Portal of a Thousand Worlds Read online

  “You said you would never lie to me!”

  Silky looked sulky. “I did not say I would tell you everything.”

  “But you will tell me this!” Jade Harmony shouted.

  The sand warrior pouted for another moment and then shrugged. “Very well. The eminent merchant, Distant Cloud.”

  The merchant wailed. “My son-in-law? My daughter’s husband?”

  “Who is merely five years younger than your honored self,” Silky said snidely. “What did your fifteen-year-old daughter think of her gouty, baggy-faced, thrice-married bridegroom? In a year, he has not gotten her with child, which tells us much. Like you, he is a client of ours. A good financial match, you thought, but right after the wedding, Distant Cloud asked us to advance your father, his wife’s grandfather, which we did. Today, I requested—and received—permission to return the compliment, since your contracts are now likely to come into conflict. I think I will advance his sons first, and then him, because it will be tidier if your daughter returns to you bringing his entire estate intact, except for taxes and his bequest to the Gray Helpers. I will use some means that will not make three deaths close together seem suspicious. This program will triple your assets within the month and bring your daughter back to her mother’s loving arms. That should stop some of her moping. Do you see any flaw in this proposal, Master?”

  Silence. Jade Harmony stared into the abyss. Triple?

  Triple his assets?

  Within the month?

  Shut up Morning Jewel and stop her never-ending griping?

  “Master?” Brother Silky muttered.

  “You murdered my father?”

  “Oh, not I, Eminence! You are my first client.”

  “But Distant Cloud paid your House to have my father murdered?”

  “He ordered your esteemed ancestor’s death and will pay for it in the manner I just explained.”

  After another long pause, Jade Harmony whispered, “I approve your proposal, Brother Silky. Does that make the proposed incidents requested or routine?”

  Suddenly, the boy was back with his eager childish grin. “Since I already proposed them and received the Abbot’s approval, they won’t be charged to your account, Master. You still have six outings in hand.”

  Chapter 3

  Siping, northernmost province of the Good Land, was the site of its capital, Heart of the World. The city itself was an ugly sprawl of shanties and slums whose sole reason for existence was to provide services and goods to the imperial palace, Sublime Mountain. Sublime Mountain justified its name by occupying the entire surface of a large mesa, a yolk around which the city lay like the white of an egg. But even Sublime Mountain was not the true center of government, for the palace was divided into the Great Without and the Great Within. The Great Without was the abode of the mandarins who ran the courts, enforced the laws, and gathered taxes. The imperial stud, armory, printing office, library, archives, and army headquarters were there. The Great Without was about work.

  The Great Within was concerned with pleasure. It covered a much larger area, and comprised many parks and palaces, where the hundreds—or in some reigns thousands—of imperial concubines, Empresses, their female children and juvenile male children, plus thousands of female servants and eunuchs to guard and tend them, dwelled. Only one unaltered male lived there: the Emperor himself, currently Absolute Purity, Son of the Sun, Denizen of the Golden Throne, Lord of the High and the Low, et cetera.

  The Empress Mother looked out with deep disapproval at the snow swirling past her window. A blizzard in Falling Leaf Moon! Winter had come too early, and storms as violent as this one normally raged across most of the northern provinces. There would be dead livestock, flooding, and probably famine before summer. She could do nothing about the weather. She could handle almost anything else, though, and today she was to set in motion events necessary for the survival of the Eleventh Dynasty.

  A score of women and some eunuchs had labored for hours over her toilet, from bathing in rose water to the final delicate touch of paint on her faded eyelashes. They dressed her in enough embroidered silk to carpet a palace and jewels that could have graveled a courtyard. A hundred artisans had worked for a year to create her costume. Now, with perfect timing, her carrying chair arrived. She rose from her bench and minced two steps in her platform shoes—a striking, even terrifying, figure in her imperial-yellow finery, with her tall hat, elaborately bedecked hair, and starkly painted face. Two women adjusted her folds and covered her in a thick fur rug, four eunuchs lifted the poles, eight eunuch guards took up position, and the Empress Mother of the Good Land was borne swiftly from her quarters, having spoken barely a word so far that morning.

  No one saw her as her bearers trotted through the Great Within complex, up and down stairs, from building to building. To avoid the snow, they skirted the open courtyards, going by way of covered cloisters and secret tunnels. It was possible, even likely, that these courts and halls were, at most times, thronged with scores or hundreds of people, all of whom had been hastily cleared out to allow the Empress Mother unseen and untroubled passage. The Empress Mother neither knew nor cared.

  Her destination was the room called the Emperor’s Eye. It was tiny and very private, its only function being to provide a view through an ivory screen into the Abode of Wisdom, the meeting hall of the Great Council. This was, in effect, a window from the Great Within into the working palace, the Great Without. If the Emperor did not wish to preside in person, he could watch from the Eye while remaining unseen, or he could choose to stay away altogether and no one would know the difference. In fact, the present Emperor had never been even to the Emperor’s Eye, let alone the Abode of Wisdom; his mother always came in his stead. His father, Zealous Righteousness, had watched proceedings from that room a very few times, but had never presided over the council. Unlike ordinary mortals, the all-powerful need not endure boredom.

  As her attendants withdrew, leaving her alone in the little room, the princes were entering the hall, joining the mandarins already assembled—the timing was always perfect, but whether the meeting was adjusted to her toilet or her toilet to the meeting, the Empress Mother neither knew nor cared. Anyone approaching the throne was required to do so barefoot and in an undignified scamper. On reaching his place, he must kowtow, which involved kneeling and knocking his forehead on the ground three times, repeating the procedure twice, for a total of nine knocks.

  The councillors’ rugs were arranged in arcs facing the throne on its stage, to the watching Empress Mother’s right. The throne—a minor throne, not the Golden Throne itself, which stood in the Hall of Celestial Peace—was concealed behind an even larger and more intricate screen because an Emperor would lose face if he ever entered before his courtiers did, and even more face if he fussed with the hang of his elaborate costume. Any Emperor who ever did attend would be revealed only when everything was ready to proceed.

  The most ornate of the rugs lay close to a corner of the dais, reserved for Venerable First Mandarin. The company bowed in reverence as the old fox entered. Despite his trailing white beard, First Mandarin was spry enough when he wanted to be, but as a tribute to his high office, he was allowed to approach the throne slowly, with ancestral dignity.

  Of the twenty-four men present, only four really counted—First Mandarin, who ran the government; Chief Eunuch, who ran the palace; Supreme Guardian, who ran the army; and Court Astrologer, who could advance, retard, or totally prohibit just about anything. These four formed the Small Council, which ruled the Good Land in the name of the Emperor.

  The Empress Mother ruled the Small Council.

  Following centuries-old ritual, First Mandarin ran the meeting without a wasted word. Each official, in turn, was recognized and produced the reports he had brought, one by one. Only the titles were spoken: “A demon wind has made great havoc in the Mulberry Islands.” “A catalog of tributes sent
to the Son of the Sun by certain Outlanders of the west.” And so on. A deaf-mute page would gather the file and lay it before the throne with much ceremony. Rarely, First Mandarin would issue orders or call for comment, but those were kept equally terse. He ordered money sent to rebuild the imperial docks destroyed by the typhoon, for example. And so on.

  The Empress Mother listened and watched. Any report that mattered had already been read to her in private and now she was mainly assessing people. Despite all their practiced inscrutability, she had a very good idea of what every man in the room thought of every other one—envy, distrust, loyalty, or admiration. Incompetence, excessive ambition, and especially alliances must be detected and dealt with before they became dangerous. She especially watched the four princes in attendance. None of them was closely related to her son, because over the years she had methodically pruned the sprawling imperial family down to a manageable size. Nonetheless, if her son were to die or be deposed, then one of those four would succeed to the throne. They all seemed loyal enough, but she kept them under close watch and never trusted any of them.

  What did not happen in the Great Council mattered more than what did. Unrest attributed to the Bamboo Banner insurrection had now spread to two provinces, but both governors’ month-end reports were logged in as routine. The new warden of Four Mountains Fortress had recently confessed to a complete lack of success in coercing his prisoner into cooperation and requested permission to proceed to sterner measures, but that affair had never been mentioned, even in the Small Council. The Empress Mother handled it personally, through First Mandarin.

  At the end, First Mandarin made a ritual call for new business. In a shocking breach of tradition, Supreme Guardian raised his hand. The current blizzard was making roads impassable, he said. The ways up to Sublime Mountain itself were very steep and he was concerned that the palace would experience food shortages unless the storm ended soon. This announcement produced no panic in the chamber, because none of the grandees present would ever go to bed hungry even if the lesser staff were starving. First Mandarin just told him gently to remind the army of its duty to the Son of the Sun. In a world of hyperbolized civility and circuitous euphemisms, that was a brutal public rebuke.

  The Empress Mother felt a tremor in the webs. Supreme Guardian might have been aiming his barb at Chief Eunuch for not making sure that the imperial larder was adequately stocked, which would be a normal enough political catfight. On the other hand, the general and First Mandarin had kept daggers drawn for years, and might have staged this public spat to conceal a secret rapprochement. She made a mental note to keep that possibility in mind.

  As the meeting adjourned, she went out to where her bearers waited to convey her to her next appointment.

  By the time Chief Eunuch was ushered in, the Empress Mother was sipping tea, comfortably seated on the modest throne in her audience chamber. The old man was obscenely obese, as round and soft as a ball of fresh dough; he waddled when he walked. Palace flunkies were not normally required to kowtow, but he must when he was formally summoned like this, unless she bid him come forward. Today, feeling spiteful, she left him to it, not letting him off a single twitch. By the time he was kneeling on a rug at her feet, he was streaming sweat and puffing like a steamboat.

  For months, even years, she had been procrastinating over the problem of her son. Procrastination was second nature to her except when she was faced with imminent danger, but time was running out. If Sublime Mountain did not shortly declare that the Son of the Sun had fathered an heir—or even a daughter, which would be a great relief to the Empress Mother and a huge disappointment to everyone else—then people were going to start believing the rumors of impotence or idiocy or insanity. Thousands of men labored in Sublime Mountain, thousands of women, girls, and eunuchs worked in the Great Within, and yet no more than four dozen people had ever set eyes on His Imperial Majesty Absolute Purity since his accession as a child. The enormous deception was becoming too obvious. There was speculation over who was next in line to the throne. The rabble dissidents in the south calling themselves the Bamboo Banner were claiming that the Emperor was dead. There were demands that he appear in public.

  In fact, Emperors almost never did appear in public, and no one dared look at them when they did. The Emperor was the Son of the Sun, above all other men. He must not be seen to spit or cough or display any form of weakness. Inside the Great Within, he was seen by no one except women and eunuchs. Eunuchs were universally despised, half-men, little more than spayed animals, and it did not matter if they saw the Lord of the High and the Low with a head cold or a hangover. They were everywhere in the Great Within, and yet very few eunuchs, even, had ever set eyes on Emperor Absolute Purity. When an Emperor proceeded outside the Great Within, he traveled in a covered palanquin, carried by sixteen bearers and surrounded by a troop of guards, all of whom would be eunuchs. Crowds groveled in the dirt as he passed, and any head that was raised would be chopped off.

  Finding her back to the wall, the Empress Mother had made a decision. In fact, she had made two decisions. Two plans were always better than one. Typically, of course, she would reveal only one of them to Chief Eunuch, at least at present.

  The moment the servants withdrew and the two of them were alone, she went straight to the point, giving him no time to catch his breath. Only she could cut through ceremony like this, and it pleased her to demonstrate her power.

  “Which girl do you recommend, Chief Eunuch?”

  But even that could not catch him off his guard. “If it please Your Majesty, Snow Lily.”

  “Why?”

  He adjusted his facial blubber into a mawkish smile, which did not reach the little pig eyes; none ever did. “She is so sweet, so dainty! So delectable.”

  “My son is not expected to eat her, Chief Eunuch.”

  He wobbled his jowls politely at her joke. “To have served His Majesty and his greatly honored father all my life has been a peerless honor. My only regret, you know, is that I cannot have sons to continue my service after I advance.” Lying was food and drink to him. “And to have had a daughter like Snow Lily!”

  He would have sold her at twelve or younger, the Empress Mother decided. No one in Sublime Mountain had fewer scruples or more crimes on his soul than the fat man. Zealous Righteousness had called him a leather bag of night soil, but he had not hesitated to employ the eunuch’s many talents.

  “They are all highly qualified. Why should Snow Lily be first?”

  He simpered. “She is lyrical and agile, well cultivated in art and classical poetry, a credit to the finest courtesan school in the Good Land.” He clasped his hands, fingers like great white slugs, and paused as if wondering whether to point out that the Empress Mother herself had graduated from that same establishment. Apparently, he decided that discretion was safer and didn’t. “During the demonstrations, she was the first to start touching herself. That is always the sign of a lustful nature. Their clothing is examined afterward, of course, and her shift was the dampest.”

  The Empress Mother had noticed that fondling also. She could remember her own training, and how shocked she had been when she had first been required to witness the mechanics of human copulation. She had never been warned that men did to women what ganders did to geese and dogs to bitches, if in different positions. Her body had known, though, and had soon reacted to the demonstration. In her innocence then, she had not realized that there were other candidates watching the same performance from other spy holes and that the watchers were themselves being watched. The training required had been simpler in her day, too, for Emperor Zealous Righteousness had been a mature man and still virile, with wide experience of women. The current class was being instructed in rousing the reluctant and elevating the limp.

  It was past time to introduce Emperor Absolute Purity to the joys of concubinage. Hundreds of girls had been considered over the years, delivered to the gates by proud,
rejoicing families and later returned privately, rejected and in tears. Nobody outside the Great Within could keep tally, so nobody outside realized that not a single girl had been accepted. But the hoax could not go on forever. A final six had been examined in the greatest detail. They were all mature—meaning fifteen or even sixteen in that context—all physically perfect virgins. They were also petite, for His Majesty tended to be alarmed by large people. Five would be rejected; one must go to his bed.

  “I agree with your choice, Chief Eunuch,” she said. “I will receive her.”

  “Now?” Was he bluffing, or had he prepared for even that surprise?

  “At noon. If she pleases me, I will present her to His Majesty directly.”

  When important matters were in play, the Empress Mother liked to allow time between appointments so that her confidants would not run into one another in the antechambers. She therefore sent for a secretary and had some reports read to her before calling for her next visitor, Lady Twilight.

  Twilight was close to forty, spare of build, with a face like a cleaver and an overall look of hard wear about her. Officially, she was His Imperial Majesty’s chief food taster, which was fitting, because she probably knew more about poisons than anyone else in the Good Land. She had entered Sublime Mountain at eighteen as food taster to the Pearl Concubine, this being a standard palace precaution for any of the Emperor’s women who conceived. They had been together ever since. The Pearl Concubine had been promoted to Junior Empress and now Empress Mother, but it had been thanks to Twilight that she had survived the so-called Scorpion Summer that followed Zealous Righteousness’s death. Poisons had swirled around Sublime Mountain like plague, wiping out nine-tenths of the imperial family. No one had doubted that Twilight was behind many of the deaths or that she was a Gray Sister. It had been the Empress Mother who so aptly named her, of course. Now, after many years, the Empress Mother needed the Gray Helpers again, and Lady Twilight was still her liaison.