Chapter 63: The Sky-Fall Platform

They saw it on the fourth morning, from the top of a long gray pass, and for a moment, no one said anything at all.

It rose out of the end of the world.

The plain ran away below them in a vast, tawny, wind-combed sweep, mile on mile of dry gold grass under a sky the color of pewter, and at its far edge, quite suddenly, the earth stopped. There was a mountain there. It was not a mountain as other mountains are, with slopes, and shoulders, and a peak. It was a table. It stood up out of the plain in a single sheer unbroken wall of dark red stone, a thousand zhang high, as flat on top as if it had been cut with a knife, and across that mighty flat summit a city spread, shining.

"The Sky-Fall Platform," said Guo Qing, in a hushed voice.

It was a golden city. It glittered in the early light like a heap of coins. There were towers, and pavilions, and long curving roofs of pale gilded tile, and a hundred thin bright banners streaming from the battlements. There were bridges, thin as threads, flung out from the edge of the table over a great gulf of mist. And all around it, below, in a ring of dark red rock, a vast white cloud lay on the plain like milk in a saucer, and out of the cloud, here and there, thin black spires of stone stood up, like the stumps of broken teeth.

"That is the Fall," said Yun Tianxiao, very quietly.

He was not looking at it. He was looking at his own hands.

"It is a drop of eleven zhang," he said, "into the mist. The mist is very thick. No one has ever seen the bottom." A small, crooked, difficult smile touched his lips. "I landed on a goat."

Nobody laughed.

The road to the Platform went up the mountain in a single enormous staircase of red stone, nine thousand steps from the plain to the gate. It was a fine staircase. It was broad, and smooth, and shaded with gilded awnings, and every thousand steps there was a rest-house with a tea-seller and a brazier. At every rest-house a banner of pale gold silk hung from a pole, and under it a clerk sat at a table with a bowl for coins.

They paid nothing.

Jiang Ming had sent a runner. It was a flushed, breathless, golden-liveried boy of fourteen who met them at the foot of the stair, bowed three times, and informed them in a high squeaking voice that the young master of the counting-house had given instructions that the honored guests of the Jiang Clan should be spared every inconvenience. A sedan chair was waiting. Two, in fact. There was also a litter, for the donkey.

"The donkey," said Tax Collector’s owner, gravely, "will walk."

The boy looked at the donkey.

Tax Collector looked at the boy, and, with the deliberation of a minister granting an audience, laid back his ears.

They walked.

It took the better part of the day. Li Xuan did not mind. It was a pleasant climb, in the thin bright mountain air, with the great plain falling away behind them and the gilded awnings rippling overhead, and a crowd, all the way, flowing up and down the stair beside them in an endless many-colored stream. There were thousands of people on that mountain. He had not expected it. They were sect disciples in robes of a hundred colors, and wandering swordsmen in patched traveling cloaks, and fat merchants in sedan-chairs, and hawkers with trays, and children. They came from all across the Southern Border and beyond. They came, he gathered, for the market.

"The Platform has the best in the south," said Guo Qing, with wistful longing, eyeing a stall that sold dried plums. "Everything is here. Pills. Swords. Scrolls. Beast-eggs. They say you can buy a dragon’s tooth."

"It will be a counterfeit," said Gu.

"It is always a counterfeit." The stout young man sighed. "But it is a very good one."

The crowd parted for them, in the end, without being asked.

It did so slowly, and with a rustle, like a field of corn bending before a wind. People turned. People looked. They looked at the old man with the plain sword and the young woman with the ice-jade at her hip, and the old woman with the medicine-box, and the child with the black lacquer box in her arms, and the donkey. They looked at the thin young man in the patched blue robe, with the horsehair broom on his shoulder and an iron dustpan hanging at his belt. They whispered. A few laughed.

"That is the one," said a voice, quite clearly, from somewhere in the crowd.

"The sweeper?"

"The custodian. From Sky-Clearing. The one who..."

"Is that a dustpan?"

Someone gave a high delighted whoop of laughter. It spread, in a small, ugly, ripple, through the people on the stair, and Li Xuan felt the back of Yun Tianxiao’s neck, a pace ahead, go crimson.

He did not turn his head. He walked on, with his broom on his shoulder, in the thin gold light, and the Deciphering Eye, patient as ever, showed him the long soft web of what everyone in that crowd owed and was owed. He saw a thread from a merchant to his mother. A thread from a swordsman to a man he had wronged. A hundred small gray strings, tangled, plain, unremarkable, and all of them running, very faintly, up the mountain toward the same bright center.

They all ran to the Platform.

It was as though every person on the stair, without knowing it, owed something to the city on the summit. It was very small, in each case. It was an ounce of tribute, a toll, a fee, a favor. But there were so many, and they were all so patient, and they ran uphill, like water in a great funnel, toward a single dark point on the cliff’s edge.

The Platform, he thought. It is not a market. It is a mouth.

The gate was a great gilded arch with two guardian lions of red jasper, each as tall as a house.

Beyond it lay the city. It was every bit as beautiful as it had looked from the pass, and not at all as he had expected. It was very clean. Its streets were paved in smooth gray stone, swept to a polish by a thousand silent servants in pale gold livery, and lined with shops of dark carved wood. Fountains played in the squares. Lamps of colored glass hung from every eave. A band of musicians, in a pavilion, were playing something thin, sweet, and quite without feeling.

A slim, smiling, extremely well-dressed young man in pale gold silk was waiting at the foot of the steps.

"Custodian!" said Jiang Ming.

He came forward with both hands outstretched and an expression of the warmest, most winning delight. A little golden abacus swung at his breast. His black eyes, in the clear mountain light, were very bright and very kind, and Li Xuan, who had looked at a great many faces in the last four months, thought that he had never seen so pleasant a face in his life.

It had no thread at all.

He stopped, for a half-second, on the step. He looked again. Every other soul in that city, every servant and porter and lion-keeper and musician, trailed its small bright cords of obligation. It was like looking at a field of grass in the wind. But the young man in front of him stood in the middle of it, smooth, golden, and bare. There was nothing running out of his chest. There was nothing running into it.

It was as though he had never in his life borrowed, or lent, or owed.

No, thought Li Xuan, with a cold, clear, quiet interior shock. That is not right. That is not possible.

"You are tired," said Jiang Ming, with great solicitude. "You have come so far. A very long way. And in such unseasonable weather." He took Li Xuan’s hand, warmly, in both his own. "I have taken the liberty of preparing rooms. The Pavilion of Quiet Reflection. It is our best. There is a bath. There is a very good cook." His smile broadened. "There is even a stall for the donkey."

"You are very kind."

"I am only a host." He pressed the hand, and released it. His own was soft, and dry, and perfectly cool. "It is such a pleasure to meet you in person. I have heard such... stories. I should like, if you will permit me, to show you the city."

"We should be glad."

"And my cousin Chen would like to make your acquaintance."

He said it in the same warm tone. But something in the black eyes had flickered, and Li Xuan, who was not looking at them, felt it, like the touch of a cold finger on the back of the neck.

He turned his head.

A procession was coming down the long gray street.

It was a very splendid one. It came on slowly, with a rustle of silk, between lines of kneeling servants, under a canopy of white and gold. It was headed by a tall, handsome, graceful young man of about twenty-two, in a robe of white satin embroidered with golden cranes, with a wide jeweled sash at his waist and a long straight sword at his hip with a hilt of pale jade. His face was lean and arrogant and beautiful. His hair fell to his shoulders like a black waterfall. He walked as though the ground had been laid down for him.

Behind him, in a tight half-ring, walked four old men.

They were very old, and very lean, and very tall, in plain gray robes trimmed with gold. They carried nothing. Their faces were as seamed and hard and expressionless as the red rock of the mountain. And as they passed, a faint, heavy, dry, immense pressure came with them, like the weight of an approaching storm.

Li Xuan felt Gu go very still at his side.

"Four," the old man said, under his breath, without moving his lips. "All Nascent Soul. Late Stage, every one."

"Is it a great many?"

"It is four more than I had counted on."

The procession halted.

The young man in the white satin robe looked at them. He looked at each of them in turn, slowly, with the cool, bored, appraising gaze of a man examining a row of merchandise, and when his eye came to the broom, his lip curled. When it came to Yun Tianxiao, it stopped.

"The goat boy," said Jiang Chen.

His voice was light and clear and very pleasant. It carried perfectly in the still air.

"I had heard that you were back. I confess that I did not believe it." He tilted his head. "I have been meaning to ask. Was it a very large goat?"

Yun Tianxiao did not say anything. His face was dead white. His hands had closed at his sides.

"Tianxiao," said Gu, very softly.

"I know."

"Do not."

"I know."

"We have been very glad," said Jiang Chen, in a tone of warm and easy courtesy, "to hear of your sect’s efforts. A custodian. A broom. A staircase. It is so touching, to see the old ways kept up." He glanced at the cousin beside him. "Ming has told me that you are to appear before the Covenant. I do hope that it goes well. It would be a pity if the Sky-Clearing were to lose its little hill."

"It is not little," said Yun Tianxiao, hoarsely.

"No? I thought that it was rather small." The cool dark eyes came back to his face. "Three hundred and eleven disciples, I think. And a debt of forty thousand. It is not a great deal." He smiled. "You should have won the token, you know. At the Trials. It would have been so much simpler for everyone."

"I did win," said Yun Tianxiao.

It came out very low.

"I beat your second guard. I beat him fairly. And then your men threw me off the Platform."

The street had gone silent. In the pavilion, the musicians had faltered, and stopped.

Jiang Chen did not move. His handsome face did not change. But a thin, bright, cold light came into his dark eyes, and the four old men behind him shifted, a very little, like cats that have heard something in the grass.

"That," said the young man softly, "is a very serious accusation."

"It is the truth."

"It is an accusation against the house of Jiang." He drew a slow breath. "I should be very careful, goat boy, about where I said such things. The Platform has a very long memory."

"So," said Li Xuan, quietly, "do we."

It was the first thing that he had said.

He had not raised his voice. He had only stepped, very slightly, to one side, so that he stood between Yun Tianxiao and the white-robed young man, with the broom on his shoulder and his thin, mild, patched, ordinary face turned politely toward the cranes on the white satin robe.

"I am sorry," he said. "I do not think that we have been introduced. I am the custodian of the Third Terrace." He bowed, rather stiffly, from the neck. "I have heard that you are a very fine swordsman."

Jiang Chen looked at him for a long moment.

It was a look of the purest, most appraising, most elaborately courteous contempt. It went down the length of the patched blue robe and up again. It lingered on the dustpan. It rested, with weary amusement, on the broom.

"And you," he said, "are the man who sweeps."

"I do."

"I have been wondering," said the young master of the Jiang Clan, "what a person like you would do, if a man dirtied your floor."

There was a short, bright, dangerous silence.

"I should ask him to wipe his boots," said Li Xuan.

"And if he did not?"

"Then I should wait." He smiled, a little apologetically. "It is only a floor. Floors are patient."

Jiang Chen’s eyes narrowed.

Then, with an unexpectedly gentle laugh, he threw back his head, and the whole of the street seemed to let out its breath. "Oh, I like him, Ming," he said. "I like him very much. I shall have to see that he is properly looked after." He turned, with a rustle of white satin, and the four gray old men turned with him, a single motion like the closing of a door. "The Pavilion of Quiet Reflection. I hope that you will find it restful."

He went away down the long bright street, between his kneeling servants, in the clear thin light, with his hair like a black waterfall and his four old men behind him like the pillars of a hall.

No one spoke.

"Boy," said Gu at last, in a low, strange, shaken voice.

"Yes?"

"I have been a soldier for sixty years. I have never in my life seen a man pick a fight with four Nascent Soul elders using a broom."

"I was not," said Li Xuan, "picking a fight." He let out a long breath. His hands, he discovered, were not at all steady. "I was only asking him to wipe his boots."