Chapter 50: The Ancient Inkstone

[Executing Sign-In at: Third Terrace Steps of the Sky-Clearing Sect.]

[Triggered 30-Fold Multiplier on Ancient Stair Sign-In!]

[Congratulations! You have received Item: <The Ancient Inkstone Sky-Clearing>!]

[Congratulations! You have received Body Tempering Art: <The Nine-Hundred-and-Ninety-Nine Breaths Scripture>!]

Something small and heavy settled in the hollow of his sleeve.

Li Xuan took it out, and held it in his palm in the golden light of the late afternoon.

It was a stone. It was the plainest stone that he had ever been given. It was black, and flat, and roughly square, about the size of a man’s palm, with a worn, scooped hollow at one end where generations of hands had ground ink. It might have been a thing a farmer used to sharpen his knife. There was no gold in it. There was no jade. But when he turned it, a very small pool of ink lay in the hollow, clear and black and still, and it did not spill.

The Mind Palace opened a page, and read, in its dry, patient voice:

’It remembers every hand that has ever ground ink upon it. It will write in any hand that the Host can read. It does not dry. It does not run. It carries, into every line that is drawn with it, a little of what the writer meant.’

’It is not a weapon. It is only an inkstone.’

He felt the corner of his mouth lift. ’Only,’ he thought.

The second gift was a gentler thing. It unrolled in the jade hall of his spirit like a long, slow breath, and the Palace read it with a touch of what might almost have been relish. It was a Body Tempering art, a plain, unlovely, honest thing, for a body at precisely the stage that his was. It taught a single method: to climb. One breath to a step, in, and a breath out, and the whole weight of the mountain borne through the soles of the feet, up the spine, and out of the crown of the head into the sky, so that the body of the climber, step by step, became a little more like the stone it climbed.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine breaths, said the Palace. It is a very good stair for it.

He put the Inkstone carefully into his sleeve, and took up his broom, and began.

It was slow work.

The pine-needles lay on the first step in a drift as high as his ankle. They were dry, and brown, and crisp, and each one was as long as a finger. He swept them to the left, in long, even strokes, as the Archive’s floor-sweeper had once taught him, from the wall outward, and the dust of fifty years rose in a soft golden cloud in the evening light and drifted away.

The stone beneath was not plain.

He had not seen it, under the needles. But when the last of the brown drift was gone, and the first step lay bare, gray and old and smooth, he saw that something was cut into the surface, so shallow that it was only a faint shadow in the stone. It was a single character, written in a hand that he knew. He had stood in a small gray room three months ago, with a dry brush, and read a hundred thousand lines of it.

The Founder’s hand, said the Palace. Or his brother’s.

He knelt.

He set the tip of one finger on the cold stone, and followed the lines of the character, as the Ledger’s gift lifted it and laid it, quite clear and plain, in the jade hall of his spirit.

The mountain is a book.

He was still for a moment, with his finger on the stone.

Then he swept the second step.

The stair is its spine.

The third was a little harder. The needles there were thicker, and mixed with a hard black crust of pine-pitch, and he had to scrape it with the edge of his iron dustpan. But when it came away, the third character lay clean on the stone, and he read it, and smiled.

Read it step by step, and it will read you back.

"Is it a curse?" said a voice from the bottom of the stair.

It was Yun Tianxiao. He had followed after all, a little way up the path, and stood among the pines with his bandaged eye and his hands behind his back, in a manner that was meant to look casual and plainly was not. Beside him Guo Qing stood eating a dried persimmon. Both of them were staring up the stair as though it might move.

"No," said Li Xuan. "I think it is a poem."

"A what?"

"I think that the stair is a poem." He sat back on his heels. "Each step has a line. If I sweep them in order, I think that I shall be able to read it."

"A poem," said Yun Tianxiao, in a hollow voice, "is not dangerous."

"It depends upon the poem," said Guo Qing, around his persimmon.

They were interrupted by a cough.

It was a very small cough, dry and creaky, like the hinge of an old gate. It came from a stooped, wizened shape that had appeared, without any sound, at the corner of the path, beside the foot of the stair. It was an old man, so old that he seemed to have been carved of the same gray stone as the steps themselves, in a sagging brown robe, with a sack on his back, and a face as wrinkled and as brown as a walnut. His eyes were pale and filmy. He leaned on a stick.

"Old Mo," said Yun Tianxiao, startled. "I did not see you."

The old man did not appear to hear him. He stood quite still, with his stick between his hands, and his head tilted, as if he were listening to something that no one else could catch.

"He is deaf as a post," said Guo Qing, in a low voice. "He has lived at the foot of this stair for sixty years. He sells pine-cones. Nobody knows how old he is. He has not said a word to anyone since before I was born."

Old Mo took one slow, stiff step toward the stair.

He looked at the first step. He looked at the second. He looked at Li Xuan, kneeling among the pine-needles with his broom across his knees and a little gray dust on his sleeve, and the pale, filmy old eyes narrowed.

"Ask it its name," said Old Mo.

His voice was not what anyone had expected. It was a clear, soft, light voice, slightly rusty with disuse, and it carried to the bottom of the stair as sweetly as a bell.

Yun Tianxiao dropped his persimmon.

"Ask it," said the old man again, to Li Xuan, quite gently, "its name, boy. Before you sweep another step. He told me to wait for the one who asked." The creased face was perfectly serene. "I have been waiting for fifty-one years. I had begun to think that I had got the wrong stair."

"Who told you?" said Li Xuan.

"The last custodian." Old Mo’s mouth twitched. "He was a poor sweeper. But he was a very good liar. He said that you would come. I did not believe him."

He turned his stick, slowly, and went back down the path, in the dusk, and was gone among the pines.

No one spoke.

The bird in the mist called again, three notes. Somewhere in the forest, an owl answered.

Li Xuan looked at the stone beneath his hand.

"Good evening," he said, quite softly, to the stair. "I am Li Xuan. I am the new custodian. I should like very much to sweep you, if you do not mind."

Nothing happened.

Then, with a sound so faint that he thought at first it was the wind in the pines, the stone beneath his fingers grew warm. It was not much. It was only the warmth of a sleeper turning over in his bed, who has half-heard a voice in the night and is not yet ready to wake. But it ran up the stair, from the first step to the second, to the third, to the fourth, in a long, thin, faint thread of silver light, and went out among the mist.

And far above, in the cloud, at the top of nine hundred and ninety-nine steps, a very small bell rang.

It was only one note. It was very high, and very sweet, and very far away. But Yun Tianxiao, standing at the foot of the stair with his mouth open, put out a hand and gripped Guo Qing’s shoulder so hard that the stout young man yelped.

"That bell," said Yun Tianxiao, in a voice that was hardly a voice at all. "That is the Terrace bell. It has not been rung in fifty years. It has not got a rope."