Chapter_42_The_Three_Pages

It was the third day since the roster had gone into the committee, and still no word.

Chen Jin was in his sixth day held to "stay within the harbor." The arsenal ran as usual: the three guns were oiled and covered, the old hands worked their benches, and the wall now answered to the defense officer's rulebook. Chen Jin could hear the difference through the shop door—the watch calls ran shorter than before, and along the parapet the lamps burned every other post. The lamp oil saved went into the ledger, where it looked tidy. He heard it and said nothing. The wall was not his anymore; the regulation book was clear on that.

Days under a summons had their own shape. He copied out the maintenance accounts for the three guns, checked the work tickets to month's end, counted the reloaded brass one more time. These were jobs other men used to share; now they sat in one pair of hands. When the counting was done it was dark. He could not go out, so the accounts went out for him.

Before noon Wen Heng came by with her medical box and stood at the shop door without coming in. She asked about stock—gauze, splints, gun oil—small numbers, each one entered in her book. Nothing the offices bothered to ask after, and she wrote all of it. Watching her write, Chen Jin thought that her books, stacked, would be no thinner than the stack of signed sheets on his table.

When she finished she said one thing more: "The heavy cases in the casualty tent. Their extra ration was approved three days ago. No grain has come."

He asked whose seal was on the requisition.

"The ration batch marked for the casualty tent," she said. "It goes by requisition slips."

At the word slips Chen Jin said nothing. The requisition slips were entered in a book he knew—Bi Chengzhang's book. Wen Heng gathered her box and left, tucking the book into her arm as she went, the same gesture he had seen once before, on the night she turned to the three middle pages under the lamp.

Eleven heavy cases lay in the casualty tent, all carried in from beyond the wall on the night of the fight. Wen Heng's book kept one page to a man: the wound, the dressing days, the grain owed. Two of the eleven she watched closest—an old soldier who had lost half the plate off his shoulder and could now sit up against the wall, and a recruit whose leg had closed but would not yet bear him. On the three pages of the night fight, both names were circled. A circle meant this: if the extra ration stopped, the man went back flat.

The grain was the batch the Assembly had granted the tent when the fleet came in—a month's allowance, marked for the wounded. It should have moved through the grain desk on approved slips, and the slips needed Bi Chengzhang's side to sign.

The first issue, eleven days back, had come to four parts in ten. Wen Heng had noted it and blamed the road. The second, five days later, the slip was approved, but the grain never came down — the keeper said it was still being approved upstairs, but what was approved had walked out on a different requisition slip. Today she went to the desk to ask after a third issue, and got the same answer.

She copied down both issued amounts, and beside them the amount the grant said was owed. Two sums, laid face to face. The keeper looked at his own ledger, not at her. "I'm not asking about your ledger," Wen Heng said. "I'm asking about eleven men in my tent, and where the share marked for them has gone."

"The slip says what the slip says," the keeper said. "What it approves, I issue. What it shortens, I shorten."

"And whose hand shortens it?"

The keeper closed his book and said that column was not his to know.

Wen Heng stayed where she was. She opened her own book and read the eleven names out, one by one—not for the keeper, but for the women queuing at the desk behind him. The women might not read the page, but they knew Wen Heng, and they knew whose sons those names belonged to.

What Wen Heng did after that, Chen Jin did not see. He pieced it together later, from other mouths, and it went like this.

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She did not go to the committee, and she did not go to the defense officer. She went back to the tent, took the three pages of the night fight out of her book, and from under the medicine chest drew a year-old receipt—the winter grain the Assembly had granted last year. Three pages of names, one receipt, two pages of issued amounts: she laid them under the lamp and matched them line by line.

Toward the small hours she copied the shortfall onto a fresh sheet in a different ink—which batch, how much granted, how much arrived, and through whose requisition slips the missing share had walked. On those slips sat the approval stamp. She lifted it onto wax paper, lightly, well enough to show half of one character: Bi.

Her printing she had learned from the apothecary years ago—medics copy prescriptions and lift stamps for the record; it is an old habit of the trade. Her hand had steadied these months, and the half character came off clean, even the gap in the stroke legible. She was not lifting it to accuse. Accusing was other people's work. She wanted one thing that matched: book against slip, slip against stamp, stamp against a man. Once the proof reads the same, whoever turns the pages, the argument is over before it starts.

She looked at that half character a long time. She knew the stamp. It sat complete on last winter's grain slips; back then it had been whole.

She rolled the three pages, the two receipts, and the shortfall sheet tight, sealed the roll with wax, and set her own medic's seal into it while it was soft. Then she sat a while, and blew on the wax to be sure it had hardened.

The trouble came at night, at the west wall.

A small band of Hound-class—three out of five, probing—worked the old gap between the west wall and the berth. They did not rush. They crawled along the foot of the slope, moving and stopping. In the old days, lamps burned at every other post and anything on that slope showed itself at once; tonight the lamps were dark at every other post, and in the two stretches of shadow the worms came inside thirty paces before the watch saw them.

The sentry blew wrong. By the old rule it was two short and a long, and the wall stands to; the recruit on watch blew two longs, the rear posts heard retreat, and men started down off the wall. Halfway down, the call of the gap came through the muddled horns—someone at the breach shouting with a cracked voice.

In the arsenal, Chen Jin heard exactly that. He pulled the bar off the door and went out with his blade. The arsenal was close to the gap. When he arrived, the first Hound-class was already up on the old bricks. He did not call, and did not ask the line to open—he came in from the flank. His way of it was the old way: never square on, never against plate. The first stroke went to the neck seam, his body already clearing half a step as it landed; the second worm was halfway into the gap, at its narrowest, and he came around the brick stack and took it backhand, pulling the blade free before it stopped moving.

[Kill confirmed: Hound-class x1. +10 Embers.]

[Kill confirmed: Hound-class x1. +10 Embers.]

[Embers: 1538]

The panel lit three times; he gave it no second look. The third worm stopped at the foot of the slope, turned, and was gone. The wall's rifles spoke only then, chasing the tail of it, and hit nothing.

Chen Jin wiped the blade and stepped down off the gap and stood behind the brick stack. The defending line closed up around him, muzzles outward, a full ring. Nobody spoke. The recruit who had blown the wrong call stood nearest, holding his whistle, knuckles white. As Chen Jin passed him he said, "Two short, one long. Next time, remember it." The recruit nodded hard and made no sound.

The defense officer came with men while the blood was still wet. He asked first whether anyone had died; told no, his face eased by half, and then he saw Chen Jin and set again. "Why are you here?" Chen Jin said, "The arsenal is close. The wall goes back to you."

He sheathed the blade and went out through the ring of men without looking back, and the ring let him through and closed behind him. Nobody mentioned the whistle that had been blown wrong, and nobody mentioned why the lamps were dark. Both would need owning at daylight, but not tonight, and not to any one of them.

Back in the arsenal the lamp was lit, and the old hand waited at the door with a bundle in his hands.

The bundle was coarse hemp, rolled tight, sealed with a line of wax. In the wax sat a small red seal: Wen. The old hand said it had come from the casualty tent before dark; the man who brought it put it down and left with one sentence—for the general, in the morning.

Chen Jin opened it. Three pages, the originals of the night-fight casualty roster, the old fold still showing where the lamp-thumbed crease had worn. Beneath them, two receipts and one fair-copied sheet of shortfall, line after line: granted, issued, missing, and at the end of the line a lifted stamp showing half of one character—Bi. Innermost, a note of one sentence:

"In the morning, the people who should see it will all be there."

Chen Jin rolled the papers back the way they had come, and had the old hand fetch fresh wax, and sealed it again. He pressed the seal the way she had, having none of his own, and used his thumb in its place, pressing hard. The bundle went back into its roll, no thicker than before, and heavier in the hand.

When the old hand had gone, the shop was quiet. The three covered guns stood in the dark, and the new wax hardened slowly under the lamp. Chen Jin thumbed the wick down but did not blow it out. The morning would want eyes; the lamp should stay.