The drum was a slow thing.
The drummer struck it with both sticks, once, and the deep, hollow boom rolled across the packed street of the Ninth Ward and shivered in the lantern-flames, and then there was only the sound of thousands of people not breathing. It would sound nine times. Between each stroke, the length of an incense stick. At the ninth, the Sanctuary would read.
Li Xuan walked toward the steps.
He did not hurry. He passed through the ring of silent people, and they parted for him as water parts for a stone, a thin young man in a patched blue robe with a broom on his shoulder. No one spoke. A woman with a baby looked at his face, and then quickly down. An old man crossed his hands in the sleeves of his coat, and bowed his head, very slightly, as to a passing funeral.
On the steps, the crimson guards stood aside at a flick of the Consort’s fan.
He stopped at the foot, ten paces from her, and bowed with his hands clasped.
"Consort."
"Oh, Xuan’er." She said it with a small, rueful laugh, as a woman greets a nephew who has come in with mud on his boots. "You were always going to be late. When you were seven, you were late to your own lessons for a whole month, because you had found a nest of baby sparrows in the plane tree, and could not bear to leave them." Her soft eyes searched his face. "You fell, you know. You scraped your knee to the bone. I bound it for you myself, in the Eastern Court, while your father’s tutors scolded."
"I remember," said Li Xuan.
"You cried only once. When the bandage went on." Her mouth curved. "I thought, here is a boy who feels everything and shows only a little. I was very fond of you."
The second drum boomed. The sound seemed to go through the stones of the street and up through the soles of his feet.
"Madam, I think you are still fond of me," said Li Xuan quietly. "That is why this is so hard to understand."
The Consort’s smile did not change. But something behind it grew very still.
"I never wished you harm, Xuan’er. I wished my son to live."
"He did live. For three months. On my veins."
"You killed him."
"He died because the veins did not belong to him," said Li Xuan. "Nothing that is taken whole and kept can be kept forever. I think you knew that." He paused. "The register of the Royal Physicians. The year the astrologer first said ’hollow.’ Three pages were cut away. I have held that gazette in my hands."
The fan stopped moving against her cheek.
It was very quiet. Even the nearest guards seemed to be holding their breath. And then the Consort laughed softly, and lowered the fan, and for the first time her face was neither gentle nor lovely. It was simply a woman’s face, tired and a little cruel.
"Hollow," she said. "Yes. That was the word. The astrologer used it kindly. He was an honest man. He said that my son had been born with no spirit-veins at all." Her small hands closed on the feathers. "No veins. A dantian that was only a name. In a house where a child without veins is a child without a future. Where a child without a future is, within a decade, a child without a life."
"So you hid it."
"I burned the report. I cut the pages. I told them he was frail, a delicate child, in need of a tonic and time." She gave a little shrug. "It would have worked. A frail prince can be loved. A hollow one is only buried." Her eyes lifted. "But your father is not a fool. He asked me, in the end, what sort of a medicine could mend a frail constitution. And I said: the veins of an heir. And he did not ask me what I meant."
Li Xuan said nothing for a long moment.
He knew, he thought. Not the whole of it. But enough.
The knowledge went through him as cold water goes through a cracked jar. It did not hurt as much as he had expected. Perhaps he had already known it, somewhere, in the dark of the third month, among the cobwebs.
"And now," he said, "a hundred thousand names, for a son who is dead."
"Not for my son." Her voice sharpened. "For the throne. For the next hundred years. Do you think the Nine Sects of the Wilderness have forgotten the Wall? The Ancestors’ great array is the only thing that keeps Great Liang a kingdom and not a feast. It must be fed." She leaned forward. "Would you rather have a living empire that eats a little of its children, or a free one that is eaten?"
"I should like to ask the children," said Li Xuan.
A flicker of something crossed her face. It might have been pity.
"The people do not know what they want, Xuan’er."
"They have named themselves in blood without being asked." He turned his head and looked, slowly, at the silent ring behind him, the thousands of bowed heads. "I think that is a different matter."
"Enough talk," said a voice like a rusty hinge.
The gaunt man in gray robes had stepped forward from beside the coffin. He was long and narrow, with sunken eyes and cheeks as hollow as a skull’s, and green runes crawled up the sides of his neck like creeping vines. He looked at Li Xuan the way a butcher looks at a carcass.
"Du Heng," he said. "Master of the Poison Sect. You killed my brother in a cellar, with a cup of tea." He laid a long gray hand on the black lid of the coffin. "This is for you. I had it carved the day the news came."
"Master Du," said the Consort, with a trace of impatience, "the reading first. You were promised the boy after."
"I was promised him," the Poison Master said, without looking at her. "I did not say when."
The third drum sounded.
It rolled across the ward like the footstep of some great beast, and with it came a low, collective moan from the crowd, thin and terrified. Li Xuan felt it in his own chest, an odd, faint tug, as though a hook had been set very lightly in the skin and drawn once, to test the line. He had no name on the register. The pull was only an echo of what passed through the thousands about him.
Beside him, Gu had stepped up, his black coat swinging, with the whole wolf’s head tally lifted in his hand.
"Mo Qinglan," he said, in the voice of the gate-captain’s command. "You will release the guards."
"Marshal." The Consort’s smile returned, warm as ever. "How good to see you in the light."
From the breast of her robe she drew a small piece of white jade, carved in the shape of a phoenix.
"Do you know what this is?" she asked pleasantly. "The oath is the Throne’s. And the Throne, until the Emperor wakes, is I."
She closed her hand.
The scream that rose from the steps was a terrible thing. Every guard on the steps, in crimson and gold, collapsed at once, with their hands clawing at their chests, and from the edges of the crowd came a ragged chorus of cries. Shi Wei, with his nine men behind the cart, doubled over with a gasp, and the boy captain went down upon his knees on the stones, and blood ran from his nose.
"The hooks," Gu said hoarsely. The tally in his hand flared, a cold, steady white, and a few of the nearest guards gasped and breathed again. But only the nearest. Only a few. "Stop it, woman!"
"The oath will end when you stand before the Sanctuary, Marshal, with that tally in your hand, in the place where it was sworn," said the Consort, very gently. "You are standing in the wrong place."
Li Xuan stepped between them.
"Madam," he said, "you have a lovely seal."
She looked at him. He did not move. He only stood, with the broom upon his shoulder, in the plain stance of a man who has nowhere in the world he would rather be.
"But I think you will find," said Li Xuan, "that the Founder’s Code has a great deal to say about the use of it."
The fourth drum had not yet sounded. In the silence, behind the Consort, with a groan like a sleeping giant waking, the great doors of the Registry Hall swung slowly open.
Within, in the light of a hundred lamps, stood a vast pillared chamber. In its center rose a black iron stele twice the height of a man, carved from base to crown with names, thousands upon thousands in fine red characters. And around it, in a perfect ring, stood a hundred royal guards in crimson and gold, with their eyes closed and their hands hanging at their sides, as pale and still as men who have been dead a very long time.
"The ring," said Ji Ling’er, from behind him, very softly.
Du Heng lifted his long gray hand.
A sweet, thick, sickly-green mist began to roll from his sleeves.