Chapter 44: The Hall of Records

They buried the Emperor on the fourth day.

It was a small funeral. Li Xuan had insisted. There was to be no great procession, no ten thousand mourners in white, no imperial tomb with its jade and gold. His father had asked, at the last, to die as a man, and so he was buried as one: in a plain wooden coffin, in a corner of the garden of the Eastern Palace, beside a plum tree, a few paces from a small mound that held a baby’s gray robe.

The Ward Elders came, in their plain clothes. The thirty thousand guards stood in a long silent line along the garden wall, helmets in their hands. Grand Secretary Lin Wenyuan read the Founder’s Code for the burial of a subject, in a thin, clear, trembling voice, and when he reached the last line, he stopped, and cleared his throat, and added, in a different tone, a sentence that was not in any book.

"He was a very poor Emperor," said Lin Wenyuan. "I should like it recorded that, at the end, he was an adequate man."

Li Xuan stood at the grave with his hands folded in his sleeves, and did not speak.

When it was done, and the people had gone, and the garden was quiet, he stayed a long while alone, under the bare branches of the plum tree. There was still snow on the ground. A single sparrow hopped on the path. He watched it for some time. Then he took a pinch of rice from his sleeve, and scattered it, very gently, on the stone, and went away.

"You are going to refuse," said Grand Secretary Lin.

"Yes," said Li Xuan.

"I thought that you would."

They were sitting in the old Ministry’s lower hall, in two plain chairs, with a charcoal brazier between them and a pot of cold tea. It was the seventh day. The Ward Elders had gone home, the clerks had been dismissed, and the long marble floor, which had been designed to make visitors feel small, lay dim and empty in the lamplight. On the table between them lay the green jade dragon seal, and a long scroll in the Grand Secretary’s careful hand.

"The wards will want a ruler," said Lin gently. "A people accustomed to a throne for three thousand years do not easily learn to do without one. And you have, if I may say so, the best claim in the realm. You are the Founder’s blood. You are the Crown Prince they had before the Third, and the only one who was ever loved. You broke the oath, you balanced the Founder’s ledger." He touched the scroll. "There is not a man or woman in the capital who would not give you the crown tomorrow."

"That is why I should not take it."

"No," said Lin. "I did not think that it would be."

He sat for a time with his white-bearded chin on his hand, and looked at the young man across the brazier, with something that was very like affection and very like regret.

"What do you propose?" he said.

Li Xuan reached out, and took up the green jade seal, and turned it in his hands.

"The Founder’s Code has nine hundred articles," he said. "I have read them all. They are a very clever book. They were written by a man who loved his realm very much and had no idea how to make it love itself. But they say, in article six hundred and twelve, that when the line of the throne is ended, the realm shall be held in trust by the Ministry of Rites and the voice of the wards, until such time as it shall choose."

"Until it shall choose," Lin said quietly. "What?"

"A king, or a council, or nothing at all." Li Xuan smiled a little. "I thought, perhaps, that it might like the chance to find out."

He held out the seal.

"The Dragon Seal is yours, Grand Secretary. Not as a ruler. As a steward. It does not belong to a throne. It belongs to article nineteen. Whoever holds it is only the person who signs, when the wards have agreed." He set it upon the scroll. "And when the wards decide that they would like another steward, you will give it to him."

The old man looked at it for a very long time, and did not touch it.

"I am seventy-one years old," he said at last.

"You have a very good clerk."

Lin gave a short, startled laugh. His thin hands closed round the jade. Then he drew himself up, and in the dim light of the Ministry’s great hall, for a moment, he looked a great deal taller than he was.

"I accept it," he said, "on the condition that I may ask you something."

"Ask."

"What of the Architect’s study? The people are asking. A little room behind the Founder’s statue, with a ledger written on the walls, and a desk. The priests say that it should be a temple. The scholars say it should be a library. The Ward Elders do not know whether to be afraid of it."

Li Xuan thought of the plain gray walls, and the dry brush, and the stool that was a little too low. He thought of a scroll that began If anyone should come after me who can read this.

"A Hall of Records," he said. "Open to anyone who can read. Staffed by anyone who will keep it. Not a temple. Not a treasury. Only a place where the accounts of the realm are written down, honestly, once a year, in black and white."

"Who will keep it?"

"Whoever the wards choose." He smiled. "I should like very much if it were someone who liked ink."

The letter from the Shrine of Lamps arrived on the tenth day.

It came by a crane of folded rice paper, which fluttered down the Archive stair on a cold dawn, and landed, with an air of exhausted dignity, on Ye’er’s head.

She read it three times, with her lips moving. Then she folded it very small, and carried it, at a run, down the aisles to the Fourth Aisle, where a thin young man in a patched blue robe was making tea.

"It is from the east," she panted. "It is from a priestess. It has your name in it."

He took it. He read it standing, with the kettle singing at his elbow.

To the one who returned the lamps,

I am the keeper of the Shrine of Lamps in the Eastern Province. For nineteen years I have watched a thousand women lie in the long gallery with their flames in jars beside them. Last night, at the third watch of the snow, the flames came home.

They woke, one by one, in the dark. Eight hundred and sixty-one. They rose and wept and asked for their children, and the oldest asked what year it was, and did not believe me when I told her. There are others who did not rise. A hundred and eighty-two lie still, and their breathing is slow, and their flames burn low in the jars. I do not know if they will wake.

Among them is a woman whose jar is empty. The priests say that her lamp was taken out of the Shrine seventeen years ago, and that without it she cannot be roused. I do not know whether you have it.

I write only to say that if you do, her flame must be fed. The old books of the Shrine are plain on it. A soul-lamp that has burned for nineteen years cannot be fed with oil, or fire, or any common thing. It must be fed from the Dragon-Vein itself: the living flow of the realm, as it was in the age of the Founder, running clear in the Nine Pillars.

The Pillars were broken in the Founder’s own time. No one now alive knows where they stand. But the old books say that they may be found, and mended, by one who can read the realm’s ledger. Perhaps that is you.

She is called Su Wanqing. She is alive. She is very patient.

Come when you can.

He read it twice.

Then he folded it carefully, and put it into his sleeve, beside the lacquer box that Ye’er had pressed into his hands that morning, and which was now, he noticed, very slightly warm.

"Is she going to die?" Ye’er asked, in a very small voice.

"No." He heard his own voice come out quite steady. "She is going to wait."

"For how long?"

"For as long as it takes to find nine Pillars." He lifted the kettle from the stove, and poured, and held out the first cup to the girl. "I think we had better start."