Honor is a light that brings trouble. Shadows are safer by far. [loc. 902]
Chih is a travelling cleric of the Singing Hills monastery, accompanied by a knowledgeable talking hoopoe bird called Almost Brilliant. Entering the ghost-haunted lands which until recently were under imperial lock, Chih and Almost Brilliant encounter an old woman who goes by the name of Rabbit. She is the sole inhabitant of the abandoned imperial residence which was known as 'Thriving Fortune' -- a joke, because it was a place of exile, where the recently-deceased empress In-Yo had lived for many years with a court of unwilling aristocrats. Rabbit was very close to In-Yo, and as she tells the stories of the objects that Chih discovers in the dusty archives of the palace, she gradually (but with definite intent and a storyteller's gift of pacing) reveals her own role in matters of state.
I liked the layered narrative here, the ways in which stories are told and untold: I liked the worldbuilding, which is not detailed but is delivered in a few striking images: I was pleased that most of (or all of?*) the major characters were female, and that not all of them were nobles or courtiers. I don't feel I know Chih or Almost Brilliant well enough, even after this novella, to like them or not, but I understand there are further novellas in the sequence, and I'm keen to read more about this world, with its Asian influences and its mammoth-and-lion Empire.
* I am not sure how Chih self-defines: 'cleric' seems to be a gender-neutral term, and Rabbit at first assumes Chih is female: "Oh, I see I was mistaken. Not a girl after all, but a cleric."
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