Chapter 51: Ghosts for the Custodian

The first ghost appeared on the seventeenth step, at the hour of the rat.

Li Xuan had gone up alone, with a lantern and a broom, because Yun Zhenyuan had said that it would be better so. The Sect Master had come down to the foot of the stair at dawn, with the whole sect behind him, three hundred and eleven in blue robes standing in the pale light of a pine forest, and listened to Yun Tianxiao’s account of the bell in a silence like a held breath. At the end of it, the tired old face had shown nothing at all. He had only said: "Let him sweep."

So he swept.

He had done nineteen steps in the first night, and thirty-one the second, and by the sunset of the third, he had cleared sixty. The needles lay in great brown ridges along either side of the stair. The stone beneath was clean, and smooth, and old, and every one was cut with a single character. He read them as he went.

Sweep what has fallen. Leave what has been planted. Keep nothing that you cannot return.

He did not climb. He did not need to. The breaths of the Scripture went with him as he worked, one in, one out, one stroke, one step, and by the sixtieth, something in the center of his body had begun to feel firm. It did not feel like strength. It felt like a floor.

The seventeenth step, on the second night, had a glow on it.

It was a very faint blue glow, the color of foxfire, and it came up out of the stone like breath from a cold mouth. Li Xuan stopped, with the broom half raised. The glow thickened. It gathered itself, in front of him, in the cold, pine-scented dark, into a long pale shape, as thin as a reed, in a gray scholar’s robe.

It was a man.

He was thin and stooped and extremely old. His face was a dead white mask, and his hair stood up on his head in a wild halo. His mouth was open in a silent scream. Cold radiated from him, a bone-deep, sickening, hopeless chill, and the lantern in Li Xuan’s hand guttered and burned blue.

The ghost lifted one skeletal hand, and pointed down the stair.

Go, said a voice, hollow and dreadful, in the air. Go. Go. Go.

Li Xuan looked at it for a moment.

"Good evening," he said.

The ghost stopped.

"I am the new custodian. My name is Li Xuan." He lowered his broom. "I am afraid that I have not been introduced. May I ask yours?"

The hollow voice faltered. Go, it said, a little less certainly. Go. Go. Go away.

"That is very kind of you. But I have quite a lot of steps to do." He sat down on the step below it, with his lantern on his knee. "I have brought some tea. It is only mountain leaf. I am afraid I do not have a second cup, but if you will be so good as to wait, I could make one from the lid of the pot."

The ghost stared at him.

It had begun, very faintly, to flicker. The pale halo of its hair was rippling, and its mouth, which had been open in a scream, was closing, and opening, and closing again, like the mouth of a fish.

You are, it said, in a thin, bewildered whisper, supposed to be afraid.

"I know." He took the pot from his sleeve, and set the copper stove on the step, and lit it. "I am so sorry. I am told that it is a great disappointment. I have tried very hard."

The ghost looked at the little stove. It looked at the steam rising from the pot. And then, quite suddenly, with an expression almost of anguish, it said in a high, cracked, much more ordinary voice: "Oh, bother."

It vanished.

There was a sharp, flat sound like the snapping of a piece of paper. A small gray square fluttered down from the air and landed on the seventeenth step, face up. It was a scrap of yellow talisman paper, with a red character stamped across it, curling at the edges, and smelling faintly of cinnabar and a cheap, stale incense.

Li Xuan picked it up. He held it to the lantern.

It was an illusion plate. It was the sort of thing that a minor sect might buy by the dozen from a back-street talisman-seller, for a few coppers apiece. You laid it under a stone, and when a living man came within a certain distance, it showed him whatever he most feared. It was meant to be used on thieves.

It had been stamped, in the corner, with a small, neat, square seal.

He read the seal in the lamplight, and sat for some time without moving.

Then he put the talisman carefully into the iron dustpan, with the pine-needles, and went on sweeping.

He found nineteen of them.

They were under the steps. Seventeen. Forty-four. Seventy-one. One hundred and three. They lay beneath the stones, buried a hand’s breadth deep in the soil beside the stair, in neat little rows, a few steps apart, each with its stamp. Some had been there for years. The oldest was so brittle that it crumbled when he touched it. The newest was no more than a month old.

By the fifth day he had swept them all.

He laid them out on the Sect Master’s table, in the First Terrace hall, on the morning of the sixth, in a neat row, nineteen small squares of yellow paper in the clear gray light. Beside them he set a small lantern, and the iron dustpan, and an ordinary clay teacup.

Yun Zhenyuan looked at them for a very long time.

He did not touch them. He sat in his plain wooden chair, with his gray head bowed and his big hands lying open on his knees. His son stood behind him, speechless. A little way off, near the door, a narrow dry upright figure in a robe of good cloth had gone as still as a post.

"The three custodians," said the Sect Master at last, in a quiet voice, "who fell down the steps, and went mad, and turned white."

"I think," said Li Xuan, "that they were frightened. I think that they were very badly frightened, by a thing that was not a ghost."

"A thing that was a seal."

"Yes."

The Sect Master lifted his eyes.

He did not look at Li Xuan. He looked over his shoulder, at the narrow man in the good robe by the door. And the look was not angry. It was only very old, and very tired, and very sad.

"Fang," he said.

Elder Fang’s face did not move. His thin lips were bloodless. His hand had closed on the abacus at his belt so hard that the little beads had dug into his fingers.

"Sect Master."

"How long?"

A long silence.

"Twenty-two years," said Elder Fang. It came out very flat, like a coin dropped on a stone floor. "Since the Blood-Blade first made an offer. I thought that if the Terrace were feared, no one would trouble to buy it, and the sect would not need to sell." His pale eyes did not waver. "I did not think that I should have to do it for so long."

"Three men," said Yun Zhenyuan.

"They were not hurt. Not badly. The first broke an arm. The second..." For the first time, a thread of something crossed the pinched face, and it was not defiance. It was shame. "The second I did not intend. He had a weak heart."

The Sect Master closed his eyes.

"I did it for the sect," said Elder Fang, in a thin, rigid voice. "You do not look at the accounts, Master. You never have. You have a good heart, and a fine sword, and you do not look at the accounts. We owe forty thousand taels to the Jiang Clan’s counting-house. The note is held by the Blood-Blade now. At the new moon it falls due, and we have four hundred." His hand twisted on the abacus. "I have been selling rice-wine to pay the interest. I have been selling the bell-metal off the roofs. I have been telling the disciples that it is a drought. If I did not frighten the custodians away, they would find the Terrace’s books, and the books would show it all."

The room was very quiet.

Li Xuan stood by the table with his hands folded in his sleeves, and looked at the nineteen small yellow squares, and thought: So that is the whole of it.

It was not a thing he had expected. A villain would have been easier. A villain is a stone, and one may walk round a stone. But this was a clerk. It was a dry, upright, frightened, honest clerk who had spent twenty-two years doing a dishonest thing to keep an honest house standing, and had not slept well in any of them.

"I should like to see the books," said Li Xuan.

Elder Fang stared at him.

"I am only a scholar," he said mildly. "I cannot see a ledger without reading it. And I think that I should like to know the whole of the sum, before the new moon."