The Shen Fenjin Lineage

The Shens are an old lineage within the Fenjin school, carried 4 generations on a single Dragon-Stirring Fragment. By Shen Zhaoye's generation the house has fallen: the Fragment survives only as a copied First Half, and the family is spread across Xi'an, Guangzhou and San Francisco, each branch at its own living, no longer adding up to a house.

Shen Zhaoye lives in Wanhua, Taipei, in an alley off one stretch of Xining South Road that runs toward the river, 6th floor, no elevator. The tube light at the turn of the stairs is dead and he does not intend to replace it — his grandfather used to say that eyes kept long enough in the dark stop being fooled by light. The place is under 9 ping, and the desk by the window takes up 3 of them. The things on the desk have fixed positions: the old dragon-seeking compass, the hand-copied half volume of the Dragon-Stirring Fragment, First Half, the hardbound waterproof notebook, the No. 6 sapper spade, the miner's headlamp, a bag of glutinous rice, 3 wax-sealed glass vials. Weighed down at the corner of the desk is the third letter from the tax bureau: 720,000 in unpaid tax, with another round of interest added last month.

The Shens left behind no shortage of house rules. No explosives into the vault, no blade longer than 6 inches. In any record of a vault sited, a compass read, a tomb entered, the time column is written in the old hours rather than clock time — a clock measures minutes and seconds, the old hours measure the rhythm of the earth-vein, and since the Shens work the earth-veins their records line up with the earth-vein's time. By the Shen reckoning 1 old hour is 2 clock hours and 1 mark is 30 minutes, so 22:31 goes into the notebook like this:

Third mark of the Hour of the Pig

Some of the courtesies end with him. Every time his grandfather read the compass he would turn the plate 3 times on his thumb and say 'honoring the earth.' Shen Zhaoye never learned it — the old man told him so himself: courtesy is left for people who believe in gods, and you believe only in stone, so you need not bow. What he has always believed in is terrain, rock strata and magnetic declination; fenjin, to his eye, is a fine-grained kind of geology.

His grandfather's dying line took him 7 years. The danger of the first two vaults he understood at twenty-one; the third had to wait until he was standing inside that nameless imperial tomb before he understood that what the old man truly feared was his siting it right.