Chapter 40: Behind the Statue

The Emperor of Great Liang knelt before the altar, and bled.

He did not any longer feel it. For forty-one days the blood had gone out of him at the hour of the tiger and at dusk, a little from each hand, and his hands had learned to leave themselves. He knelt on the cold black stone of the Sanctuary floor with his bandaged palms laid upward on his knees, like a beggar’s, and watched with a strange, distant interest as a thin red thread rose from each one, and bent, and went up, into the dark of the dome.

The chanting went on above him.

It was a thing of three voices, dry and cracked and very old, in a tongue he had never learned. The three Supreme Ancestors sat in their triangle round the altar, in their crimson-and-gold robes, withered and brown and still as three dead trees, and they sang. The First Ancestor sat at the head. The Second and Third sat at his left hand and right. In front of the First Ancestor, on a bier of black iron draped in white, lay an old, old body. It was his own. It had been a handsome man once. Now it was only a dry brown husk with a bald skull and a hole where the nose had been, and it breathed, very softly, in and out, with a sound like wind in a tomb.

Around the walls of the great round hall, in a ring, stood a hundred guards in crimson and gold. Their eyes were open. They saw nothing. Each one was pale as paper, and each had a red thread running from the crown of his head up into the dark.

And beyond the walls, in the courtyards, on the steps, over the whole of the hill, thirty thousand more.

The Emperor could feel them.

It was a thing he had never been able to explain to anyone. It was a kind of pressure, a soft, steady weight on the inside of his skull, like the sound of a very large crowd heard through a closed door. Each man had a weight. Each weight had a face. He had never known a single one of their names. And in forty-one days, as the thread grew thinner and the blood grew less, he had begun, very slightly, to know them all.

’I am so tired,’ thought Emperor Li Tian.

Beside the altar, with a long gray hand upon the lid of a small bronze box, stood a gaunt man in gray robes, with green runes crawling up the side of his neck. Du Heng did not chant. He had been given nothing to say. He stood with his sunken eyes half-lidded and his thin lips curled, and every now and then he lifted the lid of the box, a finger’s breadth, and let a pale green thread of mist curl up and drift away across the hall, into the air.

The Emperor had breathed it for nine days. He had stopped caring what it was.

"He is late," said the Third Ancestor, in a thin, dry, irritable rasp, between two verses of the chant.

"He is coming," said the First Ancestor.

"The boy has been told. The Emperor sent the word. He has had forty days to consider."

"He is coming." The old, soft, cracked voice did not stir. "He is a boy who cannot bear to leave a thing unsettled. I read his face in the pool, three weeks ago, when he turned down the stair with his broom. He has a conscience like a bell. He will ring."

"The dome will crush him at the gate."

"It is meant to. A little. Enough to soften him. And then Master Du’s cup." The First Ancestor’s dry lips drew back from his black gums. "The moss and the bone. I do not like to waste an opportunity. A vessel that arrives already tired is a vessel that does not struggle."

Du Heng bowed slightly, with a faint, thin, satisfied smile.

The Emperor knelt and bled and said nothing.

There was a small sound.

It was a very small sound. It was almost nothing at all. A dry, quick, whispering sound, like the rustle of a mouse in a grain-store, or the scratch of a pen. It came from somewhere behind him, at the back of the hall, where the great bronze statue of the Founder rose into the dark, with its sword raised in its right hand and its broad scarred face turned to the altar.

He did not move his head.

He was a man who had sat through forty years of court ceremonies, and he knew the art of looking at nothing. But a thing went through him that was sharper than the cold, sharper than the pain: the sudden clean knowledge, like a drop of icy water on the nape of the neck, that the sound was ink on paper.

’He is writing.’

Not at the gate. Not in the dome. Not in any way the Ancestors had imagined. The boy had ’come,’ and he had come the one way that they did not know, and now he was sitting in a small room somewhere behind the Founder’s statue, doing the one thing he had always been best at in all the world, and the Emperor was the only person in the hall who could hear it.

He had the Founder’s blood. He had never known what use it was.

He had been, he thought, a very poor father.

Slowly, very slowly, with the stiffness of a man who has been kneeling for a long time, Emperor Li Tian lifted his head.

"Venerable Ancestors," he said.

The chant broke off.

Three pairs of milky, blood-red eyes turned upon him. It was the first time that he had spoken in nine days. His voice was a dry, cracked croak, and he had to stop and swallow.

"The Rite of Re-Founding," said the Emperor, "as it is set down in the Founder’s own text, has nine hundred and ninety verses."

"We know the Rite, Li Tian," said the Second Ancestor, in a voice like old iron.

"You have been chanting the abridged form." He had never in his life disputed with an Ancestor, and his heart was beating so hard that he thought they must hear it. "In the Annals of the Third Dynasty, it is recorded that the abridged form was permitted only in the case of a living vessel ’consenting’. If the vessel is brought unwilling, the whole text must be recited, from the first verse. Else the new body will reject the soul, and the Ancestor will go mad."

A silence.

The First Ancestor’s blood-red eyes narrowed.

"I do not recall that passage," he said softly.

"It is in the third scroll, on the left shelf of the Archive, in the Seventh Nether Floor. I heard of it as a boy." His throat was dry. "It was not a book that anyone wished to remember. That is why it was put in the cellar."

He was lying, but only a little. There was such a passage, or something very like it. The old Grand Secretary had mentioned it to him once at a banquet, forty years ago, as a curiosity of the Annals, and he had never forgotten it.

He had never expected to find a use for it.

The First Ancestor looked at him for a long, long time, with a flat, unreadable, ancient gaze.

"Begin from the first verse," he said at last, very softly, to the others.

The Third Ancestor made a small sound of disgust. But the chant began again.

The Emperor lowered his head, and shut his eyes, and for the first time in forty-one days, the faint, steady, hopeless weight in his chest seemed to ease a very little. Nine hundred and ninety verses. At the pace of the full Rite, it would take them until dawn.

He did not know whether it would be enough.

Behind him, in the dark, the pen went on.