At dawn the great gate of Iron Pass stood open for the first time in fifty years.
Li Xuan walked through it alone.
He wore his dark blue servant’s robe, rebound over his ribs with strips of Gu’s old coat. The horsehair broom rested on his shoulder, the iron dustpan hung at his belt, and the little copper stove rattled in a bag at his hip, because a man should never go to a strange place without the means of making tea. Behind him, on the wall, the Seventh Banner stood at its posts in the pale light, ten thousand motionless shapes of cold moonlight, and watched him go.
Gu had wanted to come. Li Xuan had asked him to stay.
"If they see the Marshal of the Western Army walk out of the Pass, they will see a war," he had said. "If they see a scholar with a broom, they may only see a fool."
"A fool with a broom," Gu had muttered, and handed him a skin of water. "That is the best disguise I have ever heard of."
The Red Plain was larger than it had looked from the wall.
It ran flat and bare to the horizon, the color of old rust, and it was strewn from end to end with what fifty years and a hundred thousand dead had left behind. Broken spears lay in drifts like windblown straw. Helms and cooking pots and the bleached curves of rib cages lay half buried in the dust. Banners hung from rotted staffs, wolf-heads of the Western Army and black-and-ash banners of the Horde, tangled together in the same dry wind, and in the silence you could hear the cloth whisper.
It was the loneliest place Li Xuan had ever stood.
He walked a hundred paces from the gate, found a flat place where the dust lay thin, and began to sweep.
He swept all morning.
He did not sweep as a man sweeps a floor. He swept as a man might tend a grave. He gathered the loose bones into neat heaps, skulls toward the west, as the old books said that every people of the plains had laid their dead. He drew the broken spears out of the dust and stood them upright in the ground, one beside another, like the stalks of a harvest. He took the rags of banners and shook the dust from them and folded each in four, and set them upon the heaps.
He did not distinguish between them. There were wolf-banners and ash-banners, and the dust that covered them was the same.
Somewhere around noon, he became aware that he was being watched.
He did not look up. He went on sweeping. The wind had changed, and he could smell horses, and smoke, and old sheepskin. Five of them rode out from the broken shimmer of the horizon, slowly, with their bows across their saddles. They were lean, brown, weather-lined people in furs and felt, with their hair in long braids tied with bone, and their faces under the painted ash were the faces of people who did not often smile.
They came to a halt at a distance of twenty paces. No one spoke.
Li Xuan finished a heap of bones, set the last skull upon it, and looked up.
"Good afternoon," he said. "Forgive me for not rising. The ground is still unswept just here."
One of the riders, a young man with a scar across his lip, drew his bow halfway.
"Who are you?" he said, in the broken, accented Great Liang of the border. "Where is your army?"
"I do not have one."
"You walked out of the Wall. The Wall does not let the living walk out."
"It let me." Li Xuan considered. "I did stand for a hundred breaths. I am told it was a hundred and one."
The riders exchanged a look. The young man drew his bow all the way.
"Temur," said a dry, cracked voice behind him. "Put it down."
The riders parted.
An old woman rode through them on a shaggy gray pony, very slowly. She was very small and very bent, wrapped in layers of felt and sheepskin, with a staff in her hand hung with the small bones of birds. Her face was brown and creased like a walnut. Her eyes were the pale gray of river ice, and they were fixed upon the neat heaps of bones and the standing spears and the folded banners.
She slid from the saddle without help and walked forward, leaning on her staff.
She stopped in front of the nearest heap. She looked at it for a long time.
"You laid them with the skulls to the west," she said at last, in a voice like dry leaves.
"It seemed correct."
"And you folded the banners." Her hand shook as she touched one. "Both kinds."
"They lay together," said Li Xuan. "It would have been unkind to part them."
The old woman said nothing at all. The young man with the scar looked from her face to the bones, and his bow slowly lowered.
When she looked up again, her ice-gray eyes were wet.
"My name is Hulan," she said. "I am the bone-speaker of the Ash Horde. For fifty years I have asked the sky who would come to bury our dead. For fifty years the sky has said nothing." She looked at the broom, and at the dustpan, and at the thin young man in the blue servant’s robe. "I did not think it would send a sweeper."
"I am only a scholar," Li Xuan said, "who is unable to leave a floor unswept."
Hulan laughed, a short, cracked sound, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
"Temur. Tell the riders to dismount."
"Grandmother, he is from the Wall..."
"He is from the Wall, and he has done what no Horde son has done in fifty years, which is to bury our dead without being asked." She turned her head. "Dismount, all of you. Put down your bows. And if any of you is ashamed, go and pick up a spear and stand it in the ground, as he has done."
One by one, the riders got down from their horses.
Not all of them touched the spears. But three of them did, silently, while the young man named Temur stood with his bow in his hands and his scarred face working. Then he put it down, took a broken spear from the dust, and stood it upright among the others.
By sunset, the five riders had become fifty, and the fifty had become three hundred. They came in ones and twos from the line of fires on the horizon, and they stood in a silent ring around the plain’s center, where a great cairn rose from the dust. It was a pile of bones and stones as high as a house, twenty zhang across, a thing the Ash Khan’s warriors had raised before the last charge of the war.
"The first Khan built it," Hulan said, at Li Xuan’s side. "Every man who fell in the first winter, he laid there. It was meant to be a monument to victory." She looked up at it. "Instead it is what remains of ninety-one thousand who did not go home."
He set down the broom and walked to the foot of the cairn.
Hum.
The chime was slower than any he had heard before. It had the sound of a bell tolling under deep water.
[Location Verified: Cairn of the Plain of Two Armies (Historical Weight: 91,000 Fallen Warriors).]
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[Congratulations! You have received Technique: <The Soul-Resting Sweeping Hand>!]
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The Mind Palace took the technique as a student takes a lesson it has waited its whole life to learn. It was not a sword art. It required no Qi. It was a gesture, a sweeping motion of the right hand, open and unhurried, with a breath in and a breath out, the gesture of a man brushing the dust from a tomb, and it asked only that its master mean what he did.
In the hollow of his sleeve, a hundred slender sticks of dark incense settled, smelling of cedar and old paper and rain.
Li Xuan took one out. He set it upright in the dust at the foot of the cairn, and breathed upon its tip, and a thread of silvery smoke rose straight up into the windless evening.
Then he raised his right hand, and swept it once, softly, through the air.
Nothing seemed to happen.
Then, very slowly, the smoke began to spread.
It spread outward over the plain like mist over a river, thin and pale and silent. And where it touched the heaps of bones, small lights rose up. They were no larger than candle flames, white and soft, and they came by ones and twos and tens, and then by hundreds, out of the dust and the heaps and the folded banners, until the whole of the Red Plain glimmered in the dusk as if a field of fireflies had risen from the earth.
The riders of the Ash Horde stood without moving. Granny Hulan had dropped to her knees.
The lights drifted upward. They did not go east or west. They simply rose, slowly, into the darkening sky, higher and higher, and where they passed the beacon torches on the Wall flickered, and one by one, they went out.
Not those on the gate tower. Those stayed lit.
On the wall, the ten thousand of the Seventh Banner stood motionless, and watched the lights go up, and did not follow.
Not yet, Li Xuan thought. The oaths still bind them. Their rest is not mine to give.
It cost him. He felt it in his knees, in his seed, in the ache of the cracked ribs. He had not used a drop of Qi, but he had meant it, and meaning, he found, was a thing that weighed. He leaned upon the broom a little more than he liked.
When the last of the lights had gone, Granny Hulan crossed the dust on her knees and laid her forehead against his boot.
"Stand up, Grandmother," he said, a little helplessly. "You will ruin your robe."
"Sweeper." Her voice was thick. "Fifty years, and no one has done what you did tonight."
"It was only incense."
"It was not only incense." She lifted her face, and her ice-gray eyes shone in the light of the fires. "The Khan’s granddaughter leads the riders now. She is a strange girl. She has said for three winters that the vow is a lie, that the dead do not want our children to die at the Wall in their name. No one has listened to her." Her gnarled hand closed on his sleeve. "Come to our fire tonight. She will want to see the man who swept the Plain."
Li Xuan looked past her, to the line of three hundred fires that burned along the horizon, and to the dark mass of the Wall behind him with its single steady light.
He thought of the capital, four days east, and of a red ink register in the Ninth Ward. He thought of an old man on the gate tower, waiting.
"I should like that," he said. "If there is tea."