The Secrets of Jin-Shei by Alma Alexander

tended by one of the three Tower Priests. High above, reachable by a catwalk that clung to the walls of the tower well away from the altar, hung the gigantic brass bell which was rung by the priests every day at noon.
    A complex place for a complex faith, an orderly set of beliefs on which heaven and earth were made, a creed which assigned everything to its perfect, particular place.
    Nhia had been brought there for the first time when she was a babe in arms, barely born, perhaps a week old—her mother had brought her in, purchased amulets, purchased potions, offered her child and her child’s troubles to the deities of the Second Circle and begged for deliverance. But Nhia’s twisted leg and withered foot did not go away. The child crawled a lot later than most children did, unable to put any weight on the crippled limb; she had not walked until she was almost four years old, and even then it was with a pronounced limp. By that time her mother had progressed to the Third Circle, entreating for salvation from higher authority—but no amount of incense or rice wine helped, and
ganshu
readings were inconclusive.
    The Temple was a daily stop, and more often than not Nhia was required to accompany her mother the supplicant so that she could show the Gods just what they had to do for her. Any other five-year-old or six-year-old or seven-year-old, and as the years wore on Nhia reached and passed all those milestones, would have started pulling the Temple apart stone by stone from sheer boredom. Nhia was different. Her physical disability focused her mind on things others might have missed, and even as a very young child she was an acute observer and an astute interpreter of the throngs of humanity she saw parading in and out of the Temple every day. By the time she was ten she had taken to coming to the Temple by herself. She would strike up conversations on the theology of the Way with some of the younger and more indulgent acolytes of the outer Circles, or some of the older ones willing to indulge an interested and precocious child. It was all couched, as much wisdom of the Way was, in ancient tales and fables. There were many, but there was one which most of Nhia’s Temple friends always returned to in the end.
    “When the evil spirits tricked Han-fei into raiding the Gardens of the Gods …”
    “I know, I know,” Nhia would interrupt when this sentence was offered to her. “He picked too many of the plums from the Tree of Wisdom, and could not carry them, and had to leave all of it behind when he was driven from the Garden by the angry Gods. I know,
sei,
I know. The plums of wisdom should be taken one by one and savored. But I would still like to know …”
    The Temple teachers would shake their heads and smile.
    But Nhia was told much, and had seen more than any Linh-an child her age and twice as well born as she could lay claim to. She had even glimpsed the Tower altar by the time she was eleven.
    By the time she had turned thirteen, Nhia could recite the correct offerings for any Deity within the Great Temple—their composition and their timing—to a precise degree. Her mother, Li, had exhausted her avenues of help and appeal in the living world, the healers and the hedge-healers and every connection she had ever had, including her handful of
jin-shei
sisters. Nothing had helped, and Li had turned almost wholly to the Heavens now, praying daily for intervention in the circumstances concerning Nhia’s withered foot. But for Nhia herself that foot had long since ceased to be of any importance. She would listen to her mother’s entreaties to the Gods, which had started out as abasement and pleading for a miraculous cure and had then proliferated into all kinds of peripheral demands—
Send her a husband who will care for her.
But Nhia knew that it was unlikely that she would ever marry, or at least unlikely that she would marry well—she was the daughter of a washerwoman, with no inheritance or dowry to speak of,