Free Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay Page B

deceive?”
    Tai shook his head again. “I knew him.” He sipped his wine. “But someone knew me, if they told her not to fight. She said she’d have preferred to kill me in a combat. And she knew I was here. Yan didn’t know. She let him go first to my father’s house. Didn’t give away where I was—he’d have suspected something. Maybe. He wasn’t a suspicious man.”
    Bytsan looked at Tai narrowly, considering all this. “Why would a Kanlin Warrior fear you?”
    He wasn’t so drunk, after all. Tai couldn’t see how it would hurt to answer.
    “I trained with them. At Stone Drum Mountain, nearly two years.” He watched the other man react. “It would take me time to get my skills back, but someone may not have wanted to chance it.”
    The Taguran was staring. Tai poured more wine for him from the flask on the brazier. He drank from his own cup, then filled it. A friend had died here today. There was blood on the bedding. There was a new hole in the world where sorrow could enter.
    “Everyone knew this about you? The time with the Kanlins?”
    Tai shook his head. “No.”
    “You trained to be an assassin?”
    The usual, irritating mistake. “I trained to learn how they think, their disciplines, and how they handle weapons. They are usually guards, or guarantors of a truce, not assassins. I left, fairly abruptly. Some of my teachers may still feel kindly towards me. Others might not. It was years ago. We leave things behind us.”
    “Well, that’s true enough.”
    Tai drank his wine.
    “They think you used them? Tricked them?”
    Tai was beginning to regret mentioning it. “I just understand them a little now.”
    “And they don’t like that?”
    “No. I’m not a Kanlin.”
    “What are you?”
    “Right now? I’m between worlds, serving the dead.”
    “Oh, good. Be Kitan-clever again. Are you a soldier or a court mandarin, fuck it all?”
    Tai managed a grin. “Neither. Fuck it all.”
    Bytsan looked away quickly, but Tai saw him suppress a smile. It was hard not to like this man.
    He added, more quietly, “It is only truth, captain. I left the army years ago, have not taken the civil service exams. I’m not being clever.”
    Bytsan held out his again-empty cup before answering. Tai filled it, topped up his own. This was beginning to remind him of nights in the North District. Soldiers or poets—who could drink more? A question for the ages, or sages.
    After a moment, the Taguran said, also softly, “You didn’t need us to save you.”
    Outside, something screamed.
    It wasn’t a sound you could pretend was an animal, or wind. Tai knew that particular voice. Heard it every night. He found himself wishing he’d been able to find and bury that one before leaving. But there was no way to know where any given bones might lie. That much he’d learned in two years. Two years that were ending tonight. He had to leave. Someone had been sent to kill him, this far away. He needed to learn why. He drained his cup again.
    He said, “I didn’t know they would attack her. Neither did you, coming back.”
    “Well, of course, or we wouldn’t have come.”
    Tai shook his head. “No, that means your courage deserves honour.”
    Something occurred to him. Sometimes wine sent your thoughts along channels you’d not otherwise have found, as when river reeds hide and then reveal a tributary stream in marshland.
    “Is that why you let the young one shoot both arrows?”
    Bytsan’s gaze in mingled light was unsettlingly direct. Tai was beginning to feel his wine. The Taguran said, “She was flat against the cabin. They were going to crush the life from her. Why waste an arrow?”
    Half an answer at best. Tai said wryly, “Why waste a chance to give a soldier a tattoo, and a boast?”
    The other man shrugged. “That, too. He did come back with me.”
    Tai nodded.
    Bytsan said, “You ran outside knowing they’d help you?” An edge to his voice. And why not? They were listening to the cries outside