Chapter 10: Terms Accepted

Ming kept accounts. It was the only way she knew how to think.

So on the tenth day of the tenth month, at her desk by the window, in the hour after her steamed bun when the outer hall was at its sleepiest, she took a clean sheet of the Bureau's cheapest paper and ruled it down the middle with the edge of her inkstone. At the top of the left column she wrote Owed. At the top of the right, after some thought, she wrote Other ways.

Under Owed she wrote: Thirteen lines. By the spring equinox. Else called against Ba.

Under Other ways she wrote:

1. Exchange the surety. (Needs the officer who assigned him. Unknown. Han won't say. Bao won't look.)

2. Pay in something else. (No. Lines are paid in lines.)

She sat and looked at the right-hand column. It was much shorter than the left.

"What are you doing?" said Nine.

He was sitting on the windowsill beside her desk, which was new. He had moved there yesterday, after Bao came back from exile in the archive and stood beside his own desk for a whole morning with a look of such silent, dignified suffering that even Nine had been shamed by it. The windowsill was narrow, and he had to sit with one knee drawn up, and the pale light behind him made a pale edge around his black hair.

Ming put her hand flat over the sheet.

"Accounts," she said.

"Whose?"

"Mine."

"May I see?"

"No."

"You've written Other ways," said Nine. "I can read it upside down. I can read anything upside down. It was my only childhood accomplishment." He tilted his head. "Other ways to do what?"

She folded the sheet in half, and then in quarters, and put it in the drawer where she kept things that were not Bureau business, on top of the note that said Fan, daughter, marriage, spring. She closed the drawer.

"Nothing," she said.

"Nothing," said Nine. "You keep saying it. It must be getting crowded in there."

"It means I'm working." She picked up her brush. "Read Bao's petitions."

"Bao has forbidden me to read his petitions. He's put a paperweight on them. It's a very small bronze lion and it looks at me." But he subsided onto the windowsill and opened his fan, and for a while he only watched the hall, and she worked. When he was busy not reading, she took the sheet out of the drawer and put it up her sleeve. The drawer had kept every secret she owned, and it was no match for a fox who read across desks.

She knew what she was going to do before she went home. She had known since the ladder.

It still took her until the third watch to say it.

The fox lay in the corner of her room by the brazier with his nose on his paws, a neat red shape against the books. The snow from the first fall had stayed, and frozen, and the window paper was white with reflected moonlight. Ming sat on the edge of her bed in her padded jacket with her hands folded in her lap, which was where she put them when she didn't know what else to do with them.

"I'm going to close the cases," she said.

The fox opened his eyes.

"All of them. Whatever they send. As fast as I can." She looked at her hands. "I have to."

There was a soft rustle, and then a man sat on his heels on her floor in the gray robe, with the brazier's light on one side of his face. He looked at her for a while. Then he smiled, and it was a real one, so warm and so easy that it took her a moment to understand that he was being kind.

"Good," said Nine.

"Good?"

"Good. Close them all. Close them quickly." He settled his sleeves. "Your father puts too much salt in his broth and sings on ladders, and the world would be much the poorer without him." He bowed slightly from where he sat. "It's the right choice, Recorder. It's the only choice. I'd think less of you if you made any other."

"You know what happens."

"I know what happens."

"When the debt's paid, you're released, and you've got no line to go back to. You fade." She made herself say it plainly. Somebody had to. "I read the Code. I'm not stupid."

"Nobody who has ever met you," said Nine, "has thought you were stupid."

"Then don't tell me it's good."

"But it is good." He leaned forward a little, and his voice went lower, the decoration falling off it as it had in the cage. "Listen. A fox with no line fades eventually anyway."

"Since when?"

"Since long before you. Before the Bureau sent for me." He spread his hands. "You'd only be setting the date."

She said nothing.

"You're only making it punctual," he said.

"That's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

"It's not." Her voice had come out low and level, and she let it. "I'm going to close the cases. I'm going to pay the debt. And I'm going to find another way at the same time."

He tilted his head.

"There isn't one, Recorder."

"You don't know that."

"I've had longer to look than you have."

"Then you weren't looking properly." She stood up. She went to her desk, and took the folded accounts sheet out of her sleeve and unfolded it on the desk under the lamp. She dipped her brush. Under Other ways, she wrote:

3. Find his name.

She turned the sheet around so he could see it.

He read it. Then he read it again, leaning closer to the lamp. She watched his face. Nothing came down over it this time. It simply stopped, and went on carefully not moving.

"You said I was looking in the wrong book," Ming said. "There are only two kinds of book in that Hall. If you're not in the fox register, you're in the other one."

"Recorder."

"So you had a line once. In the human register. And something happened to it." She tapped the sheet. "If I find your name, I can find your line."

"Recorder..."

"If I find your line, I can find out what happened to it," Ming said. "And if something happened, it can be undone."

"That isn't how the Register works."

"Then I'll find out how it does work."

"There are four hundred thousand lines in that Hall."

"I can read," said Ming, "very fast."

He looked at her across the lamp. She waited for him to laugh, or to turn fox and bury his face under his tail until morning. He did neither. He just looked at her, and the brazier ticked.

"Why?" he said at last.

She had prepared for every argument except that one.

"Because it's wrong," she said. "The books are supposed to balance. Somebody struck you from them and left you to fade."

He didn't answer.

"And then they used you to secure a debt on a date that was forged," she said. "That isn't balance. That's somebody cheating."

"And that's the only reason."

"It's a good reason."

"It's an excellent reason," said Nine. "It's the most Recorder Lin reason I've ever heard." But he didn't look away from her, and he didn't smile.

She looked at the sheet on the desk instead, at her own heavy square characters, Find his name, which were not beautiful and never would be.

"I don't want you to fade," she said, to the sheet.

After that the room went quiet.

The lamp needed trimming. She reached for the scissors, and found that his hand had reached for them too, from the other side of the desk, at the same moment. Both their hands stopped above the lamp.

His was an inch from hers. Less. She could see the ink on his second finger, the same place as hers. She could see the lamplight shining through the edge of his palm, thin as breath on a mirror. If she moved her little finger, it would touch his. She didn't know what it would feel like, or whether it would feel like anything at all.

She didn't move it. Neither did he. They sat there with their hands in the air over the lamp, like two people at a game of chess who have both forgotten whose turn it is.

"Recorder," he said, low.

"What?"

"The lamp is smoking."

She looked. It was. She took the scissors and trimmed the wick, and he drew his hand back into his sleeve, and when she looked up again he was a fox in the corner by the brazier with his tail over his nose, and she couldn't see his face at all.

The red paper came at dawn.

It was pushed under her door while she was still asleep, and she found it when she got up, lying face-up on the cold floor in the early light from the window. The fox was already up, sitting beside it, looking at it with his ears forward, like a cat with a mouse it hasn't decided about.

She picked it up. It was in Han's tall old-fashioned hand.

A haunting. The house of the scholar Shang, outside the north gate. Two foxes, sisters. One is reported to be gentle. One is reported to be dangerous. The household cannot tell them apart. Neither can anyone else.

At the bottom, in smaller characters, Han had added: One line. Be careful which one you file.

Ming read it twice. She folded it into her sleeve. Then she took down her blue robe and her warmest jacket and her seal case, and the spare writing brush for her hair, because she always lost the first one.

"Up," she said to the fox. "We have a case."

The fox stretched, slowly, front legs and then back, and yawned, and stood up a man, his gray robe falling straight and his fan in his hand.

"Two sisters," said Nine, reading over her shoulder. "Oh dear. Oh, I don't like the sound of that at all."

"Why not?"

"Because the Hu sisters of the north hills are twins," he said, "and in that family, the nice one is the one you should worry about."