Chapter 9

Chapter 9: Chapter 9

"Light duty," Bai Rou said, writing it on his discharge slip in her small, neat hand. "Ten days. No hauling, no digging, nothing heavier than a broom. If I see you on the mine track before your ribs knit, I’ll break the other three myself."

"You’d do that?"

"I’m a physician." She blew on the ink to dry it. "I know exactly where to hit."

The duty roster in the Outer Valley had a column for injured disciples, and the steward who kept it took one look at Bai Rou’s slip, sniffed, and ran his finger down a list of chores nobody wanted.

"Scripture Pavilion," he said. "Dusting. They’ve been short a pair of hands since spring." He stamped the slip without looking up. "Don’t touch anything above the second floor unless the steward there tells you to. And don’t read on duty. They hate that."

So on the fourth morning after the beating, Yan Shuo climbed the long stair to the Scripture Pavilion with a broom over his shoulder, a bucket in his good hand, and a Law Hall watcher trailing thirty paces behind him, pretending to admire the pines.

’New one,’ Qin Wuyue observed in his mind. ’Not to mention he is worse at hiding.’

’Gu’s not giving up.’ Yan Shuo sighed internally.

The Scripture Pavilion stood on its own crag above the Cloudsea, five stories of dark timber and green-glazed tile, every eave hung with bronze bells that rang softly whenever the wind moved. The ground floor was open to any disciple with a contribution token. The second held inner-sect techniques. The third and fourth were sealed to anyone below core disciples. The fifth, at the very top, was sealed to almost everyone. It was bound with arrays. The script carved into its heavy shutters glowed faintly even in broad daylight.

Yan Shuo had been inside exactly twice in six years. Both times he had stood on the ground floor, looking at the shelves of techniques he couldn’t use, and left.

Into the main hall, the morning light slanted through lattice windows onto rows of shelves that stretched back into the dimness, and the silence was so thick that his footsteps seemed loud and rude.

At a wide desk near the stairs, a woman was writing.

She was older than the disciples he usually saw, perhaps in her late twenties, though something in her posture suggested far more years. Her dark hair was pinned up with a single plain jade hairpin, and a pair of thin wire spectacles sat low on her nose. Her fingers were stained with ink to the second knuckle. She wore the grey robe of a pavilion steward, copying from an old scroll into a bound ledger with steady, unhurried strokes.

She didn’t look up.

"You must be the one with broken bones," she said.

Yan Shuo stopped. "Steward?"

"The roster sent a note. Three cracked ribs, one broken finger, ten days of light duty." She finished a character, rinsed her brush, and finally raised her eyes to him over the top of her spectacles. They were dark and amused. "Or is there another broken disciple I should be expecting this morning?"

"Only me, Steward."

"Wen Lingxi." She set the brush down on its rest. "Steward is fine. Or Madam Wen, if you’d like to make me feel old. Do you read, Yan Shuo?"

He hadn’t told her his name. The roster note, he supposed.

"A little."

"A little." She seemed to taste the words. "That’s a careful answer. Are you a careful person?"

"I try to be, Steward."

"Good," she said mildly. "The ground floor needs dusting. The second floor needs dusting more. The third floor hasn’t been dusted since my predecessor died, and he was very old and very short-sighted." She continued. "Start at the bottom. Work up. If you find any books on the floor, put them on my desk, and I’ll decide whether to forgive whoever left them there."

He started at the bottom.

It was good work for a man with cracked ribs. Slow, quiet, and mostly reaching. He wiped down shelf after shelf of basic cultivation manuals, sect histories, and treatises on spirit herbs. The dust came away grey on his rag, the bells rang softly overhead, and no one beat him or watched him except the steward at her desk, who seemed entirely absorbed in her copying.

He didn’t believe that for a single moment.

’Ask me,’ Qin said, around midmorning. ’You’ve been wanting to since you walked in.’

’Would the sect’s records say anything about the Twin Souls?’

’About the lineage itself? Nothing true. The sects burned everything and spent the next century writing their own version.’ A heavy pause echoed in his head. ’But you’re not looking for the lineage, are you?’

He ran his rag along an empty shelf.

’The Law Hall copies its judgments,’ he thought back. ’Every verdict goes into a register. The originals stay in the Law Hall. The copies come here.’

’And you want to read your mother’s.’ she asked.

’I never saw it. They told me she was executed, and that was all.’

Qin was quiet for a while.

’Then be clever about it,’ she said at last. ’That woman at the desk has been watching you in the reflection of her inkstone for an hour.’

By the afternoon of the second day, he had worked his way up to the third floor.

The steward had handed him the key herself, a heavy bronze thing on a red cord, with the strict instruction to dust the shelves and nothing else. The third floor was darker than the floors below, with narrower windows, and its shelves held the sect’s own records: lineage registers, contribution ledgers, the minutes of elder councils going back two centuries. Dust lay so thick on the upper shelves that his rag left clean, bright stripes.

The Law Hall registers took up four full shelves near the back. Each volume was bound in black lacquered board and stamped with a year.

Yan Shuo dusted his way toward them, one shelf at a time.

The register for the year his mother was taken sat on the third shelf from the floor. He dusted the shelf above it. He dusted the shelf below. Then he lifted it out, as though to wipe beneath it, and opened it against his chest where his body hid the pages from the stairwell.

The pages were close-written in a Law Hall clerk’s cramped hand. Verdicts, punishments, expulsions. He turned them quickly, scanning dates, until he reached the right month.

There was the entry before hers: a disciple fined for stealing spirit herbs.

There was the entry after: two outer disciples flogged for brawling.

Between them was a narrow, ragged edge where a single page had been cut out, very close to the binding.

He stared at the stub of paper.

Someone had removed her verdict. Carefully. Recently enough that the cut edge was still pale white, while the rest of the register had yellowed with age.

’Brat,’ Qin said quietly.

He heard the faint, protesting creak of the wooden stair.

Yan Shuo closed the register, laid it flat on the shelf, and wiped the black cover with his rag in a single, smooth motion. He was reaching for the next volume when a soft voice spoke right behind him.

"That one’s interesting, isn’t it?"

Wen Lingxi stood at the top of the stairs with a lamp in one hand. The light caught her spectacles and turned them into two small golden coins, completely hiding her eyes.

"Steward." He bowed, keeping his heart rate utterly even. "I was dusting."

"So you were. Very thoroughly." She walked toward him between the shelves, unhurried, her grey robe whispering against the floorboards. "Do you know how I can tell when a disciple has been reading where he shouldn’t?"

"No, Steward."

"The dust." She lifted the lamp and let its warm light fall directly across the shelf. On the black lacquered cover of the register, right where his fingers had gripped it, two clean thumbprints showed in the thin film of dust he hadn’t wiped away. "Everyone remembers to clean the shelf. Nobody remembers that the book was dusty, too."

Yan Shuo said nothing. His mind raced through the cover stories Qin had drilled into him, discarding one after another.

The truth, here, would cost him less than any lie. Not the full truth. Just enough of one to bleed. He had a name the whole sect knew. His mother’s sentence was no secret.

"My mother was sentenced six years ago," he said, keeping his voice low and flat. "I was thirteen. They told me she’d been executed, and that I should be grateful. I never saw the verdict." He looked at the register. "I thought, while I was up here, I might finally read it."

Wen Lingxi studied him over the glow of the lamp.

"And did you?" She asked, looking at him closely.

"The page is gone." He said.

"Is it?" she said softly. She set the lamp on the shelf, drew out the register, and opened it to the exact right month with a speed that told him she had done it before. She ran an ink-stained finger along the cut stub.

"Cut with a blade," she murmured to herself. "Close to the binding, so the gap wouldn’t show unless someone looked for it." She glanced up at him. "Pages don’t usually remove themselves from Law Hall registers, do they, Yan Shuo?"

"I wouldn’t know, Steward."

"No. I suppose you wouldn’t." She closed the book. "This register was borrowed once, three years ago. By my husband. He was an elder of this sect, and he was very interested in old Law Hall cases in the last month of his life." She slid the register back into its exact place on the shelf with great care. "He died on an external mission. Very suddenly."

The bells rang overhead. Somewhere below, the wind slammed a loose shutter against the timber frame.

Yan Shuo kept his face completely still. He was aware, all at once, that this conversation had stopped being about dust some time ago, and that he didn’t know where it was going.

’She’s fishing,’ Qin breathed in his ear. ’Say nothing.’

"I’m sorry for your loss, Steward," he said.

"Thank you." Wen Lingxi picked up her lamp. Then she tilted her head, considering him the way a scholar considers a difficult, dangerous line of text. "You know, when you reached for the top shelf yesterday afternoon, something slipped out of your collar. A pendant. Green jade."

His blood went ice cold.

"A keepsake from my mother, Steward."

"Of course." She smiled pleasantly, turning toward the stairs. "Come downstairs with me. There’s something on my desk I’d like you to look at."

The main hall was empty. The afternoon light had gone amber, and the long, dark shadows of the tall shelves lay across the floorboards like the bars of a cage.

Wen Lingxi sat down at her desk, set the lamp beside her ledger, and opened a locked drawer with a small key she wore on a cord around her wrist. From it, she took a thin book bound in faded blue silk. Its edges were brown and brittle with age. There was no title on the cover.

Faint lines of array script ran around its spine—the exact same script that glowed on the shutters of the forbidden fifth floor.

She turned it so that it faced him and opened it to a page near the middle.

The page was mostly blank. In its center, drawn in ink so old it had faded to the color of dried blood, was a single symbol.

Two curving lines that almost touched.

The exact same lines carved into the jade disc lying against his chest.

Under his robe, very faintly, the pendant began to burn.

Wen Lingxi folded her ink-stained hands on the desk and looked up at him over her wire spectacles. Patient. Pleasant. Missing absolutely nothing.

"Tell me, Yan Shuo," she said softly. "Have you ever seen this before?"

The silence stretched, thick with cedar and dust. The jade against his ribs grew hotter by the second.