The Reverse-Ash Yard

West of Qingqi Market, the lowest grade of takeover yard. A rogue cultivator who has taken a qi deviation, cannot pay his debt, and has nobody to redeem him is carried in here. What the register says is shelter. As for the men who go in, the odds of coming out are zero.

A takeover has a procedure, and it runs very smooth. The pill-shop keeper passes a slip of paper out from behind the curtain; the carriers read the name off it once to confirm it, then push a thumb along under the injured man’s left rib, as though checking for something. Once that is checked, the grey hide rope, 3 feet of it, goes round without a sound, and they carry him out one in front and one behind, his feet never dragging. From the slip coming out to the man going through the door is less than the time it takes to drink a cup of tea.

The debt is divided too. Of what a deviated rogue cultivator owes, the pill shop covers half, mostly taken out of the injured man’s unsettled wages. The other half is charged to the Reverse-Ash Yard. How that half gets squared, the books carry no second line about. Most shops in the market town have this transfer arrangement with the Reverse-Ash Yard; asked about it, the shopkeeper only says he is finding the injured man somewhere that will take him in.

The two young men who do the carrying wear short grey-blue jackets with those 3 feet of grey hide rope at the waist. Neither is old, and both say very little. No shouting, no explaining, and no sound when they tie a man. People on the street give half a step, follow them a few paces with their eyes, and go back to their own business. Stop them once and what you pay with is the rest of your days on this street.

On the notice wall at the East Street entrance hang sheet after sheet of Intake Register, put up the same day a man is taken in, so that his family can check the name and claim him back:

Intake Register
  Name          Ding Mao
  Former work   regular hand, West Street mine
  Debt          174 copper coins (87 covered by the pill shop)
  Claimed       —

Seventeen or eighteen notices have gone up, and on not one of them has that bottom line ever been filled in. When nobody comes to take one down within 7 days, the market town draws two slanting strokes under the name. The paper goes brittle and yellow in the sun, and a new sheet goes over an old sheet, until that wall has thickened by a finger.

The wall around the yard is higher than a man, the gate stays shut all year, and a course of broken tiles is set along the top. Nobody has actually gone in to look, and there is no shortage of accounts: that inside are labour sheds, that it is a mine that squeezes the deviated to their last breath, that there is no yard there at all and the men carried in are gone the same night. The accounts do not match one another, and not one person has gone to check — to check means walking through that gate yourself.