They drove east as though the road were on fire.
This was not saying much, because the cart was a cart and the donkey was a donkey. But Gu stood up on the bench for the first hour and shouted at the gray rump in a voice that had once carried across a battlefield, and Tax Collector, who had been shouted at by experts, flattened his ears and trudged on at exactly the speed he had always trudged.
On the second afternoon the donkey sat down in the road.
It was not a protest. It was a statement of principle. He lowered his hindquarters upon the dust with the weary dignity of a minister conceding a point of order, and no amount of pulling, pleading, or profanity would move him. They lost three hours. At last Li Xuan, in desperation, produced a ripe persimmon from his sleeve, a gift from the Yellow Reed teahouse that he had been saving, and the donkey rose and ate it and went on at a pace that was, for the first time, almost brisk.
"Bribery," Gu said, with deep disgust.
"It is the oldest tool of the Ministry of Revenue," said Li Xuan.
They drove until dark, and past it, and stopped only when the donkey’s legs began to shake. In a shallow hollow beside the road, with a small fire and a smaller supper, Gu broke a straight branch from a roadside willow and tossed it across to Li Xuan.
"Stand up."
"Senior, my ribs..."
"Your ribs will be mended or they will not, and no amount of sitting will change it. Stand up." The old man rose with his own willow stick. His clouded eyes were unfocused, but he moved with a strange, deliberate economy that had nothing of the old drunk in it. "You have been a very fine wall, boy. A wall is a fine thing. But you cannot sweep the world with a wall."
He tapped the end of his stick against Li Xuan’s knee.
"You stand like a man guarding a door. Feet too wide. The weight too far back. When the enemy comes, you will be struck before you have decided what to do." He tapped the other knee. "Closer. A hand’s breadth. Good. Now, the Pass-Sealing Step. You do not retreat from a blow. You do not meet it. You shorten the distance the enemy must cross, so that he finds his own strength has run out before it arrived."
He moved. It was a small movement, a quarter-turn of the hips and a half-step forward, and the tip of his willow branch was suddenly resting at Li Xuan’s throat, and Li Xuan had not seen it come.
"A sword is a conversation," said Gu. "Say less. Say it sooner."
They practiced until the fire burned low. Li Xuan was clumsy at first, and then less clumsy, and by the end he could do the step twice in three attempts. Gu said nothing about it. But he grunted, once, and that was more than he had ever said before.
As they sat down, Li Xuan took a twig from the fire’s edge, and almost without thinking, drew a single line in the dust at his feet.
It was only a stroke. Straight, thin, and ordinary. The first stroke of the Imperial Monarch Sword Art, that he had practiced for a month with a brush, for want of anything better.
Gu went very still.
He did not move at all. His clouded eyes were fixed upon the line in the dust, and the lines of his weathered face had gone as flat and hard as stone.
"Where," he said, in a voice Li Xuan had not heard before, "did you learn that?"
"In the Archive." It was nearly true. "From a book."
"There is no book." Gu’s hand closed on the willow branch until the wood cracked. "I have seen that stroke once in my life. On the Founder’s statue, in the Sanctuary, on the day they sealed me. The statue holds a sword, boy. Its sword hand makes that line." He swallowed. "The Ancestors have hunted the Founder’s sword art for three thousand years. They have the first three characters of its name, and nothing more."
The fire popped.
"Do not draw that stroke before any living man who might understand it," said Gu at last, very low. "Not for money. Not for love. Not for your life."
"I drew it before you."
"I am a fifty-year drunk," said Gu, "with nothing left to sell." He looked up. For a moment, in the firelight, the cloud over his eyes seemed to thin, like mist at the edge of a field, and what looked at Li Xuan from under it was something very old and very sharp. "Besides. I think you know exactly what you are doing, boy. I think you have always known."
Li Xuan said nothing. He took the twig, and scuffed the line from the dust with his boot.
They reached Stone Well Village on the afternoon of the fourth day.
It was a small place, a single street of mud-brick houses around a well with a stone rim, a day’s drive from the capital’s western gate. Chickens scratched in the dust. A dog slept in the road. And in the center of the street, before the well, stood a table with a sunshade, and a tall, narrow clerk in a crimson-bordered robe, with a ledger and a brush and a small porcelain dish.
A line of villagers stretched from the table down the street. They stood without speaking. A woman held a baby. A bent old man leaned on his grandson. Beside the table, in the dust, stood ten royal guards in crimson-and-gold, with their spears grounded, as though they were guarding something very valuable.
The clerk took a villager’s hand, pricked the tip of the finger with a bone needle, and pressed a single drop of blood into the porcelain dish. Then he dipped his brush in the dish, and wrote.
He wrote the name in red.
Li Xuan, on the cart at the edge of the village, felt a cold weight settle in his stomach.
"A blood-name," Gu said quietly. "The array can reach through it. A named man does not need to be present. At the new moon, the Sanctuary reads the register, and every name on it gives up a measure of its life." His voice was very flat. "A strong man will feel only a chill. A child, or an old woman, will not wake."
"Stay here," said Li Xuan.
"Boy..."
"Stay, Senior. Please. Hold the donkey."
He got down. He walked up the village street, broom in hand, past the line of silent villagers, who watched him go with the dull, frightened eyes of people who have stopped hoping. When he reached the table, the clerk did not look up.
"Name?"
"I am not on your list," said Li Xuan. "I should like to see the register."
The clerk looked up then, and his lip curled. "The register is the property of the Consort, by authority of the throne. Move along, sweeper."
"I do not think it is." Li Xuan took out a sheet of paper from the hollow of his sleeve. It was a plain sheet, folded in four. "The Founder’s Code, article nineteen: No blood may be drawn from a subject of the throne but by the seal of the Emperor himself, and the countersign of the Ministry of Rites. I have read the original. It is on the third shelf of the Seventh Floor. This register has been signed by neither."
The clerk’s face went tight. "The Consort speaks with the Emperor’s voice."
"The Consort speaks with her own." Li Xuan looked at the ten guards, who had begun, uneasily, to turn. "The Emperor has been in seclusion for three months. Whose seal is this?"
"Seize him," snapped the clerk. "He is a seditious..."
The ten guards hesitated, with their hands upon their spears.
It was a small hesitation. But it was enough, because behind Li Xuan, from the edge of the village, came the sound of a cart creaking, slow and heavy, and an old man’s voice. It was not the voice of a drunkard. It was a voice that had given orders across a mile of battlefield, and it carried down the whole length of that muddy village street.
"Who holds the gate?"
The guards flinched, as men flinch at a thunderclap they have heard in a dream.
Gu came up the street at a measured, steady pace, in his old black coat with the wolf’s head at the clasp. He had left the donkey standing in the road. He held the whole tally aloft in his right hand, and the bronze caught the afternoon light and threw it back in a long, cold flash.
A young guard at the end of the line, a lean boy of perhaps twenty with a wispy mustache and a captain’s red cord, had gone completely white.
"That tally," he whispered. "My grandfather had a drawing of that tally. He kept it in a box. He said it was..."
"Who holds the gate?" Gu said again.
The boy’s lips moved. And the answer came out of him, in a trembling whisper, as a thing learned in the cradle and never quite forgotten: "The... the Seventh Banner holds the gate."
"Who relieves the Seventh?"
"No one relieves..." The boy’s voice cracked. He dropped his spear. He went down on one knee in the dust, with his head bowed, and behind him, one by one, the other nine followed, until ten royal guards knelt in a row before an old man with clouded eyes in a patched black coat.
The wolf’s head tally glowed in Gu’s hand, faintly, like a coal. And as it glowed, the boy at the end of the line sucked in a sharp breath, and his hand flew to his chest.
"The... the hook," he gasped. "It’s loose. It’s been there my whole life. It’s..."
"Eased," said Gu quietly. "Only a little. Only while you stand in the light of this." He crouched, with a grunt, before the boy. "What is your name, son?"
"Shi Wei, Marshal." The boy was crying, without seeming to know it. "My grandfather was Sergeant Shi, of the Third Banner. He used to say you drank like a fish and fought like the sky."
"Both are true," said Gu.
The clerk had backed away, with his ledger clutched to his chest like a shield. He turned to run.
Li Xuan was already beside the table.
He set a slender stick of Soul-Resting Incense in the dust, and breathed upon its tip, and a thread of silvery smoke rose. Then he laid his open hand over the page of the register, and swept it, softly, once, in the gesture of a man brushing dust from a tomb.
The red ink paled.
It did not vanish. It faded, slowly, name by name, from scarlet to rust to brown, and from brown to a thin, dry dust that lifted from the page in a breath and drifted away on the wind. Nothing was left upon the paper but its pale grain. A murmur ran through the line of villagers. A woman gave a small, startled cry and put her hand to her throat.
It cost him. It cost him a great deal more than the cairn had, because these names were alive, and the blood in them was fresh, and each one was a thread pulled taut. His nose bled, and his knees shook, and for a long moment the street swam around him. He leaned on the broom.
Two hundred names, he thought, and tasted blood. A day’s drive from the capital. And the Ninth Ward has a hundred thousand.
A hand took his arm from behind.
"That is enough," said Gu, very low. "You will fall on your face."
"Yes," said Li Xuan. "I think I will."
He did not. But it was nearer than he liked.
By the time the sun began to go down, the clerk had fled up the road toward the capital, with his crimson robe flapping. The villagers were gathered around the well, weeping and laughing, and an old woman had pressed a bag of dried dates upon Li Xuan, and would not take it back. And Shi Wei, the young captain, stood at the edge of the road with his nine men beside him, helmets in their hands.
"Marshal," he said. "You should know. The registers are to be read tomorrow night, at the first drum, at the Registry Hall in the Ninth Ward. The Consort will preside herself." He swallowed. "And the Poison Sect’s Master came to the capital two days ago, with a coffin on a bier. They say it is for his Grand Elder. They say he will not leave the city until he has taken his satisfaction."
Gu looked at Li Xuan, and Li Xuan looked at the setting sun.
"One day," said Li Xuan. "We can be there by dusk."
"If the donkey cooperates," said Gu.
In the road, Tax Collector regarded them both with an expression of dark foreboding, and lowered his head, and began to chew a tuft of grass.