Chapter 15 The Relay Ledger

She met Luo Cheng in the tea shed outside the south gate of the palace, on the twenty-eighth day, where men of the outer offices came to sit out the hour before their watch and drink tea they did not enjoy. He had brought the relay pages with him, her brother's pages and a second set from the relay's own file, and he laid them on the bench between them and put his hand flat on them. "Your brother's hand is bad," he said. "Every clerk writes a hand like a man carrying two buckets. But the hours are consistent, and the relay's own file agrees with his copies on every line I checked, and I checked every line. Sixty-one letters between the tenth day of the ninth month and the last day of the tenth month. In the first part of the month the gap between the sending hour and the arrival hour is a mark and a half, as the relay's book of instructions requires. From the twelfth day onward the gap narrows, letter by letter, until the last week of the month, when the palace's own stamp is so far ahead that a letter arrives at Millet Gate before it was sent." "It is one clock against another clock," Shulan said. "Both of them wet and both of them bronze." "It is one clock against another clock, and the censorate will say exactly that." Luo Cheng took his hand off the pages and leaned back. "So I took the pages to the branch of the Astronomical College west of the market, where there is an old man who has spent forty years drawing shadows on a stone. I gave him the palace's four certified sunrise times for the season and the days they were certified, and I asked him one question: are they true? He drew the shadow lines for those four days and measured them against the palace's numbers, and he told me that the palace's numbers for the last two of them are a mark and a half too late." Shulan sat very still. "The sun said it," she said. "The sun said it, in the hand of a man who has never been inside a palace and would not know the director of the Bureau if he sat on his foot." Luo Cheng looked at her. "That is what you have been trying to buy with your scraps and your wax. You have been trying to find a witness who does not need to be believed." "Does the censorate accept him?" "The censorate accepts an officer of rank," Luo Cheng said, and there was a tiredness in his voice she had not heard before. "That is the wall, Keeper Yan. I am a secretary. I cannot open a file against a bureau. My chief will not open a file against a bureau on the word of a keeper and the drawing of an old man with a stick, because if the file is opened and then closed, my chief is the man who opened it, and the Bureau will remember that in ten years, when my chief wants a post for his son. So I have looked for another way, and there is one, and it is a very old and very stupid one, and it is this." He took out a strip of paper and drew on it with his own brush, a square, and a smaller square inside. "Twice a year the Bureau certifies the state clocks. The rule is the rule of the Bureau's own founding, and it is older than any director: the certification is made by two astronomers, in the presence of the officer in charge of the instrument, and it is entered in the Bureau's register of instruments, and the register of instruments is a public paper which any officer of the government may read and copy. Two astronomers, Keeper Yan. Last season only one came, because the director had a second astronomer down sick. This season the director will send one, because that is what he did last season, and if he sends one, the certification is defective, and a defective certification on the day the drift is found in the clock is the whole case, opened by rule, in front of witnesses, with the register of instruments as the paper." "Then we need the second astronomer to come." "We need the second astronomer to come," Luo Cheng said, "and I went to his house three days ago and stood in his yard and told him a keeper in the Hall of Measured Hours was going to make the sun and the clock stand up against each other at the solstice, and that he could be the second name on the paper or he could be the man who was not there." Shulan's breath came out slowly. "What did he say?" "He said he would come," Luo Cheng said. "And then he said a thing I did not understand. He said, 'Tell her to keep the arrow, not the water.'" --- Shulan walked back through the ward gates with the phrase going around and around in her head, and by the third gate she understood it, and by the fourth gate she had stopped walking altogether and was standing in the middle of the street while the carts went by on both sides of her. Pei Zhongyan knew about the shim. He had never seen the shim. She was certain of it, because the shim was under the arrow and the arrow lived under the ivory rule and no astronomer would put his hand in the receiving bowl. But he had signed the year's certifications, and he was a man who had spent his life measuring, and if the clock had been certified true four times while it was running fast, then the man who certified it had been looking at the arrow and not at the water, and he knew, in the way a man knows the weight of his own work, that the arrow was the part of the clock a clever man would move. They had narrowed the seventh spout. They had forgotten the arrow. And the one other man in the capital who could see that they had forgotten the arrow had just told her, in a sentence, that he was coming to the solstice with his eyes open. She began to walk again, faster, and by the time she reached the north gate she had made the plan, and the plan was simple and terrible, and it rested on a thing she had never done in eight years of keeping the clock. It rested on her telling the truth out loud, in the open, to men who had already decided that a woman of the inner court does not speak. ---