Ch. 043| Those Who Didn't Come Out

The sachet came back on the afternoon of the fifth day.

Each month the herb-lodge supplied the true-lineage disciples with a calming incense pellet; it was an old arrangement. The young disciple who came to fetch it this time left behind an empty sachet, as usual, for Lin Que to fill with a fresh one. Lin Que carried the empty pouch toward the stove, his fingertip brushing along its bottom—inside the lining, there was a slip of paper folded exceedingly small.

He gave no sign, tucking the sachet into a medicine drawer, and only when no one was about did he unfold it in a place hidden from view.

On the paper were just six characters, in a stroke thin and sharp as a blade—"Matter grave, hard to set down whole." Below, a line smaller still: "Tonight, the hour of the Rat, the west slope."

Lin Que held the slip to the stove-flame, watched it curl into a speck of ash, then turned to compound that calming incense pellet.

Bai Heng had found something. Something so large that even she dared not commit it to paper.

These five days he had gone on decocting medicine, sweeping the floor, tending the injured cases—his face betraying nothing, while inside him the tension wound tighter by the day. Bai Heng had gone into that forbidden court with her life as the stake; the heavier the words she brought back, the less easily he slept.

Going to the west slope at the hour of the Rat, he had to be careful himself. At night men patrolled the bunks in the menial-chores court; he had to wait until his roommates' snoring had evened out before slipping over the back wall in the dark and picking his way up the mountain by paths no one used. More than one pair of eyes on this mountain watched him.

---

The west slope at the hour of the Rat: the moonlight thin, the woods sunk in black.

When Lin Que arrived, Bai Heng was already there. She stood with her back against an old pine, no lamp lit, and only when she heard his footsteps did she turn out of the tree's shadow.

By that faint moonlight, Lin Que saw her face—that face always cold as a drawn sword was now white without a trace of blood in it.

"I got in," Bai Heng said, her voice hoarser than usual. "A true-lineage disciple has cause to make an inspection. The guard at the gate couldn't turn me away; they let me into the outer court."

She paused, as if she had to press down in her throat first the thing she had seen before she could get it out.

"That court is deeper than it looks from outside the wall. Just inside is a yard where the stock is piled—the baskets hauled up from the mountain foot, stacked one atop another, all of them the kind you spoke of: bound up tight, heavy. At the far end of the yard stand two stone houses, no windows, low doors, the lintels smoked black. There's a breath coming out of them, seeping through the door-cracks, rank and cold—it made my scalp crawl to smell it."

Lin Que's heart sank. That breath—he had caught it once himself, out beyond the wall. The smell of rift flaw-lines.

"Burly laborers carrying the stock into the stone houses, basket by basket." Bai Heng's voice dropped lower. "Under cover of inspecting the wall's defenses, I stayed in the outer court more than a full hour. The men who hauled stock in, front and back, I counted—seven or eight of them. Not one came out again."

That habitual true-lineage pride was nowhere to be found on her face now.

Lin Que said nothing. Those two times of his beyond the wall, all he had made out was stock hauled in cartload after cartload and none hauled out; what actually happened inside the wall he could not get close to, could not see true. Bai Heng had gone in and kept watch more than an hour, and only so had she seen clear through to the truth within that wall.

"And inside the stone houses?" he asked.

"Couldn't get in." Bai Heng shook her head. "At the door of the stone houses there's another guard, and not ordinary disciples—their qi runs deep and heavy. A true-lineage disciple making her rounds, come that far, was politely sent back. 'The Teacher is forging implements; idlers keep out.' Six words, and not half a step given."

Forging implements. Lin Que bit down on the two words. To forge one furnace of implements took this much rift-stock, and this many living men hauled in basket by basket, not one coming out?

"There's another strange thing." Bai Heng suddenly raised a hand and pressed the spot on her chest, brows knitting. "When I made my round up to the front of the stone house, that old injury that has stopped me for three years began, without reason, to throb and ache—as though something inside were answering it. Only after I left the court did it slowly ebb."

Something stirred in Lin Que; his face showed nothing.

That flaw in her chest and the flaw-lines twined in the grey breath of the stone house came from one and the same hand; the flaw resonated the moment it neared its source—drawn, perhaps, by their common origin. This he could not say now. But Bai Heng's throbbing ache added one more proof to that thread: the one who had cut through her art and the crowd who forged this forbidden court were of a single line.

---

"I couldn't get into the stone houses," Bai Heng said, closing her eyes for a moment. "But in the outer court, I saw what was carried out from within."

"Two stretchers, covered with blue cloth. The bearers' steps were heavy; the shape pressed up beneath the cloth—it was human." Her knuckles dug into her palm. "The living men who went in hauling stock, not one came out; what came out was covered with cloth, and moved no more."

The woods were so still you could hear a pine-needle fall.

"And more." Bai Heng's voice pressed lower still. "After the stretchers were carried off, a steward came out cradling a brocade box. The box wasn't shut tight, and I glimpsed inside—a few pills, and their sheen was exactly the look of the Pill Hall's monthly-allotment pills. But that box didn't go toward the Pill Hall's stores. It went toward the Archive Hall."

"The Archive Hall." Lin Que rolled the three words on his tongue. "Senior Sister, did you see clearly whose hands that box of pills fell into?"

"I didn't dare follow too close," Bai Heng said. "But the one who has charge of the Archive Hall is Steward He. Scrolls, pills—anything the higher-ups want quietly passed through—all pass through his hands."

Steward He.

The one who had turned away Senior Brother Chen and Senior Brother Du when they came to borrow the sixth-layer commentary scroll, with a single "It's been borrowed"; the one who, bent low, had shown the blue-robed man—"the Teacher"—up to the third floor. And now, the pills forged in the stone house of the forbidden court, bearing their cut-mark, had passed through his hands too.

Lin Que kept his eyes lowered, and the several threads in his mind slowly joined up.

Stock went into the stone house, men went into the stone house; what came out was corpses covered in blue cloth, and that box of pills with the Pill Hall's look sent instead to the Archive Hall.

Those flaws, one after another—he had seen enough of them; every one was a flaw men had deliberately cut. But to cut out a flaw like that, one had first to have a handy tool.

This forbidden court, taking rift-stock and taking living men's lives, was likely forging just that—a tool that could "cut a stroke" out of an art, a pill, a talisman.

If so, then the source of all the flaws on this whole mountain lay inside this wall.

Standing beneath the pine, Lin Que felt a chill run up his back.

Those men hauling stock were, like him, the cheapest lives on this mountain. Stock needs men to haul it; those hauled in were carried out under blue cloth. This court swallowed men and stock alike. He had had his face marked by that dark-robed disciple at the foot of the wall—had he been greedy for half a step that time and been dragged in, the one carried out under blue cloth would have been him.

What in the end was that "tool," and what did "the Teacher" mean to make of this whole mountain with it?

---

"Was it worth it, your trusting me this once?" Bai Heng suddenly asked.

"Worth it," Lin Que said. "This trip of yours, Senior Sister, saw through half of what lies behind that wall."

"Half." Bai Heng gave a cold laugh, and in it was a dread she couldn't hide. "The other half is inside the stone houses. And I can't get into the stone houses—even a true-lineage disciple, come to the Teacher's door, has to fall back."

She straightened, leaving the old pine.

"One more thing I have to tell you." She fixed her gaze on Lin Que, her eyes gone sharp again. "While I was making my round of the outer court, the Teacher was there. When I withdrew and reached the courtyard gate, I looked back once—and that man, across half the court, was watching me."

Lin Que's heart tightened.

"He didn't stop me, didn't question me, only watched me like that, once." Bai Heng's voice was level, level to the point of cold. "For a true-lineage disciple to inspect the inner court is an ordinary thing. But that one look of his—it was as if he'd known all along why I had come."

Wind passed through the pine woods, and a black shadow swayed.

The man behind it all had now seen Bai Heng too.

The chill in Lin Que's heart deepened by a layer. Bai Heng had gone into that court for him; he had thought a true-lineage standing was a talisman of protection, that at most the higher-ups would suspect her of meddling. But the Teacher's single look, across half the court, had seen through that layer of protection. From now on, whenever the ones who cut the flaws chose to move against her, she might not even have a place to plead her case, to seek redress.

He had dragged a true-lineage disciple into a peril no different from his own.

---

"For the next few days, Senior Sister, don't go near that court again," Lin Que said. "Since he's given you that look, going back means becoming the second Senior Brother Xu—true-lineage standing or no, it's all the same."

Bai Heng didn't answer that, only asked in return: "By what you say, those flaws were cut out one stroke at a time by a single man—then what they forge day and night in that stone house is the very tool that can cut a stroke?"

"Near enough."

"Then there's another thing you and I both ought to think through to the bottom." Bai Heng's voice pressed exceedingly low. "To cut one stroke, they burn this much rift-stock, spend this many lives, keep a man-eating court running. To press cohort after cohort of disciples beneath a threshold they can't pass, at this much cost—what in the end is that outland crowd after?"

To that, Lin Que had no answer.

This half-year, his fingertips had mended one flaw after another for people. But the tool in that stone house went the opposite way, cutting flaws, furnace by furnace, into thousands upon thousands of cultivators. However fast he mended, he could not outrun a court that cut flaw after flaw, furnace by furnace—all the flaws under heaven, could he alone ever mend them all?

The thought pressed on his chest, so heavy he could scarcely breathe. But what lay behind that stone-house door, and whether the one who did the cutting had someone above him still—across the Teacher's single look, tonight neither of them could reach.

Bai Heng straightened, smoothed her cloak, and left one last word, her voice cold and settled: "That stone-house door—sooner or later, someone has to go in."

Then her figure sank into the woods. Lin Que stood beneath the pine a long while before groping his way down the slope in the dark.

The calming incense pellet in his breast, undelivered, still carried its medicinal fragrance. From now on, each coming and going of this sachet carried two lives staked upon it, edging along this thread, inch by inch, toward the door of that man-eating stone house.

Bai Heng said that door would sooner or later have to be entered by someone. Lin Que knew in his heart: that someone, in the end, would be him.

【Ch. 043 End · the rear mountain of the Xuanzhao Sect · the old pine of the west slope】