Chapter 32: Four

"That's obscene," said Chan-i.

"It is."

"You're not even—" Chan-i's voice cracked. "You're not even arguing."

"What would I argue?" Nam Gyeol looked at him with what appeared to be real interest. "That it isn't? Baek Chan-i, you burned a knot in Yeoju two years ago. The seventh rite. You couldn't read him in time and you burned him and you scattered him over four counties, and your Hall calls that a ledger and writes it in the margin, and in eighty years somebody's going to dig sixty-three graves and none of them will know your name."

"That's not the same."

"No," Nam Gyeol agreed. "It's cheaper, and it's slower, and nobody has to look at it. That is the entire difference and I have never once pretended otherwise. I kill men to keep rite-keepers alive. Your Hall kills strangers eighty years out to keep the fee ledger balanced. Neither of us is clean and only one of us is honest about the arithmetic, and I have been very tired of that for eleven years."

He turned back to Doha.

"You'll say no," he said. "You should say no. I'd think less of you."

"Then why come?"

"Because of the fourth thing," said Nam Gyeol.

"You have eleven days," he said, "and there is exactly one person alive who can complete that technique in your chest, and it is me, and I am not going to do it."

Doha stood in the wreckage of his own yard.

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"Say that again," he said.

"I'm not going to do it. I could. Eleven days is enough, and I'd be doing you a kindness, and it would put you in my debt in a way you'd never get out of, and I've thought about it every day since the spring." Nam Gyeol's flat, patient face did not change. "But you'd hate me, and you'd owe me, and neither of those makes a person work. So no. I'm going to tell you where the hole is instead, and then I'm going to leave, and you're going to fill it in yourself, or you're going to be in the orchard by the thaw."

"Why?"

"Because I need something from you," said Nam Gyeol, "and I've needed it for eleven years, and I can't take it, and I can't buy it, and I can't harvest it off a corpse. I've tried all three. It's the only thing in this world that has to be grown."

He looked at Doha with an expression that was almost gentle.

"There's a thing in my chest doing four beats of Yun Ha-gyeong's ninth rite," he said, "and it has been doing them since I was thirty-three, and in the spring it will be doing them most of the day. I can take a knot out of anybody in the Thousand Li. I cannot take this one out of myself, because the fifth beat needs the fourth rite, and the fourth rite needs a stance, and the thing in my chest took my stance eleven years ago."

The yard was absolutely silent.

"So I need a rite-keeper," said Nam Gyeol. "One who can hear whole, and hold the fourth rite, and complete a technique with a hole in it. There has been one born in four hundred years and he's standing in front of me and he's seventeen and he thinks I'm the worst man he's ever met."

He bowed. The Hall's bow. Very low, slightly too long.

"The hole is the fourth rite," said Nam Gyeol. "Third beat. Everybody I ever taught goes around it, because you cannot teach a man in six years to put his weight in the ground the way this Hall puts it in at six years old. That's all it is. That's the whole secret and it took me nine years to find and I have just given it to you in a sentence."

He straightened.

"Sesan's field," he said. "Forty-one, in the warm, braiding. You'll come because you can't leave a thing unfinished and because in eleven days you won't be able to walk, and I'll be standing in the middle of it, and one of us is going to bury the other."

He walked out through his own Hall's front gate, and nobody stopped him, and afterward at least four people gave a different reason why.