The Hall of the Ninth Rite ran, in a good year, at a loss of about forty taels.
Doha learned this on his fourth morning as a named rite-keeper, sitting on a stool in the west range while Elder Mo went through the fee ledger with the air of a man picking at a scab.
"Duman village. Two goats, sold, eleven hundred coppers." The elder's brush moved. "Cart, four days. Lime. Eight men fed for four days. Rope, which we do not recover. Stone, which we cut ourselves, so call it labor. That comes to fourteen hundred and change."
"So we lost three hundred coppers."
"We lost three hundred coppers and gained the northern half of a county that will not have to bury sixty-three people in eighty years." Elder Mo blotted the line. "Write that in the margin. Nobody ever does and it makes the book read like a suicide note."
The Hall had one hundred and six people who ate every day and forty rite-keepers who worked, and it was kept solvent by exactly one thing: great sects, which paid enormously and instantly and never, ever put it in writing.
"The Cloudfall Sect paid us two hundred taels last spring," said Elder Mo, "for four days' work and a very short walk. Do you know what for?"
"No."
"Neither do I. Neither does anyone but the Hallmistress and the two men who went, and one of those is dead of natural causes and the other has not spoken since." He set down the brush. "That is the arrangement. They pay us as though we were a physician they were ashamed of. We take it, and we keep the counties clean, and we do not ask."
Doha turned the abacus around on the desk without moving any of the beads.
"They hate us," he said.
"They're afraid of us, which is cheaper for them to call hate." The elder gathered his sleeves. "Nine great sects. Every one of them has a room somewhere with a locked door, and behind it is a body they cannot bury and cannot burn and cannot explain, and they know that the only people alive who can do anything about it are a hundred and six laborers in grey. That is not a comfortable thought to have about your inferiors. So they seat us below the servants, and they pay us in cash, and they sleep."
Word had gone around the compound in a day and a half.
It changed things in ways Doha had not predicted, and most of the ways were small and stupid and wore at him more than a large one would have.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Bori in the kitchen gave him a second egg and would not look at him.
Nineteen, who had shared a bunk row with him for six years and had once traded him a boot, stopped talking in the middle of a sentence when he came into a room, twice, in one morning.
Two rite-keepers he had never spoken to came and found him at the woodpile and asked him — courteously, with real deference, which was the horrible part — whether he would mind very much coming down to the cold room at some point and telling them if the man on the second table was doing anything with his left hand, because they had four days into him and it wasn't coming.
Doha said yes.
He went down that afternoon and stood beside a stranger's corpse for seven seconds and said, "He's not doing anything with his left hand. He's got his left hand hooked on something. There's a rope. Or a strap. He's holding a strap and pulling down on it while he does the rest."
And the older of the two rite-keepers, a man of about forty named Su Han, had said, "Oh," in the voice of somebody who has just seen the answer to a problem he has been staring at for ninety hours, and then had gone out of the room, and Doha had heard him stop in the corridor and stand there for a while.
He got very tired of that very quickly.
"One a month," said Grandmother Ok.
Her windows were open. It had turned cold in the night, properly cold, and the fourth day after the Cut was the first day of the year with frost on the north side of the wall.
"Hallmistress—"
"One Cut a month. Not two. Not one and a small one. Not one and a favor for Su Han because he asked nicely." She had a piece of paper in her lap and she was not looking at it. "Say the number back to me."
"One."
"Twelve a year. That is twice what I did in my best decade, and I was the fastest rite-keeper in four hundred years of this Hall, and you will note the tense." She looked up. "Twelve a year for forty years is four hundred and eighty. Do you understand what I have just described?"
Doha stood in the middle of the floor.
"A full life," he said.
"A full life, ending in a posture, at fifty-seven, having done four times the work of any rite-keeper who ever lived." Grandmother Ok's voice did not change at all. "That is the good outcome, boy. That is the version where everybody behaves. And the reason I am telling you the good outcome is that within a year there will be nine great sects and forty small ones who know what you are, and every one of them will have a body in a locked room, and every one of them will come here and be extremely reasonable about it."
She held out the paper. It was blank.
"Reading is not the difficult thing," she said. "Refusing is the difficult thing. And you have a flaw, and I am going to name it now while you are still young enough to be insulted by it: you cannot leave a thing unfinished. You proved that in a ditch in the rain in front of Mo Yeongsu when the sensible course was silence. It is a fine quality in a rite-keeper and it will be used against you by the first intelligent person who notices it."
Doha said nothing.
"Say it," said Grandmother Ok.
"One a month."
"Swear it on something you'd mind losing."
He thought about that for longer than he expected to.
"On the ledger line," he said. "Iron Coin. My first."
Grandmother Ok's mouth moved very slightly.
"That'll do," she said.