The donkey’s name was Tax Collector, and by the end of the first morning, Elder Gu had explained why.
"He takes and takes," the old man said, glaring at the gray rump swaying between the shafts. "He gives nothing back. And he stops wherever he pleases, and no man alive can make him go."
"He has a charming disposition," Li Xuan said.
"He has the disposition of the Ministry of Revenue."
The cart creaked down the western road at the pace of a very old man walking uphill. Beneath the bench, the copper tea stove rattled against its strap. Li Xuan sat with the reins slack in his hands and let the donkey set the pace, since the donkey would have set it anyway.
It was a fine, cold morning at the end of autumn. The road ran through the granary country of Great Liang, past terraced slopes where the millet had been cut and the stubble lay gold beneath a pale sky, past persimmon trees hung with fruit no one had picked, along a river braided with reeds. It should have been a land of plenty.
It was not. Li Xuan counted as they passed. In the first village, thin children watched the cart from a doorway. In the second, a woman beat a straw mat against a fence with the slow, tired strokes of someone who had not eaten that day. In the third there were no children at all. And in each village, at the center, stood a granary of gray brick with a yellow paper seal across its door.
"Imperial seals," Gu said, following his gaze. "Every third village. Full to the rafters, and sealed against the day the court sends for it." He spat over the wheel. "The people who grew it eat bark in winter."
"I said I had seen where the grain goes," Li Xuan said quietly. "I had not seen what it looked like."
Gu said nothing. For once, he did not reach for his gourd.
At noon they came to Willow Ford, where the road crossed a river by a narrow stone bridge. A wooden gate had been dragged across the span. Before it stood a gate-captain with a belly like a barrel and two spearmen leaning upon their weapons, and beside them, at a little table, sat a clerk in a threadbare gray robe with an ink-stone, an abacus, and a thick ledger.
"Toll!" the gate-captain bellowed, and rapped the cart’s shaft with his knuckles. "Ten copper for the cart. Five for the donkey. Twenty for the unregistered stove."
"The stove is not goods," Li Xuan said politely. "It is a stove."
"Everything is goods if I say so. That is thirty-five, and ten for the inspection." The captain’s eye slid to Gu’s gourd. "And ten for the wine."
Gu opened his mouth. Li Xuan laid a hand lightly upon his sleeve.
"May I see the ledger?" he asked the clerk.
The clerk jumped. "The... the ledger?"
"I am only a scholar. A ledger is a kind of book, and I cannot see a book without reading it."
The clerk looked at the captain. The captain shrugged, with the lazy contempt of a man who was sure of his ground. "Read all you like, bookworm."
The clerk pushed the ledger across the table with both hands.
Li Xuan turned the pages with a single finger. He did not seem to read. His eyes moved down each column the way a man’s eyes move down a familiar road. Four breaths passed, and then he stopped.
"On the eleventh day of the month and the twelfth," he said, in his soft, mild voice, "the day’s toll is the same sum, to the copper, in the same hand, with the same blot upon the seven. The twelfth was copied from the eleventh."
The clerk went the color of tallow.
"The monthly total is carried from this page to the next with a difference of three hundred and forty copper that has been entered nowhere. That is very nearly the toll of a hundred carts. And in the receiving column, the gate-captain’s mark appears in three different hands." Li Xuan closed the ledger gently. "The circuit inspector comes before the new moon, does he not? He will find in a quarter of an hour what I found in four breaths."
The captain’s face darkened like a thundercloud. "Insolent bookworm..."
"Sir..." The clerk’s voice shook. "Sir, he made me. He made me copy the..."
"Shut your mouth!"
The captain lunged forward with one meaty hand outstretched for the reins.
Tax Collector, who had stood motionless through all of this with the dignity of a boulder, laid back his ears and kicked.
It was a very good kick. It caught the gate-captain squarely in the belly and lifted him off his feet, and he went backward over the parapet with a bellow and landed in the river with a splash that wet both spearmen to the knee.
Gu laughed so hard that he had to hold the bench.
The two spearmen looked at the river, at the clerk, at the donkey, and at one another. One of them sighed. "I told him it would come to this," he said, and went to lift the gate himself.
Li Xuan counted ten copper onto the table. "The cart’s toll." He added five more. "And the donkey’s. He has earned it." Then he laid a hand on the clerk’s trembling shoulder, and his voice dropped so that only the clerk could hear.
"Burn the false ledger tonight, and keep the true one. A true ledger is the only thing a clerk owns."
The clerk stared at him as the cart rolled onto the bridge. "Sir," he whispered, "who are you?"
"A man who dusts scrolls," Li Xuan said, and flicked the reins.
They stopped at dusk in the village of Yellow Reed, at a teahouse that was no more than a low timber shed with a roof of rushes. It was crowded with farmers, carters, and a few scholars in patched robes, because at the far end of the room, upon an upturned barrel, a thin man with a folding fan and a voice like a rusty gong was telling a story.
"...and from the black stair that opened in the earth," the storyteller cried, snapping his fan wide, "rose the Broom Immortal of the Nether Archive!"
The room gasped. Gu, who had just lifted a cup of cheap wine to his lips, stopped with it halfway there.
"A hundred feet tall he stood! His robes were the color of midnight, and in his hand he bore a broom made from the hair of nine hundred white horses! The wicked Crown Prince fell upon his knees, and begged, and wept, and the Immortal said only four words." The storyteller dropped his voice to a whisper. "Why did you force me?"
"Ahhh," breathed the room.
"And with one glance he split the sky in two! With one breath he blew out nine thousand candles in the Hall of Heaven! And with one sweep of his broom, he swept three hundred wicked nobles into the river!"
Gu made a small, strangled noise and began to cough. Li Xuan, seated beside him with his back to the wall, sipped his tea with perfect serenity.
"Decent tea," he remarked.
"A hundred feet," Gu wheezed. "Three hundred nobles..."
"I hear he is a very tall man."
A farmer at the next table shook his head, wonderingly. "They say he halved the taxes."
"Of course he did!" the storyteller declared, though no such notice had been posted anywhere. "Half and half again!"
A woman near the door spoke up then, quietly, over the laughter. She was thin and tired, with a basket on her knees. "My sister lives in the Ninth Ward of the capital," she said. "She writes that the clerks have come to count every household. Every man, every woman, every baby in its cradle. And they write it all in red ink."
The laughter died.
Li Xuan’s cup stopped halfway to his lips. Gu, beside him, went very still.
"Is it true the Immortal will protect the outer districts?" the woman asked the room, to no one in particular. "My sister’s husband says they must all be at the registers on the night of the new moon."
No one answered.
A small girl in a patched jacket had crept up to their table, round-eyed, with a rice cake in her fist. "Sir," she said to Li Xuan, in a very serious whisper, "Grandfather says the Broom Immortal sweeps away bad men. Will he sweep away the clerks?"
Li Xuan set down his cup.
"I hear he is very tired," he said gently. "But I think he would like to."
She nodded, satisfied, and gave him half her rice cake.
He ate it slowly, and said nothing more that night.
They camped a few li beyond the village, beside the road, in a hollow where the wind could not reach. Gu built a small fire out of dry reeds. Tax Collector grazed with the air of a creature who knew that he was beneath everyone’s notice.
Before he slept, Li Xuan stood for the length of two incense sticks in the stance he called Mountain Roots. Behind his closed eyes, in the jade hall of his spirit, the silver thread of the Mind Palace crept along the Dragon-Vein Core, and one thick black strand, rotted with three hundred years of royal blood, loosened at its edge and began to fall away like ink from wet cloth.
One, he thought. Many more.
When he opened his eyes, Gu was sitting very still on the far side of the fire with his gourd untouched at his knee, staring at a leaning stone beside the road.
It was a milestone, gray and lichened. Upon its face was carved a wolf’s head, with one ear broken.
"They put those up every hundred li, when I was young," Gu said, without looking away. "Western Army markers. That one has a broken ear. A soldier I knew once did that, to win a bet." His voice was strangely light. "With the tip of his sword. A foolish thing to do."
Li Xuan said nothing.
Gu was silent a long while. Then he stood, and, his joints cracking, walked to the stone and laid his palm on the wolf’s head, as a man lays his hand upon the shoulder of an old friend.
"Iron Pass is three hundred li from here," he said. "I had hoped I would forget the way."
He turned to go back to the fire.
Then he stopped.
Far to the west, beyond the black line of the hills, a row of faint lights had begun to glow along the horizon, tiny and blue and perfectly even, like a string of lanterns hung across the night.
"The beacon towers," Gu said, and his voice had gone hollow.
"They are lit."
"No one has lit them in fifty years."