never would; and she’d known it even before the Tianshu Emperor sent her there. She’d known it as she’d watched the Sixth Prince just after the Edict’s proclamation, his face frozen in what might have been grief, what might have been anger—a memory warm enough to last for a lifetime. “No,” she said. “I have made my peace with that.”

Gao inclined his head again—could he even feel ironic, or amused? No, of course not; he couldn’t—and that was what frightened her so much. Lust burnt and destroyed the world, and duty compelled, maintaining the structure of the universe; but he was beyond either of those, so far away from the living creatures he might as well have been a rock, or a waterfall.

“Why have you come back?” she asked. “Something had to draw you here. Something had to make you return.” He had to have found a way around the constrictions of the Transcendents; some trick to bend the rules to his will.

But Gao sat, and smiled, and said nothing.

“If I can find no explanation, someone else will come,” Shinxie said. “Someone with fewer scruples than I.”

But, no matter how hard she pressed him, she obtained nothing but that enigmatic smile—the same one teasing up the corners of her students’ lips, the same one carved on the statues of all the Celestials in their temples.

In the end, weary of his silence, she left him, and retreated to the safety of her room—where she began composing, with painstaking eagerness, a missive to the Imperial Court, explaining what had happened, and humbly pleading for guidance.

She had to pause for a moment at the transmitter, her hand frozen on the controls—it had been so long since the last communication between White Horse and the capital that she’d forgotten the proper protocol. But the lights shimmered on the panel; the humors swirled within the machine, until a single spike of wood-humor surged through the antenna; and the reassuring hum of an outgoing transmission soon filled the room.

The Court’s answer was curt, and almost instantaneous: Wait. Someone will come to you.

* * * *

The Sixth Imperial Prince arrived with all the pomp due to one of his rank: a row of attendants, the metal of their engineered arms glinting in the morning sunlight; a few advisors, their gazes distant and contemptuous; and, finally, at the end of the procession, the Prince himself, a short, plump man of middle age, who looked curiously at every building in the monastery, as if working out a particular literary or alchemical problem.

The students, the alchemists and the teachers had all assembled in the Hall of Cultivating the Body and Mind, the teachers and alchemists looking almost colorless next to the students—their second-skins shimmering in the sunlight, so strongly Shinxie could almost imagine the whirlwind of humors beneath the alchemists’ modifications.

As abbess of the monastery, Shinxie was the one who welcomed the Prince—standing in the center of the Hall, under the ever-shifting pictures of successful Transcendents.

“Your Excellency.” Shinxie abased herself to the ground, in the prescribed position for welcoming a son of the Emperor—her chest pressed against the stones of the floor, her head lowered, her gaze down—she couldn’t afford to look up at him, couldn’t afford to meet his eyes.

She found, to her dismay, that she was shaking. Ten years past, and a whole world between them, and she couldn’t even quiet her memories and her desires enough to respect protocol. What a waste.

“Yue Shinxie.” The Prince’s voice was low, with the cultured accents of the Court. “You may rise. There’s no need to stand on ceremony here.”

From where Shinxie lay, she heard the sharp, shocked intake of breath course through the ranks of the assembled teachers and students—how could the Prince set aside protocol, unless he had some previous acquaintance with her? She could only guess at the questions she’d have to face later, the idle speculations at the noon rice and in the quiet hours after evening, the subtle accusations spreading like wildfire among the students.

But then, none of that mattered, because she was rising on stiff knees, to meet the Prince’s gaze. He hadn’t changed in ten years—aged a little, with new wrinkles on the moon-shaped face, a few lines pulling his eyes into sharper almonds. But the same presence emanated from him: the palpable charm and aura that underlined every one of his postures. She knew, of course she knew, that the imperial alchemists had worked on him while he was barely in his mother’s womb—and she knew that, if she laid her hands on him, her implants would feel the engineered humors pulsing, combining into the melody of seduction—but it didn’t matter, it had never mattered. Her throat was dry, her breasts aching as if with milk.

“You’ll want to see him,” she said, struggling to bring her mind back to the present.

The Prince inclined his head, gracefully. “Of course. Walk with me, will you, Yue?”

Protocol would have put him in front of her—but protocol had to give way to practicalities; for, of course, he had no idea where the holding cells were. She walked slightly in front, head bowed, trying not to think of his presence behind her—of the hands that had once traced the contours of her body; of the lips, moist and warm, sending a quiver of desire arching through her body like a spear.

There were no other footsteps: neither the attendants nor the advisors had followed them, and the others in the monastery had gone back to the flow of their lives.

“You’re happy here,” the Prince said. There was a hint of wood in his aura—a hint of enquiry, barely perceptible unless one knew him well.

Shinxie sucked in a slow, burning breath. “Of course,” she said.

“Shinxie.” He gave her name the edge of a blade.

She stopped, still not daring to look at him. “My work is here,” she said. “Helping them transcend.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“No,” she said. “You were the one who once said that happiness wasn’t our fate, Your Excellency.”

“Your Excellency? Is this what it has come to?”

It wasn’t, and he knew it—he had to know it, to see something on her face, in her bearing, of the confusion of humors within her. “I’m sorry,” she said, finally. “But it’s been a long time.”

“It has.” Was the quiver in his voice bitterness, or regret? She’d never been able to read him properly; she, the physician, the empath, the one who could always know what her students were thinking, who could always open the book of their lives with the mere touch of her hands.

“Why did they send you? There are many Princes, and even more censors.”

The Prince did not speak for a while. Their path crossed the Pavilion of the Nesting Phoenix, where the hum of the alchemists’ machines made the slats of the floor tremble underfoot. “They could have sent someone else,” he said, with something like a sigh. “But I asked.”

The shock of his answer was like cold water. “You—”

The Prince shook his head. Before them stretched the Corridor of Stone, and the rows of holding cells, all doors half-open—save one. “I wanted to see how you were, Yue.”

The hint of hunger in his voice made her uncomfortable—as if something were not quite right with the world. He had always sought what he needed, taken what he wanted; but never had he let protocol lapse, except for that one unguarded moment after the Edict. “As well as can be,” she said, carefully. “I trust you are well.”

The Prince did not look at her. “I have three wives, and have been blessed with seven sons and three daughters.”

That was no answer. “I see,” Shinxie said. She laid her hand on the door, wondering why she felt so empty inside. “Let’s see him, shall we?”

* * * *

Gao’s eyes flicked up when they entered, but he showed the Prince even less interest than he’d shown Shinxie. The Prince, if he was angered by this lack of protocol, showed nothing—sitting cross-legged on the floor with Shinxie by his side.

“Gao Tieguai,” the Prince said. “Do you know why I am here?”

“This humble person would not presume,” Gao said. His face was blank, the second-skin like gleaming cloth over his features. “Your Excellency.” He used the wording and tone suitable for addressing a high-ranking member of the Imperial Court.

“Deference,” the Prince said, as if pondering a particular problem. “That’s something to work with.”

Gao bowed his head. “I assume you’ll ask me the same question the Honored Abbess did.”

The Prince inclined his head, looking at Gao. “No,” he said, finally. “The wise man knows better than to travel well-worn roads. I’d find nothing more than she did.”

“Enlighten me,” Gao said, gravely.

“I’ll give you a variant on the warning she’s already given you, no doubt,” the Prince went on, as if this were nothing more than a polite conversation. “A delicate balance maintains us all bound to each other: the workers in the factories, the merchants in their skiffs, the alchemists at their machines, the Emperor on his throne. You—upset this, Gao Tieguai.”

“Because I fit nowhere?”

The Prince made a quick, dismissive gesture with his hands. “Everyone in White Horse is as you once were,” he said, bending toward Gao Tieguai, as if imparting a particular secret between equals. “Dreamers. Troublemakers. Rebels who flee Earth, finding no other choice but to leave the world behind. So long as you bend your mind to transcending, you’ll not upset anything. So long as your voyage is without return. Do you understand, Gao?”

“You are mistaken,” Gao said. His face had not moved. “If I truly wanted to cause unrest, I could not have returned.”

“I know what you told her,” the Prince said. “About desire and care. I don’t believe it.”

“Whether you believe it or not will change nothing to what is.” Gao spread his hands. “Consider dandelion seeds, Your Excellency. They go where the wind blows them, take root where the Earth welcomes them. If they flower in the cracks of some high mountain, it’s not because they chose to ascend the mountain, or because they love heights.”

The Prince pondered this for a while. Gao did not move; and Shinxie could feel his presence, the humors he radiated, like a weight on the palms of her hands—calm and balanced, so unlike the Prince’s fierce, stormy aura.

Finally the Prince said, “Chance? I find it too convenient that you, of all people, should return.”

“As you said—” Gao shook his head—”many people like me came to White Horse. You try to read too much into events.”

The reproach was almost palpable, to a man whom only the Emperor or the Grand Secretary were in a position to correct. Surely the Prince would not tolerate it? But he merely shook his head, as if amused. “I see. If that is the way the game must be played, it would be inappropriate of me to refuse. Thank you for your answers, Venerable. I trust we will speak again.”

Gao inclined his head; but it was Shinxie’s gaze that he met when he looked up again. His presence was in his eyes, in the light the faceted covers caught and broke into a thousand sparkles. On impulse, Shinxie reached out to touch him—and stopped herself just before she breached his privacy.

Gao made a slow, graceful gesture, inviting her to go on. “There is no shame in this,” he said.

His second-skin was metal-cold, as if remembering the frosty touch of Heaven—but then her implants connected, and all she could feel was the maelstrom of humors within him: fire and earth and water and metal and wood, generating each other, extinguishing each other in an endless dance, everything in perfect balance, no one humor dominating the others, no one feeling distinguishing itself from the endless cycle. He cared for nothing; loved nothing and no one; and even his courtesies toward her or the Prince were nothing more than bare civilities, doled out on a whim.

“I see,” she whispered, standing on the edge of the abyss—feeling the wind howling in her ears, the cold that traveled up into her belly. “Thank you.”

Back in the Corridor of Stone, the Prince turned to Shinxie, who had not said a word. “So?” he asked.

“Are you asking for my opinion?” Shinxie said.

The Prince made a quick, annoyed gesture with his right hand. “Who else would I ask?”

“When I touched him—” Shinxie shivered—”I knew that he was right. He’s brought all five humors into perfect balance; he is one with the world. He feels nothing.” Nothing stuck out from the morass within him; nothing ever would. Her first instinct when she had seen him had been correct: there was no descent. The Transcendents, their bodies changed by the alchemists, their minds shaped by the teachers and their hours of meditation, were everything they had been molded into: beings who no longer had their place on Earth, who no longer belonged in the cycle of life and death and rebirth.

The Prince walked ahead of her, in perfect control of protocol. He did not look back. “I don’t believe that,” he said.

He didn’t trust her, then—but he had made it clear what he thought of White Horse. “Even if you didn’t,” Shinxie said, wearily, “what does it change? He only indulges us by staying here.”

“Exactly,” the Prince said. “If he is innocent, then we have no right to take his life. But, if he turns out to be a danger to the Emperor’s mandate ... then we’ll take what opportunity we can to strike at him.”

Shinxie nodded—it made sense, although he was wrong about Gao. But, clearly, she would not dispel his worries on her own.

“What you told him about White Horse...” she said, slowly, carefully.

The Prince made a quick, stabbing gesture with his hands, in a swish of silk. “Don’t be a fool, Yue. What I told him clearly doesn’t apply to you.”

Didn’t it? Wasn’t she, too, a dreamer, a troublemaker? Not all troubles were political, and the prolonged affair of a minor official with an Imperial Prince had disrupted enough of the Court’s protocol. And who but a dreamer would remain for so long in exile?

The Prince, though he was insensitive to humors, must have felt her hesitation. “Yue,” he said, turning so that his gaze met hers—his whole body softening to the pose between a man and his concubine. “Every place must have its hierarchy of officials in charge—someone to wield the authority of the Court. And to impose order on chaos requires higher discipline than living in the midst of order. You’re no troublemaker.”

Just a jailer for a jail, Shinxie thought—and, suddenly, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to contain her bitterness. To see him there—unchanged, radiating his usual, careless ease, the silk robes as out of place in the monastery as a scholar in the fields—bothered her more than she’d thought it would.

“No,” she said, finally. “I’m no troublemaker.”

* * * *

That night, Shinxie could not sleep. Confused memories of the Imperial Court mingled in her mind with the monastery—the quiet of the meditation hour mingling with the gongs announcing the Tianshu Emperor’s arrival, and the hum of the alchemists’ machines becoming deeper and stronger, a memory from the huge contraptions at Pavilion of Going to War, hammering men into the elite of the army, with the ring of metal on metal, and the hiss of fire meeting water, and the thud-thud of metal striking earth...

She sat up with a start, an uneasy feeling of loss clenching her chest like a fist of ice. There was nothing around her but silence.

She got up, and stared for a while at the four chests that held her clothes—a vanity from her court days that she’d kept even here, at White Horse, where the only dress was white robes for alchemists, brown for teachers, and grey for students. Then she laid the palm of her hand on the Autumn chest, and pulled out a robe of silk embroidered with three-clawed dragons, watching it flow in her hands like sunlit water.

The Prince had seen her in this, once—with ceruse whitening her face, and her lined eyebrows joining in the shape of a moth. In another lifetime, he had asked for her in his chambers, and bent toward her as he served her tea, his lips wide and inviting in the shadows. He had—

Slowly, she folded the robe back inside the chest, and went for a walk.

In the Hall of Cultivating the Body and Mind, the students all sat in meditation, cross-legged on the ledge that ran along the walls. Their eyes in the darkness were wide open, the facets catching and reflecting moonlight—their faces slack and smooth, though she could still feel the faint threads of emotion radiating from them, as if they were all sleeping. Dreaming.

Dreamers. Troublemakers. Was that all White Horse was to the Flowering Empire: a regulator, an escape valve—a place where the alchemists would take those who had erred, who could still err, and mold them into people who could no longer care enough to be a threat? And—if she searched her heart and mind long enough, would she remember that, when she sent them upward into Penlai Station, she saw them as already dead?

“You look troubled,” a voice said behind her.

Her heart leapt, painfully, into her throat. She turned; but even before she did, she knew whom she would see.

Gao stood where, a moment before, there had been only emptiness. She couldn’t see the singularity that had brought him here; but, of course, they closed quickly. “Aren’t you supposed to be in your holding cell?” Shinxie asked, but the heart wasn’t in it.

Gao bowed his head, gravely. “And aren’t you supposed to be in bed?”

“My own business,” she said. She should have been irked, but his presence—his utter lack of salient emotions—was potent, a balm to her troubled spirits. “Just as being troubled is my own business.”

“Remorse,” Gao said, thoughtfully. His eyes seemed reflections of the students’, blank and unmoving and utterly unreadable. “Regret. Lust.”

Of course, he too could read humors.

“Not lust,” Shinxie said, with a quick shake of her head. She should have told him—something else. To go back to his cell, perhaps? But, when no locked door would hold him, did that rigmarole still have any sense?

“No,” Gao said. “Not lust. Love. Perhaps it’s worse.”

“There are those,” Shinxie said, stiffly, “who’ll tell you that love holds up the world.”

“The followers of the Crucified Man?” Gao’s hands moved, slightly. “Perhaps, in some other world, that is an inalterable truth—perhaps love does keep Earth under Heaven and the world on its axis. But consider—” He paused for a moment—not because he hesitated, Shinxie suspected, but solely for effect. “You long for this man, even now, even after so many years. You humiliate yourself for him. You would die for him. Perhaps, given enough time, you might even kill for him.”

“That’s nonsense,” Shinxie said, abruptly. “I wouldn’t do anything for him.”

“Really? If he told you, tomorrow, that you could come back as his concubine, what would you do?”

She thought about it for a while. There was something about him that compelled honesty—or perhaps it was merely that she was tired of lies, hidden beneath the thin coat of makeup that was protocol. “I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s what’s wrong,” Gao said. “By your love, you set him apart from other men.”

“Do you believe that nonsense, then, that all men are equal?” Shinxie asked.

“All men are,” Gao’s lips stretched into what might have been a smile. “All men are born of a woman’s womb: the Emperor, the laborers; even the foreigners. They do not choose the circumstances of their birth; but, sometimes, they may alter the course of their lives. And, of course, we die, all of us, at a time that is seldom of our own choosing.”

Shinxie shivered. “I did not come here to listen to philosophy.”

“As you wish,” Gao said. “I merely wished to point out some facts to you.”

“Wished?” Shinxie said. “You have none of those, I’d have thought.”

“No,” Gao said, finally.

“Why are you here?” Shinxie asked, again. “Surely not for the pleasure of talking about my private life, Gao. Surely not for angering the Sixth Prince.”

“I know the Sixth Prince,” Gao said. “I know what he will do, and that is of little interest to me.”

“I thought knowing everything was wrong.”

“Some things you can know,” Gao said.

She looked at him; at the expressionless face, the aura that was perfectly in balance. “Why are you here?”

“You know,” Gao said, gravely.

She had heard his explanation about the dandelions—about going where the wind would carry them, flowering where the earth would have them. “No,” she said. “If you came by whim, why aren’t you leaving?”

“I might,” Gao said. “Who knows what I will do tomorrow?”

“There is something, isn’t there?” she asked. But, looking into the glint of his facets, feeling the perfect, oppressing balance of his elements, she knew that she was wrong, that the Prince was wrong: there was nothing more to him than this. He was the clouds, he was the storm: here one day, gone the next. He cared not about what he brought with him, or about what the Prince would do.

Oh, Celestials, she thought. What have we wrought here, in White Horse?

* * * *

The Sixth Prince came into Shinxie’s office two days later, looking pleased with himself—like a tiger who has just successfully stalked a man. He settled himself near the door, waiting for her to finish reading Fai Meilin—an unnerving presence at the edge of her field of vision.

Fai Meilin’s aura was more subdued than usual, with none of the water that usually dominated her thoughts. She submitted herself meekly to Shinxie’s examination, uncaring of the presence of a man in the room; and bowed to Shinxie when she was finished.

“Soon,” Shinxie said. “One or two weeks, I’d think, if you keep this up.”

Fai Meilin nodded, distantly—she had already reached the stage where it didn’t truly matter anymore.

When she was gone, the Prince detached himself from the wall. “Come with me, Yue.” He sounded almost eager, his aura roiling with fire. “I’ve found a way.”

“A way?” Shinxie asked.

“A way to solve our problems,” the Prince said, with a stab of his hands. “A way to beat him on his own ground.”

“Gao Tieguai?” Shinxie said. “Your Excellency, I humbly submit you are mistaken. I spoke with him two days ago—” she stopped then, but the Prince didn’t question her further—”and I don’t think he would do anything to harm the Flowering Empire.” He wouldn’t do anything, just drift through the monastery until he left—staring at students or at buildings with no real interest, as if knowing already how unreal all of this was, all bound to crumble.

The Prince’s aura roiled more strongly, fire taking true precedence over the other four elements. But then he seemed to remember who he was talking to, and—for a bare moment—remorse and affection filled his eyes. Shinxie’s heart tightened.

“Yue,” he said. Unexpectedly, he stopped, facing her equal to equal—her eyes tingled with unexpected tears. “He may well be. I trust you, but I have to be sure. I can’t face His Imperial Majesty without being sure. This goes higher than what’s between us.”

“I see,” Shinxie said, slowly.

“You do?” the Prince looked at her for a while. “Don’t worry. It will soon be over—and then we’ll see. Perhaps you don’t need to be at White Horse anymore. There are far better places in your future. In our futures.”

If he told you, tomorrow, that you could come back as his concubine, what would you do?

He took her, not to the Hall of Cultivating the Body and Mind, but to the World of the Celestials, one of the smallest courtyards in the monastery. On the short flight of stairs that led up to the Memorial Pavilion, Gao stood waiting for them, surrounded by a handful of Imperial soldiers.

Other soldiers were moving toward them, escorting two prisoners, their shoulders weighed under the metal frame of a cangue.

Shinxie looked from the prisoners to the Prince—and to Gao, whose face still had not changed.

The Prince said to Gao, when they reached the dais. “You’ll know who they are.”

The prisoners—a young man and middle-aged woman, their faces thin, emaciated —were forced to kneel. Their cangues were removed; they kept their gazes to the ground, not daring to look up at the Prince.

“Enlighten me,” Gao said. He had not moved.

“Gao Yuhuan, Gao Jiajin,” the Prince said. His voice, too, was low and even. “Your wife and son.”

The woman started, and her aura roiled with the agitation of water—but when she made to move, one of the guards hit her in the back with the butt of his weapon, sending her sprawling to the ground.

“I see,” Gao said. He might as well have been talking about the weather. “It has been a long time, Your Excellency.”

The woman, Shinxie saw, was weeping; and her son held himself rigid. Both auras were shot through with metal—the element of anguish.

The soldiers moved into position, stretching the prisoners flat on the ground. Two of them hefted bamboo canes, looking thoughtfully at the bodies before them.

Shinxie had seen many such scenes, when she was a court official; it was common to be beaten. But, nevertheless, she couldn’t help the shudder that ran through her.

“You will read him,” the Prince said to Shinxie. His face was a mask, his own aura dominated by fire—but, when she brushed him on her way to Gao Tieguai, she felt the other element: metal, anguish, and disgust. He was doing his duty, and not caring much for it.

Gao Tieguai extended his hand to her; she’d expected a little shrug, a little sign that he was also finding this distasteful, but there was nothing. “Gao,” she said, but found all words had gone.

“Begin,” the Prince said.

The canes rose, fell. The first blow tore the clothes from collar to hem; the second drew beads of blood; and each subsequent one widened the wounds even further. Shinxie could see the bodies arch against the pain—could feel the anguish and pain of metal in the auras, roiling stronger and stronger—could hear the woman’s quiet sobs, slowly rising into raw screams—could see the son’s body, shuddering every time the blows came. And still it didn’t stop—blood was flowing over the beaten earth of the courtyard, watering the earth, and neither of them could hide their suffering any more, neither of them could bear it any more....

Her hand tightened around Gao’s, strongly enough to crush the fingers of a mere man.

“Again,” the Prince said, his voice flat.

The soldiers nodded—and it went on, the even rise and fall of the canes, the little snap as the thin bamboo bent to strike the skin, the blows coming one after the other, the sheer repetition of it all....

And, throughout, Gao’s aura never wavered, never tilted out of balance—all five elements, no anguish, no anger, no pain. Nothing. The canes rose and fell and the blood splashed, and once there was a crunch like bones breaking, and the son finally cried out, his leg sticking out at an awkward angle from his hip, his flesh glistening in the morning sun, and the canes rose and fell and there was only blood and pain and a smell like charnel-houses, and still Gao said nothing, moved nothing, felt nothing.

At last, at long last, it stopped, and Shinxie drew in a shuddering breath, half-expecting the Prince to raise his hand again. But he didn’t. He merely looked at her holding Gao’s hand, as if she had the answers to everything.

The woman, lying in the stickiness of her own blood, tried to pull herself upward, fell back with a cry. She was whispering something, over and over; and it was a while before Shinxie realized that it was Gao’s personal name, only used by his intimates.

Gao looked at the woman, uninterested; his aura did not waver.

Shinxie shook her head at the Prince, willing this farce to be over.

“I see,” the Prince said. He looked at the two pitiful, broken bodies below him. “I humbly apologize, in the name of the Tianshu Emperor, for this ill-treatment. The imperial alchemists here will see about your wounds. Come, Yue.”

She followed, Gao’s hand still in hers—cool, reassuring, unwavering.

As they walked out of the courtyard, the woman cried out, “Husband!” Her voice was a sob.

Gao turned, bowing to her—dragging Shinxie with him. “Guilin,” he said, speaking her personal name.

“Lisai,” the woman whispered. “Please...”

Gao shook his head, very gently. “It was a long time ago, Guilin. I am deeply sorry. You’ll recover, and have a long, prosperous life.” He glanced at the Sixth Prince, and added, “They’ll make sure you lack for nothing.”

But his aura was undisturbed, his second-skin cool under Shinxie’s touch. He meant none of it.

* * * *

Later, the Prince came to her office, looking small and wan. “I’ll be going back to the capital, Yue. I’ll report that there’s nothing to see here, nothing to threaten the Flowering Empire. My work is done.”

“I see,” Shinxie said. She still heard the sounds of the canes rising and falling—still smelt the sharp, animal tang of blood in the morning—and felt Gao’s aura, utterly unperturbed. A dandelion, going where the wind blew; a cloud, a storm. There was nothing more to him; not anymore—and she was the one who had shaped him, who had made hundreds like him.

The Prince’s face was pale, and even his formal makeup couldn’t quite disguise it. “I shouldn’t have done it, should I?” he asked.

Something twisted within her. “You had to protect the Empire,” she said. “You had to make sure.”

The Prince’s hands clenched, slightly. “The alchemists will repair the skin, and mend the broken bones. It will be as if it had never happened. I’ll make sure they’re compensated—that they’re pardoned, with enough money to establish themselves. It will be as if it had never happened.” His tone was that of one who didn’t believe in what he said; and for the first time since she’d known him, his voice shook and broke.

Shinxie fought the crushing feeling that threatened to overwhelm her chest. “Go home,” she said, gently. “You have wives and children. You have no reason to cling to any of this.”

“Yue—” the Prince said, and stopped. “If I were to—” He stopped again, as if words would no longer come to him. “Come back with me,” he said. “Please.”

He had never asked. He had never begged. In all the days of their liaisons, even in the days since he’d come back into her life....

Oh, Your Excellency....

If he told you, tomorrow, that you could come back as his concubine, what would you do?

She hadn’t been able to answer Gao, then. But now, in the quiet of her office, there was only one thing she could say, one answer that would make sense. “My place is here. My work is here. I am sorry. Go home. Forget about this place.” Forget about me.

The Prince’s face contracted, very slightly. Shinxie reached out, feeling nothing but a shadow of her old desire—stroked his hand, gently. “May you live long, and attain all five blessings, Your Excellency.”

And, in that instant—looking at this small, hunched man who was no less broken than the prisoners he’d chosen to beat—she knew.

* * * *

Gao was waiting for her in the Hall of Cultivating the Body and Mind—standing in the center, amid the students deep in their meditations. He bowed to her when she arrived.

It was the hour after dusk; the drum had been beaten, signaling the end of this day’s teaching. The teachers had gone back to their rooms; the alchemists to their laboratories. The procession that accompanied the Sixth Prince was making its slow way down the mountain, taking with it Gao’s wife and son in palanquins—pale and shrunken, their bodies repaired by the alchemists’ painstaking work.

“I know how you came back,” Shinxie said.

Gao’s face turned toward her, the eye-facets gleaming with the first star. He said nothing.

“Balance,” Shinxie whispered. “You can’t open a singularity unless you care about nothing—but that’s not how it works, is it?” That wasn’t how ... She took a deep, trembling breath, feeling the icy air go down, all the way into her lungs. Finally she said. “If you loved everything on this earth—the mountains and the valleys, the storms and the sunlight—the Emperor, the merchants and the laborers, the alchemists and the workers...” If nothing truly stood out, if everything was in balance...

Gao said, finally, “Then, if you’ve listened to what I told you, you’d know that wouldn’t be love anymore.”

No, not in the sense of desire or lust—it wouldn’t set people apart, wouldn’t tear away at the fabric of the world....

He did not move—and she was half-relieved, half-disappointed. Would he not even attempt to silence her?

“You needn’t have come back here,” she whispered, and then something came loose within her, some pent-up anger or frustration. “You needn’t come back here and go through this pretense—there was no need—” Not for the Sixth Prince, not for the canes, not for the memory of blood clogging up her nostrils, the nausea that threatened to overwhelm her every time she paused....

“This is White Horse,” Gao said, gravely. “A refuge for the Flowering Empire’s dreamers; the only place where they can thrive. If you cannot grasp what this is about, then who will?” He tilted his head—and, with a growing, convulsive shiver, she remembered the conversation they’d had in the Hall, the students in meditation, his words about love and equality, nesting at the back of their minds like coiled snakes....

New teachings. He had come back because of the students, because of what he thought he could give them. Because he meant to change them.

“You—” she whispered.

“There is so much blindness in this world,” Gao said, and for the first time, she heard kindness in his voice. It did nothing to quell the tremors that ran up her arms. “So much misery to extinguish.”

“And you’d change us?” she whispered. “To fit your rules? What gave you the right—?”

She swung her hand, clumsily, toward him; he caught it in his own, imprisoning the fingers in an unbreakable hold.

“Shinxie,” he whispered, and in his voice was an echo of the Prince’s need, of his aching tenderness. “The Tianshu Emperor shapes us to his needs. Do you think it’s a better rule?”

The Imperial edict, sending her into her exile; White Horse, the gateway to a voyage of no return; the casual arrogance of the Sixth Prince, the faith that the Empire should be safeguarded, at all costs. “I don’t know what your rule would be,” she said.

“You know how I came back,” Gao said. His aura washed over her, unchanging—all five elements, entwined into perfect balance; fire and wood, earth and water and metal generating each other, destroying each other, supporting each other in their endless cycle. “That’s all I can offer you.”

“I could call him back,” Shinxie said. “The Prince. Tell him what happened, tell him what you did.”

Gao said nothing. “If that is your wish, I will not gainsay it.”

“You wouldn’t?” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “You let your wife and son be beaten rather than reveal anything, and you wouldn’t stop me?”

“My wife and son were never in real danger,” Gao said. “Many things are wrong in the Flowering Empire, but the death of two innocents is not yet condoned. But to stop you would require violence,” Gao said. “Perhaps even killing you.”

Shinxie laughed. She couldn’t help herself—the sounds racked her, bitter sobs with nothing of joy. “You—”

He was still watching her, his head bent at an angle, like a curious bird; and suddenly she realized that everything he had ever said or done had led to this point—that every one of his acts had aimed to let her know, to put her in the position when she knew exactly what he felt—as if he still needed some kind of judgment passed on him, some reassurance that he was right.

No, that was not it.

He had come here, in White Horse, for a change that would start among the Flowering Empire’s dreamers—among her students. A change she would witness; for she was Abbess of White Horse.

Of course he would want her to understand.

“Celestials take you,” she whispered.

Gao’s lips thinned into a smile. “You’ll find that’s impossible.”

“I could stop you,” Shinxie said—but she thought of the Prince’s haunted face, and knew she couldn’t. “But it wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair.”

Gao inclined his head, and said nothing. His aura washed over her, with the regularity of waves on a calm morning—something she could cling to, even now.

“The others,” she said. “On Penlai Station. Will they come back?”

“Who knows? I can’t speak for them.”

Gao made a slow, sweeping gesture with his hands; and the air started to sparkle around him. Slowly, the singularity came into being, blurring the edges of his being—layer after layer of his body slowly erasing itself from reality. “Goodbye, Yue Shinxie. I trust we will meet again.”

After he was gone, she stood for a while, the silence of the Hall washing over her—the familiar sounds of nightingales singing, the crisp, biting air of the night on her fingers, the lights reflected in the facets of her students’ eyes.

She wondered how he would fare, out in the Flowering Empire—what else he would do.

Whatever the case, things would never be the same.

She wanted to laugh, or to weep, but even that seemed to be beyond her. Instead, she felt a slow, inexpressible feeling rise up in her: a desperate wish for the world to thrive, no matter what happened; for the Emperor, the merchants and the laborers, the alchemists and the workers to live and prosper and understand what was right—Gao’s love for everything, strong enough to crush the bones of her chest.

And, standing shivering in the courtyard, she finally understood the gift he had left her.

The path to transcendence had shifted, away from the dry detachment of Penlai Station and the emptiness of Heaven: it now lay in the shadow of his footsteps, in the singularity that compassion had opened—wide and clear and ready to be followed.

Copyright © 2010 Aliette de Bodard