Chapter 55: What You Carry

The Blood-Blade Sect came up the road at sunrise in a long, slow column of black and red.

There were three hundred of them. They walked in good order, in ranks of four, with their curved blades at their hips and their faces set, and the cold pale light fell on their shoulders and glinted on the dark enameled hilts. At their head, on a tall black horse, rode a heavy, thickset man in a robe of dark crimson, with a square red beard and a scarred, sullen, intelligent face. Beside him, on foot, walked a gaunt gray figure with green runes crawling up the sides of his neck.

They stopped at the foot of the mountain.

The road ended there, at the first of the ninety-nine slips, a pale strip of bamboo set upright in the frozen earth beside the path, with a small clay bowl of cold tea at its root. Nobody on the Blood-Blade side so much as looked at it. They were looking up.

The Third Terrace of the Sky-Clearing Sect stood on its mountain shoulder, in the light of the rising sun, gray and old and serene. Nine hundred and ninety-nine steps ran up to it through the dark pines. They were clean. They had been swept, every one, and the pale stone shone in the cold like a ribbon of silver.

At the very top, on the last step, in front of the great door, a single figure sat with a small copper stove between his knees.

"That is him," said Du Heng softly.

He had stopped beside the black horse. His sunken eyes were fixed on the tiny figure at the top of the stair, and his thin lips had curled into something that was not quite a smile. "The cripple. The scholar. The Sweeper. He is drinking tea."

"I can see that," said Xue Wuya. His voice was deep, and rather slow, and entirely without humor. He was the Sect Master of the Blood-Blade, and had been for thirty-one years, and in all that time he had not once been made to feel foolish. He did not intend to begin now. "Is he alone?"

"There are three hundred and eleven of the others," said Du Heng. "They are in the First Terrace hall. They are afraid. The Sect Master is a Nascent Soul of the very earliest stage, and a kind man, and will not fight until he must." He shrugged. "There is a girl with a frost-sword who is Core Formation. And an old man with a sword, who is nothing at all."

"And the scholar?"

"A mortal. Body Tempering, perhaps, at the best." Du Heng’s voice was soft with something that was almost tenderness. "He is mine, Sect Master. I told you. I will take him myself."

Xue Wuya grunted.

He lifted one thick hand, and the column halted. He rode forward to the foot of the stair, alone, and sat his horse looking up at the long silver ribbon of steps. Then he threw back his head, and his deep voice rolled up the mountain like a wave.

"SKY-CLEARING! I am Xue Wuya of the Blood-Blade! The note on your Third Terrace falls due at the new moon, and I am a man who likes to be early! You have forty thousand taels, or you have a mountain." His red beard split in a grin. "I will take the mountain!"

Nothing answered.

He waited. A bird called in the pines.

Then, from the top of the stair, in a clear, mild, carrying voice that was not in the least loud, a thin figure in a blue robe said: "Good morning. Would you care for some tea?"

There was a long silence.

"He is mad," said someone at the back of the column, quite distinctly.

Xue Wuya’s face darkened.

"Take it," he said.

They did not go round.

That was the thing that Gu observed afterward, with a kind of grim and incredulous satisfaction. There was a perfectly good road. It ran up the mountain’s flank in a long, easy switchback, through the pines, to the First Terrace gate. It was the way that any sensible commander would have taken. But Xue Wuya was a proud man, and the steps were there, clean and bright and mocking, and at the top of them sat a man drinking tea.

He went up the stair.

The whole column went with him. They went in good order at first, three hundred men in black and red, with their blades drawn and the sun on their helms, at a steady, even, climbing trot. Gu, standing at the top of the First Terrace’s wall with his arms folded, counted them as they passed the first hundred steps and said, quite softly, to no one: "Here we are."

They did not notice it for fifty steps.

It began very faintly. A man in the middle of the column slowed, and frowned, and shifted something on his belt. It was a small leather pouch. It had not seemed heavy at the bottom. He hitched it up, and went on. Another man shifted the purse at his waist. A third rubbed his shoulder. By the hundredth step, the climb had slowed to a walk, and the sound of the column had changed. It was no longer the steady beat of marching feet. It was a murmur, rising, of men who were beginning to feel something that they could not name.

"What is this?" muttered a young disciple near the front. He stopped, and looked at his own hand, and the dark red phial that he held in it, a small thing the length of a finger, sealed with wax. It was one of a dozen that he carried in his belt. They were his pride. They had each been given to him by an elder, in the cellar under the Sect’s mountain, on the day of his first kill, and they were warm and faintly pulsing, as a living thing is warm.

They were very heavy.

He took a step. The phial dragged his hand toward the ground like a stone on a string.

"Sect Master," he said, in a thin voice. "Sect Master, I think there is something..."

He fell on his knees.

It was not a dramatic fall. He simply went down, as though his legs had been cut from under him, and the dozen phials at his belt struck the step with a soft, dull, wet sound, and rolled. The man behind him stumbled over him, and cursed, and then also dropped, with a groan, because the leather bag at his waist, which held what he had taken from a widow in the Black Willow valley, had suddenly weighed as much as an ox.

It went up the stair like fire through dry grass.

There were men who carried silver, and men who carried jade. There were men who carried hair, and men who carried a child’s tooth, and a small gold ring, and a letter. There were men who carried nothing in their hands at all, and who simply went down, one after another, with a look of blank, white, perplexed horror, because what they carried they carried in a place that no one could see, and that place had suddenly grown a great deal heavier.

By the two-hundredth step, the column had stopped.

By the three-hundredth, a hundred men were on their hands and knees.

By the four-hundredth, there were two hundred, and they did not rise.

"What is it?" screamed Xue Wuya. He had left his horse at the foot of the stair. He was standing on the three hundred and eighty-second step, with his thick legs braced and his red beard standing out from his face, and he was sweating. He had never in his life sweated at a staircase. "Get up! Get up! It is a trick! It is a talisman! Use your Qi!"

They used their Qi.

It did nothing at all.

A heavy, soft, quiet, relentless pressure lay on every man on that mountain, and it did not care what he cultivated. It was not a force. It was an accounting. It rose out of the stone, and the air, and the cold, and it measured what each man carried that was not his, and it laid the weight of it, to the grain, upon his back.

Xue Wuya felt it come.

It began in his hands. They were big, strong, scarred, capable hands, and for thirty-one years they had been wet with other men’s blood, and they had never once felt the weight of it. They felt it now. It settled on them, like a pair of iron gauntlets, and then in his arms, and his chest, and the thick crimson robe on his back. He staggered. Another step. His knee struck the stone.

Somewhere high up, a small cold voice, clear as a bell, was reading aloud.

Take nothing that you cannot carry, it said.

They reached him one by one, on the stair, in the cold clear light of the morning.

He came down very slowly, with his broom on his shoulder and an iron dustpan in his hand. He did not hurry. He stopped at each rank of the fallen men, and crouched, and looked into their faces, and when they flinched from him, he said, quite gently: "I am so sorry. I do not mean to alarm you. I only wish to ask if there is anything that you would like to put down."

For a long time, no one answered.

It was a young man, in the end. It was the one who had fallen on the hundred-and-twelfth step, with the twelve small phials spilled around him. He lay on his face on the pale stone with his cheek in the dust, and his breath came in short, shallow, rasping sobs, and he did not look up.

"They have names in them," he said, into the stone.

"Yes?"

"The phials. They told us that they were only blood. That it was only... for the pool. That it came from the herders, in the marches, and that they did not mind." His hand flopped open on the step. "They minded. I saw them. I took one from a boy with a goat."

Li Xuan said nothing.

He knelt beside the young man on the cold stair, and held the iron dustpan out, very quietly, as one holds out a bowl.

"If you would like to put them in here," he said, "I should be glad to keep them. I shall not break them. I shall see that they go home."

The young man raised his head.

He was no more than nineteen. His face was wet and pale and young, and his eyes, as they met Li Xuan’s, held a horror so vast and plain that Li Xuan did not look away.

"Home," he said, in a cracked whisper.

"If it can be done."

The young man’s hand shook. He gathered the phials, one by one, with his trembling fingers, and laid them in the dustpan, and with each, a little of the weight went out of him. He sagged. He drew a long breath, as a man does who has been under water. When the twelfth was in, he lay on the stair, gasping, and a thin pale ghost of a smile touched his lips.

"It is gone," he whispered. "The weight. It is gone."

"I am very glad."

A hand caught Li Xuan’s sleeve.

It was another man, a thickset veteran with a broken nose and a black-and-red sash. He had been lying three steps below, in the same cold sweat, and he was staring at the dustpan with a look of such fierce, appalled hope that his whole face worked.

"Here," he said hoarsely. "Take mine. Take... take them all."

They came after that in a rush.

It was not a thing that Li Xuan had planned. They came crawling, stumbling, groaning, up the stair and down it, from every rank, with their hands full of what they had taken and a look in their faces like men who have been carrying a thing for years in the dark and have just been given leave to set it down. The dustpan was full in a moment, and he emptied it into the clay jar that Ye’er had brought, and filled it again. He worked without speaking. He took the phials, and the purses, and the rings, and the little gold tooth. He took a letter, with a name on it, from a man who could not read. He took a lock of a child’s hair.

It took the rest of the morning.

The sun climbed. The pines dripped. And up and down the long silver stair, three hundred men in black and red lay in the cold light, light-handed, shaking, spent, and free, and not one of them rose to go.

"STOP!"

The cry rang across the mountain like a cracked bell.

Xue Wuya was on his feet.

He had not moved in an hour. He had lain on the three hundred and eighty-second step, face-down, with his thick arms spread, and no one had gone near him. But he was standing now. His face was a dull purple, and the red beard was matted with sweat, and he had pulled the heavy black blood-blade from his hip, and held it in both hands with the point wavering, as if it weighed a hundred jin.

"Do not touch my disciples!" he roared. "Do not touch... what is mine!"

"It is not yours," said Li Xuan.

He had risen. He stood on the stair, two steps below, with the iron dustpan in his hand, and his sleeve stained to the elbow, and he looked very small and very mild.

"Nine hundred and ninety-nine steps," he said. "You are on the three hundred and eighty-second. I do not think that you will reach the next."

"I am a Core Formation!"

"I know."

"I could crush you with my hand!"

"I think that you could," said Li Xuan, "if you could lift it."

Xue Wuya stared at his own hand. It was shaking. Beneath the black blade, in the folds of his crimson robe, something was throbbing, a heavy, dark, slow pulse, like the beating of a great and ancient heart. He knew what it was. He had not touched it in thirty years. It lay in a sealed iron casket in the cellar under his mountain, and the key was on a cord about his neck, and he had thought that no one living knew where it was.

The blood-pool.

It was not a pool. It was a thing of eleven thousand pearls, each as large as a quail’s egg, strung on a dozen cords of braided silver wire, each one containing the living blood-essence of a man or woman of the marches, taken one by one, over thirty years, by his disciples. He had worn it, in the dark, against his own heart, on every night of the last three decades. It was the thing that had made him a Core Formation, and kept him one. It was the reason that no one had ever stood against him.

It was a good deal heavier than it had been that morning.

"Put it down, Sect Master," said Li Xuan, very quietly.

"I... will... not!"

He tried to swing the blade. It slipped from his fingers and rang on the stone. His knees gave way. He went down on both of them with a crash, and his face twisted, and a long, low, animal sound of agony came out of him, and he clawed at the front of his robe, and tore it open.

The pearls fell out.

They spilled over his belly in a cascade, white and shining and obscene, and lay in his lap, and rolled onto the step with a sound like rain. There were so many. They lay in heaps. They gleamed. And in each one, faint and small and perfectly clear, as in a drop of dew, a face was looking out.

Xue Wuya knelt among them, quite still.

"I did not know," he said, in a thick, dazed voice, "that there would be faces."

No one answered him.

It was Du Heng who stopped them.

He had come up the stair behind them all, alone, at a slow, quiet, deliberate walk, untroubled. He had stopped, at last, on the seven hundredth step. He stood there in his long gray robe, with his hands folded in his sleeves and a small bronze box tucked under one arm, and looked down at the broken ranks of the Blood-Blade with an expression of mild and scholarly disgust.

"A pity," he said. "They were such useful men."

Li Xuan turned.

He did not look afraid. He looked, if anything, a little tired, as a man looks who has seen a great deal of what is wrong in the world and has not found it any easier to bear.

"Master Du," he said. "I am sorry. I did not wish you to be here."

"I am sure that you did not." The sunken eyes were bright with a fixed, hungry glitter. "But I have been wanting to meet you for a very long time, scholar. You killed my brother with a cup of tea. You broke my sect’s name in a canal. You took the only thing I had ever loved, which was a plan." His thin lips curled. "I have been looking at the stair, as I came. A very pretty trick. It measures what a man carries that is not his, and lays it on him. I should think that it would be a very heavy thing for any man to climb."

"I do not think that it would trouble you."

"No?"

"You carry nothing that is not your own," said Li Xuan. "I have looked. You took nothing from the villagers. You never touched the pearls. You have been a very careful man." He paused. "It is only that what you have taken, you have taken from the mind."

Du Heng went still.

"The bronze box," said Li Xuan gently. "I do not know what is in it. But Ye’er told me that you were fond of a thing called Dream-Bone. I think that you have made a good deal of it, and put it into a great many people. And I think that every one of them is heavy."

The wind blew a little dust along the stair.

For a moment, the gaunt man did not move. Then, with a very slow and deliberate precision, he lifted the bronze box from beneath his arm, and looked at it. His long gray hands were very white. His lips were pressed tight, and a thin line of sweat ran down his hollow temple, and Li Xuan saw, with a distant, quiet pity, that the weight had come, and that he was bearing it.

"I have carried this for three weeks," said Du Heng, in a low, odd, careful voice. "It was the lightest thing I ever owned."

"I know."

"I should have liked to keep it."

He opened his hands.

The bronze box fell. It struck the stone with a flat, loud, ringing clang, and the lid sprang open, and a thin pale green mist came out, curling, sweet and thick and sickly, like rotted honey. It did not spread. It rose in a slow spiral about the box, and a small clear voice from the top of the stair said, with great firmness: "Now, Aunt Liu!"

Something came flying through the air, a clay jar, trailing a thin bright stream of green tea. It broke on the stair beside the box. The mist met it. There was a soft hiss, like a hot iron plunged in water, and the green thinned, and paled, and went out.

Du Heng looked at it for a long moment.

Then he looked up, at the thin young man in the patched blue robe, and for the first time in all the long cold weeks since the Ninth Ward, he did not seem angry. He seemed only very tired, and very old.

"I will be back," he said.

"I know."

"I will be a great deal worse."

"I am sorry to hear it," said Li Xuan, and meant it.

Du Heng turned. He went down the stair, one slow step at a time, with his hands in his sleeves, and the fallen men on either side of him did not so much as look up, and at the foot of the mountain, he took the reins of a black horse that no longer had a master, and rode away east, alone, without looking back.

On the three hundred and eighty-second step, Xue Wuya knelt among his pearls, in the cold morning light, and wept.