Chapter 8 The Empty Page

The boards came back on the eighth day. Two men carried them in and stacked them on the shelf, and the smaller of the two told Shulan that the censorate had finished and that the Hall should keep its books in the Hall in future, and he said it as though the Hall had been the one misbehaving. She waited until the men were gone. Then she took down the boards, and she checked them the way she checked the jars: by feel first, and then by light. Two boards covered the ninth and tenth months. She laid them on the floor and turned each page in its turn, and each page was there, and the hours on them were the hours the Hall had called, and the hand was her hand and Meng Zhu's hand and Gao Peide's hand in the first part of the ninth month before his eyes had got too bad. And then, in the middle of the tenth month, at the ninth day, there was a cut. The page for the ninth day of the tenth month had been taken out with a knife. She could see the cut edge at the binding, clean and straight, and the stub of the page still in the stitching, and the pages on either side had the small dark stain of a wet finger where a hand had held the board flat while the knife went in. It was the one page in the whole season that mattered, and it was gone. Shulan sat on the floor with the board across her knees and did not move for a long time. Behind her the drip counted on, patient, honest as a heartbeat, from a jar that was not. What had been on the page? She knew, because she had written it. The first watch. The second watch. The third watch at the arrow's first mark, which was the hour she had called aloud and the hour the boy had carried to the tower. And at the foot of the page, in the small box the Bureau left for the daily slip, the sunrise time, three breaths later than the arrow had shown. They had taken the page that had the sunrise time on it. Not the page that had her hours. The page that had the slip. She thought about that for a while. She thought that a man who wanted to hide the drift would take the whole season. A man who took one page was not hiding the drift. He was hiding the slip, which meant he was hiding the Bureau's number, which meant he knew that the Bureau's number was the one thing in the record that could be checked by anyone, from the sky, without asking a keeper, because the sun rises at the same moment for the palace and the ward and the relay and the magistrate alike. The sunrise is the one witness in the empire who cannot be bribed. They had taken it out of the book. She got up and put the board back on the shelf, and as she did she heard the inner door of the Hall open, and she turned, and Warden Huang Zhen was standing in it, and he had come in very quietly, and he was looking at where she had been sitting on the floor with the board across her knees. "Keeper Yan," he said. "The books came back, I see." "They came back." "Are they in order?" "One page is missing." Huang Zhen's face did not change at all. That was the thing about him, the thing that made the younger servants uneasy. A face that never changed was a face that had decided long ago to keep everything, and a man who keeps everything must be very tired, or very careful, or much older than he looks. "Boards are cut for many reasons," he said. "Ink runs. A page is bound wrong. The steward cuts a bad page out and the book goes on." "This page was bound right," Shulan said. "And the ink did not run." Huang Zhen came into the Hall and walked the length of it slowly, past the jars, past the bowl. He stopped at the receiving bowl and stood looking down into it, at the arrow lying at the morning's last mark. "The ivory rule has a loose stopper," he said. "The wax is old. It has been loose for years. I have meant to have it seen to." Shulan said nothing. Her heart had begun to go like a drum. "It is a small thing," Huang Zhen said. "A hollow in a rule. But I was thinking, this morning, walking my rounds, that there are very few places in this palace where a person may keep a thing that no one else may find, and that a hollow rule is one of them." He turned and looked at her with his mild, unreadable eyes. "Keep your clock, Keeper Yan," he said. "Do not keep anything else." He went out, and his keys made no sound. --- Meng Zhu found her a little later, standing at the window with her hands on the sill. "What did he want?" "He wanted to tell me that he knows." "Knows what?" "Knows that I keep something in the rule." Shulan turned. "Meng Zhu. I want you to take the scraps out tonight and put them in your sleeve and keep them on your body, and if anyone asks you for them, give them up at once, do not lie, do not run." Meng Zhu's face went young and frightened for a moment, and then, to her credit forever in Shulan's memory afterward, it went hard. "No," she said. "Meng Zhu—" "No, you do not give them up at once, and I do not give them up at once either." She took the rule off its pegs and worked the wax out with her thumbnail, and the little roll of scraps came into her hand, and she tucked it down the front of her robe and patted it flat. "He is not going to search the laundry girl. He is going to search the keeper. That is what he told you. He gave you a warning, Shulan. He could have taken the rule off the wall and had the wax out before you came in. He did not. So he is either on our side or he wants us to keep going so he can see where we go, and either way, we keep going." Shulan looked at her for a long moment. "You are seventeen," she said. "I am seventeen, and I have hands, and this palace has one rule about hands, which you told me yourself." Meng Zhu grinned, and it was not a happy grin, it was the grin of a girl at the edge of a cold river deciding whether to jump. "Nobody watches the hands of a girl who scrubs jars." That night the seventh jar ran fast again, and the arrow climbed, and Shulan called the watches exactly as she was required to call them, and wrote them on the new board in a steady hand, and every hour of it was a lie she had been told to tell by a clock that had been made to tell it for her. ---