They reached the capital at the last hour of the day.
The western gate stood open, but only just. The great leaves of timber were swung half-closed across the road, and a double line of guards in crimson stood before them with their spears crossed. Beyond them, the streets of the city were silent. No peddlers cried their wares. No children ran. The shutters were closed upon every house, and in the windows of the upper stories, white faces watched from behind the lattice.
It was the dark of the moon. The sky was already the color of a bruise.
"Halt!" shouted a gate-captain. "By order of the Consort, all gates are closed at sunset! No one enters!"
Shi Wei, who had insisted on riding beside the cart with his nine men at his back, said something low to the gate-captain. The man stared at the old black coat on the cart bench, and at the wolf’s head tally, and went the color of paper.
The spears came uncrossed.
The cart rolled through the gate, and Tax Collector, with the air of a creature that had walked four hundred li for no one’s benefit but his own, paused at the first crossroads and declined to go farther.
"I will go on foot," said Li Xuan, and climbed down.
"You will not go alone."
It was a calm, clear voice, and it came from the shadow of a gateway on the left.
Ji Ling’er stepped out into the failing light. She wore her white-and-silver robes and her silver veil, and the ice-jade sword hung at her hip. Frost lay thick upon the cobbles at her feet, and her breath hung in the cold air in a small, pale cloud. Behind her stood Aunt Liu with a lantern, and the four elders of the Feathered Frost Sect, with their hands in their sleeves and their faces drawn.
She bowed, deeply, with her hands clasped.
"Senior Li. You are late."
"By about an hour," said Li Xuan.
"By one hour," she agreed, and the faintest suggestion of warmth touched her cold voice. "I have been standing at this gate for nine days. I have a report."
She gave it as they walked, swiftly, down a side street toward the Ninth Ward, with Gu limping at Li Xuan’s elbow and the four elders pacing behind. The clerks had finished their work in the inner districts a week ago. In the outer wards, they were nearly done. Eight in ten of the capital’s people had given their blood-names. The Ninth Ward’s Registry Hall, a vast pillared building that the Ministry of Revenue had used for three hundred years to keep the city’s tax rolls, had been fitted with a dais, and the registers had been carried there in lacquer chests, under heavy guard.
"The notices bear the Consort’s phoenix seal," said Ji Ling’er. "Not the Emperor’s. I went to the Ministry of Rites myself. The Grand Secretary refused to countersign. He was dismissed the next morning, and his seal was taken."
"Article nineteen," said Li Xuan.
"I know. I read it." She glanced at him. "I have been reading a great deal of the Founder’s Code, lately."
"And your master’s counsel?"
Her step did not falter. "The Feathered Frost keeps no quarrel with Great Liang. I am only standing in a road."
"That is a very large road," said Gu, from behind them.
"It is a very stubborn Saintess," said Aunt Liu, and for the first time Li Xuan heard something like fondness in her voice.
The Ninth Ward was a district of low, crowded houses, narrow alleys, and old, sagging balconies, and tonight it was as quiet as a graveyard. In the street before the Registry Hall, thousands of people stood in a vast, silent ring. They had been summoned. They had come. Some held lanterns. Some held children. They stood in the dark, packed shoulder to shoulder, with their heads bowed, and above them, on the steps of the Hall, rows of crimson-clad guards stood with their backs to the doors.
A great drum hung from a wooden frame at the head of the steps, twice the height of a man. A drummer stood beside it, with his sticks lifted.
"The first drum," said Ji Ling’er softly, "is at dusk. After that the Sanctuary reads."
There was very little light left in the sky.
Li Xuan looked at the great hall, and the drummer, and the ring of silent people. He looked at his own hands. His nose had stopped bleeding. The seed in his abdomen was a steady spark, and he could feel the Dragon-Vein Core in the jade hall of his spirit, bright and golden and slowly clearing, with one more black strand dissolving as he watched.
Not enough, he thought. Not by a long way.
But a wall is stones that lean on each other, and he was not alone.
"Saintess," he said, "I shall need the doors."
"They will be opened." She did not ask how. "Aunt Liu, the elders with me. Senior Gu, Captain Shi, with your men, to the side stair." Her sword whispered half out of its sheath, and frost blossomed along its edge. "Senior Li, we will make you a road."
The drummer lifted his sticks.
In the great doors of the Registry Hall, a small side door opened, and a woman stepped out onto the top of the steps.
She was not tall. She wore a gown of deep crimson silk embroidered with golden phoenixes, and the long fall of her hair was held up with a pin of white jade. Her face, in the light of the lanterns, was gentle and lovely and entirely without age, with soft dark eyes and a small, kind mouth. She carried a fan of white feathers, and she laid it lightly against her cheek as she looked out over the silent ring of people.
Behind her, on a bier of black iron, lay a coffin. Beside it stood a gaunt man in gray robes, with sunken eyes and green poison runes crawling up the sides of his neck.
The woman’s soft eyes passed over the crowd, and the guards, and the frost on the stones, and came to rest, with a faint smile, upon a thin young man in a patched blue robe at the edge of the ring.
"Xuan’er," said the Imperial Consort, in a voice as warm as a mother’s. "You are late. We have been waiting for you."
And the first drum began to beat.