Chapter 42: Due Now

The brush was dry again.

Li Xuan dipped it, for the three-hundredth time, in the cinnabar and the old black ink, and bent over the scroll. His fingers were cramped to the wrist. His eyes were burning. For three hours he had worked, without stopping, without lifting his head, down the long gray walls of the Architect’s study, line by line, column by column, in the mild small ink-stained hand that he had inherited from three months among the cobwebs.

He was adding.

It was the dullest work in the world. It was the only work, he had decided, that mattered. The walls held thirty-one thousand, four hundred and six lines of debt. Each had a figure. Each figure had to be written out, in its place, in a long column on the scroll, and then added to the figure beneath it, and the whole of it carried to the next page, as a clerk at the end of a long year carries the sums of a household. There were no shortcuts. There was no trick. He had asked the Mind Palace, once, whether it could do the sum for him, and the palace had answered, with a certain dry dignity, that the accounts of a realm are not balanced by anyone but the man who owes them.

He had done nine thousand lines when the hall above them went silent.

He had not stopped writing. He had only paused, for the space of a breath, with the brush trembling over the paper, and a cold hand closed on the back of his neck.

The chanting had stopped. And in the place of it, faint and far through the stone, a thin, high, many-voiced cry went up and was cut off. A harp-string note rang across the whole of the Sanctuary, and the light on the study walls flickered, and went pale, and the fine black columns of the ledger shivered, line by line, all the way down to the floor.

"Gu," said Li Xuan, very quietly.

There was no answer.

He set down the brush. His hand shook so badly that he had to use the other to steady it. He rose from the stool, and crossed the little eight-sided room in four steps, and put his palm to the bronze door.

It was cold. It was ordinary cold. And it was empty.

The old man who had been standing at his back for three hours, quite silent, with his clouded eyes fixed on the dark, was not there.

He did not remember opening the door.

He remembered the stair, and the faint blue-white glow of a great many small cold lights, and the steps going up. He remembered the long dark shape of the Founder’s statue rising before him, and the passage behind it, and the edge of the great round hall, and the smell of blood. And he remembered, very clearly, as one remembers a thing that one will go on seeing for the rest of one’s life, the black altar at the center of the Sanctuary, with its three withered figures in crimson, and an old, gray, bearded man in a torn black coat, lying on the floor at its foot, with his face turned up, and his clouded eyes open, and a thin, bright line of blood running from the corner of his mouth.

The First Ancestor stood over him with one bare foot upon his chest.

"Ah," he said, quite pleasantly, looking up. "Here is the scholar."

Li Xuan did not run.

He walked. He crossed the black stone floor of the Sanctuary, past the kneeling Emperor, past the fallen ranks of ghosts, through a hall full of silent soldiers who had stopped and turned and were looking at him with blank pale eyes. He had a brush in his left hand. He did not remember bringing it. There was ink on his sleeve to the elbow. His broom was somewhere behind him, on the floor of a very small room, and he did not think that he would need it.

He stopped three paces from the altar.

"Let him go," he said.

The First Ancestor smiled.

It was the smile of the golden-haired man in the vision, the one who had poured wine in a mud-brick room three thousand years ago. It was only a withered, brown, skeletal mask now, stretched over a skull. But it was the same smile. It was warm, and generous, and full of a terrible, tender regret.

"The Marshal has done what he came to do," said the old man. "The oath is broken. The guards are awake. My dome is cracking. I should think that he might be allowed, now, to die."

He bent his foot, very slightly, and Gu coughed.

"He is alive," said Li Xuan.

"A little."

"Then he is not yours." He did not raise his voice. He held up the brush. "I am going to tell you something, Ancestor. I have been sitting in the Architect’s study for three hours. I have read your accounts."

The smile stopped.

"You changed the last column," said Li Xuan. "In every line. You wrote Due: never. It was very neat work. The brushwork is rather fine." He looked at the old man, mildly. "But I should like you to know that I have been adding. I am nine-tenths of the way down. And I have found that the sum, when I have it, is not a very large number at all, considering what is owed."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I have not been writing Due: now." His voice was very gentle. "I have been writing the sum. The Architect said that the accounts can be balanced, if someone will write it down. I have written down every figure. I have only the last line to write. And when I have written it, there will be nothing in the Founder’s ledger that has not been put down in black and white, and carried, and cast, and found to be what it is." He lifted the brush. "A debt that has been counted is a debt that has been called. You will find that the array does not care very much what the last column says."

The old man stared at him.

Then, with an expression that was almost admiration, he began to laugh.

"A clerk," said the First Ancestor, shaking his bald head. "Three thousand years. The Founder’s blood. The Architect’s key. Every treasure of the dynasty, laid open to a clerk." He lifted his foot from the Marshal’s chest. "I should have known. I should have known when I saw the sort of child he was, with his sparrows." He drew himself up. "But you are too late, boy. I do not need the Rite. I do not need the vessel. I only need you. One hand, and a little blood, and a stroke."

He moved.

It was a thing too fast to see. One moment he stood by the altar, and the next he was a pace from Li Xuan’s chest, with one thin brown hand reaching for the brush, and behind it, like a wave rising out of a dark sea, the whole accumulated weight of three thousand years of borrowed strength.

Li Xuan did not have time to raise a hand.

But someone else did.

He had not seen him come. The man in the brown cloak had been on his knees by the altar, bleeding, with his bandaged hands palm-up in his lap, and now he was standing, between the First Ancestor and his son, with his arms flung wide, and the red thread of the throne’s lamp blazing from his neck like a wound.

"No," said Emperor Li Tian.

The First Ancestor’s hand passed through his chest.

It did not seem to hurt him. He stood quite still, with a look of mild, almost childlike surprise on his gaunt, white, ravaged face, and looked down, as if wondering where it had come from.

"Father," said Li Xuan.

"Ah." The Emperor swayed. He put out a bandaged hand, and found Li Xuan’s sleeve, and held it. "It is not so bad. Do not... it is only the lamp. I am... I am only putting it out." A little blood ran from the corner of his mouth, and he gave a small, strange, breathless laugh. "I have not been of very much use. I thought, perhaps, in the end... one small door."

"You held the Rite for three hours."

"Did I?" The wide, bloodshot eyes moved to his son’s face. They were clear. For the first time in forty days, they were quite clear, and very young. "Xuan’er. I should like to say..."

"I know."

"No. You do not." His breath caught. "I should like to say that I was... I should like to have been the father who found the sparrows with you." His fingers tightened. "Is that... may I say that?"

"You may."

"Good." The ghost of a smile touched his lips. "Good. I should like to die as a man. And not a lamp."

The red thread at his throat went out.

It did not snap. It simply thinned, and thinned, and faded, like a thread of spun sugar dissolving in warm water. And with it the lamp-light went out of his face, and the weariness out of his shoulders, and the lines out of his brow. He looked, for one moment, quite young. Then his knees folded, very gently, and Li Xuan caught him, and lowered him to the cold black stone, and laid him down.

He did not breathe again.

But he was smiling.

Li Xuan knelt beside him for a long moment with his father’s head upon his arm, and he did not weep. He found that he could not. He only knelt, very still, with the ink drying on his sleeve and the quiet of the great hall ringing in his ears, and felt something that had been tight in him for nineteen years slowly, painfully, come loose.

"Touching," said the First Ancestor, somewhere above him.

Li Xuan looked up.

The old man had not moved. He was standing in the same place, with his thin brown hand still raised, and the Emperor’s blood dripping slowly from his fingers. But something had changed in his face. The smile had gone. The terrible, tender regret had gone. What was left was only a bald, brown, wrinkled mask, and behind it, for the first time, an expression that Li Xuan had never seen in him.

It was fear.

"What have you done?" he said, in a thin voice.

"Nothing yet," said Li Xuan. He rose. He took up the brush from the stone, where it had fallen, and dipped it in the little pool of ink that he had carried across the hall in his left sleeve. His hand was quite steady. "But the sum is very nearly done."

He drew a line.

It was not a line of any art. It was a simple, plain, quiet stroke, from the shoulder, in a single breath, across the black stone of the altar, in the Emperor’s own blood and a little cinnabar. It left a thread of silver light behind it, that glowed in the dark like a seam of moonlight.

And then, slowly, without lifting, he turned the brush, and brought the hand back along the line.

Return what you borrow.

The whole of the Sanctuary rang.

It was the great bronze bell of the System, tolling in his consciousness, and the little silver bell of the Architect’s study, and the deep soft note of the Founder’s door, and a hundred thousand names flying home on a winter night, and thirty thousand threads breaking all at once. It was a single clear, vast, patient sound, and it ran out from the line on the altar through the hall, and the walls, and the courtyards, and the hill, and the Archive beneath it, and the Vault, and the whole of the ancient arrays beneath the capital, like a ripple in a dark pond.

[Notice: A Return has been recorded in the Ledger of the Realm.]

[Notice: 31,406 entries balanced.]

The First Ancestor screamed.

It was a high, thin, hideous sound, like a rusted hinge, and it went on and on. He had put both hands to his face. Under the crimson-and-gold gown, his body had begun to change. The brown skin cracked, and shriveled, and fell inward. The bald skull collapsed. The long, thin, spotted hands curled into claws and went gray, and then white, and then, at the very ends, began to crumble, like old paper in a fire. Three thousand years. It all came back, in a single breath, every year that he had borrowed, every night of every sleep, every heartbeat that had been drawn from the blood of men who were not him.

At the edge of the altar, the Second and Third Ancestors had fallen to their knees. They did not scream. They only looked at their hands, in silence, with wide, stunned, milky eyes, while the flesh slid from them like sand through a sieve.

All across the hall, from every wall and every beam, thousands of small lights had begun to rise.

They were no bigger than candle-flames. They were every shade of gold. They rose from the black stone of the floor, and the iron of the pillars, and the old brown dust of the bier. They drifted up, in a slow, soft, silent tide, past the cracked dome and out through the fissures into the falling snow, and Li Xuan knew what they were. They were the lamps. A thousand and forty-three small flames, stolen from a thousand and forty-three sleeping women, in a shrine in the east, and returned.

One of them, quite near, wavered a little. It was a very small flame, pale gold, no bigger than a grain of rice. It hung a moment before his face.

Then it went up with the others.

He did not know whether he had seen it. But in his sleeve, in the lacquer box that he had left with a fourteen-year-old girl in a cellar a very long way beneath the earth, he felt, quite distinctly, something brighten, and warm, and turn.

"Boy."

It was only a thread of sound. It came from the floor.

He turned.

Gu lay on his back at the foot of the altar, where the First Ancestor had dropped him, with his torn black coat open and the red net across his chest gone dark and flat as burnt paper. His clouded eyes were open. Blood stained his beard. But he was looking at something, with a fixed, intent, bright look, and one hand was moving feebly on the stone beside him, groping.

In it, clutched in a gnarled fist, was a small clay thimble.

Li Xuan knelt beside him. "Senior..."

"I said I would pour him a cup." The old man’s voice was a scrap of dry reed. "Give me... your hand. I cannot... see."

He took it. The old fingers were cold. He guided them, slowly and gently, to the flask at the Marshal’s belt, the cheap clay flask that Gu had carried through four hundred li of snow without once drinking from it. He unstopped it. He tipped it. A thin stream of dark wine ran into the thimble, and filled it, and ran over Gu’s knuckles.

On the other side of the altar, in a heap of crimson and gold, there was a thing that had once been the First Ancestor of Great Liang. It was very small now. It was almost nothing. A husk of brown skin over a skull, a few strands of white hair, two milky, blood-red eyes that had dimmed to a faint pink and were turned, still, toward the old man at the foot of the altar.

Gu lifted the thimble in a shaking hand.

"To the pact," he said, "between a man and his debts."

He poured it, a little unsteadily, upon the black stone, at the dry lips of the husk.

The pink eyes blinked.

The lips moved. The tongue, a small gray scrap, came out and touched them once. And from the withered throat, in a voice no louder than the rustle of a dead leaf, came a last, small, dry, astonished word.

"Terrible," said the First Ancestor. "This is... very bad... wine."

"It is the best I could afford," said Gu.

The pink eyes closed.

And with a sound like a sigh, the whole of the thing at the foot of the altar crumbled, in one long soft rush, into a heap of fine white dust, and was still.

Overhead, the great red dome of the Ancestral Sanctuary of Great Liang, which had burned for three thousand years, gave a last long creak, like the cracking of an enormous egg.

And came down in a soft, silver, shining fall of snow.