Chapter 61: The Threads

The Deciphering Eye was a very great nuisance.

He had not expected that. He had thought, in the first hour, lying awake on a hillside under the cold stars with the golden thread still pulling gently at his chest, that it would be a thing of solemn majesty, a power, a gift, a revelation of the hidden structure of the world. He had pictured himself looking at a mountain and seeing its secret, or at an enemy and reading his heart.

He had not pictured the donkey.

"Tax Collector," he said, on the morning of the second day, in a low and appalled voice, "owes a great deal."

Gu looked up from the fire. "To whom?"

"To a man named Ma. In Willow Ford." Li Xuan stared at the animal, which was standing in the shafts with a look of bland, dreamy, sinless serenity, chewing the cuff of Guo Qing’s sleeve. A faint, thick, muddy-brown thread ran out from its left ear, away to the north, and wavered on the wind like a piece of dirty string. "It is a very long thread. It is a debt of... nine persimmons. And a hat."

"It ate his hat?"

"It ate the hat, and the persimmons, and I think, on at least one occasion, the entire toll-book."

Gu put his face in his hands.

It was a very small, very silly thing. But it was a great deal harder to ignore than he had hoped. The Eye did not turn off. It did not blink. It simply saw, from morning to night, in a soft, steady, patient, relentless glimmer at the corner of every glance, the long slender cords of what was owed that ran between every living thing on the face of the earth. A farmer owed his field a rest. A child owed her mother an apology. A dog owed the baker a bun. They crossed and recrossed the road in an endless gossamer web, bright and dim, thick and thin, gold and gray and green and, here and there, a deep dull black.

He could not look at a face without seeing the strings.

It made him a very poor companion for three days.

It was Ji Ling’er who finally brought him out of it.

She did it, as she did most things, without ceremony. They were walking at the tail of the cart on the evening of the third day, along a dry stony road between two low ridges, in the last red light, and she fell into step beside him, hands behind her back, looking straight ahead.

"You are staring," she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"At me. You have been looking at my left shoulder for a quarter of an hour." Her voice was perfectly even. "I should like to know why."

He went red to the ears.

"It is the Eye," he said. "I do not... it is not a thing that I do on purpose. It shows a line. From each person to something they are owed, or something they owe." He stopped, cleared his throat, and began again. "Yours goes east."

"East."

"To the sea. It is a very long one. It is quite silver." He fixed his eyes carefully on the horizon. "I think that it is a thing that you have promised yourself."

She was silent for a few paces.

"And the other one?" she said.

"What other one?"

"You said a line. Not the line." She turned her head. Her pale eyes were quite steady, and quite calm, and her mouth was set in a little firm line that had a faint, strange, wavering curve at one corner. "I think there is another."

He said nothing. He found that his tongue had gone entirely stiff.

There was another. It was very thin, and bright, and new. It ran from the middle of her breast, a hair’s breadth to the left of the silver, not toward the east, but sideways, a very short distance, across the dusty road, and ended in the front of a patched blue robe. It was a quite remarkable color. It was the color of a very small, very warm, very early flame.

"It is short," he said, rather faintly.

"Is it?"

"It is only a few feet."

"And whose debt is it?"

"I do not," said Li Xuan, "think that I am entitled to say."

She looked at him for a long time. Then, very slowly, the corner of her mouth went up. It did not smile, precisely. It was something a good deal more dangerous.

"Then I shall not ask," said Ji Ling’er. "I shall only say that if it is a debt, I should like it to be paid in full." She took her hands from behind her back, and clasped them in front of her, and added with perfect gravity: "At the proper time."

She lengthened her stride, and went ahead.

Gu, who had not been listening, and who had been looking with an expression of profound innocence at a passing hawk for the last three minutes, said to the hawk, in a clear, sweet, carrying voice: "A very fine evening."

He asked about the old man’s thread on the fourth night.

It was a long one. It had been tugging gently at the Marshal’s breast since the shepherd’s hut, a thin gold cord, like a bit of spun sunlight, running away northwest over the moonlit land to some far-off point beyond the edge of sight. He had looked at it, and looked away, and looked at it again. He did not wish to pry. But it had a way of drawing the eye, like a lit window at night.

Gu did not ask what he was looking at.

They were sitting on a flat rock beside the road, a little apart from the others, in the cold quiet starlight. The old man was whittling a bit of willow with a clasp-knife, in short slow curls, and did not raise his head.

"It is a woman," he said.

Li Xuan blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"The thread. You have been looking at it for three days with your mouth slightly open. I thought that I should save you the trouble of asking." The curls of willow fell. "It is a woman. In the west. She baked bread."

"At the Pass?"

"In the gate-town, below the wall. She had a little shop, near the well. She baked a very hard, very dry brown loaf that the whole garrison called the brick, and complained of daily, and bought by the dozen." The knife paused. "Her name was Shu. Lin Shu. She was a widow. Her husband had been a sergeant in the Fourth Banner. She was thirty-four when I was forty-two, and she had the sharpest tongue in the Western Reaches, and I owed her three silver bits for a month of bread."

"Three silver bits."

"And a letter."

"What letter?"

"I said that I would write her one." The old man’s weathered face was quite expressionless. "From the capital. When I went to argue with the Ancestors. I said that I would be back in a fortnight, and that I would write." He turned the bit of willow over in his fingers. "They put me in a cellar, boy. I did not write."

The fire popped, in the distance.

"Is she alive?" said Li Xuan, in a very low voice.

"I do not know."

"The thread says that she is."

"Does it?" The knife stopped. The old man sat quite still, with the curl of willow suspended from the blade in the starlight, and for a long while he did not breathe. "It says..."

"It is very thin. But it is not broken." He hesitated. "I think that she is waiting. I think that she has been waiting a long time."

The old Marshal did not answer.

He sat there under the great cold stars, in his black coat, with the knife in his hand and the stick across his knee, a spare, gray, upright figure of an old soldier who had walked into a cellar fifty years ago and walked out again as though from a very long sleep. His face, in the starlight, did not move. But a single bright track went down the side of it, from the corner of the dark eye to the edge of the gray beard.

"Three silver bits," he said, to no one. "It is a great deal of bread."

Then he took up the willow stick again, and went on whittling, in the dark, in short slow curls, and Li Xuan sat beside him in silence, and did not say another word.

The Heaven’s Edge Toll stood on a rise at the end of the long dry plain, where the road forked.

It was a great gray gate-house of stone, as large as a fortress, with a high arched passage and a pair of guard-towers and a banner of pale gold silk streaming from every battlement. There were two hundred soldiers in the yard, in gilded half-armor, with long pale spears. There was a table, and a clerk, and a huge iron-bound chest. And over the arch, in tall square letters of gold, a single line:

THE JIANG CLAN. All Who Pass, Pay.

"A toll," said Gu, from the bench. "On a road that nobody built."

"It is the only road to the Platform," said Guo Qing, rather unhappily. "The others go through the mountains. There are bandits."

"Who do you suppose are the bandits?"

Guo Qing opened his mouth, and shut it again.

They halted in the long shadow of the arch. A clerk came out, a plump, shiny, smiling man in pale gold silk with an ink-stained thumb, and bowed with a flourish.

"Travelers! Welcome to the Jiang Clan’s Heaven’s Edge. It is a toll of fifty silver for a cart, ten a head, and a fee of five for any beasts of burden, and a further..." His eye fell on the donkey. "...a surcharge of twenty for a donkey of exceptionally ill-tempered appearance."

Tax Collector regarded him with a profound and settled contempt.

"We are guests of Jiang Ming," said Li Xuan.

The clerk stopped.

He looked at the thin young man in the patched blue robe. He looked at the broom, and the cart, and the old man with the sword, and the girl with the ice-jade at her hip. The smile did not leave his face. But something in it went very slightly stiff, like a coat of paint drying in the cold.

"Ah," he said. "The custodian. How very... prompt." He cleared his throat. "I am afraid that I shall have to consult."

He went inside. They waited. Two hundred soldiers watched them without moving. A raven walked along the top of the gate-house, and looked down.

Li Xuan looked at the clerk’s retreating back.

A thick black thread ran out of the man’s chest, from a point just below the breastbone. It was very dark and very heavy, as thick as a man’s thumb, and it hung in the air behind him like a rope, trailing away across the yard, through the arch, and out over the plain toward a distant gray smudge on the horizon that might have been a ruined village. At the end of it, a long way off, he could feel something. It was very faint. It was a great many people, in a small sad place, who had been waiting for something for a very long time.

"Who is he?" he said softly.

"The toll-clerk."

"I think that he has been taking a little more than the toll."

Gu looked at him.

"Boy," he said quietly. "Not here. Not now."

"No." He folded his hands in his sleeves. "But I think that I shall remember his face."

The clerk came back, shiny and smiling, with a thin, stern, middle-aged man in a robe of better cloth, who had a long nose, a gold chain, and a small gold abacus at his belt. The newcomer bowed, slightly, with great correctness, and said in a flat even voice: "The young master is expecting you. You may pass. There will be no toll."

"We are very grateful."

"It is not a favor." The thin man’s eyes were cold and polite. "It is a courtesy. The Jiang Clan always extends a courtesy to a guest." He paused. "I should, however, advise you to leave your weapons at the gate. The Platform does not welcome drawn steel."

"I have no weapons," said Li Xuan, mildly. "I have a broom."

The thin man looked at the broom. Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It was gone almost before it appeared.

"I have heard," he said, "that it is a very dangerous one."

"It has been known to inconvenience the floor," said Li Xuan, and went through the arch.