Chapter 56: A Deposit on the Dead

The sky did not answer.

A hand took him under the arm.

"You are alive," said Old Mo. His voice was very strange. "Boy. You are alive."

Adam rolled his head. The blind man was kneeling beside him with his scarred face lifted and tears running down it, shiny in the rain. Tao crouched behind him with both hands pressed to his mouth.

"I did what you said," Adam croaked. "I was a long road."

"You were a river," said Mo, and laughed, a cracked, shaking, delighted sound. "Nine times I have stood the ninth hour. Nine times. I have never seen... I could hear it, boy. I could hear it going through you. It did not break. It sang."

"It said it was a Third."

Mo went still.

"What did?"

"Something." Adam shook his head. The motion made the sky tilt. "Somebody. I don’t know."

"A tall man," said Old Mo, very slowly. "In black."

Adam looked at him.

The blind man’s face had gone the color of old paper.

"I have seen him," he whispered. "Not with my eyes. But I have heard him, at the end of the ninth hour, standing in the light." He swallowed. "Every time. He has been standing there for forty years."

"Mo..."

"Later," said the old man, gripping his arm. His voice had steadied. "Later. You cannot stand. Tao, your shoulder. We go to the ridge."

They got him to his feet. He leaned on Tao, who was very small and very strong, and tried not to look at the plain.

But he looked.

It was a thing he would never quite forget.

Across the whole vast gray expanse of the Tribulation Plain, in the washed, trembling light, the pilgrims lay where they had fallen.

He counted a dozen near him. Then a score. Then a hundred, strung across the glass in scattered, broken lines, their bodies black against the green-gray ground. Some lay on their faces. Some lay on their backs with their arms thrown wide. A few, here and there, sat up, slowly, dazed, patting their own chests as though to check that they were still there.

Most did not.

"Four hundred came in with the dawn," Mo said quietly. "One in nine will be alive. If it is a good cycle."

Adam looked at the old woman in the blue dress. She was lying in the open with her patched sleeve flung over her face. He had not seen her go. He thought he had seen her husband’s tools, though, a small, sad bundle, dropped on the glass a few paces off.

The rain fell on all of them, fine and gray.

Then, from the direction of the hills, a bell began to ring.

It was a thin, flat, brassy sound, and it came from Cinder-Rest. Over the glass, in the pale light, a line of dark figures was moving out through the gate, two by two, in robes of dark blue. They carried long poles with copper hooks, and handcarts, and coils of rope. They moved briskly, in step, with the calm, practiced air of men who did this every day.

"The Wardens," Mo said. His voice had gone flat. "The Sect’s collectors. They come after every ninth hour."

"To help?"

"To count."

They reached the first body in fifteen minutes.

Adam watched from the shelter of the ridge, with Tao pressed against his side and Mo’s hand on his sleeve. He watched the blue-robed man kneel by the old woman in the patched dress. He watched him take her belt-purse, her hairpin, the little silver ring from her finger. He watched him turn her over and go through her pockets, quickly, with the cold, deft efficiency of a man picking a fruit. He watched a second man fill a cart.

"The Sect claims everything on the Plain," Mo said. "Every pilgrim signs for it at the gate, in the small print. The dead are the Sect’s. Their goods are the Sect’s. Their bodies are the Sect’s." He swallowed. "You can buy them back."

"How much?"

"Two hundred a head."

Adam said nothing.

A cold anger was rising in him. It was a slow, quiet, deliberate thing, and it was not the Chaos fire’s. It was his own. It had been there since the clerk laughed at the Cauldron Note, since the woman in the blue dress said I sold my mother’s jade, and it had been growing ever since.

"They’re picking pockets," he said. "On the dead."

"Yes."

"Four hundred came in this morning. They each paid nine hundred stones. That is three hundred and sixty thousand." He spoke very evenly. "The twenty percent on the scrip, on top of that, makes seventy-two thousand. A third of the pilgrims buy lodging at the Lodge. A third buy talismans, which do nothing. And every cart those men are pushing is going back to Cinder-Rest to be sorted and sold." He drew a breath. "A hundred thousand stones a day. On the dead."

"More," said Mo. "When it is a good season."

Tao made a small sound.

He was staring across the glass at a pair of blue-robed Wardens, a hundred paces off, who were bent over a long, still shape in faded green.

"That’s Pei," he whispered. "They’ve... they’ve got Pei."

He was already up.

"Tao!" Mo hissed.

The boy ran. He was small and quick, and he crossed the glass in a flat sprint, with the rain streaming down his face. The Wardens looked up. One of them, a big man with a ledger tucked under one arm, rose with a frown and put out a hand.

"Hold, boy. You can’t..."

"That’s my brother!"

"He’s the Sect’s property, now." The man shrugged. "Two hundred, and you can have the body. Or leave it. We’ll bury it with the rest."

"I don’t have two hundred!"

"Then he’s ours." The big man’s face was perfectly mild. "It is in the contract, boy. Move along."

Tao hit him.

It was a small, hard, furious blow, and it landed on the man’s belly with a soft oof. The Warden stumbled back. The second Warden dropped his rope. A third was running over from the cart, a copper-hooked pole in his hand, and the boy, white-faced and weeping, raised his fist again.

"That," said a voice behind him, "is enough."

The voice was quiet. It was very calm. It was the voice of a man reading a ledger.

Tao spun.

Adam stood a pace behind him, bareheaded in the rain. His left sleeve had burned away. His left arm was bare to the shoulder, bronze and veined with white, and a soft white light pulsed under the skin like a heartbeat. A very faint ringing hung in the air around him, a single high, pure note.

The Wardens stopped.

"Two hundred stones," he said, and drew a single slip of cream paper from his sleeve. "For the boy’s brother. I would like a receipt."

The big Warden looked at the paper. He looked at the white-veined arm. His eyes were wide.

"That... that is paper. The Sect doesn’t..."

"It is redeemable on demand at the Imperial Alchemy Guild. If you cannot read it, I’ll read it to you." Adam’s voice did not rise. "Imperial Cauldron Note. Ten thousand stones. I am prepared to leave it as a deposit against the two hundred. You may keep the change."

"I... I can’t..."

"Or you may refuse." He tilted his head. "And I will pay the two hundred in Thunder-script, at a twenty percent loss, which I believe is the Sect’s own rate. Your choice. I’d only ask that you remember my face."

The Warden stared at him. The rain ran down his chin.

Behind him, high on the hills of Cinder-Rest, a great bell began to toll, a deep, slow, brass note. And on the highest roof of the town, on a platform ringed by nine lightning rods, a single tall figure in dark blue robes had turned his head to look out across the glass.

He was too far away to see. Adam felt his gaze anyway. It was cold and heavy, and it pressed against the skin of his face like the touch of a hand.

’Nascent Soul,’ Adam thought. ’Not a strong one. But watching.’

He did not look up.

The Warden, very slowly, put out a shaking hand and took the slip.

"Take the body," he said, hoarsely. "Please. Take him."

Tao dropped to his knees beside his brother and gathered the green-clad figure into his arms. Adam stood a pace behind him with his hands in his sleeves, watching the rain fall on the pale, burned, peaceful face of a boy who had only wanted the sky to see he was not afraid.

"Mo," he said, without turning.

The old man had followed. He stood at Adam’s shoulder with his clappers silent.

"Yes?"

"I need to know everything there is to know about the Nine-Heavens Thunder Sect." Adam’s voice was quite level. "Its Elders. Its vaults. Its debts." He paused. "And where it keeps the key to the gate."

The blind man was silent for a moment. Then he smiled, very slowly, with the tears still wet on his scarred cheeks.

"You are going to ruin them," he said.

"No," said Adam. "I am going to correct them."

"Is there a difference?"

"Ask me in ninety days."

He turned, at last, and looked up at the sky.

The round hole in the clouds was closing, slowly, like an eye. The stars went out one by one. In their place, very high, very far, in the black wheel of the storm, a single tiny point of white was beginning to gather, patient and perfect and small as a grain of rice.

It had been nine hours.

It was starting again.