Chapter 6 The Great Concordance

She read her brother's papers that night in the Hall, by the wick, with the drip for company. The relay's entries were simple. Each letter that passed carried two hours on its back: the hour stamped by the office that sent it, and the hour stamped by the relay when it arrived. Between the palace gate and Millet Gate Relay a courier on a good horse took, by the relay's own reckoning, a mark and a half. The book of instructions nailed to the relay wall said so. Every relay clerk in the empire knew how long it took a letter to come from the palace, because the inspectors audited them on it. Shulan ran her finger down the column of palace hours and the column of relay hours, and for the first part of the ninth month the gap between them held steady at a mark and a half, the way it had held steady for years. Then, three days after the tenth day of the ninth month, it began to shrink. A mark and a half. A mark and a quarter. A mark and a breath. By the eleventh month, letters were arriving from the palace before they had, by the palace's own stamp, been sent. She put the pages down and sat with her hands flat on the board and let the drip count for a while. It was not proof that would move a magistrate by itself. A magistrate would say the relay clock was wrong, or the courier was fast, or the clerk had written the hours carelessly. But it was a second clock, and it had been writing the truth every day for a year, in a building in the outer city that nobody in the palace had ever heard of, and it agreed with her, to the breath, to the day. The day the drift began was the day the recast jar had been delivered. She folded the papers and hid them under the rule with the others. --- On the fifth day she went out again, this time not to the Coldwell but to the Western Market, where the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning put the Great Concordance out to be printed. The Concordance was the year's book. It was not a calendar the way a household kept one. It was a whole machine of days: which days were auspicious for which acts, which hours of each day were lucky for a marriage or a burial or the opening of a gate or the signing of a contract, where the planets stood, when the moon would be eaten and when it would come back, when the emperor's processions would move and in what order the wards would open their gates to let them pass. Every governor in the empire received a copy. Every ward headman kept one nailed up above the gate drum. It was the Bureau's great work and it was printed, like everything the Bureau did, with an official seal on every page, so that no page could be swapped. Shulan had never seen one made. She walked into the print yard through a side door with a bundle of Wen Momo's rags on her shoulder, because a laundry woman with rags could walk anywhere, and she stood at the edge of the great shed and watched men lay paper on inked blocks and lift it off again, page after page after page, until the wall of drying sheets breathed in the draft and the whole shed smelled of ink and glue. The sheets were hung in order. She walked along the wall as if she were looking for a place to lay her rags, and she read. Two thirds of the way down the wall, among the pages for the eleventh month, three sheets had been added that were not printed with the rest. They had been written by hand, in two different hands, and pasted over the printed pages, and each of them carried the small red square of the Bureau's seal, stamped so that it ran halfway onto the printed page beside it, which was the rule: a correction was sealed across the seam so that it could not be lifted and moved. She read the first correction. It changed the auspicious hours for the winter offering at the altar south of the city, moving the hour of the rite from the fifth watch to the second, and adding a note in the margin: *by urgent instruction of the chancery register*. She read the second. It corrected the position of a planet on a day in the tenth month. She read the third, and stopped. The third sheet was the day after Han Qidu died, and it carried the chancery register's seal, and the seal was not the same seal she had seen on the decrees that came into the Hall. It was the right square, the right size, the right worn corner. It was the same seal in every particular except one, and the one exception sat in the corner of it like a grain of sand in a bowl of rice. There was a hairline flaw running through the lower stroke of the seal's second character, a flaw Shulan had seen a hundred times on the chancery's papers, because the seal was old and had been dropped once in the reign before last. The genuine seal had it. This seal had it too, and beside it, in the stroke above, this seal had a small extra hook, a barb no wider than a brush hair. A new seal, cut fresh in the last month, would have no flaw. An old seal, pressed, would have the flaw and nothing else. This sheet had the flaw and the barb together, and that could only mean one thing: someone had cut a new seal from a rubbed copy of an impression, copying the old flaw out of faithfulness, and had copied it a hair wrong, and had added the barb out of carelessness or of the copyist's brush. The paper was warm from the shed. The ink smelled of glue. Shulan stood there with a bundle of rags on her shoulder, in a laundry coat that was too big for her, and understood that the machine which told the whole empire when to marry and when to bury and when to open its gates had been fed a page in the last month by a seal that did not exist. "Move along," said a voice behind her. She turned. A man in the Bureau's dark robe stood in the aisle, holding a wet sheet by its corners, and he was looking at her not with the contempt of an official for a laundry woman but with the flat attention of a man who had been checking the wall himself and had found a person reading it. He was tall and stooped and his hands were stained with ink to the wrist, and he wore the small square badge of the Bureau on his breast. "Those are not finished," he said. "The corrections are not dry." "They were dry enough to read," Shulan said. The man's eyes narrowed. He looked at her rags, and at her face, and at her hands, which were the hands of a woman who had spent eight years lifting bronze jars, and which no laundry coat could disguise. "A keeper," he said quietly. Shulan said nothing. "The Hall of Measured Hours," the man said, and something moved behind his flat face, some small, private, bitter satisfaction, like a man who has finally been handed the thing he predicted. "You are the one who called the third watch." "My name is Yan Shulan." "I know your name," said Pei Zhongyan. "I signed the paper that says your clock is true." ---