Chapter 173

I have been in here a good long while, and I have discovered that time, when you are in the dark and cannot move, stops being measured in hours, to be measured instead in the quantity of catastrophes you can imagine for our journey through the Imperial Palace.

So when I finally notice that the rattling stops, and not because someone is halting it for a moment, but with that definitive stillness of the shafts as they rest on the ground, I let out a sigh of relief while I hear how they lift the lid.

The light slips in first through the edges of the cloth and, finally, all at once when some hands begin to push aside the clothing that covers my face, so I blink like a mole and take a couple of seconds to focus on the silhouette that leans over me.

It is Lianhua, of course.

I don’t know who I was expecting, truthfully, but there is a part of my head that has spent the whole trip preparing for the possibility that whoever opened the lid would be a guard with a face of surprise.

“Zhāohuán Wen”, she tells me in a low voice as she frees my shoulders from the cloth. “We have arrived now.”

“Can I come out?” I ask her, and it comes out of me with an urgency that betrays me more than I would like.

“Wait a moment, please”, she answers me. “Xia and I have to change first.”

And before I can protest, she reaches out her hand toward one side of the cart, takes a couple of garments from among those piled up and disappears from my field of vision, which right now consists of a rectangle of ceiling with dark wooden beams and little more.

So I stay where I am, lying on my side between the two backpacks, looking at the ceiling of a place I have never been in my life and listening to how, at some point to my right, two people change their clothing at speed.

When Lianhua’s face appears again over the edge of the cart, she is no longer wearing the low-class handmaiden’s uniform, but rather now wears an ordinary traveling outfit, the color of dry earth, with her hair gathered in a simple bun and without a single pin worth more than it would be worth on any ordinary person.

And the transformation works, because if I crossed paths with this woman on a street it is probable that I would see only a traveler.

“I apologize for the wait”, she tells me.

“Don’t apologize”, I tell her. “You have taken less time than I do to decide what clothing to put on any morning.”

Lianhua does not answer that, and instead of taking me out she leans into the interior of the cart and begins to loosen the straps with which she secured the backpacks.

She takes out the first, hangs it on her back and adjusts the straps with two dry tugs. The second she passes to Xia, who finally appears in my field of vision dressed more or less like Lianhua, with her hair badly gathered and an expression of taking all this very seriously, and who puts on her backpack with considerably less elegance but with the same decisiveness.

And afterward, the two of them take some cloths from those left in the cart and throw them over the backpacks, tying them in front in such a way that what they carry on their backs stops looking like well-made luggage and comes to look like any old bundle.

It would not hold up under close examination, but the idea has never been to hold up under close examination, the idea is that it should not occur to anyone to examine us.

And while the two of them occupy themselves with that, I arrive at the conclusion that I have already spent more time than I was willing to spend lying inside a box, so I lift my gaze, search among the beams of the ceiling for the one almost above me, concentrate on it and use the Myriad of Hands.

I come out of the cart floating in the air, with my legs hanging and the skirt of the outfit fluttering in a manner that probably flatters no one, and I stay suspended at mid-height while I hear how Xia swallows an exclamation.

Lianhua, on the other hand, doesn’t even flinch, she simply limits herself to approaching me and when I release the technique she gathers me in the air and settles me against her chest, placing one arm beneath my knees and the other on my back.

“Although you are older now and it becomes uncomfortable to carry you in my arms this way, you are going to have to endure it a bit”, she tells me as she adjusts my position.

“There is no problem at all”, I answer her. “Believe me, after the business with the cart, this almost strikes me as a luxury.”

And then I finally look around me to see another storeroom. Square, with shelves against the walls and a smell of dust I recognize perfectly because it is the same one there was in the other. But this one is not the same, and I notice the difference right away.

Here there are footprints on the floor. Not many, and not recent, but there are some. The boxes on the shelves are thoughtfully stacked, there is a corner where someone has swept at some moment in the last few years, and there is a broom leaning against the wall that has not been there since the beginning of time.

It is not a forgotten place, it is simply a little-used place, which is a different thing and considerably less reassuring.

But while I am occupied with my examination, Lianhua does not stay still.

She crosses the storeroom with Xia glued to her heels, dodges a couple of shelves and heads directly to a corner, and when I manage to look toward where she is looking, I see that on the floor, wedged between the wall and the base of a shelf, there is a trapdoor.

Of stone, this time. A square slab with two notches carved into its edges, of the dirty gray color of everything else, so unremarkable that if you were not looking for it you would pass over it without seeing it.

And there, sincerely, my patience runs out.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “How many secret passages are there in the Imperial Palace?”

She lowers her gaze toward me a moment, and although her face does not change, there is something in the pause she makes before answering that tells me the question amuses her.

“Nobody knows them all, Zhāohuán Wen”, she answers me. “Not even the Emperor.”

“That is not an answer”, I protest.

“It is the only one there is”, she tells me. “This palace has been standing for millennia, and every faction, every consort or minister with something to hide has opened their own. And since the majority were opened precisely so that no one would know of them, when the person who ordered it excavated dies, the passage is forgotten along with them.”

She makes a brief pause.

“In fact, from time to time a new one is discovered”, she adds. “One that had been forgotten for so long that there is no longer anyone alive who knew it existed.”

And I stay quiet a second, because the image she has just drawn for me is that of a building that has beneath it a second city made entirely of secrets, and that makes me remember the catacombs of Paris, or the Vatican.

And also, truth be told, that makes it more interesting from a purely professional point of view, but Lianhua does not give me time to indulge myself, because the moment she finishes speaking she positions herself in front of the slab and looks at me.

“Zhāohuán Wen”, she tells me. “Could you lift the trapdoor with the Dragon’s Grip?”

I look at the slab and then I look at her.

“It weighs more than I could move with the Myriad of Hands”, she continues before I ask. “And I cannot use mine because I have them occupied with you.”

And there, looking at that gray and dusty stone from the arms of the woman who is holding me, I cannot help a smile escaping me.

“Well, look at that”, I say without raising my voice much. “For once it seems I am going to be useful.”

And without waiting for an answer, I fix my gaze on the slab and concentrate.

The Dragon’s Grip is nothing like the Myriad of Hands. The Myriad is like having ten appendages distributed around the room, light and quick. Dragon’s Grip, on the other hand, is heavy and dense, like closing a fist you don’t have around something you don’t touch.

But I leave off the analogies as I extend it, find the edges of the stone, pull upward and the slab lifts.

Without a tremor, without a creak, and for an instant, while I hold it suspended a hand-span above the floor with the black rectangle of the hollow opening beneath, I feel an absolutely disproportionate satisfaction.

I move it to one side and deposit it on the floor taking care that it doesn’t strike, and from the hollow there rises a gust of cold air that smells of wet stone, of silt and of something older I don’t manage to identify.

“Xia, you go down first”, says Lianhua. “I have to go last so that Zhāohuán Wen can close the trapdoor behind us.”

Xia, who has already lit the lamp without anyone asking her to, nods very quickly and sits on the edge of the hollow, searches with her feet for some rungs I don’t see from here, finds them and descends with the lamp in one hand and the bundle on her back until all that remains of her is a yellow glow rising from below.

Afterward Lianhua goes down, and she goes down as she went down through the trapdoor of the Pavilion, measuring every movement, turning her body on the last rung so that my head doesn’t graze the stone edge, compensating for my weight at each step with that kind of precision that is not learned anywhere and that only appears when you have spent twelve years carrying exactly the same person.

And I, as we descend, don’t take my eyes off the trapdoor for a single second.

I keep the Dragon’s Grip hooked to the slab the whole descent, feeling its weight at the other end of my concentration like one holding a taut rope, and the moment Lianhua’s feet touch the bottom, I pull.

The stone slides over the hollow and fits with a muffled thud that is barely heard, and with it goes the last light that came from above.

“Well done”, Lianhua tells me.

“Thank you very much”, I answer her as I look around me.

Upon looking I confirm that we are in a narrow corridor, of well-cut stone, with the floor slightly concave and a pale crust on the walls at the height of my hand that I recognize instantly as the mark left by water when it has spent centuries passing through the same place. And the tunnel goes off in two directions, forward and backward, and both lose themselves in a darkness that Xia’s lamp does not even manage to hint at.

“Lianhua”, I say. “What is this?”

“A drain”, she answers me without hesitating. “The Imperial Palace is built in a low zone, and when the rainy season arrives, if the water had nowhere to go the courtyards and the lower halls would flood in a matter of hours, which is why these tunnels were built to collect it and take it out of the Palace.”

She lifts her chin toward the ceiling, toward the slab I have just closed.

“And the trapdoor through which we have come down is used for maintenance”, she adds. “For when one of these stretches gets blocked and one has to go in to clean it, but it has been a long time since it was used because these tunnels, with the current situation, are completely useless.”

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Lianhua, while she speaks to me, has lifted her head and stayed very still a couple of seconds, looking first in one direction and then the other with a certain concentration, and afterward she sets off walking in the direction opposite to where Xia is.

“This way”, she says.

Xia gives a start, hurries to get ahead through the gap the wall leaves her and positions herself in front of us with the lamp held high, and from there on the world is reduced to a trembling circle of yellow light that advances over stone.

The tunnel is long, so long that I stop trying to calculate the distance after the third crossing, and so monotonous that I begin to notice trifles, like the fact that the joints of the stone change style at a concrete point, which means that this stretch was excavated in a different era from the previous one, or that at the height of an empty niche there are some characters scratched into the wall by someone who, who knows how many years ago, was as bored as I am getting.

And in the background, always, the echo of Xia’s footsteps ahead and of Lianhua’s beneath me, multiplied by the stone until it seems we are four until, at last, the light of the lamp comes up against a grate.

The grate is of thick iron bars, embedded in the stone from top to bottom and side to side, with a door in the center closed with a padlock that has every appearance of having been there since before I was born.

“I apologize, Zhāohuán Wen”, she tells me as she stops.

After those words, she crouches to leave me seated on the floor of the tunnel, with my back resting against the wall, and takes a moment to place my legs before letting go of me entirely.

The stone is cold and I notice it perfectly through the fabric of the outfit, which is one of those ironies I have been living with for thirteen years, because while my legs do not obey me in absolutely anything, they have insisted on continuing to inform me of every disagreeable detail of the surfaces on which I rest them.

Meanwhile, Lianhua brings her hand to a little bag she carries tied at her waist and takes out of it an iron key, large and dark, of the type that is no longer manufactured.

She puts it into the padlock and turns it, but the padlock does not yield on the first try.

Lianhua does not force it nor grow impatient, she simply tries again with a firm and constant pressure, and on the third try something creaks inside the mechanism, a rusty click is heard and the shackle opens.

She pushes the door, which protests with a creak that startles me, picks me up in her arms again and crosses the opening so that Xia can pass behind us.

And on the other side, Lianhua leaves me on the floor again, closes the grate, puts the padlock back in its place, puts her hand between the bars and closes it with the key from this side with the same patience as before.

And afterward she takes out the key to do something I did not expect, since she stays looking at the key an instant, barely a blink, and then closes her hand around it while she squeezes to destroy the key.

It does not bend and it does not twist, it simply breaks with a dry crunch, and when Lianhua opens her hand what there is in her palm are three or four pieces of iron with the edges shining on the inside. Afterward, with a tranquility that makes the entire gesture turn out even more impressive, she puts them away in the little bag at her waist, pulls the cord and closes it.

“Get in front again, Xia”, says Lianhua as she gathers me from the floor.

And Xia, who has been left trapped behind us upon passing the grate, has to do some contortions to get ahead of us through a tunnel that is not designed for two people to cross, and she manages it by pressing herself against the wall, lifting the lamp above her head and apologizing three times while she does it.

And we continue another long stretch, this one somewhat narrower, and at last the lamp illuminates something different on the floor.

It is a well, a circular opening in the stone, without a curb or anything to protect it, from which rises a current of cold air of those that tell you without need of throwing a stone that down there is considerably more distance than you would feel like traveling while falling.

But the interesting thing is not the well, the interesting thing is that, right beside it, pressed against the wall, there are some stairs. Of stone, narrow, without a railing, that rise in a straight line to the ceiling of the tunnel, where the outline of another trapdoor is cut out, but this time of wood.

“Xia, you go up first”, says Lianhua.

Xia goes up, pushes the trapdoor with her shoulder, lifts it with a creak of old wood and disappears through the hollow.

And then Lianhua climbs the rungs with me in her arms, stops right beneath the opening and speaks to me without lowering her voice.

“Anchor yourself to the beam”, she tells me. “I have already checked that there is one you can use.”

I lift my head and look upward, toward the square of yellowish dimness that opens above us, and indeed there it is, crossing the ceiling of the room above, a perfectly solid wooden beam.

I concentrate on it, use the Myriad of Hands and pull to come out through the hollow of the trapdoor as I came out of the cart, with my legs hanging, until I remain suspended in the air of a very small room.

It is a tiny little room. Four walls, a low ceiling, a door and, hanging from some hooks and leaning against the wall, a few tools.

Some long poles with the end curved, some brushes of hard bristles mounted on iron rings, a couple of buckets, coiled rope, something that looks like a rake but isn’t, and some articulated rods that can be joined to one another.

I recognize them all, not because I have ever used them, obviously, but because I spent an entire winter reading a treatise on the maintenance of the drainage channels of the imperial capital that I took from the imperial library convinced it was going to be a bore and that turned out to be, against all expectations, one of the most entertaining readings of that month.

In my other life I would have died of pleasure if I had found a room like this. A storeroom of hydraulic maintenance tools, complete and in perfect condition. I would have taken photographs, I would have taken measurements and I would even have written an article about it.

In this one, on the other hand, I only have time to look at them half a second before Lianhua comes out through the trapdoor behind me, closes it with her foot and picks me up in her arms again.

“Xia”, she says. “Open the door and check that there is no one nearby.”

Xia leaves the lamp on the floor after putting it out, approaches the door and opens it barely a finger’s width, stays glued to the crack moving her head very slowly from one side to the other with all the solemnity of a professional conspirator.

“I don’t see anyone”, she whispers.

“Then it is better to leave quickly”, says Lianhua.

The light from outside hits me in the face with a violence I did not expect and I have to close my eyes a couple of seconds, and when I open them I discover that we are in a narrow alley, wedged between two brick buildings that almost touch at the top, with a floor of packed earth and a smell of fried food that arrives from somewhere and that I don’t manage to locate.

We are finally outside the Imperial Palace, and for the first time in thirteen years, there are not twenty Nei Wei around me.

It is the strangest thing I have felt in a long time, but Lianhua does not let me savor it, because the moment Xia closes the door at our backs she sets off walking, and she does it quickly.

And from there on begins a route that, if I had to draw it, would be a completely absurd line.

Because Lianhua does not take a single main street. She goes through the alleys, always through the alleys, entering and leaving them with an assurance that says she has learned them by heart, turning where there doesn’t seem to be anything, crossing back courtyards and passing beneath clotheslines loaded with laundry that graze our heads.

But we are not alone, since at this hour of the morning the alleys on the periphery of the main streets are full of people. Men with baskets, women with buckets, kids running with errands, a fellow pushing a wheelbarrow full of coal that obliges us to press ourselves against the wall to let him pass, and all of them with the same expression of one who should have been somewhere else ten minutes ago.

Although they do look at us.

I receive quite a few looks, and I don’t need to be especially clever to know why. It is not because of the clothing, nor because of Lianhua, nor because of Xia, it is because a girl of my age does not go about in anyone’s arms, and seeing me like this makes people lift their gaze a moment with that lukewarm curiosity of one who registers something odd, dedicates exactly one second of their attention to it and then goes on with their own affairs.

That is the advantage of this hour and of these alleys, they are all in such a hurry that no one stops to imagine anything stranger than a sick girl, a kid with a twisted ankle or any other ordinary explanation. It is not their affair, so they go on with their business.

I never thought I would be so grateful for indifference, so I enjoy it until after a while I cannot measure, Lianhua finally comes out of the last side street and we emerge onto a real street.

It is a street in the middle zone of the city, wide, cobbled, with arcades on the sides and shops open, and the moment we come out onto it Lianhua reduces her pace to a completely normal one that does not distinguish us from the rest of the people traveling the street.

And about thirty paces away, in front of a large building with a sign hanging over the door that identifies it as an inn, there are three carts.

One for passengers, covered, and two for merchandise, loaded and with the tarpaulins already tied. All three with the horses hitched and all three, evidently, waiting.

Lianhua does not look at the inn for a single second, she goes directly to the carts, where there are seven people distributed around them, four men and three women, all dressed in a manner that does not draw attention but that is not exactly cheap either, and all with that way of standing of people who spend their lives on the roads.

The moment she is close enough, Lianhua speaks to them.

“We are the passengers”, she tells them.

A very brief silence falls until one of the men, the oldest of the four, separates from the cart against which he was leaning and looks at us without any haste, first at Lianhua, then at Xia, then at me, and lastly at the bundles they carry on their backs.

“Can you identify yourselves?” he asks.

And here is where Lianhua readjusts the weight until holding me with a single arm, puts her free hand among her clothes and takes out something that puts my heart in my throat.

It is the jade seal.

The jade seal my mother placed in my hand last night. The seal of Yuanxing Hao, the House of the Long Journey, the one I stayed looking at with damp eyes while it warmed in my palm and which, with all the commotion of these last hours, I had forgotten about completely.

I have prepared this escape for weeks, I have made lists of the lists, I have calculated supplies, I have written an entire book and I have chosen what stays and what I take, and it turns out that the most important object of all my luggage had been erased from my head so cleanly that right now, if someone had asked me where it was, I would not have known how to answer.

The man takes the jade seal, looks at it, turns it over, passes his thumb over the carving and nods a single time.

“Get into the carriage”, he says as he returns it to her. “We have to leave right away.”

Lianhua puts the seal away without a single comment and I don’t say anything either, although inside I am cursing myself in a fairly foul-mouthed manner.

We approach the passenger cart, Lianhua lifts me into it and settles me on one of the side benches, undoes the knot of the cloth, takes off her backpack and makes a gesture to Xia to take off hers.

“Do we store these here?” she asks the man, who has stayed beside the little door. “Or do they go in the merchandise cart?”

“For now put them in there”, he answers without hesitating. “We are not going to waste time untying the tarpaulins.”

So Xia and Lianhua put the backpacks in, then they get in themselves, and the moment the three of us are inside one of the women also gets in, who greets us with a perfectly polite inclination of the head, sits across from me, beside Xia, and doesn’t say a single word.

Outside, voices are heard, footsteps and the creak of the wood as the rest distribute themselves across the driver’s seats of the three carts, and a moment later someone shouts something I don’t manage to make out, the horses move and the cart starts off with a jolt as we set into motion.

I draw back the little curtain a bit with my fingers, just enough to see, and I devote myself to watching how the city changes while the caravan makes its way through the streets.

First the arcades of the middle zone, afterward a plaza with a well in the center where there are three women arguing, afterward a wider street, and another, and another, until finally we come out onto a main street.

And the moment we do, I see it, since at the far end, closing the entire perspective of the avenue, is the wall.

At that precise instant, looking at that wall and with the little curtain between my fingers, a temptation comes to my head, and it is that of using the Golden Chains of Ogma to ask Lianhua about the jade seal.

And I am already gathering the Qi when I stop dead, since the Golden Silk Net is not a secret that is mine.

It is a technique exclusive to the Sect of the Celestial Sun, and that means that if at the moment I use it there were some member of the Sect on this street, within its reach, and they were using the technique, my golden line would connect to theirs.

And I don’t need to imagine much beyond that point to know how the day would end.

All of this. The cart, the tunnels, the broken key, the weeks of preparation, all thrown in the trash because I was not capable of holding in a question for half a day.

So I release the Qi and stay looking at the wall in silence.

I’ll ask her later; I have an entire journey ahead of me to ask her.

The caravan advances, and upon reaching the height of the gates I discover that we are not going to the one I know.

The gate through which I have gone out the other times is the ceremonial one, the one with the guards with gleaming spears through which the imperial processions pass so that everyone can see them.

Not this one, this one is a practical gate. Wide, without adornments, with the stones blackened by decades of smoke and with a line of carts, mules and people on foot waiting to cross it that extends a good stretch down the avenue.

My heart sinks upon seeing it, but it turns out that the line advances quickly, with that efficiency of the places through which the work of a city truly passes, and in less time than it has taken me to resign myself, the caravan is already at the height of the gates.

And there, at last, I see the guards.

There are four of them and they are bored, with that kind of boredom that is only achieved after many years doing the same job, and the moment one of them approaches the first cart, he begins to ask questions with the tone of one reciting something he knows by heart.

The man on the driver’s seat answers without getting down, calm, and holds out to him a sheaf of papers.

The guard takes them and looks at them. He turns one page, turns another, stops a second on the third and I, from behind my little curtain, stop breathing.

And then he nods, returns them to him and makes a gesture with his arm toward his companions.

“Let them pass!” he shouts.

And that’s it, that is all.

Weeks of planning and an entire life left behind, so that the final formality that closes it lasts less than a yawn while it is dispatched by a man who looks like he has half an hour left before his relief.

The caravan sets off again, the hooves of the horses sound different upon entering beneath the arch, and for a few seconds everything is left in darkness and in shadow, with the stone ceiling passing above us and the echo of the wheels bouncing off the sides of the tunnel through the wall.

And then, the light again, so I draw the little curtain back entirely and turn on the seat as much as my body permits me to look backward, and there, moving away slowly, are the gates of the imperial capital.

Enormous, black with smoke, thrown wide open and completely indifferent to me, with the line of people entering and leaving through them as it has done every day for centuries and as it will keep doing when I have spent a long time without remembering what they were exactly like.

I look at them until the road makes a curve, and I look at them knowing, with a tranquil certainty that does not hurt as much as I expected, that it is probably the last time I will see them.