Hidden Cities Read Online Free PDF Page B

instructions,
get them to the emperor
, but there are ways and ways to hide one purpose in the shadow of another. Ways to hide a disobediencealso. The emperor was on the wrong side of the river, in the middle of a war. Whatever these old men had to tell him, it could wait. She was not dragging two cripples half across the city in chase of him, not even for Mei Feng.
    Besides, whatever the old men knew, Mei Feng clearly knew it too. She could tell the emperor herself.
    For now, they could all sit here in the sun. Old bones appreciate heat; she didn’t want to move them until she must.
    One man, the taller—or perhaps he was only the straighter, they were much of a height sitting down—smiled at her from somewhere, from a well of grace. “Sit,” he said, in a voice worn thin she thought by screaming. “Sit with us. We have seen … entirely too much of each other, in recent days. A fresh face is a blessing.”
    “Sit and talk,” said the other. “We have talked so much together, I no longer know which is his voice and which my own. In either case, I think I prefer yours.”
    She sat, then, on dry and dusty stone at their feet, and looked up and shivered at something that shrouded them: not quite a smell—they and their clothes were scrupulously clean, as though they had most carefully washed and dressed each other—but the memory of a smell, perhaps, if memories could cling. Their nostrils flared together at the sea-breeze building.
    She said, “I think you two have been prisoners together.”
    “We have shared the same cell, certainly.” That was the crippled one, crutch laid carefully to hand beside the bench. The other had held his elbow, to ease him down when he sat. There was a courtliness between them that she liked extremely.
    “And you have not been treated kindly.” They might prefer not to speak of that, but it was in her nature to be direct.
    The tall one smiled again. The other had a solemnity that suggested he would rarely smile. Perhaps that was only because she looked up from below, saw all the lines of pain and their shadows; but she was seeing them both from the same angle. And most ofthe people she had to deal with in palace life, sooner or later she saw them from her knees. One way or another. She was accustomed to making judgments from below.
    The tall one said, “We have … shared the same suffering, also.” That odd little break in his voice was almost laughter, she thought, though it was also almost pain, as though the two instincts were somehow the same physical spasm, and needed the same little catch of breath to carry him over.
    “Yes,” she said. “I am sorry for it. But the emperor has come now, and he will see you safe.”
    “The emperor may not be so pleased to see us at all.”
    “Not? But Mei Feng was quite determined …”
    “Yes. I think she is probably quite often quite determined. And for sure he will want to know what we have told her. But whether he will want to see us afterward, if he survives it—well. Perhaps. Or perhaps only our heads, he might appreciate that more.”
    “Your heads? I don’t understand.”
    “Of course not. You don’t know who we are. Or who we were, perhaps. Now we are only two ruins sitting in the sun, watching a storm blow in. With the dragon, I think, riding above it. My eyes are not so good just now, but I think that was the dragon.”
    She would not turn her head to look, not be distracted. “Who you were? Who are you, then?”
    “Two ruins; I have said. But once I was Li Ton the pirate, and the enemy of your emperor. Before that I was General Chu Lin, a loyal servant disgraced and banished by his father.”
    “And this?”
    “Oh, this is Ai Guo. Tunghai Wang’s most excellent torturer. I have been … the object of his attentions for some time now. I said, we have shared the suffering: he at the eye of the needle, I at the point.”
    B LESSEDLY, HERE came Gieh running back with the bottle filled and a string of dried