Chapter 35: The Festival of the Last Chrysanthemums

It was Ye’er who found the festival.

She had been in the Archive for two days, which she described afterward as the two longest days of her life, and the two best. She had been given a corner of the Seventh Floor behind the third bookcase, a straw mat, a quilt that smelled faintly of old woman, and a damp shelf of herbals that no one had opened in two hundred years. She had read them all, by lamplight, with her finger under the lines, her tongue between her teeth, and a look of fierce, dazed concentration. Aunt Liu, passing, had corrected her pronunciation of a character without being asked, and then pretended that she hadn’t.

"There is a festival," Ye’er announced at breakfast, with her mouth full of millet. "I heard the clerks. Tonight. In the plaza. The Festival of the Last Chrysanthemums. They said that the Ward Elders chose it, because the first one in forty years was to be a nice one."

"It is a children’s holiday," said Aunt Liu dubiously.

"I am a child."

"You are a Poison Sect apprentice who has pulled a hundred beds of moss."

"I am fourteen," said Ye’er, with a dignity that was somewhat spoiled by a grain of millet on her chin. "And I have never seen a lantern that was not for a funeral."

There was a short silence at the table. Aunt Liu looked at her bowl.

"We will go," said Li Xuan.

The white jade plaza had been scrubbed clean.

No one had told the ward-criers to do it. They had simply come, in the morning, in their hundreds, with buckets and brushes and strips of old cloth, and scrubbed the bloodstains and the dust and the long dark scars of the great Stair’s opening, until the marble shone like new snow under the lamplit dusk. They had hung paper lanterns from every pillar. They had laid out rows of trestle tables, and on every table stood a bowl of golden, white, and bronze chrysanthemums, the last of the year, with a dish of sweet rice cakes and a flask of warm wine.

There were children everywhere.

They ran between the tables with small paper lanterns on sticks, shrieking and breathless. They chased a dog. They chased each other. A very small boy, on his father’s shoulders, was waving a toy broom made of straw.

"That," said Gu, with great gravity, "is a monstrous liberty."

"I am told that it is a sign of affection," said Li Xuan.

The old Marshal had come up the stair on his own legs, refusing every arm, in his black coat with the tarnished wolf at the clasp. He walked more slowly now. There was a gray tinge about his lips. But he looked at the lanterns as though he had not seen light for fifty years, which in a manner of speaking he had not.

A cheer went up when they were recognized.

It was not a loud cheer. It rippled out from the nearest tables in waves, and men and women stood up from their benches and bowed, shyly, with their cups in their hands. A woman pushed a plate of rice cakes into Li Xuan’s arms and fled. A man with a limp saluted Gu with two fingers to his brow, in the old Western Army manner, and Gu, after a moment, saluted back.

"I have done nothing to deserve this," Li Xuan murmured.

"No," said Ji Ling’er, at his elbow. "That is what is so terrible about it."

She had come in a plain gray robe, without her veil. It was the first time he had seen her face in the open air. She was younger than he had thought, and her cheeks were pink from the cold, and she wore, tucked behind one ear, a small bronze chrysanthemum that a child had pushed into her hand and run away.

The Temple of the Founder’s Footprints stood at the western edge of the plaza, small and old, with a roof of mossy tile and a single stone step worn into a hollow by three thousand years of bare feet.

It held very little. A stone floor. A bronze incense burner. A flat black slab, set into the floor before the altar, in which two shallow impressions had been carved, side by side, each as long as a man’s forearm. They were said to be the marks where the Founder had stood when he took the oath of kingship. Pilgrims came, and laid their own feet in them, and bowed.

Li Xuan stood at the door a long time.

"Do you wish to go in?" said Ji Ling’er.

"I do not wish to disturb it."

"It is a temple. It is for being disturbed."

He went in.

He took off his boots, as the custom was, and stepped onto the cold stone floor in his plain cloth stockings, and walked to the black slab, and stood before the footprints, with his hands at his sides. They were very small. A man of the plains, perhaps, or a man whose feet had gone bare for a good many years.

Hum.

The chime in the depths of his consciousness was a thin, quiet, bright thing, like a small bell rung at the end of a long road.

[Location Verified: Temple of the Founder’s Footprints (Historical Weight: 3,000 Years of Offerings).]

[Daily Sign-In available. Would Host like to execute Sign-In?]

Execute.

[Executing Sign-In at: Temple of the Founder’s Footprints.]

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[Congratulations! You have received Scripture: <The Founder’s Line: A Primer of the Returning Stroke>!]

[Congratulations! You have received Item: 100 Clear-Mind Chrysanthemum Pills (Grade-9 Divine Quality)!]

A thin scroll of yellow paper unrolled in the jade hall of his spirit, and the Mind Palace read it aloud, very slowly, in its dry, patient voice.

The line is drawn from the shoulder, in a single breath, without lifting the hand. This is the first half. Every student of the sword learns the first half.

The second half is the return.

A line drawn outward takes something from the world: breath, strength, a little of the day. The Founder’s line gives it back. At the end of the stroke, the hand returns along the same path, and what was taken is returned, and the stroke is erased, and only the line remains. It is a line that has paid for itself.

Few can draw it. It cannot be drawn by a man who has borrowed what he cannot return.

Li Xuan stood very still.

He thought of a crude bamboo slip, and a strand of invisible Qi, and a drop of tea. He thought of the Dragon-Vein Suppression Array, which had carried a thread of sword intent up through ten zhang of rock, and which had taken the cost out of his arm, his seed, and his blood, and given back nothing. He thought of the golden Core on its floor of jade, with its twenty-three black strands.

So that is what the door is, he thought. It is not a lock. It is a question.

Return what you borrow.

In his sleeve, the little lacquer box with the lotus lamp was warm against his wrist.

They sat on the steps of the Temple while the festival went on, under a sky the color of bruised slate.

Aunt Liu had gone to supervise a large and unsupervisable quantity of rice cake. Ye’er was in the middle of the plaza, with a lantern in each hand, being chased by a pack of seven-year-olds, and shrieking with laughter, which seemed to take her by surprise each time. Gu sat on a stone bench by the burner with a thimble of warm wine he had accepted and not drunk, and the faintly absurd look of an old general at a nursery party.

"What did it give you?" said Ji Ling’er.

"A lesson." Li Xuan turned the little bronze chrysanthemum in his fingers. She had handed it to him a moment ago, without comment, and he had not found a way to give it back. "I have to draw a line that gives back what it takes."

"That sounds very like a sword stroke."

"It sounds very like a debt." He smiled. "I think they are the same thing, when you look at them rightly."

She was quiet. A burst of laughter came from the plaza, and a single paper lantern, loosed from some child’s fingers, lifted and went floating up into the dusk, small and gold, until it was lost against the clouds.

"My master said something to me, when I left the sect," said Ji Ling’er. "She said that a sword is a promise to be at a certain place at a certain time. And that most people spend their lives learning where to stand, and never what to stand for." She looked at the sky. "I think that I have been standing, for a long time, in front of the wrong door."

"And now?"

"Now I am standing in a plaza at a festival with a Body Tempering Seventh Stage who is cleverer than anyone I have ever met, and who sits down every night to stamp decrees." Her mouth curved, a little. "It is not at all what I was trained for. I find that I do not mind."

He did not answer. He found that his tongue had gone strangely stiff.

"After the snow," she said. "Where will you go?"

"South. There is a sect on the southern border called the Sky-Clearing Sect. It has a library, five thousand years old. And a flight of steps that no one has swept in fifty years."

She laughed softly. "Of course it does."

"I should like to see it." He hesitated. "You will be very welcome, if..."

"I will go," said Ji Ling’er, quite simply. "I have told Aunt Liu already. She is very put out. She has been packing for two days." She turned, and for the first time in two months, their eyes were on the same level, and she was not looking away. "I should like to beat you in a fair fight, once, on a day when you are not trying to lose."

"I do not try to lose."

"You are not trying very hard to win."

"That is a different thing," said Li Xuan, and was silent, because her hand, resting on the stone step between them, was a finger’s width from his own, and he had no idea what to do about it.

It was a very small distance. Neither of them closed it. But neither of them moved away, either, and they sat quite still, side by side, in the lantern-light, for a long time.

It was Ye’er who smelled it first.

She came running, out of breath, with a lantern gone dark in each hand, and stopped in front of Aunt Liu with her small face white.

"The wind has changed," she said. "Smell."

The old woman lifted her head.

A thin, faint, sweetish odor was drifting across the plaza from the east, from the palace on its hill. It was so faint that most of the festival-goers never noticed it. It smelled very slightly of rotted honey, and old bone, and something cold and soft, like a wet feather.

"Dream-Bone," Ye’er whispered. "It is in the air. They are letting it out of the red place. A little at a time. So that everyone gets used to it." She swallowed. "So that when they come to the door, they do not mind."

Over the heads of the crowd, over the lanterns, over the tiled roofs of the inner palace, very faintly, a pale red mist had begun to creep toward the plaza, along the ground, like a tide coming in.

Li Xuan rose to his feet.

"We have a little time," said Aunt Liu slowly, "if the girl is right. The white root of the moss is the first part of the cure. But it needs something to carry it into the mind."

"It needs chrysanthemum," said Ye’er, in a small, startled voice. "It is in the Herbal of the Southern Border. Chrysanthemum, for clearing the head. It is the oldest cure for sleepers."

All of them looked at Li Xuan.

He had a hundred Clear-Mind Chrysanthemum Pills in the hollow of his sleeve, from a temple sign-in not an hour old.

"The System," he said at last, with great restraint, "has a very odd sense of timing."

On the stone bench beside the burner, Gu, who had not been paying the slightest attention to the conversation, was looking at the thimble of warm wine in his hand, with an expression of deep and secret amusement.