Chapter 33: A Well in the Ninth Ward

The children began to sicken on the sixty-sixth day.

It began with a girl of seven in a tenement near the old stele, who woke one morning with a thin, green, branching tracery beneath the skin of her forearm, like frost on a window. By noon there were nine. By dusk there were forty, all in the same three streets, all with the same faint, spreading green, the same heavy eyelids, the same slow, shallow breath. They did not cry. They did not fever. They simply grew quieter, and quieter, and slept.

Aunt Liu was the first to understand it.

She was at the bedside of the seventh child when she saw the veins on the little arm in the light of a lamp, and stopped quite still, with her silver needle in her fingers.

"Nine-Venom Moss," she said.

"What is it?" asked Ji Ling’er, behind her.

"It is a sect-poison." The old woman’s voice was dry as ash. "A very old one. It has no taste and no smell, and it does nothing at all to a grown man except to make him tired. But a child’s blood is thin. It goes into the veins and it grows, slowly, like a root. In seven days, it reaches the heart." She put down the needle. "It is made by only one sect in the southern provinces."

"Du Heng," said Li Xuan.

He had been standing at the door of the little room with his broom in his hand and a lantern at his feet, and he had said nothing since they came in. He did not say it loudly. He said it as a man sets down a stone.

"Later," Ji Ling’er said, very low. "He wrote it on the door."

"He fills his coffins with children, it seems."

Aunt Liu was already opening her box. She laid out jars, and a bowl, and a long strip of white cloth. Her hands moved steadily and fast, the hands of a woman who has done this work through a great many wars. "I have an antidote. It is slow. It takes a day for each child, and I have enough for perhaps twenty." She did not look up. "There are forty-three."

"Then we shall find the rest," said Li Xuan.

He set down the lantern and went out into the street.

It took him nine hours.

He did not use a sword. He did not use a seal. He sat at a long table in the back room of an old tea-house in the Ninth Ward, which Grand Secretary Lin had lent him within the hour, with a pot of cold tea, a heap of papers, and forty clerks of the Ministry of Rites who had been brought from their beds, and he asked a great many questions.

Which wells in the Ninth Ward did the sick children use? Three. Which streets drew from which well? He drew a map on the back of a sheet. Which of the capital’s three canals fed those wells? One, the Old Canal, which ran down from the northern hills past the Ministry of Revenue’s ice cellars and across the city. When had the children first sickened? Yesterday morning. How long does Nine-Venom Moss need to work through a well? Aunt Liu said: a day, no more.

So the poison had gone in the day before yesterday, upstream.

He sat looking at the map for a long time.

"The Old Canal has eleven sluice-gates," he said slowly. "Each is kept by a keeper, who is paid by the Ministry of Revenue, and who writes in a toll-book every time that the gate is opened or closed." He looked up. "I should like the toll-books of all eleven. For the last ten days."

"Young master," said a clerk, "there are three thousand pages..."

"Then you had better begin."

The clerks began. They worked through the night. Li Xuan did not read the pages one by one. He glanced over each, down the columns, as he had glanced over the ledger at Willow Ford, and a pattern began, very slowly, to emerge in the margins of his mind like a watermark in paper.

"The eighth gate," he said at last, a little after dawn.

The tea-house was very quiet.

"The keeper of the eighth gate, Old Ma, has opened and closed it twice a day for thirty-one years, precisely at sunrise and sunset." Li Xuan laid a toll-book on the table, open at a page. "Three days ago, there is an entry in a different hand. The gate was opened at the hour of the rat. It was closed at the hour of the tiger. The keeper’s signature has been written in a hurry." He turned the page. "The next day, there is nothing. The next, there is nothing. The keeper has not signed his name for two days."

"He is dead," said Ji Ling’er flatly.

"Or sleeping very soundly." Li Xuan rose. "The eighth sluice-gate stands in the old Ministry of Revenue’s ice-house. It is the one place on the Old Canal where a cart may be taken in at night, unseen, under the pretext of delivering ice. And ice," he added, "is the only way that Nine-Venom Moss can be kept alive in the autumn."

The clerks stared.

He took up his broom. "Saintess... Ling’er. If you would be so good."

She was already on her feet.

The ice-house stood at the edge of the Ninth Ward, at the end of an overgrown lane, a long, low, windowless building of black brick, its roof half fallen in. A faint chill came from it even on the warm gray morning. Beside it, the Old Canal ran in a deep stone channel under a rusted iron grating, and at the eighth sluice, where the iron wheel stood on its pedestal, a green mist hung faintly above the water, as thin as breath.

The door was open.

There was a cart in the yard, a plain two-wheeled thing with a tarpaulin across the back. It bore a mark on the shaft, scratched with a knife, small and neat, that Li Xuan knew at once. It was a single curling line, like a vine, crawling up a post.

"The Poison Sect," said Ji Ling’er.

"Yes." Li Xuan looked at the dark door, and the faint cold breath that came out of it. "I do not think anyone is here to fight us. I think they left in a hurry."

"A trap?"

"Perhaps." He stepped across the threshold. "But the children have a day and a half, and I do not know where else to go."

The ice-house was full of cold, and silence, and green.

It lay in long ranks of shelves, row upon row, to the back of the building, where the old Ministry had once stored its ice in blocks of straw. Now, from the shelves, from the floor, from every crevice, a pale green moss grew in soft, fat, glistening beds, and the cold air had a sweet, thick, sickly smell like rotted honey. On a table at the far end, among a litter of jars and drying-racks, stood three large clay vats, each as high as a man’s waist, and at the foot of the table, with her back to the wall, a figure sat hunched in the dark.

It was very small.

It looked up as he came.

It was a girl of perhaps fourteen. She wore a gray robe three sizes too large, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and her thin dark face was streaked with tears. A green vine had been tattooed across her cheek, still raw and swollen. Her hands were wrapped in rags. She did not draw a weapon. She did not run. She only stared at him, with huge, terrified, hollow eyes, and said, in a tiny cracked voice

"Please don’t hurt me. I didn’t know it was for children. They said it was only for the rich."