Chapter 43: The Palace of Heavenly Light Opens Its Nine Gates, the Third Prince Plays Black Stones Against White

The morning after the duel, Adam woke on the cold stone floor of the cellar with the taste of ash in his mouth and the distinct impression that someone had been reading him a very long list.

It was Su Lian.

She was sitting cross-legged on the altar with a ledger in her lap and a pot of salve at her knee, and she had been reading aloud for some time in the flat, tired voice of a woman who had not been to bed.

"...and the Gilded-Crow shops in the Slum Ring have been shuttered since dawn. Treasurer Mei has not been seen since the Arena. Elder Pang has submitted his resignation from the Council on grounds of ill health. The Chamber’s notes are trading at seventy cents on the stone, which, if you are counting, is the lowest they have ever been." She turned a page. "The Heavenly Exchange paid out two point eight million to a single claimant without a single dispute. I believe that has never happened either. I’ve had four merchant houses ask whether you’re taking investors."

"Are they asking in good faith?"

"They’re asking with money in their hands." She finally looked up. "Your arm."

Adam looked down at it. The sleeve had burned away, and the skin of his forearm was mottled red and white, blistered from the wrist almost to the shoulder. It did not hurt very much. The Nine-Turn body was already been knitting it from the inside, the way a good tailor mends a seam.

"It will be gone by evening."

"I’d like it gone by noon," Su Lian said, and began to smear salve on it with the ruthless, impersonal care of a woman who had spent eleven years among burns. "You’ve been summoned to the Palace."

"I know."

"Do you know who summoned you?"

"A prince. A third one."

"Qin Heng." Her hands paused. "The Dynasty has three. The First Prince is the heir, and a Ye, in every way that matters, because his wife is the Ancestor’s granddaughter. The Second Prince commands the northern armies and has not set foot in the capital in six years. The Third..." She hesitated, searching for a word. "The Third is a joke. He lives in a garden. He has no post, no faction, and no ambition anyone can find. He plays weiqi against himself and loses on purpose."

"Does he."

"That is what everyone says."

"And what do you think?"

Su Lian tied off the bandage with a small, hard knot.

"I say that in a Palace where every prince is owned by someone, he’s the only one the Ye clan has never been able to buy." She looked at him. "And a man who can’t be bought has to have been paid for in some other way."

Adam rose, flexed his hand, and reached for a clean robe.

"Then he’s the only one worth meeting."

The Palace of Heavenly Light had nine gates, and every one of them wanted to know something different about him.

The first was a plain archway of white jade at the end of the Avenue of Dragons, guarded by two men in scale armor who asked his name, his house, and the purpose of his visit. They examined the black lacquer slip with the dragon seal, and then they examined him, and then, with a short, unreadable glance, they stepped aside.

The second was a corridor of sleeping bronze lions. Each lion’s eyes opened as he passed and followed him for a dozen paces, and he felt a thin, cool wire of Qi pass through his meridians and withdraw.

The third was a courtyard of mirrors. Hundreds of them, carved with runes, each reflecting not Adam’s face but the shape of his soul. He walked through it with his hood forward, his stoop firmly in place, and the nervous, humble gait of a scholar who has never been anywhere grander than a lending library. In every mirror, a third-layer Qi Condensation cultivator in a gray cloak shuffled along, looking at his feet.

At the fourth gate, a man was waiting.

He was small and very old, in a robe of plain gray silk, with a pair of narrow, bright eyes set in a face as creased as a walnut. He stood with his hands tucked into his sleeves, and he bowed to Adam with the exact, balanced courtesy of a person who had been bowing for sixty years and never once made a mistake.

"Scholar Han. I am Gu, Chamberlain to His Highness’s household." The walnut face creased further. "His Highness has asked that you be spared the remaining gates. It is a courtesy he extends to guests whose peculiarities he prefers not to see recorded."

"Peculiarities," Adam said mildly.

"A fine cloak, if I may say so." The old man’s gaze rested, for one calm heartbeat, on the gray fabric at Adam’s shoulders. "It has a very faint distortion. I would not have noticed it myself, but I was a young man when the Palace’s inner arrays were last rebuilt. His Highness collects things that are difficult to see."

’A Golden Core,’ Adam thought, watching him. Late stage, perhaps. Hidden very well, in a body that looked as if a strong wind would break it.

"I am honored," he said.

"Not at all. This way."

The Chamberlain led him through five more gates in a single stride, each swinging open ahead of them with a soft sigh, and then through a long, curving walk lined with willow trees. It was a different Palace on the other side. The gold and white of the outer courts fell away, and the air grew soft, damp, and almost sleepy. Pale pavilions floated among the trees on slender columns of cloud. A stream ran under a bridge of moss-covered stone. Somewhere out of sight, a bird was singing the same three notes, over and over.

"The Garden of Idle Clouds," the Chamberlain murmured. "His Highness’s only residence. The Palace has seven peaks, but he has never cared to climb any of them."

They rounded a stand of bamboo, and the old man bowed again, very slightly, and stopped.

"He is in the pavilion. I will not go further."

The pavilion stood at the edge of a small lake. It was open on all sides, with a roof of green tile and a floor of pale wood, and in its center, on a low table, stood a weiqi board.

A man sat beside it with one knee drawn up, a cup of tea at his elbow, a black stone between two fingers. He was twenty-eight, perhaps, lean and loose-limbed, with a plain white robe thrown on carelessly and his hair tied up in a knot that was already coming undone. A scholar’s face, thin and pale and amused. He was staring at the board as if it had asked him a personal question.

He did not look up.

"If you came to flatter me," Qin Heng said, "I’d rather you didn’t. I’m in the middle of losing."

"To whom, Your Highness?"

"Myself." He set the stone down. "Sit. Do you play?"

"A little," Adam said, and sat.

"A little. Splendid. That’s the most honest answer anyone’s given me this year." The Prince’s eyes lifted at last, and Adam found that they were not amused at all. They were a very clear, very light brown, and sharp as a hawk’s. "Everyone else says they play very well. Or they say they’ve never played. They are all lying, in different directions."

He nudged the bowl of white stones across the table.

"Take one."

Adam took one.

"The opening is only a question," Qin Heng said. "You ask it with the first twenty stones. The answer doesn’t come until move forty, and by then, most people have forgotten what they asked." He tilted his head. "I’m going to ask you a few things, Scholar Han. Play as we speak. I find it keeps men honest."

"As you wish."

They played.

The Prince’s moves were quick and loose and slightly careless, the moves of a man who didn’t care very much about winning. Adam’s were slower. He set each stone with the small, deliberate click of someone who was thinking of something else entirely, and for a while, that was all the sound there was: the stones, the bird, the water against the pilings.

"Six hundred and thirty thousand," the Prince said abruptly.

"I beg your pardon?"

"That is how many stones the Imperial Treasury lost on the day you asked the Gilded-Crow for your money." He set a stone at the edge of the board. "The Treasury holds two point one million, in Crow Notes. They are the Dynasty’s reserves. The tax rolls are written in Crow ink, my brother’s army is paid in Crow paper, and half of the Inner Ring’s pensions are denominated in Crow gold." He lifted his tea. "On the morning of your audit, they were worth a stone each. Today, they are worth seventy cents. Do you know who paid for that difference?"

"The Dynasty."

"The Dynasty. Which is to say, me, and my brothers, and about forty thousand clerks, soldiers, and widows who thought their money was safe." He said it lightly, without reproach. "My brother the Heir has been very angry. He thinks you did it on purpose."

"I asked to redeem my notes, Your Highness."

"So you did. On demand, as printed. A perfectly lawful request that no one in four hundred years had thought to make." The Prince’s mouth curved. "The Ancestor sat on that vault for a century. He thought a person who wanted his money back was a person who didn’t trust him, and a person who didn’t trust him was a person who could be dealt with. You are the first man who ever asked for the money and was right to."

Adam placed a white stone. It sat in the corner of the board, where it did nothing at all.

"May I ask a question, Your Highness?"

"Please."

"Why am I here?"

Qin Heng laughed, softly, and for the first time something real moved behind the lazy face.

"Because I need someone to build me a currency," he said, "and everyone else I’ve asked is already holding a Ye clan note."

He set down a black stone with a click.

"The Dynasty’s money is a rotten floorboard," he said. "I’ve known it for eight years. I’ve said it to my brother, and to the Emperor’s ministers, and to anyone who would sit still. They all smile, and nod, and say that the Crow’s paper has served for three hundred years. Of course it has. Three hundred years of nobody asking." He reached into his sleeve and drew out a thin silver tablet engraved with a coiled dragon. "I want to replace it. Not tomorrow. In a year, in two, when the Crow’s notes have bled a little further and the clerks start to panic. I want an Imperial note, backed in stone, honest in every ledger, and I want it written by someone who has already done it once."

"The Cauldron Notes."

"A Guild’s note is a very small thing, Scholar Han. But the Guild’s note has never failed, and the Guild’s vault is the only one in the capital that has ever opened on demand." He held out the tablet. "The Imperial Mint Bureau’s seal. It is the key to the Treasury’s own presses. Take it, and the Guild becomes the Dynasty’s clearing house. Your Pavilion, your Champion’s seal, your name on the paper. Nobody could touch it. Not the Chamber, not the Ye, not even my brother."

Adam did not reach for it.

He looked at the tablet, and the Prince’s loose white sleeve, and the board with its sprinkling of stones. The bird in the garden sang its three notes again.

’This is the point where an honest man says yes,’ he thought. ’And a clever man asks why.’

"Your Highness is very generous," he said.

"I am not generous. I am desperate." Qin Heng set the tablet gently on the table. "But I don’t expect you to believe it. Ask what you want."

"Why not your own men?"

"Because my brother’s men are Ye, and the rest are afraid of the Ye."

"Why not a Palace minister?"

"They would sell it to the Ye the day after I signed."

"Why me?"

The Prince considered the board for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was unhurried and almost kind.

"Because you went to a Nascent Soul cultivator’s vault, with three hundred thousand stones of his own paper on your shoulder, and you did not flinch." He looked up. "I have been trying to find a man who would not flinch for eight years."

A breeze came off the lake and stirred the leaves of the willows. Adam set his next stone on the board and thought about it for what felt like a long time.

"And the flame?" he asked, at last.

The Prince’s face did not change.

"What flame?"

"The black one."

"I saw nothing of the sort," Qin Heng said pleasantly. "I saw a fine alchemist burn a fine talisman, at precisely the right moment. If anyone asks, I’ll say so." He sipped his tea. "Plausible ignorance is cheap, Scholar Han. I find it’s the one thing a prince can always afford."

"Thank you."

"Don’t. It isn’t a gift. It’s a warning." The light eyes met his. "Ye Tianhe has not left his Tower in six days. He has sent to the Palace library for every volume in its collection on primordial fire, on Chaos, on the Nine Ancient Flames. The head librarian is my man. He’s counted forty-one volumes so far." He set the cup down. "I do not know what the Ancestor is looking for. But I’d like you to be somewhere he cannot reach when he finds it."

Adam was quiet.

"I will want certain things," he said finally.

"Name them."

"The Guild runs the clearing house. Not the Treasury, not the Bureau, not a Palace clerk. The Guild, under its own charter, answering to the Council."

"Done."

"No rank. No title. No post in your household. I will act as a merchant, and I will be treated as a merchant."

"A merchant under the Imperial Writ of Free Commerce," the Prince said, and drew another slip from his sleeve. "No seizure of your goods or your reserve without the Emperor’s seal. Valid for ten years. My brother cannot confiscate a copper without waking a man who has not been seen in three years."

"And the third?"

"Say it."

"When I say no," Adam said, "I should be allowed to say no."

Qin Heng blinked, and then, to Adam’s surprise, he laughed outright, a clean, boyish laugh that startled the bird into silence.

"You are going to be very expensive," he said. "Yes. Agreed."

He slid the tablet and the slip across the table. They lay between the white and black stones like two small, bright coins.

Adam picked them up.

"There’s one thing more," the Prince said, as Adam tucked them into his sleeve. "A favor, if you will. A test. I won’t pretend otherwise."

"I assumed there would be."

Qin Heng rose, crossed the pavilion, and drew back a screen of pale silk. Behind it, on the wall, hung a long scroll of black ink on white paper: a map of the Imperial City, drawn in the old style, with a great coiled dragon laid across it. Seven glowing lines ran down the dragon’s spine.

"The Seven Dragon Veins," the Prince said. "They feed the capital. They are the reason the Dynasty exists at all." His finger traced the first six. "These are failing, slowly. The Geomancers call it the fall of the age. They say nothing can be done." His finger came to rest on the seventh line, the one that ran south, under the city’s oldest granary. "This one has been dead for three hundred years."

Adam studied the faded line. It was a thin gray thread, almost invisible against the paper.

"I would like it alive," the Prince said.

"Dead veins can’t be woken."

"So say the Geomancers." Qin Heng turned. His eyes were very bright. "Two weeks ago, one of their instruments went off in the Slum Ring. A single thread of old Qi, rising in a cellar under a shop that sells scrolls and scraps." He smiled. "The shop belongs to a scholar from the south. I do not know what he did to it. I’d very much like to learn."

Adam looked at him for a long time.

The bird sang its three notes. The willow leaves moved.

"You’ve been watching me, Your Highness."

"Since the Trials." The Prince did not look away. "I told you, I collect things that are difficult to see. I can’t do much about the ones that insist on being seen."

He stepped back to the board, picked up a single white stone, and held it up between two fingers.

"Move forty," he said. "You’ve been playing the whole game with this one in your hand, haven’t you?"

Adam looked at the board. It was a very ordinary game. There was nothing on it, as far as he could see, that mattered.

Then the Prince set the white stone in a corner where nothing had been, and the whole shape of the position changed.

"Think about it," Qin Heng said. "You have three days."

Adam walked out of the Garden of Idle Clouds with the Imperial Mint’s seal in his sleeve and the dull, steady certainty that he had just been outplayed, politely and with great skill, by the only prince in the Palace who was not on the board.

At the gate, the Chamberlain was waiting.

"Scholar Han," he said, and bowed. He walked beside Adam through the willows in a silence that lasted nearly a hundred paces. Then, without turning his head, he spoke in the soft, dry, absentminded voice of a man commenting on the weather.

"The First Prince’s guards were at the third gate when you came."

"Were they?"

"They counted your steps." The walnut face did not move. "I thought you might wish to know."

Adam inclined his head, a very small, very grave bow.

"Thank you, Chamberlain."

"His Highness will be pleased," the old man said. "He does like a guest who listens."