Chapter 29: The Man on the Throne

The Emperor of Great Liang came down the Founding Ancestor’s stair at the hour of the ox, alone, in a plain brown cloak, with the hood drawn up over his face.

Li Xuan was waiting at the bottom.

He had not asked anyone to wait with him. But in the shadows between the mahogany shelves behind him, he knew very well, a man in a black coat sat cross-legged on the slate with his clouded eyes closed, and a woman in white and silver stood with her hand on a sword hilt, perfectly still, among the dust of a thousand years. He had not asked them. He had not needed to.

The footsteps came down slowly, one at a time. They were uneven. A man with a limp, or a man who has not walked far in a long time, and whose legs have forgotten how.

The Emperor stepped off the last stone, and put back his hood.

Li Xuan had last seen his father on the white jade steps, upon a dragon throne, in the golden light of a ritual noon, with a face like a mask of ivory and gold. That man had been fifty and looked forty. The man who stood now on the slate of the Seventh Nether Floor looked seventy.

He had grown thin. His cheeks had fallen in, and there were hollows at his temples, and his beard, which had been black and carefully oiled, was white and ragged and untrimmed. His hands, which hung at his sides, were wrapped to the wrist in strips of yellow linen, and the linen was spotted with old brown stains. And his eyes, which had been so cold and level, had gone wide and bloodshot and strange.

He looked at Li Xuan for a long time without saying anything.

"You have your mother’s way of standing," said Emperor Li Tian.

"Father."

"I did not think you would come." The Emperor’s voice was dry and thin as old paper. "I had written come, and then I thought, he will not. I should not, if I were he." He gave a very small, strange laugh. "I am not accustomed to being refused. I find that I do not know how to bear it."

"You are bleeding," said Li Xuan.

He was. The yellow linen on the Emperor’s right hand had begun to darken, in a spreading stain, at the palm.

"It is the lamp," said Li Tian, looking at it with a curious detachment. "Every day, at the hour of the tiger, and again at dusk. A little, from each hand. It has been so for forty days. The Ancestors say that it is a small price for the throne." He let the hand fall. "I came to tell you that it is not."

He sat down.

It was not a decision. His legs simply gave out, and he lowered himself heavily on the nearest stool, a three-legged thing of cracked wood that had belonged, for five months, to Li Xuan, and looked about him at the long shelves and the dim lamp and the patched straw mat in the corner, where a young man had slept for three months on a damp slate floor.

"This is where I put you," said the Emperor, very quietly.

"Yes."

"I thought it would be a death sentence. A slow one. I thought you would sit among the cobwebs, and rot, and, in a year or two, be forgotten." His bloodshot eyes went round the Fourth Aisle. "I thought it was merciful."

"I know."

"It is very quiet." He sounded almost puzzled. "It is the quietest place I have ever been in my life."

Li Xuan said nothing. He took down the red-clay teapot from its shelf, and set it upon the little copper stove, and lit it. The charcoal caught. The water began, faintly, to sing.

The Emperor watched his hands. "I did know," he said. "I want you to hear it from me. When the Consort came to me with her story of a frail child and a medicine, I did not ask what it meant, because I knew. I knew that the boy was hollow. I knew that she had hidden it. I had known for years." His voice cracked. "I did not ask, because the Ancestors had told me that they would require a body. A vessel. A young body with pure veins, to hold the First Ancestor when his own body failed. And I had two sons."

The water boiled. Li Xuan did not move.

"A vessel," he said.

"Yes. Not for the Consort’s boy. For him." The Emperor looked at his bandaged hands. "The First Ancestor is three thousand and some years old. He has slept and woken and slept again, each time a little thinner, and he has run out of sleeps. He needs a new body, and an inheritance, the Founder’s sword art, and the Dragon-Vein Core, to anchor him. You were that body, Xuan’er. You were the one the Founder’s blood had marked. I was to give you to them at the Rite of the Ancestors, and keep the throne."

"And you did."

"I did." His father’s voice was hardly a whisper. "But the Consort took half your veins for her son before the priests had finished, and you cut away the rest, and the First Ancestor could not use you. So they waited. They waited for the Consort’s boy to die, and for the Western Army’s oath to be ripe, and for the first snow, when the Dragon-Vein runs highest. At the first snow they will perform the Rite of Re-Founding. They will burn the oath of thirty thousand men, and the blood of an Emperor, and the heart of the dynasty, and the First Ancestor will rise again, young, in a new body, with the sword art of the Founder in his hands." His eyes lifted. "Whose body, I do not know. I think he will have to find one."

"Mine," said Li Xuan, quite softly.

"Yours," said Emperor Li Tian.

There was a long silence. In the shadows between the shelves, nothing moved.

Li Xuan poured the tea. He set one cup before his father, and took the other in his own hands. The leaves were mountain tea. They tasted of nothing in particular. He drank, and let the warmth go down.

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because I am a lamp," said the Emperor.

He said it simply, as a man says that he is thirsty.

"Each Emperor of Great Liang is a wick," he said. "That is the secret of the throne, and no one outside the Sanctuary knows it. The dynasty is three thousand years old, and every one of those years has been paid for in blood, a little at a time, by the man on the throne. Ninety-nine of us. My father was ninety-eight. He died at fifty-three, and no one ever asked why." He turned the cup in his bandaged hands. "I will be dead by the first snow. They will not need me after the Rite. A lamp that has burned its last drop is only a lamp."

Li Xuan said, very gently, "And you would like not to be."

"I would like to die as a man," said Li Tian, "and not as a lamp." He put down the cup. He looked up, and for a moment, the ivory mask was gone. There was only a frightened old man in a brown cloak, with a very small, very tired, very human hope in his face. "I came to give you what I have. It is not much."

He put his hand inside his cloak and drew out something wrapped in yellow silk. He laid it on the stool between them, and unwrapped it.

It was a seal.

It was a block of green jade, as big as two fists, carved on top into the shape of a coiling dragon, so old that its edges had worn smooth. On its base, in the oldest form of the old script, were four characters.

"The Dragon Seal," said Li Xuan.

"The Emperor’s own. The only seal that can satisfy article nineteen." Li Tian’s bandaged fingers shook. "I have not used it in forty days. The Consort used a copy, and the Ancestors did not care. With this, you may countersign what you wish. The wards. The Code. The decrees of the Grand Secretary. They will all be law."

"I do not want to rule."

"Then give it to the old man with the white beard. But take it." His eyes held Li Xuan’s. "I do not know what else I can give you. I have thought and thought. I have given you everything else that I had to give, and none of it was a gift."

Li Xuan looked at the jade seal for a long moment. Then he took it up. It was cold, and very heavy, and it smelled faintly of old blood.

"There is more," said the Emperor.

"Yes?"

"The red dome of the Sanctuary will not take you at the main gate. It will crush you. It was built to." He leaned forward. "But there is a door, behind the Founder’s statue in the inner hall, that no Emperor has ever opened. It is the only door in the Sanctuary that the Ancestors did not build. They have tried to open it for three thousand years. It opens, so the old records say, to a man who can draw the Founder’s line."

"The Founder’s line?"

"I do not know what it is. I have only seen it carved on the statue’s sword hand. A single stroke." His father’s face was a mask of weary honesty. "No Li has ever been able to draw it. I thought, perhaps, if anyone..." He stopped. "I do not know why I am telling you this."

Because you are afraid, Li Xuan thought, and you have nothing left, and I am the only person who has ever listened.

He did not say it. He sat very still, with the tea cooling in his hands, and in the shadows behind him, a small, indrawn breath that might have been Ji Ling’er’s.

"I will think about it," he said at last.

The Emperor nodded slowly. He did not seem disappointed. He seemed, if anything, relieved, like a man who has set down a load he had carried for a very long time, and has found that he can still stand.

He rose. He pulled up his hood. Then, at the foot of the stair, he turned back, and looked at his son, standing in the dim lamplight with his broom, and a thing passed across his face that was not an Emperor’s.

"Xuan’er."

"Yes, Father?"

"Your mother did not die of a fever."

The teacup in Li Xuan’s hand did not move. Nothing in him moved. It was as though the world had stopped, and was holding its breath.

"The lamps," said the Emperor, very low. "Not all of them are lit for me. You will find a shrine, in the east. Ask the Grand Secretary about the Shrine of Lamps." His voice cracked. "I am sorry. I am so sorry. I did not know how to say it, and now I have said it badly, and there is no time."

A thin red line had appeared on the side of his neck, just under the hood, like a thread drawn tight. He put up one bandaged hand and touched it. His face went gray.

"They have noticed," he said. "I must go back."

He went up the stair as he had come down, one step at a time, unevenly. At the top he did not look back.

Li Xuan stood a very long time with the cold jade seal in one hand, and the empty tea in the other.

Then, from the shadows, a quiet voice said, "He is telling the truth about the fear."

"Yes," said Li Xuan.

"He may not be telling the truth about the rest."

"No." He set down the cup, very carefully, upon the stool. "But he said a word about my mother. And I think that is the one thing in all of this that he did not mean to say."

Gu came out of the dark, slowly, with his black coat swinging, and laid a hand on his shoulder, and did not say anything at all.