Chapter 27: Offerings on the Stair

He woke to the smell of rice porridge and the sound of a donkey chewing.

For a long moment, Li Xuan lay quite still, with his eyes closed, taking inventory. His ribs hurt. His arms hurt. His back felt as though a mountain had been laid upon it and lifted off again, with great care, a stone at a time. But the pain was a clean pain, the kind that comes of work well done and not of injury, and somewhere in the depths of his lower abdomen, a small, steady warmth was burning that had not been there before.

He opened his eyes.

The Moon-Vein Stones overhead had turned the gray of early evening. He lay on his straw mat in the Fourth Aisle, with Gu’s old coat beneath his head, and at the foot of the mat, perfectly calm, chewing a mouthful of what appeared to be a Ministry of Revenue ledger, stood Tax Collector.

"He got in somehow," said Gu, from his stool by the desk. "I did not have the heart to put him out. He has been very good company. He has eaten two volumes of the southern boundary records."

"Those were seventeenth-century," Li Xuan said hoarsely.

"He did not care."

The old man set down the porridge bowl he had been stirring and came over. He moved differently now. The stoop was gone. The shuffle was gone. He had the quiet, level, deliberate gait of a man who knows exactly how far every step will carry him, and his clouded eyes, for all their milk, seemed to see more clearly than they had in fifty years. There was no wine gourd anywhere in the aisle.

"Three days," said Gu. "I had to check twice that you were breathing."

"The names?"

"Home. Every one. The stele is only black stone now." Gu knelt, with a small grunt, and held the bowl to his lips. "Eat."

Li Xuan ate. The porridge was thin and tasteless and the best thing he had ever put in his mouth.

The Mind Palace gave its report in the usual unhurried way, between mouthfuls.

The seed in his lower abdomen had put out a fifth root, thicker than the rest. A hundred thousand small lives had passed through his body, and something of that passage had stayed behind, the way a river leaves silt in a dry channel. His bones were denser. His breath was slower. His blood ran warmer.

Body Tempering, Seventh Stage.

The Dragon-Vein Core, on its floor of moonlit jade, glowed a little brighter than before. Another black strand had loosened. Thirty-one, the palace noted, dryly, and began, as it always did, to work.

And there was something else, something small and strange and quite impossible to name. He could feel, very faintly, like the warmth of a hearth in another room, the presence of the Ninth Ward. Not its streets or its houses. Its people. A hundred thousand quiet hearts, going about their quiet business, a long way off.

He did not mention it to Gu. He was not entirely sure that it was real.

"What has happened up there?" he said instead.

Gu snorted. "Come and see."

The stair that led up from the Seventh Nether Floor to the surface was long, and narrow, and had not been climbed by a crowd in three thousand years.

It was climbed now.

Li Xuan stood at the bottom, leaning upon his broom and the old Marshal’s arm, and looked up. The whole length of the spiral, from the iron door at the top to the stone landing at his feet, was covered in offerings. There were bowls of rice, set neatly on every step, some still steaming. There were paper cranes, dozens of them, hundreds, pinned to the walls with bits of red thread. There were small clay lamps, burning, and incense sticks stuck in cracks in the stone, and bundles of dried persimmons tied with straw. A child’s drawing had been tacked up beside the door: a stick figure with a very large hat, holding what was unmistakably a broom, standing on a hill of very small people who were waving.

"They started coming the morning after," said Gu. "By noon, the guards at the top had stopped trying to turn them back. By evening, the guards were bringing rice." He tapped the child’s drawing. "That one is going on the wall."

"Gu." Li Xuan’s voice was a little unsteady. "I did nothing. I knelt there. They did it."

"I know." The old man’s mouth twitched. "They know it too. That is why they are afraid to say thank you to anyone else."

There were footsteps on the stair, slow and careful.

An old man in a plain gray robe was coming down, one step at a time, carrying a large scroll case under one arm and leaning upon the shoulder of a very young clerk. He was thin and stooped and as white-haired as an egret, with a long, drawn, scholarly face and sunken eyes that had seen very much and very little of it pleasant. He stopped three steps from the bottom, and set the scroll case down, and bowed so deeply that his white head nearly touched the stone.

"Grand Secretary Lin," said Gu, with open surprise. "They let you out of your house?"

"The Ministry’s clerks put on their best robes and walked to my door at dawn, and carried me here in a chair," said the old man, in a voice like paper. "I was dismissed for refusing the Consort’s countersign. I am now, it appears, restored. No one has told me by whom." He straightened, with some difficulty. "Lin Wenyuan, Grand Secretary of the Ministry of Rites. I come at the request of the people of the Ninth Ward."

"I am only a servant of the Archive," Li Xuan said, with a faint smile.

"You are the man who sat through the ninth drum," said Grand Secretary Lin gravely. He lifted the scroll case in both hands. "This is a petition. It has forty thousand thumbprints in red ink. Not blood. I made certain. They are the thumbprints of men and women who can write no better name than that, and who wished it known that they would like the young master to be their ruler."

Li Xuan did not take the scroll.

"I cannot," he said gently.

"Young master, the court is in ruins. The Emperor is sealed in the Sanctuary. The Consort has vanished. The Crown Prince is dead. The ministers are afraid of their own shadows. The people want you. The Code says..." The old man swallowed. "The Code says that when the throne is empty, the Ministry of Rites may name a regent by the voice of the realm. It is the voice of the realm. I have heard it."

"The throne is too dirty," said Li Xuan.

The Grand Secretary’s face did not change. But something at the corners of his mouth moved.

"I had heard you said that," he murmured. "I did not believe it."

"I do not want to rule, Grand Secretary. I am a bad hand at it. I like books and quiet." He leaned a little more upon the broom. "But there is something that I should like very much to see done, if you are willing to do it for me."

"Name it."

"Copy the Founder’s Code. All of it. Nine hundred articles. And have it posted in every market square in the capital, and read aloud by the ward criers three times a week, until every child can recite article nineteen." He drew a slow breath. "And let each ward choose one elder, by whatever means it likes. A baker, a carter, a woman who keeps a school. Let them sit together in the Ministry’s great hall on the first day of every month, and speak to you, and to the court, in the open, and be written down."

The old man stared at him.

"The wards have never had a voice in the court," he said slowly.

"No."

"It has not been done in three thousand years."

"Then it is long overdue." Li Xuan’s smile was tired, and quite genuine. "I told the Consort that I should like to ask the children. I should like to try it. If it fails, it fails. But I think they have been asked very little."

Grand Secretary Lin stood on the stair for a long moment, with his white head bowed, and the paper cranes stirring on the walls around him in the draught.

Then he laughed. It was a thin, cracked, delighted sound, like a door opening that had not been opened in years, and the young clerk beside him looked up in alarm.

"Forty years in the Ministry of Rites," said Lin Wenyuan, "and I never thought I would hear a Crown Prince say that."

"I am not a Crown Prince."

"No." The old man wiped his eyes, and bowed again, even lower than before. "You are something that I do not have a title for. It will do very well."

He took up his scroll case, and went back up the stair, step by shaky step, leaning on his young clerk, and the little paper cranes on the walls rustled as he passed.

Gu waited until he was out of earshot.

"There is more," he said quietly. "You will not like it."

"Tell me."

"The Poison Sect’s Master did not stay. Ji Ling’er’s frost had him by the collarbone when the ninth drum fell, and then the dome cracked, and the whole thing came apart. He left before dawn." Gu’s lip curled. "He took the coffin with him. But he nailed a card to the door of the Registry Hall first. One word. Later."

"He means to fill it."

"He means to try." The old man’s clouded eyes narrowed. "The Poison Sect has sent word to every sect on the southern border. They have declared a blood feud on the Seventh Floor of the Imperial Archive."

"A very small archive to feud against," said Li Xuan.

"A very large sect to feud with." Gu rubbed his jaw. "And the Consort is gone. Her rooms in the Eastern Palace were found open, and her jewel boxes empty. She walked out of the east gate before dawn, alone, on foot. No one saw her go. I do not think that a woman like that walks out of a palace with nothing in her hand."

Li Xuan was silent a moment.

"And my father?"

"Not a word. The Sanctuary has been silent since the dome cracked. There is a red fog over it. Nobody goes in. Nobody comes out." Gu hesitated. "The first snow is thirty days off, perhaps less. The Ancestors have lost a great deal of what they stored. But three men who have slept for three hundred years do not die of a cracked egg."

They stood together on the lowest step, and looked up the long, dim, flickering stair, at the cranes and the lamps and the rice.

A small, high, solemn voice spoke from above.

"Please, sir."

A little girl in a patched jacket stood on the landing, three steps up. She was not more than six. She held a very small broom in both hands, made from a bundle of straw tied to a stick, and her face was bright red with the effort of bravery.

"Grandfather said," she said, "that if the Broom Immortal came down, I was to give him this."

She came down one step at a time, and put the little broom in Li Xuan’s hand, and fled.

He stood holding it for a long time.

It was only straw, tied with a bit of red thread. It weighed almost nothing.

"I am not an immortal," he said at last, very quietly.

"No," said Gu. "But you are going to have to be something."

On the stair above them, in the lamplight, a single sheet of paper fluttered down from the top of the spiral and landed at their feet.

Gu picked it up. He read it, and his face went hard as stone.

It bore a single character, written in a bold, familiar, slightly shaking hand, in an Emperor’s black ink.

Come.