Chapter 9: The Wrong Book

Registrar Han read her copy of the seal standing up.

He held the folded sheet in both long hands by the window of his cramped office, where the light was best, and he read the four characters of the rank in her heavy square hand, and his face, which was always the color of old paper, went one shade paler.

"You copied it," he said.

"Yes."

"In the cage. In ink. On a sheet you carried out in your sleeve."

"You said to come and tell you. I'm telling you."

Han folded the sheet. He folded it again, small. Then he unlocked the drawer of his desk with a key from around his neck, put the paper inside, and locked the drawer again, and put the key back inside his yellow robe.

"Leave it with me," he said.

"Registrar..."

"Leave it with me." He sat down at last, heavily, as if his bones had been dead even longer than the rest of him. "Keep your head down. And whatever you do, don't copy that seal again where anyone can see it."

She opened her mouth.

"Please," said Han.

He had never said please to her. She closed her mouth and went out, and Nine, who had been leaning in the doorway, followed her back to her desk without a word.

The first snow came that night, early, as it sometimes did in the hills.

It began while Ming was walking home through the temple's front courtyard, big soft flakes that fell straight down out of a dark sky and landed on the ginkgo's last yellow leaves and on the shoulders of her blue robe. By the time she reached the back courtyard the flagstones were white. Nine walked beside her with snow in his black hair, saying nothing about the cold, pointedly.

She stopped at her door.

He stopped too. He looked at the ginkgo, where the snow was already settling into the hollow between its roots, the place where a fox would sleep.

"Come in," Ming said.

He turned his head and looked at her.

"There's a brazier," she said. "You'll be in the corner. By the books. It's still within a hundred paces, so it's allowed."

"It would be extremely improper."

"Then be improper. I'm not going to lie awake listening to a fox freeze in the courtyard."

He stood in the snow for a moment longer. Then he bowed to her, the short bow, and when he straightened he was not a man any more. He was a red fox standing in the snow in front of her door, with a white tip to his tail and white flakes melting on his back, and he looked up at her with amber eyes and waited, formally, to be invited across the threshold.

"Come in," she said again, and held the door, and he went past her ankles into the warm dark of the room, a red shape with snow melting on its back.

He lay in the corner by the brazier with his nose on his paws, a neat red shape against the shelf of books arranged by height. Ming sat at her desk in her padded jacket with a lamp, pretending to read the Code of the Bureau, and listened to the snow brushing against the window paper.

She had been pretending for some time when she said, "Hu Jiu isn't a name."

The fox opened one eye.

"Hu is the clan. Jiu is nine. You're the ninth of the house. That's not a name, it's a place in a line." She turned a page she hadn't read. "Like calling someone the second son."

The fox yawned, showing a great many teeth, and then a man sat on his heels in the corner with his gray robe settling around him and his hands in his sleeves. He looked better in the lamplight than he had any right to. She looked at the Code.

"Foxes," said Nine, "are very private about names."

"Why?"

"Because a name is a handle. Whoever holds it can pick you up." He tilted his head back against the bookshelf. "Rule one hundred and one. A fox gives his true name only to the one who will write it last."

"Write it where?"

"Wherever it's written last. On a stone. In a book." He shrugged. "It's an old rule. Nobody remembers exactly what it means. We just keep it."

"Did you make it up?"

"That one," said Nine, "I didn't."

She closed the Code.

"What was your name?" she said. "Before the Hu clan. Before you were the ninth of anything."

The brazier ticked. Outside, a branch of the ginkgo let go of its snow with a soft sound. Nine sat looking at her, and the charm went out of his face, as it had in the Hall of Registers on the second day, and behind it she could not see anything at all.

"It's very late," he said. "And you have to go to work in the morning."

"That isn't an answer."

"No. It's a fact." He stood, and bowed, and was a fox again before he had finished bowing, curling himself up by the brazier with his tail over his nose. His voice came out from under the tail, muffled. "Goodnight."

She sat looking at the fox, then blew out the lamp and lay down, and listened to the snow, and to the small even breathing from the corner, and lay awake until the window paper began to pale.

In the morning there was a Magistrate at her desk.

She knew it before she was through the door from the back hall, because the outer hall was silent. Not the ordinary silence of dead clerks working. The clerks were standing. All eleven of them, beside their desks, with their hands folded in their sleeves and their eyes on the floor, and in the pale window light by her desk stood a man in a black official robe with a crimson underlayer and a jade plaque at his belt.

He was looking at her inkstone.

"Recorder Lin," he said, and turned, and smiled.

He looked about fifty. His hair was silver at the temples under a black gauze hat, and his face was kind, and his hands were the most beautiful hands she had ever seen on a man, long and clean and still. He cast no shadow on the boards. None of them did. But on him the lack of one looked like a choice.

Ming bowed. Beside her, Nine bowed, and it was the longest bow she had ever seen him give. It went on and on. It had parts she had never seen before.

"Magistrate," she said.

"Wen," said the Magistrate pleasantly. "We haven't met, which is my fault. The Bench is a long way from the outer hall, and I am very lazy." He touched the corner of her inkstone with one fingertip. "This is cracked."

"Yes, Magistrate."

"It will split by spring."

She had heard those words once before, from a fox under a blanket who thought nobody was listening.

Wen smiled. "I have a stone from the southern quarries in my chambers that nobody uses. Let me send it to you."

"Thank you, Magistrate. I'll keep this one."

He looked at her for a moment, still smiling, as if she had said something more interesting than she had.

"Loyal," he said. "Good. That's rarer than talent." His eyes went past her to Nine, who had finished bowing and was standing behind her with his hands in his sleeves. "And this is the surety. I hope the Recorder is treating you well."

"Exquisitely, Your Honor," said Nine. "With every possible courtesy."

Wen inclined his head.

"I have never been so well looked after in all my life," Nine said, "and I am humbly grateful for the privilege."

Ming turned her head and looked at him. He was smiling. It was a flawless smile. She had never seen anything she liked less.

"Registrar Han tells me you've been down to the cage," said Magistrate Wen.

The outer hall was so quiet she could hear the snow sliding off the roof.

"Yes, Magistrate. On a petition."

"In triplicate, he says. Very proper." He nodded.

In triplicate. She had made the three copies herself, and one of them always went up to the Bench. She had never asked who read it.

"You found a discrepancy," said Wen. "You mustn't let it trouble you. The old books are full of them."

"Yes, Magistrate."

"The scribes of fifty years ago were careless men. Some of the senior officers of that time were worse." He sighed a little, a man who had been tidying up after his colleagues for far too long. "The Third Magistrate's people, especially. I've said so for years. Nobody listens to me."

"Yes, Magistrate."

"Close your cases, Recorder. Pay down your debt. It's a heavy thing for someone so young to carry." He touched the inkstone again, gently, like a small animal. "If you change your mind about the stone, you have only to send word."

He went away down the long room between the standing clerks, unhurried, his crimson underlayer showing at the hem with every step. When the door to the inner offices closed behind him, the clerks sat down all at once, like grass after wind.

Ming looked at Nine.

He was still smiling. He kept it on until the door was shut, and for a moment after. Then it went out, and he sat down on the corner of Bao's desk rather suddenly, as if his knees had made the decision without him.

"You were very polite," Ming said.

"I'm always polite."

"Not like that."

He opened his fan. His hand was not quite steady, and the paper trembled, and he closed it again.

"He's a Magistrate," said Nine. "One is extremely polite to Magistrates. Rule one. The very first rule." He looked at the closed door at the end of the hall. "It's the only one that's never let anybody down."

If he wouldn't tell her, she would look it up. She was a recorder. Looking things up was what she was for.

The fox register lived in the Hall of Registers too, on the far side from the human registers, in its own row. Its books were bound in green lacquer instead of red, and they were arranged by clan and then by den, and then, for reasons nobody had ever explained to her, by the number of tails. She had used it twice in three years.

The Hu clan of the western hills took up most of a shelf.

She took the volumes down one by one and laid them on the long reading table, and Nine sat on the end of the table with his feet swinging and watched her do it, with no apparent interest at all.

"You could help," she said.

"I could. But I'm afraid I'd find myself very boring."

"Why are they arranged by tails?"

"Because a fox with nine tails outranks a fox with one, and nobody wants to be shelved below their inferiors." He swung his feet. "There was a scandal two hundred years ago when a clerk filed a seven-tailed matron beside a three-tailed nobody. She haunted the Hall for a month."

"How many tails have you got?"

"One does not ask a fox that," said Nine, scandalized.

"Why not?"

"It's like asking a lady her weight. Or a scholar his examination marks." He considered. "Or a recorder how many times she's checked one particular page of the Ledger of Debts."

She looked up sharply. He was smiling at her, his feet still swinging.

"Once a month," she said. "It's procedure."

"Of course it is," said Nine gently. "And I have one tail, and it's a very good one, and you've seen it, so you know." His ears had gone pink at the tips, she saw, though they hadn't come out. "Now find me in the book, or don't, and let's go and have lunch. You've been grinding your jaw since the Magistrate left."

She hadn't known she was. She stopped.

She found the den. She found the house: the old fox of the house, his wife, three sons, a daughter. And below them, in a separate list headed Taken in, the strays. Foxes who had lost their own dens to hunters or floods or bad luck, and been sheltered by the Hu. Each with a number instead of a name, and a date, and a short note. The first, a vixen from the river dens, after the flood. The second, a young dog fox, after the hunters. The third. The fourth. All the way down.

The eighth, an old vixen, blind, taken in out of charity.

She ran her finger down to the next line.

There was no ninth.

The list stopped at eight. There was no entry, no scraping, no strike, nothing. Just the end of the list, and then blank ruled lines going down to the bottom of the page, waiting for strays who hadn't come yet.

She looked up. He was still sitting on the end of the table, swinging his feet.

"You're not here," she said.

"No."

"You're the ninth of the Hu house. The bride's mother called you that. Everyone at the wedding knew you. And you're not in the book."

"No," Nine agreed.

"Then where are you?"

He stopped swinging his feet.

She waited for the joke, with her face arranged to be cross at it. It did not come. He sat on the end of the long table in the lamplight, with the green volumes of the fox register spread out between them, and he looked at her. He looked at her for a while, as though he were trying to read what was written under her.

I'll never lie to you, he had said. It's the one rule I made up that I actually keep.

"Recorder," he said at last, gently. "You're looking in the wrong book."