Chapter 13 A Thread of Bronze

The wax came from the Hall's own bench, where it was kept for sealing the lids of the water jars in the cold months so the ice would not split them, and Shulan took a lump of it the size of a thumb and worked it warm in her hands until it was soft as dough. Meng Zhu watched her do it. "You want me to walk into the Bureau and put my hand in a director's jar." "No," Shulan said. "I want you to walk into the Bureau with a cracked jar on your shoulder, which is a thing the junior keeper of the Hall does every month, because the Bureau's lower court is where the Hall's broken bronze goes to be weighed and entered in the loss book. You will be admitted, because you are expected. You will put the cracked jar on the bench and wait, because you are a servant and servants wait. And on the shelf behind the bench, at the height of your waist, there is an old seventh jar with a reed's mouth and no crack in it, and when nobody is looking at you, you will press this wax against the mouth of its spout, gently, no wider than the nail of your thumb, and take it away and put it in your sleeve." Meng Zhu looked at the wax, and then at Shulan. "That is theft of a likeness," she said. "It is a likeness of a thing that should not exist." "If they catch me—" "They will not catch you," Shulan said. "Because if they catch you, you will cry, and you are seventeen, and a girl who cries in an office is not searched, she is sent out. That is the one advantage you have in this palace and it will not last, so we will use it." Meng Zhu took the wax and put it down the front of her robe. Then she grinned, and it was the river-grin again, and she said, "You have become a very bad influence, Keeper Yan," and went out with the cracked jar on her shoulder. --- She was gone three hours. Shulan filled the jars and cleaned the spouts and read the arrow and wrote the hour on the board, and the whole time she did it she was counting, not drips, but breaths, and every breath after the first hundred belonged to Meng Zhu and was an anxiety. She came back at the end of the afternoon with the cracked jar gone and her sleeve pinned shut and her face carefully blank, and she waited until the Hall was empty and Gao Peide was asleep and the wick was lit, and then she took the wax out and gave it to Shulan, and it was a small grey plug, and in the plug was the shape of a spout. Shulan lit the second wick and held the plug up to the light. It was a clean impression. The mouth of the spout came through in it as a small dark opening the width of a reed stem, and around the opening the wax had taken the curve of the bronze lip and the ring of old wear where the water had run for forty years. She laid the plug on the bench beside the seventh jar, the new one, the one with the widened mouth, and she laid a reed from the broom beside both of them, and she set the reed against the new jar's spout, and the reed went in to its middle. She set the reed against the wax plug. It would not go in. Shulan sat back and looked at the two jars: one bronze, one wax, one real, one a likeness, and between them a reed that proved what her ear had told her in the eleventh month. "There was never a crack," she said. "There was never a crack," Meng Zhu agreed. "And everybody in that lower court knows it. Shulan. They were talking about it while I waited. The clerks. They were talking about the old jar and how it came back from the Hall in the ninth month uncracked and how the office was told to hold it on the repair shelf and not to enter it in the loss book, and one of them said the order came down from the director's own hand, and the other one said, in the month of the corrections, everything comes down from the director's own hand." Shulan's mouth was dry. "What else did they say?" "They said the corrections were being sent out to the provinces that week, the three hand-written pages, to every relay on the eastern road, and that they went with the ordinary letters in the ordinary saddlebags, which was unusual, because a correction to the Concordance is sent under the Bureau's own post, not the relay's." Meng Zhu's voice had gone quiet. "And they said that the clerk who carried them to the eastern relay was promoted on the fifteenth day, and that his name is Bu Ying, and that he is now first class, and that he walked through the lower court that morning with a new badge on his breast and did not look at any of them." --- That night Shulan did not sleep. She sat by the receiving bowl with her back against the frame and the plug of wax in her hand, and she thought about the shape of the thing, which had come clear at last, and which was this: someone had needed the hours of a single night to be longer than the hours of a single night. To do it they had needed a clock that ran fast, and to get a clock that ran fast they had needed the seventh jar of the Dripping Stair to have a wider mouth, and to get a widened mouth into the Hall they had needed the old jar out of the Hall and a new jar in, and to get the new jar in they had needed the foundry to recast a jar that was not cracked, and to send a jar up from the foundry into the inner court they had needed a paper with the Bureau's stamp on it, and a man who signs the Bureau's papers had signed it. Everything she had found was true and everything she had found pointed at the same office, and she had no way to carry a wax plug from the inner court into a room where anyone with the power to read it would read it. And then there was the other thing, the thing that had been sitting under her ribs for a month like a swallowed stone. If the clock had been made fast so that a night could be stretched, then the night had been stretched for a reason, and the reason had a beneficiary, and the beneficiary was not the Bureau's director. Cui Yuanheng was already the director. He had the sky in his hand. A man like that did not risk his office to stretch one night for a clerk. He had done it for someone. She did not know who. She did not know how far up the man was, or how many robes stood between him and the throne, or whether the throne itself had ever asked for an hour of room. She only knew that the wax plug in her hand would burn her unless she got it to a room with a door that locked, and that the only door in eleven days that would be opened for her in front of the whole palace was the door of the winter certification, and that on that morning the man who signed the certification would be standing not four paces from the seventh jar, watching the arrow climb toward the hour the sun was coming up to meet. ---