Ch. 047| The Ledger of Flaws

On the third day after breaking the seventh layer of Qi Condensation, Shen Ningshuang sought out the herb-lodge.

She came with cause—the Enforcement Hall was looking into a trifling case of an outer-gate disciple swapping talisman paper, and needed to requisition a few herbs for tracing marks. Lin Que was in the back yard sifting charred cores; hearing the herb-keeping elder up front bowing and scraping, he knew which sort had come. When an enforcement disciple came to the door, the elder always dropped three parts.

The elder went off to fetch the herbs, leaving Shen Ningshuang alone to wait in the court. She didn't sit, but stood with hands behind her back before the herb-racks, her gaze sweeping the rows of medicine drawers, as though inspecting something.

"Lin Que." She didn't turn her head, her voice pressed to reach only the two of them. "You're at your leisure—taken to sifting dregs, have you."

"An errand handed down by Supervisor Pei." Lin Que set down the bamboo sieve, lowered his hands, and stepped a pace or two nearer. "Senior Sister Shen, looking into a talisman-theft case—how did the trail lead to the herb-lodge?"

"The talisman theft is the errand on the surface." Only now did Shen Ningshuang turn around, those eyes practiced at examining corpses and discerning marks fixing steadily on him. "I've come with two words to reconcile with you face to face."

She drew from her sleeve a thin, evenly-cut sheet of paper and set it by the herb-mortar, as though she wanted Lin Que to help her look over some herb. The motion of her hands was made natural, but the words from her mouth were another matter.

"Last time you tossed me half a sentence—mind where the stock-carting cart in the back lane goes." Her voice was exceedingly low. "I minded it. That cart runs once every three or five days, covered with blue cloth; leaving the market town it doesn't go down the mountain pass but goes up along the mountain road to the north. At the end of it is that northernmost court of this Xuanzhao Sect's outer gate."

Lin Que knew where this stood. That court, these two months, he'd already felt over three times with those eyes—the forbidden court where stock went in and none came out. But this he could not say; he only knit his brows, feigning to hear it for the first time: "Stock carted in through the gate? Carted in to do what?"

"I'd like to know too," Shen Ningshuang said coldly. "That court is a forbidden ground within the gate. I, an enforcement disciple looking into a trifling case, sent word asking to enter, and was politely barred outside."

"Can't get in, so I looked into it roundabout." Her voice dropped half a shade lower. "The scrolls, pills, stock within the gate—who requisitioned them, whose hands they passed through—must leave a mark somewhere in the record-files. I followed the record-files upward, questioning as I went—and at one place I was blocked back, blocked politely."

She fixed her gaze on Lin Que, word by measured word: "The Archive Hall."

Lin Que's lowered eyes stirred, exceedingly faintly.

"Senior Brother Xu's fatal fall—I turned over the old files." Shen Ningshuang's voice sank half a shade more. "A few days before he died, he'd borrowed a register of outer-gate disciples' scroll-requisitions, meaning to check who had touched those few qi-deviation dead men's commentary scrolls. That register was locked in the Archive Hall. The one in charge answered him with a single 'It's been borrowed' and sent him off. Within a few days, the man had fallen into a mountain gully."

"It's been borrowed." Lin Que chewed over the three words.

Senior Brother Chen and Senior Brother Du, asking to borrow the sixth-layer commentary scroll, sent off with a single "It's been borrowed"; Senior Brother Xu, wanting to check the requisition register, another "It's been borrowed," and then fell to his death. Three lives, all stopped at the same mouth in the Archive Hall.

"The one in charge is Steward He." Shen Ningshuang fixed her gaze on him. "In the Enforcement Hall's name, I demanded that requisition register. Steward He wouldn't give it. He said the Archive Hall's scrolls, and the requisition records of outer-gate disciples, may not by rule be read by outsiders—not even the Enforcement Hall—save by Supervisor Pei's written order."

Supervisor Pei. That wall again.

"If I force the issue and demand Supervisor Pei's written order," Shen Ningshuang pressed a thread of cold to the corner of her lip, "it's as good as telling the higher-ups that I, the one looking into a talisman theft, am boring straight into a case of arts and dead men. The three-day closing order is already down; probe any deeper, and the next one to have my errand pulled from me is Supervisor Pei."

Lin Que understood. On the official road, this thread broke at the Archive Hall. The Enforcement Hall's token couldn't knock open Steward He's door.

"I've come to ask you one thing." Shen Ningshuang's eyes were sharp as needles. "You're always turning up at the edge of the corpse-piles, and always able to speak of ways others can't. As for the Archive Hall—have you felt out any path?"

Lin Que didn't take up the words. Felt out—he'd done far more than feel out. Behind that ebony door lay the deep scrolls; he'd gone in, rubbed the sixth-layer mending method, seen on the monthly-allotment pill formula the one stroke likewise struck by the cut-mark. But of these, not half a word could he say to her.

"The Archive Hall is closely guarded; I'm a new odd-job hand, I can't get near it." He kept his eyes lowered and made the words level. "But since you say, Senior Sister, that box of pills, that register, anything the higher-ups want quietly passed through, all pass through Steward He's hands—then in Steward He's hands there's likely a ledger no one else can see."

"A ledger?"

"Which scroll lent to whom, taken back or not; pills sent in, sent out; which volume to lock, which flavor to reconcile." Lin Que said. "This much passing through one man's hands—if he doesn't keep a ledger, he can't keep it straight. Fail to lay hold of that ledger, and this thread of yours, Senior Sister, forever circles outside the door."

Shen Ningshuang fixed her gaze on him a good while, then gave an exceedingly faint snort: "Quite the one to point the way for me. And you yourself huddled in the herb-lodge sifting charred cores."

"My life is cheap; it can't take Supervisor Pei marking me down once more." Lin Que kept his hands lowered. "If you'll trust me, Senior Sister, leave the matter of that ledger for me to mind. I'm in the herb-lodge; carrying medicine to the halls is my duty—the Archive Hall, too, has to take its medicine."

Shen Ningshuang answered neither yes nor no. She put away the thin sheet and left a bland word: "Supervisor Pei still remembers you. That cleverness of yours—show less of it before others hereafter."

With that, the elder who'd fetched the herbs was just returning, and she recovered that cold, case-solving face, examined the herbs, and turned to go.

---

After Shen Ningshuang left, Lin Que crouched in the herb-lodge a whole day, turning this road over and over in his mind.

The door Shen Ningshuang's token couldn't knock open, he was no stranger to nearing—some days before he'd slipped in by night, after the deep-scroll art locked behind that door. Only the ledger Steward He guarded by day—the lending and return of scrolls, the coming and going of pills, the reconciling of flaws—that he had yet to see with his own eyes.

To see it, he needed a cause to enter the Archive Hall openly and to linger a while under Steward He's very eyes.

The cause was ready to hand. The scroll-warden disciples of the Archive Hall, facing volumes day after day, discerning characters by lamplight, nine in ten had eye-ailments and suffered head-winds. Each month the herb-lodge issued the halls calming, eye-brightening pellets; it was an old arrangement. Lin Que leafed through the old register of medicine deliveries, and sure enough—the Archive Hall's share, due last month, had been dragged to now because the herb-lodge kept changing hands.

So he went before the herb-keeping elder to ask for the errand: "The Archive Hall's eye-brightening pellets are ten days overdue; I'll deliver them while I'm about it."

The elder, only too glad to put him to use, waved him off with a nod.

Lin Que made up that batch of eye-brightening pellets, and added within them an extra measure of chrysanthemum, a measure of cassia seed, compounding it with particular care—an odd-jobber who compounds his medicine well is one the scroll-wardens will spare a couple more words to, and so he could linger a quarter longer within that hall.

At noon the next day, medicine-satchel on his back, he went up to the Archive Hall.

---

Noon was the Archive Hall's slackest hour. Most of the scroll-wardens were off at their meal, only one or two on duty. Lin Que gave the herb-lodge's delivery as his cause; the disciple on duty, hearing it was eye-brightening medicine, rubbed his swollen eyes and waved him in.

The ground floor held the ordinary volumes for outer-gate disciples to read; the second floor locked away the inner-gate commentary scrolls; behind that ebony door on the third floor lay the deep scrolls—the place he'd slipped into by night. Steward He's duty-room was a room at the east end of the second floor, its door ajar.

Lin Que doled out the medicine to the disciple on duty, then went on and on with "this chrysanthemum must be taken with warm water, not boiling," and by those few words edged slowly, on his feet, toward that half-open door on the second floor.

Within the duty-room, Steward He sat before his desk.

He was a lean old man of about fifty, his face dry and sallow, in an enforcement-steward's blue robe washed pale, his back slightly bent, his expression bland—looking no different from an ordinary old clerk. On the desk was spread a thick register, and by his hand rested a brocade box—a box Lin Que knew: the very kind Bai Heng had spoken of, cradled out of the stone house of the forbidden court, holding pills that bore the cut-mark.

Lin Que kept his eyes lowered and stood a good ten feet outside the door, feigning to wait for the duty disciple to sign off the medicine register. But the heat beneath those eyes was quietly kindling.

Steward He picked a pill out of the brocade box, held it before his eyes, squinted at it, then brought it under his nose and sniffed. Then he opened that thick register, ran a finger down a certain page line by line, stopped at one place, and, taking up his brush, lightly marked a stroke beside that line.

The marking done, he put the pill back in the box, picked out another, and again pointed, looked, and marked against the register.

His movements were unhurried, like an old accountant taking stock of a storeroom, reconciling stroke by stroke, exceedingly fine.

In Lin Que's left eye, the "flaw" of that pill was plain—the half-flavor cut from the pill's qi matched, to the least degree, the flaw on the Pill Hall's monthly-allotment pill.

That flaw, Steward He's pair of cloudy eyes might not make out, nor need to. That thick register on his desk recorded, line by line, just this: which furnace of pills, which half-flavor should be drawn from the original formula, drawn to what measure. The pills were refined below according to rule, then sent up to his desk; he took them up one by one, appraised their sheen by the light, brought them to his nose to discern the pill-qi, and reconciled them against the record—whether this furnace had been drawn right, drawn enough, the sheen and firing bore their own marks, and he, decades steeped in pills, discerned them plain. Reconciled true, he lifted his brush and marked a stroke, and passed them. What the disciples below drew month by month were these very pills, drawn according to the ledger.

A furnace of pills missing half a flavor by chance is a bad firing; but this—furnace after furnace sent up, every flaw in the same place, half a flavor neither more nor less—behind it there had to be a man holding a ledger, watching stroke by stroke, year upon month, cutting without the least deviation.

Lin Que's eyes swept along the spread thick register. Across a good ten feet the characters wouldn't come clear, but the layout of that page he saw clear enough—line upon line of records throughout, unlike ordinary volumes for reading. Each line led off with an item, a string of small characters beside it, and beside that, a small mark like a corner missing. Lin Que knew the meaning in that mark: this line recorded a pill of the Pill Hall, that line an art of the deep scrolls, and a line below that, astonishingly, recorded down to the talismans of a lay family outside the gate. Pill, art, talisman—which by rights fell to three halls and three families, each managing its own—now lay spread in one register, recorded under one man's brush.

So the flaws he'd run across this half-year—the Pill Hall's pills, the deep scrolls' arts, the Xu family's talismans below the mountain—had never been oversights each hall and family let slip on its own. The flaws all about the Xuanzhao Sect were, astonishingly, gathered into this one thick register before him, numbered and ranged into lines by this sallow old man, reconciled stroke by stroke.

Across his mind flashed again, for no reason, an old matter of the market town—that third vat at the Hundred Herbs shop back then, on the surface collected by the Waste-Medicine Bureau, yet in the end hauled off in a small cart by a straw-hatted practitioner, its destination he never traced even by the time he left the market town. That flaw, that small cart, and this ledger before him—were they two ends behind the same single hand? The thought had just risen when he pressed it down. Across a good ten feet, he couldn't even see true what this page recorded; this thread stretched too far.

The source of the flaws lay in the stone house of the forbidden court; but the ledger of "whether each stroke was cut right," stroke by stroke, was here.

Lin Que kept his eyes lowered, a thin sweat seeping down his back.

---

"The medicine's delivered; be off, then."

Steward He spoke suddenly. He didn't lift his head, the brush-tip still on the register, his voice level without the least rise or fall.

Lin Que's heart went cold, but his face was only that of a servant on errand; he bent low: "Yes. Delivering the eye-brightening pellets to the hall."

"Eye-brightening pellets?" Only now did Steward He raise his eyes. Those eyes were cloudy, yet at the instant they swept over Lin Que's face, they paused, exceedingly faintly. "You're new to the herb-lodge?"

"Reporting to the steward—an odd-job hand of the herb-lodge."

"An odd-job hand of the herb-lodge?" Steward He slowly set down his brush, those cloudy eyes fixed on him, as if reconciling an item on a ledger. "That time Disciple Chen of the west court had a qi deviation forcing his layer—it was you who drove that needle."

His tone was certain, as though the answer had long since been set on that ledger, and he were now only reconciling it in passing.

Lin Que's heart tightened. He'd thought this sallow old man buried in old papers only, never that his own needle had long since been recorded on some ledger of the man's.

"A blind cat blundering onto a dead rat." He kept his eyes lowered and made his voice both timid and dull. "Saw someone save a qi deviation at a market-town pill shop, learned a smattering, got lucky."

Steward He looked at him a good while, that gaze turning slowly over his face, his hands, that coarse-cloth short jacket, as if to reconcile this odd-jobber too into the register. After a good while, he drew back his eyes and took up his brush again.

"The herb-lodge's errands—do the herb-lodge's well." He said blandly, the brush-tip falling on the register. "The Archive Hall's scrolls and pills are not things an odd-jobber should look at twice. Look twice—"

He paused, leaving the words unfinished, only opening a blank page at the end of that thick register, taking up his brush, and writing two characters.

Across a good ten feet, Lin Que couldn't make out those two characters. But the rise and fall of that stroke, he watched—it was the opening of the character "Lin."

"Off you go," Steward He said.

Lin Que bowed and withdrew, the garment at his back already clinging wet against his spine.

---

Down the steps of the Archive Hall, the sun was glaring white.

Lin Que, empty satchel on his back, walked unhurried, but within him things churned hard.

The thread-end Shen Ningshuang wanted, this trip he'd felt out—that ledger was locked in Steward He's duty-room. Only across a good ten feet, all he'd seen clear was the layout; what each line recorded, by whose order those flaws were made, cut into which gates and which schools, were still in a place beyond his reach.

At the last, Steward He had opened a fresh page on the register, leading off with a character "Lin." That stroke Lin Que saw plain: the eyes watching him had gained this sallow old man's pair too.

Back at the herb-lodge, the two vats of dregs still weren't sifted through. He rolled up his sleeves, crouched before the vats again, and slowly picked out the charred cores. No one could tell that this timid odd-jobber picking charred cores at his unhurried pace had, this day, gone up to the Archive Hall and seen into his eyes the ledger Steward He had guarded who knew how many years.

【Ch. 047 End · the Xuanzhao Sect's outer gate · the Archive Hall】