Chapter 49: The Third Terrace

The Sky-Clearing Sect lay at the end of a very long road, at the foot of a very old mountain.

It was not a grand mountain. It rose from the dry brown plain in a series of long, steep, stepped ridges, like a stair that some giant had begun to build and abandoned, with a thin cloud sitting on its crown. Dark pines clung to its flanks. Here and there, on the slopes, a roof of gray tile showed through the trees, small and weathered, with a thread of smoke curling from a chimney. There were nine of them, one for every terrace. The highest, near the cloud, was too small to see.

"The First Terrace is the gate and the guest-halls," said Yun Tianxiao, walking at the donkey’s head, with an air of tremendous importance and a bandage over one eye. "The Second is the training grounds. The Third is the Archive. The Fourth is the elders’ dwellings, the Fifth the pill-hall, the Sixth..." He waved a hand. "It does not matter. It goes up."

"How many disciples?" asked Gu.

"Three hundred and eleven." He did not look round. "There were thirty thousand once. My grandfather’s grandfather told me."

They climbed the long road in the last of the afternoon, and the mountain came closer. It was larger than it had looked. The pines were taller. At the gate, which was a plain wooden arch painted a very faded blue, two young disciples in sky-blue robes stood with their spears, and when they saw the young master, they bowed, and then stared, with undisguised astonishment, at the cart, the donkey, the old man with the sword, and the thin scholar with the broom.

"Young Master," said the left one. "You are... you have a bandage."

"I fell on a goat," said Yun Tianxiao, with dignity. "These are guests."

The Sect Master received them in the Hall of the First Terrace.

It was a plain, long, low room, with a floor of worn stone and rafters black with age, and nothing in it but a row of wooden chairs and a very large painting of a mountain. He sat in the middle chair, a tall, stooped, gray-bearded man in a faded blue robe, with a lined and gentle face, and hands that were folded in his lap like a man at prayer. His eyes were Yun Tianxiao’s eyes, blue-gray and honest. But they were tired. They were very tired indeed.

"Yun Zhenyuan," he said, with a small bow. "I thank you for bringing my son home in one piece. It is more than he has managed himself."

"Father!"

"I do not criticize. I only observe." He turned his mild eyes on the little group. They moved from face to face: the old Marshal, the girl with the frost-sword, the old woman, the child with her black box, and last, with a faint, curious pause, on the thin young man in the patched blue robe who stood at the back of them with his hands folded in his sleeves.

It was a long look. It was the look of a man who has spent a great many years reading faces and has stopped expecting to be surprised.

He did not seem to find what he expected.

"You are a scholar," he said.

"I keep books."

"Where?"

"For three months, in a cellar in the capital of Great Liang." Li Xuan inclined his head. "I have come to apply for the post of Custodian of the Third Terrace."

There was a stir at the side of the room.

An elder had been standing, half in shadow, behind the Sect Master’s chair: a narrow, dry, upright man in a robe of better cloth than the others, with a long nose and thin, pursed lips and a small abacus on a cord at his belt. He stepped forward at once. He did not look at the scholar. He looked at the Sect Master, and spoke in a voice like a rusty hinge.

"Sect Master, this is a most irregular..."

"Elder Fang," said Yun Zhenyuan gently, "I have not yet said that it was."

"The post has been vacant fifty years. The Third Terrace is cursed, and in any case, it is already as good as sold. The Blood-Blade Sect will have it at the new moon. The Steward’s accounts are quite clear. To appoint a custodian now would only provoke..."

"Provoke whom?" said Li Xuan.

Elder Fang looked at him for the first time. His eyes were small and pale and without warmth.

"A scholar," he said, "has no business in the councils of the sect."

"I have no business there," Li Xuan agreed. "I only wish to sweep the steps."

"Sweep..."

"I am told that it has not been done for fifty years." He smiled, a little, apologetically. "I find that I am unable to leave it."

There was a silence.

Then a strange thing happened. At the Sect Master’s side, the weary, gentle, ageless old face changed. It was not much of a change. It was the faint beginning of a smile, the kind that crosses a man’s face when he hears something that he has been wanting very badly to hear, and had not known it.

"The post," said Yun Zhenyuan slowly, "pays three bowls of rice a day, and a broom."

"I should be glad of the rice."

"The last custodian’s desk is at the top of the steps. No one has sat at it since he died. I will be honest with you." His gray head inclined. "It is not a cursed place. I do not believe in curses. But the people of this sect believe in them, and no one has gone up that mountain in my time, and I do not know what you will find."

"A great deal of dust," said Li Xuan.

Someone laughed, and stopped. It was Yun Tianxiao. He had turned crimson.

"Appointed," said the Sect Master. "By my own seal, and without the Steward’s leave. Elder Fang, you may enter your objections in the ledger."

Elder Fang’s thin lips went white. He bowed, stiffly, and withdrew, and as he went, he gave Li Xuan one long, flat, colorless look that Li Xuan observed, and filed, and laid away upon a shelf in the dark.

The steps began at the foot of the Third Terrace.

They were a long, steep, narrow flight, of a gray stone so old that its edges had worn smooth as river pebbles, and they ran straight up the face of the mountain through the dark pines, into the mist. There were nine hundred and ninety-nine. He counted them from the bottom, as the custom was. They were buried in drifts of dead brown pine-needles, ankle-deep at the foot and, higher up, as far as he could see, knee-deep, soft and silent and fragrant, like the floor of a forest that had been left alone to dream.

No one else had come. Yun Tianxiao had offered, and been refused. Gu had said nothing. Ji Ling’er had watched him go with her cool gray eyes, and a small, odd, indefinable expression, and had turned away to help Ye’er unload the cart.

He stood alone at the bottom, in the late golden light, with his broom on his shoulder and the iron dustpan at his belt.

The air was very still. It smelled of resin and old stone and cold. Somewhere high above, in the mist, a single bird was calling, three notes, and then silence.

He set the broom down against the first step. He laid his palm upon the cold gray stone.

Hum.

It was not like any chime he had heard before.

It did not come from the depths of his consciousness. It came from the stone. It came up through the soles of his feet and the palm of his hand, a low, slow, vast, patient sound, like the tolling of a bell in a very old, very large, very empty house. It had waited, he thought, for fifty years. It had been waiting for a great deal longer than that. And in the margin of a ledger that he carried in the hall of his spirit, a line of pale script flickered, and was there.

[Location Verified: Third Terrace Steps of the Sky-Clearing Sect (Historical Weight: 5,000 Years of Footfalls).]

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He stood very still, with his hand on the stone.

He thought of nine hundred and ninety-nine steps, and fifty years of pine-needles, and a ledger with a line that read Entry the Second: Pending.

He thought that he had never before been so entirely certain that someone had been expecting him.

Execute, said Li Xuan.