第10章 The Warden's Ledger

Shulan went to Huang Zhen at the end of his rounds, in the little stone room by the north gate where he kept his brushes and his book and a kettle that was always warm. She stood in the doorway until he looked up. "Warden. On the ninth day of the tenth month, who had a night pass into the chancery court in the third watch?" Huang Zhen set down his brush. He did not ask her why, which she had expected, and he did not tell her to go, which she had also expected. He got up and took a book down from the shelf, a thin book bound in blue paper, and laid it open on the table and turned the pages until he found the ninth day. "Night passes are issued at the second watch and returned at the fifth," he said. "On the ninth day of the tenth month I issued three. One to the stable to bring the physician's horse. One to the kitchen yard for the night fires. And one, tally forty-one, to a clerk of the chancery register, second class, named Bu Ying." Shulan's hands, which had been perfectly steady all day, went cold. "Bu Ying." "He wrote his name in the book in front of me. He has a hand I have seen a hundred times, because he comes to stamp the decrees." Huang Zhen turned the book toward her and put his finger on the entry. The characters leaned. The tails of them came out thin and hooked, like the feet of a bird. "Tally forty-one was returned at the fifth watch. Clean. No note. No complaint from the court, no note from the gate. A clerk came in, did his office, and went out, and the night closed over it." "He came in at the third watch," Shulan said. "Not before?" "Not before. I was on the gate myself from the second watch to the fourth." Huang Zhen closed the book. "The chancery register does not open in the night. That is the whole use of a register. It is where the decrees are kept, and decrees are kept locked at night, and a clerk who comes in at the third watch to a locked office and stays until the fifth is either a clerk who has permission or a clerk who has business." "Was there a decree sealed that night?" "There is always a decree sealed that night," Huang Zhen said. "The register seals one most nights. It goes to the throne in the morning if it is urgent, or waits for the week's bundle if it is not. You have seen them. They come to the Hall once a season so the hours can be copied into the register." "I have seen them." Huang Zhen looked at her for a long moment. The kettle behind him began to whisper, and he did not move to take it off. "Keeper Yan," he said. "You are asking me these questions because you think I know more than I have said. I do know more than I have said, and I am not going to tell you all of it, because I do not know how the thing will end and I have a great deal to lose. But I will tell you this. I write the hours in my book every night. I have written them for twenty years. Nobody has ever read that book. In twenty years, not one person has opened it to see whether the hour I wrote was the hour I called." He tapped the blue cover. "If the day comes when someone reads it, I want the hour in it to be true. That is all I have. So. What did you call on the ninth day of the tenth month at the third watch?" "The first mark." "And what did the water say?" "That it was not yet the third watch. That the second watch had two fingers left in it." Shulan heard her own voice come out low and even. "The clock was fast. It had been fast since the tenth day of the ninth month, when the seventh jar came back from the foundry. If the clock was fast, then the hour I called was not the hour it was. The hour I called was later than the hour it was. And if the hour I called was later than the hour it was—" "Then every hour written that night was later than the night was," Huang Zhen said, "and a man who died in the second watch could be written into the fifth." They looked at each other. "That is the whole of it," Huang Zhen said. "That is what a fast clock buys. Not a different day. An hour of room, in the dark, in a locked office, with a clerk who has the register's key and a man who is still alive when the register says he is not." --- The two fishes was a small shop on the market street behind the great silversmiths, and it sold tonics and salves and the powders women took for their courses and the powders men took for their courage. Wen Momo went in with the laundry cart and came out with a length of bleached cloth and a packet of myrrh and a face that had stopped being a face and had become a wall. "He would not show me the book," she said, when they were back in the yard. "But his boy would. The boy is fourteen and there is nothing in that shop to do, and I gave him a copper and told him I had heard there was a great lord in this city who paid for tonics for the whole chancery court, and the boy laughed and said the register's account. The register's account. Opened eleven years ago, when there was a different secretary, and paid every quarter by the chancery register, and the monkshood root is drawn against it once a month, thirty grains at a time, for the rat traps. Every office in that court draws from the same account. Four offices use the same tonic. I asked him how many times the register drew the monkshood this year and he looked in the drawer and told me nine times, and the last was three days before the secretary died." Shulan sat down on the bench by the well. "Thirty grains a month is enough to kill every rat in the palace and have powder left over," Wen Momo said. "Thirty grains a day would kill a man in a month. Whoever did it did not have to buy anything. He only had to reach into the drawer that his office pays for." "And everybody in the court could reach it." "Everybody in the court could reach it," Wen Momo agreed. "Every clerk, every runner, every second-class scribe. Which means that everything you have found so far points to a shop that did nothing wrong, an account that did nothing wrong, a powder that did nothing wrong, and a drawer that thirty men could open." She folded her arms. "Shulan. Do you understand what you have?" "I have a clock that was moved, a seal that was cut, a page that was taken, and a poison that anyone could have given him." "You have nothing that points at one man." "I have a name," Shulan said. "Bu Ying. The clerk who came into the chancery court at the third watch with a night tally and a bird's-foot hand, and who sealed a decree at the fifth watch beside a man who was already cold." Wen Momo was quiet for a moment. "Then go and say it," she said, "and see how far it carries." ---