Chapter 2: Delivery

There was a man at her desk.

He stood by the lattice window with his back to the room, holding one of her petitions up to the window like a jeweler with a stone he suspects of being glass. He was tall. He wore a pale gray scholar's robe of a silk far too fine for the Bureau, belted with a rust-red sash, and his long black hair was tied back loosely with a cord of the same rust color. He looked dressed for a poetry party and arrived at a tax office.

Down the long room, eleven dead clerks had stopped working. One had dropped his ledger and not picked it up. They stared at the man as they usually stared at Ming's shadow.

The man had no shadow either. Ming noticed that first, because she noticed everything on the floor. The window light fell straight through the space where it should have been.

"That's mine," she said.

He turned around.

He had a narrow face, amber eyes, and one laugh line, on the left side only, as if he had spent years smiling at something slightly to his left. He looked at her, at the petition, and at her again, with the face of someone told a tragedy and then asked to pay for it.

"This," he said, "is yours?"

"It's a Petition for the Entry of a Death."

"Is it? I took it for a map of a very small and badly planned town." He held it up beside his face. "This stroke. Here. Is it meant to be a person?"

"It's the character for person."

"It is leaning on the next character like a drunk on a gatepost."

"It's legible."

"So is a ransom note." He laid the petition down on her desk, squared it to the edge with two long fingers, and then, because apparently he could not help himself, nudged it a hair to the left so that it sat exactly in the middle. Then he stepped back, folded his hands into his sleeves, and bowed.

It was not a small bow. It went on for some time. It had parts.

"Hu Jiu," he said to the floor, "of the Hu clan of the western hills, ninth of my house."

He straightened by one degree.

"Delivered this morning by order of the Bureau. You may call me Nine. Everyone does, except the ones who call me worse." He straightened. "And you are Recorder Lin, who owes fourteen lines and writes like a hen that has walked through ink."

Ming put the red notice on the desk, face down. She lined it up with the petition.

"You're the surety," she said.

"I am."

"You're a fox."

"Mostly." He produced a folding fan from his sleeve, a plain thing of white paper with a bamboo frame, and opened it with a soft snap. "Is that a difficulty?"

"It's irregular. A surety is usually a deed. Or a jade seal. Once a buffalo."

"I am a great deal more pleasant than a buffalo."

"The buffalo didn't comment on my handwriting."

"Then the buffalo," said Nine, "was not your friend."

Somebody down the room made a small sound that, in a living man, would have been a laugh. Ming turned her head. Every dead clerk in the outer hall was suddenly busy.

The delivery slip was pinned to the inside of his sleeve. He unpinned it himself, with the air of someone surrendering a love letter, and handed it over.

It was red paper, the same true red as Han's notice and in the same fine, formal hand. Ming read it at her desk while Nine sat on the corner of a desk three down, which belonged to a clerk named Bao who had been dead since the flood of two reigns ago and who looked at the intrusion with silent despair.

Surety: one fox, called Hu Jiu, of no line. Held against the debt of the Recorder Lin Ming. The surety shall remain within one hundred paces of the debtor until the debt is balanced. When the debt is balanced, the surety is released.

"Released," Ming read aloud.

"Released," Nine agreed. He was fanning himself, although the Bureau had never once in her experience been warm.

"So when I've paid, you go free."

The fan neither stopped nor changed speed. But he looked out of the window at the gray sky, which nobody ever did, because there was never anything there.

"That is what it says," Nine said.

"Of no line." She tapped the slip. "What does that mean?"

"That I am a fox of humble origins and great personal charm." He snapped the fan shut and pointed it at the slip. "What does one hundred paces mean? That is the clause I would be worrying about, if I were you."

"Why?"

"Walk to the paper store."

Ming looked at him. Then she got up, because she did not like being told what to worry about, and walked down the long room between the desks. Past Bao. Past the clerk who kept a cricket in a dead man's cage. Past the archive door. She had gone a hundred and ten paces, counting without meaning to, when there was a scrape and a yelp behind her.

She turned around.

Nine was being dragged down the aisle after her. Not quickly, and not roughly. It was more that the floor had tilted in her direction and he was sliding down it, robe and fan and dignity, his heels skidding on the boards. He caught at the edge of a desk. The desk came with him for two feet before he let go. His ears had come out, two tall red fox ears standing straight up out of his black hair, and he was clearly unaware of it.

He arrived at a stop exactly one hundred paces from her and straightened his sash.

"You see," he said, "the difficulty."

Ming looked at his ears.

He followed her gaze, put a hand up, felt one, and closed his eyes briefly, in real suffering. The ears folded down and vanished back into his hair.

"We will not," said Nine, "be speaking of that."

"Noted," said Ming.

He followed her for the rest of the day. He had no choice.

She worked through her afternoon petitions, and he read over her shoulder and winced. She went down to the archive to return the regulations, and he came with her and remarked that the archive was arranged by someone who hated joy. She ate her steamed bun at her desk at the usual hour, and he watched her do it with open fascination, as the dead clerks sometimes did, and she realized that she had not seen him eat anything all day either.

"Do foxes eat?"

"Foxes adore eating. Foxes eat chicken, and duck, and the little sweet cakes from the bakery by the east gate." He looked at the bun. "I am not hungry."

"Is that a fox thing?"

"It is a manners thing. One does not eat in a house where one has not been invited to the table." He bowed slightly from where he sat on Bao's desk. "First rule of fox etiquette. There are three hundred and twelve."

"You made that number up."

"I made up perhaps forty of them," Nine said. "The rest are very old and extremely binding."

At the end of the afternoon, when she had finished her last petition and capped her ink, she took a fresh sheet and wrote one character on it. She did not mean to show him; she was only practicing. Person. Two strokes, leaning on each other.

A long hand reached past her shoulder. It took the spare brush from the knot of her hair without asking, which nobody had ever done, and dipped it, and on the same sheet beside hers it wrote the same character.

It was beautiful. There was no other word. The two strokes stood apart and held each other up at the same time, and the ink thinned at the end of the second one like breath going out. It was the hand of someone who had been taught by a master and then practiced every day for years until it stopped being practice.

Ming looked at it until the ink dried.

"Where did a fox learn to write like that?"

He put the brush back into her hair. He did it carefully, sliding it through the knot at the same angle she always used, which meant he had been watching her closely enough to notice the angle.

"Foxes have a great deal of time," Nine said, "and very little to do with it."

The Bureau's door let out behind the statue in the back hall of the City God Temple, and at that hour of the evening the temple was empty except for an old woman sweeping incense ash in the courtyard. The great ginkgo tree had gone yellow in the first frost. Its leaves lay on the flagstones like coins nobody had bothered to pick up.

The old woman looked up as Ming came out of the back hall. She nodded, as she did every night, and her eyes passed over Nine the way they would pass over a post.

"She can't see you," Ming said, when they were past her.

"Nobody living sees me unless I let them." He walked a pace behind her left shoulder, exactly as a well-bred escort should, and she was annoyed to find that she liked it. "And you? Where does the Recorder of the Unrecorded go at night?"

"Here."

She stopped in front of a narrow door in the wall of the back courtyard. Behind it was the room the temple let to the recorder: one window, one bed, one desk, one brazier, and a shelf of books arranged by height. She had lived here for three years. Before that she had lived above her father's paper shop on Lantern Lane, and she still went to see him on rest days, and she did not think about why she had moved out a week after she struck his name, or why she could no longer sit across the supper table from him for a whole evening.

She opened the door. Nine looked in, and looked at her, and looked in again.

"One room," he said.

"One room."

"One bed."

"You can sleep in the courtyard. You're within a hundred paces."

"It is the first frost."

"You're a fox."

"I am a fox," Nine said, with enormous dignity, "of refined sensibilities." But when she came out an hour later to empty her washbasin, there was a red fox curled at the foot of the ginkgo tree with his tail over his nose, and she stood and looked at him for longer than she meant to. In the moonlight he looked small. Smaller than a fox should look, as if part of him had been mislaid.

She went inside and came back out with the spare blanket and dropped it on him. He did not wake up, or pretended not to, which in a fox might have been the same thing.

She almost went back in. She stood on her step with the empty basin, and her breath smoked in the cold, and the temple bell down the hill rang the first watch of the night.

"Nine."

One amber eye opened under the blanket.

"The slip said I have to close cases. One line each." She looked at the fox, and not at the sky. "What happens when the debt is paid? When it says you're released, where do you go?"

The eye looked at her for a moment. Then it closed.

"Your inkstone," said the fox's voice from under the blanket, muffled and drowsy, "has a crack in the lower left corner. I noticed it this afternoon. It will split by spring if you go on grinding so hard."

"That isn't what I asked."

"No," the fox agreed. "Goodnight, Recorder Lin."