第1章 The Seventh Jar

The Hall of Measured Hours had one window, set high in its western wall, and in winter the light came through it late, thin, the color of weak tea. By the time it reached the floor the afternoon was already spent. Shulan had stopped expecting more from that window years ago. She knew the room the way a blind man knows a room, by what it did. The six upper jars had gone dull with service, their bronze worn to the color of old coins. The seventh jar, the lowest, the one that fed the receiving bowl, she polished herself, though nobody had asked her to. A keeper kept her jars. That was the whole of her ambition and she did not think it small. The instrument was called the Dripping Stair. Seven bronze jars stood in a frame of dark wood, each set a hand's width lower than the one before, so the whole shape climbed and fell at once, a staircase that had leaned with age and never been straightened. Water was poured into the top jar at the start of the evening. It left each jar through a spout filed into the lip, a spout no wider than a reed stem, and fell into the jar below. The seventh jar fed the receiving bowl. In the bowl a wooden float carried an arrow, and the arrow rose as the water rose, and its tip read against a rule of yellowed ivory set into the bowl's rim. Twenty-four marks on the rule, each mark a quarter of an hour, each mark cut again into smaller lines that Shulan could count but did not need to, because she knew the drip the way a mother knows a child's cough. Eight years she had kept this clock. She had come into the palace at fourteen and been sent to the laundry yards, where her hands went red with lye and stayed red. At nineteen she was moved to the Hall because a keeper had died in the autumn and the Hall needed hands that would not flinch from cold well water in the twelfth month. She learned the jars from Gao Peide, who had kept them for thirty years and was now going blind. "Listen before you look," he told her in her first week. "The arrow is a servant. The water is the master. Learn the master and the arrow will never lie to you." She had learned it. She could hear a spout begin to clog two days before the arrow showed it. She could hear a hairline crack open in a jar's belly by the change in its note, the way a bowl rings differently when it is chipped. On this evening in the eleventh month, the water in the top jar was cold enough to ache through the bronze. Shulan filled each jar in its turn, waiting for the level to steady, and when she came to the seventh she stopped with the jug still in her hand. The note was wrong. It was a small thing. The drip from the sixth jar into the seventh fell at the same rate it had always fallen, a slow, patient ticking like a woman winding thread. But the seventh jar answered too quickly. The water in it climbed faster than it should have, and the spout that carried it down into the receiving bowl took it away too fast, and the arrow in the bowl had already reached the evening's first mark when by her own count it should have been three fingers short of it. She set the jug down. She knelt by the bowl and watched the arrow. Then she counted, using the old count she had learned from Gao Peide, which was not a count of numbers at all but a count of breaths held just below full, the way a singer holds a note at the edge of the lungs. Ninety breaths. The arrow moved a mark and a quarter. It should have moved one. She stood up and looked at the seventh jar for a long time. It was a good jar. She had oiled its lip that morning. The bronze was bright where her cloth had been, and dull in the places the flame could not reach. "You are early," she said to it. The jar did not answer. It never did. That had never troubled her before. --- At the second mark of the first watch, Warden Huang Zhen came through the Hall on his rounds. He was a thin man with a soft voice and careful hands, and he wore the keys of the inner gates at his belt in a row of seven, from smallest to largest, which was the only order he had ever seemed to care about. He had served the inner court since he was a boy and had outlived three of its mistresses. Nobody disliked him. Nobody trusted him either. Shulan was on her stool by the receiving bowl with the tally board across her knees. "The hour?" he asked. She read the rule. "The second mark of the first watch, and no more." Huang Zhen wrote it in the small book he carried, using a brush already wet with ink, which meant he had been writing all evening and had never once needed to stop and dip. He wrote the hour every night and never used the record. Still, he wrote it. "Cold," he said. "Yes." "You should have the brazier moved closer." "The heat moves the water," she said. "It climbs in warm rooms." Huang Zhen looked at her for a moment with his mild, unreadable eyes, and then he wrote something else in his book that was not the hour. Then he went on his rounds, and his keys made no sound at all, which was the thing about him that most unnerved the younger servants. --- In the morning, Shulan measured the seventh jar again. She did it properly, with the little bronze measure she kept in a cloth bag inside her sleeve, the one her brother had bought her at the Coldwell for three cash and which technically belonged to nobody but herself. The measure held one hundred and twenty drops of well water when filled to the line. She held it under the spout and counted, and the seventh jar gave up its full measure in the time it took her to count to two hundred and thirty. Last spring it had taken two hundred and ninety. She did the sum in her head while she scrubbed the receiving bowl. If the jar ran in two hundred and thirty counts instead of two hundred and ninety, then every hour of every watch since the change had been a little too long, or a little too short, or the arrow had climbed a little too fast. The clock gained time the way a gambler gains debts: patiently, by fractions, so that no single night looked wrong. The clock had gained, she worked out, a half mark in a night. A mark and a half in three nights. In three weeks, more than a watch. She sat back on her heels. The morning light had not yet reached the floor. Above her the jars stood in their tired staircase, silent, six of them honest and one of them lying. At the third hour after dawn, the hour-slip came up from the outer court as it did every morning: a strip of paper the width of two fingers, sent from the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning, bearing the certified time of sunrise, the length of the day, and the corrections the Bureau wished the Hall to enter. A boy brought it in a lacquered tube and would not meet her eyes, because boys from the outer court never met the eyes of women who worked the inner rooms. Shulan unrolled the slip and read the corrections. Then she read them again. The Bureau's sunrise time for that morning was three breaths later than the arrow had shown when she had called the watch, and the Bureau had entered a note in the margin stating that the Hall's clock had been certified at the season's end and no further correction was to be applied until the spring. She looked at the number in the margin. The Bureau had sent a correction to the correction, in a hand she did not know, in ink that was not the ink of the almanac office, and the note was dated the ninth day of the tenth month. On the ninth day of the tenth month, Secretary Han Qidu had been found dead in his office in the chancery court, at the third watch, with his brush still in his hand. ---