who knows what happened in that time and place does not know with any certainty what will happen in my story. In Under Heaven I've served notice with the shift to an imagined Kitai from real China that I reserve the right to change, or telescope events." |salign = right |source = Under Heaven'''s Author's letter by Guy Gavriel Kay at Brightweavings, Kay's authorized website }} The story takes place in a fictionalized China that corresponds approximately to the Tang era. The Empire of Kitai (China) has enjoyed a period of prosperity and peace under its now aging emperor Taizu in his capital at Xinan. Peace has been made with the Taguran Empire (Tibet) to the west, and with the Bogü (Turkic or Mongolian) peoples of the northwest. At the opening of Under Heaven Shen Tai, second of four children from a well-known family in central Kitai, has gone to the battle site of Kuala Nor near the western frontier of Kitai following his father's death to commence the task of burying the bones of the dead Kitan and Taguran soldiers killed twenty years earlier. At Kuala Nor Shen Tai is haunted by the ghosts of the dead whose cries can be heard at night. Word of his efforts spreads east to Xinan and west into the Taguran Empire, whose empress, a former Kitan princess, prevails upon the Taguran emperor to make Tai a gift of 250 prized Sardian horses (Ferghana horse). Shortly after receiving word of this gift, a friend, Chou Yan, arrives with news of Tai's sister, but the Kanlin warrior accompanying Yan is actually an assassin. She kills Yan before he can tell Tai his news, but Tai is saved by the ghosts and by the return of the Tagurans. Knowing that he has already been the target of assassination, and fearing that word of the extraordinary gift of the Sardian horses will only make his death more attractive, Shen devises a strategy designed to keep himself alive in order to deliver the valuable Sardian horses to the Empire with the assistance of Bytsan sri Nespo, a Taguran officer with whom Shen develops a lifelong friendship. Returning to the Kitai with a single Sardian horse, he finds a Kanlin warrior, Wei Song, in pursuit of the first, false Kanlin. She has been sent by Shen's former lover Spring Rain, a courtesan who has now become the favoured