Ch. 042| The Same Hand

On the shaded west slope of the back-mountain, Lin Que crouched before a clump of dendrobium, gathering it slowly.

This slope was far from that forbidden court on the northern back-path; it was where the herb-lodge gathered herbs day to day, and no one would spare a second glance at an odd-jobbing disciple with a herb-basket on his back. That was exactly what he wanted—rested a few days, the mist in his eyes fully dispersed, he meant, under the pretext of gathering herbs, to weigh once more the matter on his mind: how to hand the affair of the forbidden court into Bai Heng's hands.

The thought had barely risen when, from the woods behind him, came a very light footstep.

Lin Que's hand did not stop, but his breath sank first. That footstep fell even and steady—a trained one; and it circled to his downwind side before making a sound, deliberately not letting him sense it first—that measure was not an outer-gate disciple's.

"Gathering herbs all the way out here," a cool woman's voice halted three paces behind him, "how peaceful."

Lin Que turned his head.

Moon-white vigorous garb, a pale-blue thin cloak over it, a plain-sheathed long sword at her waist. Bai Heng stood in the tree-shadow of the slanting slope, looking down at him, and on that face, beautiful as a drawn sword, was no expression.

"Senior Sister." Lin Que set down his herb-hoe and rose, dropping his hands.

Spared him the trouble of working out how to approach her. Bai Heng had sought him out herself.

---

"That day in the empty courtyard, the words I said—do you still hold to them?" Bai Heng did not go round about. "I told you not to merely act as if you saw nothing."

"I hold to them."

"These days, the outer gate has lost another one." Bai Heng's voice was pressed very level, level enough that the fire beneath it could not be heard. "Charging the sixth layer, ran afire, ruined. I went to investigate, and it was as before—the Pill Hall pleads roots and bones, the Archive Hall pleads that true-lineage arts are not for me to comment on, Supervisor Pei calls me in and tells me to cultivate quietly. One wall, three quarters pushing back."

"I know." Lin Que said. "The night he was carried into the herb-lodge, I looked him over for you."

She stepped forward, the tree-shadow swaying on her face.

"I, a true-lineage disciple, investigating the deaths of my own sect's people, and I investigate into walls at every turn. You, a floor-sweeping menial, see clearer than I who built this wall." She stared at Lin Que. "I've come to ask you—these past half-month and more, what else have you seen?"

Lin Que did not answer at once.

What he was about to do was hand a matter that could cost a head into the hands of a true-lineage disciple, one of the higher-ups. Whether Bai Heng believed him, whether she would turn round and sell him out, he could not lay odds. But that wall of the forbidden court, he, a menial newcomer, could not break open; apart from her pair of eyes that could enter the inner gate, he had no second road.

Stake it.

"Let me first examine an old wound of Senior Sister's." Lin Que said. "That one three inches below your throat, off to the left—these three years, has it not hurt further and further down?"

Bai Heng's pupils contracted, imperceptibly.

---

That flaw was the vital gate she had hidden three years, kept even from her master. And it was this very man who had, last time, pierced it through with a single sentence.

That flaw lay low; to examine it, she had to unfasten down to the chest. She was silent a breath, but in the end did not ask what he meant to do, and reached to undo the toggles of her cloak; at the second, her fingertips paused, and a very faint flush rose to her cheeks. Yet undo them she did, and turning slightly aside, bared a stretch of fair chest below the collarbone—that flaw others could not see was hidden right beneath that layer of skin.

It was the vital spot a trained one most forbids another to come near. A true-lineage disciple baring her chest before a herb-lodge menial was as good as laying half her life beside his hand. Her face was red, but her eyes did not flinch away.

Beneath Lin Que's left eye that heat quietly rose, and looked in.

That stretch of qi-channel at Bai Heng's chest was of the same shape as what he had seen in the empty courtyard last time: each time it washed across, at that place it collapsed, ground out into a threshold it could not pass. But this time he saw more clearly than then—the break of that flaw, its opening and its closing, was cut neat, a stretch cut away from the middle.

Cut-marks leave a veining. How this break opened, how it closed, which stretch was cut away—he had seen it again and again this past half-year: the stroke drawn from the sixth layer of the Xuanzhao Breathing Art in the deep scrolls, the half-ingredient cut from the Pill Hall's monthly-allotment pill, the last stroke broken on Qinghe's ancestral Green Seal-Script Talisman, the thread of flaw-lines wound in the grey vapor of the stone houses in the forbidden court on the northern back-path—every one the same veining.

The same veining, out of the same person. Not a hair's breadth off, like the same brush, the same stroke laid down.

Lin Que withdrew his eye, and that chill in his heart welled up again.

"This flaw of Senior Sister's," his voice went very low, "is not inborn; it was cut by a man. The handiwork of the cutting is the same one set as the Xuanzhao Breathing Art that ruins outer-gate disciples, and as those few deaths you're investigating."

Bai Heng's face cooled, inch by inch.

That barrier that had snagged her three years, Lin Que had long since pierced for her in the empty courtyard—the art was missing a stroke. But she had never thought further down: who, and why, that stroke was missing. And now what he said was—someone had cut it deliberately; and the one who cut hers was the same as the one who killed those disciples.

"One person." She forced it out word by word from between her teeth. "You mean… the one who ruined this barrier of mine, and the one who killed those disciples, are the same person?"

The hand she set on her sword-hilt, its knuckles whitened, and in those ever-cold eyes the flames leapt up past holding down.

"More than that." Lin Que looked at her. "The one behind it hides a courtyard on this mountain too."

---

He told the forbidden court's affair, as much as could be told.

The stock collected up the mountain from the Listening-Rain Tower, the blue-cloth carts not weighed nor registered, the inner-gate-guarded forbidden court at the outer gate's northernmost edge, the grey vapor unquenched day and night in the stone houses, the blue-robed man ushered respectfully in at the gate. He did not mention rift crystals, did not mention that he had been into rifts, still less mention the origin of those eyes—said only that he had chanced upon it gathering herbs and sensed the wrongness.

Bai Heng listened dead-still. At the three words "blue-robed man," her knuckles tightened on the sword-hilt.

"That man, I've seen him." she said low. "He's waited outside Supervisor Pei's duty-room; the Archive Hall steward calls him 'the Teacher.' I asked Supervisor Pei who he was, and Supervisor Pei said it was not mine to ask."

She paused, and pitched her voice lower still, as if speaking of a thing kept unspoken even among true-lineage disciples: "He is not of the Xuanzhao Sect. He comes once every so many days, and when he comes, the higher-ups fall silent. I watched coldly once—before him, Supervisor Pei bent his waist lower than before the sect-master. A supervisor of a whole sect, made to read the face of an outsider."

Lin Que's heart sank.

He had taken the one behind the hand to be some person of standing within the Xuanzhao Sect. Now, hearing Bai Heng say it, it was turned about instead—the one cutting arts, leaving pill-flaws, collecting rift-stock was not of the Xuanzhao Sect at all; rather, the whole of the Xuanzhao Sect, high and low, lay beneath him, doing his work, hiding it for him.

Then this mountain's "higher-ups"—whose higher-ups were they, in turn?

Both fell silent. The mountain wind rolled up from below the slope and set that clump of dendrobium rustling.

Lin Que looked at her. What he could give ended here—what exactly the stone houses within that wall refined, what that man in the end meant to do, he, a menial newcomer, could not see, could not get into.

"I can see where that courtyard is; I can see the stock going in, the vapor coming out, is wrong." Lin Que said. "But that wall is guarded by inner-gate disciples, and I, a herb-lodge menial, drew near it twice and have already had my face marked and hard words dropped on me. Draw near again, and I'm the next 'lost his footing on a mountain path by night.'"

He paused, and handed over the last sentence:

"But Senior Sister is different. Senior Sister is true-lineage. That courtyard, others cannot get into—Senior Sister can."

---

Bai Heng was long silent.

She understood, of course, the weight beneath these words. A true-lineage disciple, to spy on a forbidden court guarded by the higher-ups' own hand, one that even Supervisor Pei forbade any to ask about—to reach a hand toward that was to fill it with her own life. Found out, it was treason; not found out, she would not even know how she was gone, coming to the same end as that Xu fellow.

She understood too that this youth, shaking out to her a matter that could cost a head, was staking his own life that she would not turn back.

"Aren't you afraid," Bai Heng said suddenly, a trace of probing crossing those cold eyes, "that I'll turn round and report this whole speech of yours, word for word, to the higher-ups? A menial, investigating a forbidden court privately, in private league with a true-lineage disciple—enough to have you dead ten times over."

"Afraid." Lin Que answered without hesitation. "But if Senior Sister meant to claim merit by turning me in, that day in the empty courtyard, she would not have pressed that one glance down for me." He looked at her. "The hand that ruined that barrier of yours, and the hand that built that wall, are the same one. What Senior Sister has investigated three years, and what I chanced upon, are one and the same matter. This account, Senior Sister wants to settle more than I do."

The tree-shadow swayed between the two of them. The wind passed, and the woods rustled a sheet of sound.

Bai Heng gazed toward the direction of the northern back-path, gazed a long while. That flaw that had trapped her three years, those several lives dead in the dark, that courtyard whose very gate she could not so much as touch—today, by one sentence of his, were strung into a single rope. The far end of that rope was gripped in that man's hand.

"I can get into the outer gate's northernmost edge." At length, she drew back her gaze, her voice cold as iron. "For a true-lineage disciple, to requisition records, to make an inspection, there's cause. That courtyard, I'll go and see."

"Whatever Senior Sister sees, how shall she let me know?" Lin Que asked. For a true-lineage disciple and an outer-gate disciple to meet face to face like this again would draw eyes.

Bai Heng considered a moment: "Every month the true-lineage require the herb-lodge to supply a portion of calming incense-lure. Next time I send someone to fetch it, if there's a slip tucked in the sachet—blank means I've found nothing; if there's writing, do as the writing says. Your reply to me, tuck it likewise in the emptied sachet returned." She glanced at him, her look cold and keen. "Read the writing and then chew it and swallow it down—not a shred left on your person."

A line that need never meet face to face, hidden in an ordinary offering, was thus laid.

She turned to go, then checked again, without turning back.

"From now on you keep close watch on something else—keep close watch on yourself." she said. "For me, a true-lineage disciple, to nose toward the forbidden court, the higher-ups at most suspect me of meddling; you're different—caught at that wall-foot again, and you won't outlive three days. Before I've turned up anything of note, don't go anywhere."

She turned to go, but her steps checked before the first tree, without turning back. That examination just now—she had bared, before an outer-gate disciple, the flaw she had hidden from her master three years; and thinking of it now, the nape of her neck still burned faintly.

"…Don't throw your life away." after a while, she added low, that habitually cold voice cracking a line. "If you're lost in there, this whole mountain's tangle will be beyond anyone's unraveling."

That said, the moon-white figure melted into the woods, her steps light and even, gone in a blink.

Lin Que stood before the clump of dendrobium, the shoulder bearing the herb-basket slowly easing down.

This hand, staked out.

What he had not said was: that flaw of Bai Heng's, he not only saw clearly, but had the mending of it reckoned too—of the same set as mending the sixth layer of his own Breathing Scroll. Only, to say that, he would have to spill the origin of those eyes along with it; and now was not yet the time.

【Ch. 042 End · Xuanzhao's back-mountain · the west slope】