第4章 The Night Tallies

The Hall kept its records on shelves behind the receiving bowl, ten boards of them, each board the length of a man's arm and covered in the hour-notes of every watch since the reign before last. Nobody read them. They were kept because keeping them was the office, and the office was old, and old things in the palace were not thrown away, they were stacked. Shulan began on the fourth day, in the dead hour after the noon meal, when the Hall was empty and Gao Peide was asleep in the sun-court and Meng Zhu had been sent to carry the water jars to the kitchen to be scalded. She took down the last three boards and laid them on the floor. Each night had its page: the watch, the mark, the arrow's reading, the weather, the name of the keeper on duty, and, twice a season, the Bureau's certified correction in a fine, careful hand. She read backward. She read the same page three times. She counted marks with her fingertip, the way she counted drips, and by the time the light had moved off the floor and onto the wall she had what she wanted. Before the tenth day of the ninth month, the Hall's hours agreed with the sunrise times the Bureau sent in the slips, to within a breath or two, which was as close as any clock could be asked to hold. After the tenth day of the ninth month, the Hall's hours began to run ahead. Not by much. A breath the first week. Three breaths the second. By the eleventh month, the Hall was calling the watches a full mark and a half before the sun. The finding was clean and it pointed at one date, and Shulan sat on the floor with the board across her knees and felt, for the first time since the morning of Han Qidu's death, something that was almost relief. Then she looked again at the corrections. The Bureau sent two kinds of paper to the Hall. The first was the daily slip: sunrise, sunset, the length of the day. The second was the seasonal certification, which came four times a year and was a sheet rather than a slip, signed by two astronomers and stamped with the Bureau's square seal in red. The certification Shulan had read the week before was a seasonal sheet, and the note denying any further correction until spring was written in the margin of it in a hand she had not seen before on any Bureau paper. The hand was not the Bureau's. The Bureau's scribes wrote with a fine, dry brush, upright and even, the characters standing like soldiers. This hand leaned. It had a habit of lifting the brush at the end of a stroke, so that the tails of the characters came out thin and hooked, like the feet of a bird. Shulan had seen that hand before. She had seen it on the sealed decrees that were brought into the Hall once a season to be dated, when a clerk of the chancery came to copy the Hall's hours into the decree register. The clerk's name she did not know, but the hand she knew, because she had once spent a whole evening watching it move across a page while she waited to call the watch. She had spent that evening being bored. Now she remembered it and could not breathe. A chancery clerk's hand had written a correction into the Bureau's certification and dated it the ninth day of the tenth month, and on the ninth day of the tenth month Han Qidu had been found dead in his office in the chancery court at the third watch. --- That afternoon Warden Huang Zhen came to the Hall with two men of the inner gate and took the tally boards away. He was very polite. He always was. He explained that the censorate had asked for the Hall's records of the past season, and that the Hall would have them back when the censorate had finished, and that in the meantime Shulan should keep the clock and call the hours as she always had, and if she needed a board to write on she could ask the Hall steward for new ones. "All of them?" Shulan asked. "All of them from the ninth month forward." "For what is the censorate reading the hours of the night?" Huang Zhen's mild eyes rested on her for a moment. "They are reading the hour a man died," he said. "They want very badly to know it. You should want them to know it too." He said it without emphasis, the way he said everything, and then he took the boards and went out, and his keys made no sound. Meng Zhu, who had come back from the kitchen with scalded hands and had heard the last of it, stood in the doorway with her mouth open. "They took the books," she said. "They took the Hall's books." "Then how will you—" Meng Zhu stopped, because she was quick, and because she had watched Shulan too many nights not to understand. "You wrote it down. The true hours. On your scraps." Shulan did not answer. "Did you." "I wrote them," Shulan said. "Every night since the night after he died. Twelve nights. Not all of them true, because for the first four I did not know yet what I was looking at. But the last eight are true." "Where?" "In the rule." Meng Zhu went to the bowl and lifted the ivory rule off its pegs and turned it over, and there, in the hollow under the scale where the wax stopper sat, was a roll of paper scraps folded as small as a fingernail, eight of them, each holding an hour the Hall had never been allowed to call. Meng Zhu put the rule back exactly as she had found it, which was the first careful thing Shulan had ever seen her do. "You have to tell someone," Meng Zhu whispered. "Who?" "The censorate. That man. The one with the flat face." "Luo Cheng." Shulan looked at the drip. "If I tell the censorate, I am a keeper in the inner court saying the clock is wrong. The clock is the Bureau's clock. The Bureau is the throne's eye on the sky. There is no rank in this palace at which a person may say the Bureau is wrong and keep their hands." "So what do we do?" "We find a thing that can say it for us," Shulan said. She thought of the relay stations, and the little clocks they kept, and of her brother, who worked at one of them in the outer city and owed her money and loved her, in that order or the other, she was never sure. She thought of the shim of pine, hidden in her robe, and of the twelfth day of the ninth month, which was the day the recast jar had come up from the foundry, and of the delivery note that must have come with it, and of where a delivery note went once the kitchen had signed for it. "Tomorrow," she said, "I am going to the Coldwell." "You are not allowed to leave the inner court." "No," Shulan said. "I am not." ---