Chapter 34: The Poisoner’s Apprentice

Ji Ling’er’s sword was out before the girl had finished speaking.

The point of it hung a hand’s breadth from the thin, tear-streaked face, trembling very slightly in the cold, and a ring of frost spread out across the floor of the ice-house from beneath her boots, white and bright, crackling over the green moss in the beds. "Do not move," she said. "Do not so much as breathe on that vat."

The girl did not move. She shut her eyes tight and began, very quietly, to cry.

"Ling’er," said Li Xuan.

"She is Poison Sect. She has the vine on her face. She has been brewing this, in a vat the size of a bath, for the better part of a week, and there are forty-three children..."

"She is fourteen," said Li Xuan. "Perhaps. And she is afraid."

He did not raise his voice. He crossed the frosted floor with his broom on his shoulder, and stopped beside the sword, and laid two fingers lightly on the flat of the blade. It was cold enough to burn. He let them rest there until she looked at him.

"If you must," he said, "you may do it afterward. I should like to ask her something first."

The cold blue eyes searched his face above the silver veil. Then, slowly, with a small, reluctant exhale, the sword came down.

Li Xuan knelt. It was an awkward business, with his bruised shoulder and the broom, but he did it, and sat on his heels on the cold stone, so that his eyes were level with the girl’s. He took the little copper stove from his belt, and set it on the floor between them, and lit it from a flint. Presently, it began to sing.

"I am going to make some tea," he said. "I do not know what the Poison Sect drinks. I hope you will not mind mountain leaves."

The girl opened her eyes.

She looked at the copper stove, and the little pot, and at the thin young man in the patched blue robe who had come into a cold green room full of poison and was making tea. Her mouth worked. A small, wet, hiccuping sound came out of it.

"What is your name?"

"Ye," she whispered. "Ye’er. It means leaf. I was left on the sect’s gate when I was a baby."

"Ye’er." He poured a little into the lid of the pot, and held it out. "Drink. It will not hurt you."

She drank. Her hands shook so badly that the tea slopped over her wrapped fingers, but she drank the whole of it, and then she sat holding the lid in both hands, as one holds a small, warm animal.

"I did not know," she said, in a very low voice. "They said it was for the rich. Master Du said that rich people would pay a great deal of silver to have their enemies sleep. He said it was only a sleeping-draught. I was only supposed to tend the beds, and keep the vats cold, and put in the ice."

"Who set it in the canal?"

"Brother Shen. He is the Master’s second disciple. He and two others came in a cart, on the night of the new moon. They opened the gate, and poured in all of the first vat, and then they went away." Her face crumpled. "They said I was to finish the rest at sundown. I did not understand until I saw the people in the street, last night, through the crack in the door. They were carrying a little girl, and she was green all along her arm, and I..."

She could not go on.

Li Xuan was quiet for a moment.

"There are forty-three children in the Ninth Ward who will sleep until the moss reaches their hearts," he said. "We have an antidote, but there is only enough for twenty. Do you know of another?"

The girl stared at him.

"Every poison has its cure beside it," she said slowly. "It is the first law of the sect. The Master says so. It is why we are not simply butchers." She swallowed. "The moss has a root. A white one, very thin, at the bottom of the bed. It looks like a hair. If you boil it in cold spring water for the length of an incense stick, it draws the poison out of the blood. It is why we keep the moss in ice. The ice keeps the root from drinking the poison back."

Aunt Liu, who had come in softly behind them and had stood unnoticed in the doorway for some time, drew a very quiet breath.

"The white root of the Nine-Venom Moss," she said. "It is mentioned in the Herbal of the Southern Border. I had thought it was a legend."

"It is not," said Ye’er, and her voice cracked. "I have pulled it a hundred times. I know where it is."

She set down the lid. She stood up, on very unsteady legs, and wiped her face with the back of her wrapped hand, and walked to the nearest bed of pale, thick, fat green moss, and knelt, and put both arms into it to the elbow.

"Wait," Ji Ling’er said sharply. "It will poison you..."

"It is only poison if you are afraid of it," the girl said, in a small, stubborn voice, and drew out a handful of moss, and under it, tangled in the pale green, a mass of fine, white, hairlike roots, as thin as silk thread.

She held them up.

"There are thousands," she said. "Under every bed. We have enough for the whole ward."

There was a silence in the ice-house.

"Ling’er," said Li Xuan gently, without looking up, "the frost on the floor. Would you be so good as to let it go?"

She looked at him for a long moment. Then, with a small, grim, unwilling smile, she sheathed her sword, and the white rime across the stones melted away like breath from a window.

They worked until dusk.

Aunt Liu boiled the roots in cold spring water, in the ice-house yard, over three braziers, with Ye’er squatting beside her and murmuring directions in a small, serious voice. A hundred clerks came in a long relay from the Ministry of Revenue, carrying copper pots, and a hundred more carried the pots in procession through the streets of the Ninth Ward, from house to house, to the beds of the sleeping children. Ji Ling’er walked beside them with her hand on her sword, as much for company as for protection, and the people in the streets stood at their doors to watch.

By sunset, a girl of seven in a tenement near the old stele had opened her eyes, and asked for her mother, and the green tracery on her arm was fading like frost in the sun.

By midnight, thirty-one children were awake.

By dawn, all forty-three.

At the eighth sluice, Li Xuan opened the iron gate to its full width, with a spokes-wheel that three clerks turned together, and the Old Canal ran roaring through the capital for an hour, carrying the green mist away to the sea. He stood on the stone bank, with the cold spray in his face, and did not say anything for a long time.

"You are thinking of something," said Gu, who had come down from the Archive at noon and had been leaning, with his black coat and clouded eyes, against the sluice-house wall.

"I am thinking that the Poison Sect has a very good law."

"Every poison has its cure beside it." Gu’s mouth twisted. "A very good law. It is a pity that the Master who keeps it so carefully lets his students break everything else."

She was sitting on an upturned bucket outside the ice-house at dawn, with her wrapped hands in her lap and a blanket around her shoulders, when he came to find her.

She looked as though she had been asleep for a great many years and had only now woken up, and did not quite know where she was. The raw green vine on her cheek had been dressed with salve. Beside her, with the air of a creature who has taken a thing under his protection, Tax Collector was standing very close, with one hoof placed squarely upon the toe of her shoe, chewing a tuft of grass with enormous satisfaction.

"He will not move," the girl said, in a bewildered whisper. "I tried."

"He will not," Li Xuan agreed. "It is a form of respect."

She looked up at him. "What will you do with me?"

"I am not sure." He sat down on the ground beside the bucket, with his broom across his knees. "The Poison Sect will not be pleased with you."

"They will kill me."

"Possibly. I should rather they did not." He thought for a moment. "I keep an archive, Ye’er. A very small one. I have a shelf of old herbals, somewhat damp, that I have never had time to read. I have an old woman from the Feathered Frost Sect who needs an apprentice, though she would sooner be stung by a scorpion than admit it. And I have a donkey who seems to have taken to you."

"I am Poison Sect."

"You are a girl who put her arms into a poisoned bed because forty-three children were dying." He smiled a little. "I am not sure that the Poison Sect will remember that you were theirs."

Ye’er did not answer for a time. Her fingers plucked slowly at the edge of the blanket.

"Brother Shen said something," she said at last.

"Yes?"

"When he left. He did not think I could hear. He was talking to the others, at the door." She drew a breath. "He said the Master had gone to the palace, to the red place. He said the Master was a guest of the old men there now, and had promised them something. A drug. It is called Dream-Bone, and it is made from the same moss, but boiled for nine days instead of one." Her voice dropped. "It makes a person’s mind soft. As soft as milk. They put it in a cup. And then whoever is in the cup does not mind who takes them."

Li Xuan was very still.

A vessel, he thought. To hold the First Ancestor. A will that is soft as milk.

"And?" he said, very evenly.

"Brother Shen said that the old men will not wait for the snow." She was staring at the ground. "He said they have begun already, three days ago. They are calling in the guards. All of them. Thirty thousand, to the red place, to stand in rings. They are to be there before the snow, so that nobody can say that there was a night when they might have run away."

The wind blew a little dust across the lane. In the ice-house, the last of the pale moss was melting in the morning light.

Li Xuan said, after a long moment: "Thank you, Ye’er."

"I should not have told you."

"You should. It is the best thing you have ever done." He got to his feet, and held out a hand. "Come. The Archive has a great deal of damp."

She looked at the hand for a long time. Then she took it, and rose, and Tax Collector, with a profound sigh, shifted his hoof.

Behind them, Ji Ling’er said, from the lane, in a low, wry voice: "You are collecting strays, Senior."

"The Archive has room," said Li Xuan.

But his eyes, as he said it, were turned toward the east, toward the gray shape of the palace on its hill, and the red haze that hung over it like the breath of some great, slow, sleeping thing.

The thirty thousand were being called in.

And he had nine days, and an old man who had fewer.