Chapter 169: An Open Door
The accounts did not improve however many times Mu read them.
He read them anyway, by the light of a single lamp in a windowless room three floors under the Blood Fang’s outer hall, because a man who looked away from a wound did not stop bleeding, he only stopped knowing how much. The ledger in front of him had been bleeding for a season.
Two mines, struck from the column of holdings as if a hand had reached in and torn the page out. The silver that used to climb north up the mountain roads, ended. Two elders to account for in the margin. Cao Yan, who had gone east to collect fifteen years of breath from one man and left his head in a ditch for the trouble.
Han Ying, posted to plug the second mine and folded under the same boy’s work without ever sending word he was in danger. Both irreplaceable on a week’s notice. Both replaceable in a year, which to a sect that counted time in dynasties amounted to the same as tomorrow.
Mu felt none of the heat a younger man would have felt. Heat was for people who believed the world owed them a tidy ledger, and he had stopped believing that before most of the disciples upstairs were born. What he felt, turning the ruined page, was the cold arithmetic of a man deciding which truths left this building, and in what dress.
The version for the rank and file was already written. A rival sect had grown teeth, the elders had fallen at their posts doing their duty, the mines were a strategic withdrawal and not a defeat. The version for the man in the capital who had paid for those mines would take more care, because that man would not swallow a comfortable lie, and would gut the messenger who tried to spoon him one.
The knock came while he was still deciding how much of the truth the capital was owed.
A disciple, young, careful, holding a lacquer case in both hands with the stiffness of someone carrying a thing he was afraid of. "From the capital, Elder Mu. The rider would not hand it to anyone but you. He carries the Second Prince’s seal."
Mu took the case, turned the seal to the lamp to read it true, and broke it. He read the order once, the way he read everything, without his face offering the room any opinion on the contents. He set the slip down on the ruined ledger, where the two failures could keep one another company.
’Straight to me.’
The thought arrived dry and unhurried. For two years the arrangement had run one direction only. Zhao came south with the prince’s wishes, took a seat across Mu’s table, drank Mu’s tea, and carried Mu’s answers home.
The prince did not summon. The prince did not write his own name across a case and send it down the mountains to a sect elder as though snapping his fingers at a household steward. That was beneath a son of the empire, and the Second Prince had never once in two years let a soul forget what was beneath him.
He had reached past Zhao. He had reached past the whole patient machinery of it and pressed his own seal onto a command for Mu to present himself in the capital, in person, inside the week.
Which told Mu more than the order did. A man who kept his composure did not break protocol; he made the protocol do his breaking for him. The Second Prince had thrown the courtesy aside and reached down the mountain with his own hand, and a prince only did that when something had gone wrong enough that the pretense of patience cost him more than it earned him.
’He is bleeding worse than the report let on,’ Mu thought. ’Good. A bleeding man is an honest one, for as long as the bleeding lasts.’
He poured himself a measure of the plum wine he kept for the close of bad days and considered the summons the way a man considers weather he has no power to change and every intention of dressing for.
In a better week he would have carried this up the carved stairs of a certain lacquered house and laid it at the feet of the only man whose word outranked his own.
But his lord was not in the house, had not been for some days, and the prince’s clock did not care where the man behind the silk had gone. The decision was Mu’s. He had served long enough to make it the way his lord would have made it, without needing to be in the room to be told.
The whole worth of the arrangement rested on one belief living undisturbed in the Second Prince’s mind. That Blood Fang was his. His coin, his knife, his to point and put away. Mu had spent two years tending that belief like a lamp, trimming the wick, keeping the glass clear, never once letting the prince catch a glimpse of the hand that actually fed the oil.
Refuse the summons, and the prince would feel the leash pull back against his own grip. Stall, and he would start to wonder why a sect he owned needed coaxing to come to heel. Either crack would set a clever, humiliated man asking the one question Mu existed to keep him from asking. Whose sect is this, in truth?
So going was not obedience. Going was upkeep. Mu would present himself precisely so the prince could go on believing he had been obeyed.
He built the visit as he went, the way he built every audience. He would stand in the prince’s residence and let the man spend his anger, because anger spent on a bowed head was anger that did not go hunting for a meaner outlet.
He would carry the blame for the mines somewhere it could do no further harm, hang it on Cao Yan’s corpse, which could no longer object, and on the bad luck of a sect that had chosen the wrong season to find its feet.
Before the prince could decide Blood Fang had outlived its use, Mu would lay a fresh knife on the table. Something pointed at the boy. Costly enough to wear the face of loyalty, cheap enough that his real lord would never feel the spending. The prince would leave that room sure he had bent a sect back into line. He would have done no such thing.
Only one entry in the whole ruined ledger refused to file itself, and it was the one the prince had laughed at.
The boy.
Mu had buried two elders this season, and a younger man might have shrugged it off as ill fortune. Mu did not believe in fortune that struck the same house twice running.
Cao Yan had been a butcher of fifteen years’ standing, a killer sects kept and aimed and did not question. Han Ying had been the steadier of the two, posted to that mine precisely because he did not lose.
A cursed boy of Qi Refining had put them both in the ground inside a single season, and the reports of how he fought refused to agree with one another or with anything Mu knew about what a child that age could do.
The prince had heard "cursed boy" and "regional bracket" and filed the whole business under vanity. Mu heard two dead elders and a pattern he could not yet name, and filed it under the only word his trade respected. Unfinished. He did not fear the boy; fear was one more luxury for people who had not lived long enough to learn its uselessness. But he marked him, the way a careful man marks the one stair in a house he has known for years that has lately, without warning, begun to creak.
He drank off the last of the wine, pinched out the lamp, and climbed back toward the light.
The orders were given before he reached the upper hall. The beast made ready. The eastern ledgers handed to a junior elder who would keep them warm and quiet against his return. The story for the disciples set running, so it would be old news by the time he came home.
The junior who took the ledgers from his hands had the sense to ask only one question, and chose it well. "And if anyone asks where you have gone, Elder Mu, how should I answer?"
"Tell them I have gone to reassure an investor." The corner of Mu’s mouth shifted, the nearest thing to humor he allowed himself in daylight. "It carries the rare advantage of being true."
The beast waited in the high yard, a long-bodied raptor the deep red-black of dried blood, its folded wings spanning twice the width of the yard gate. It had carried him on errands like this for thirty years and had never once asked where, or why.
He took his place in the harness at its shoulders, and the great wings opened to either side of him with a sound like two banners hauled taut in a gale.
He looked north, toward the haze where the mountains broke open onto the plain and, a hard day’s flight past it, the spires of Tianzhao caught what little the grey morning had to give them.
A lesser servant would have read the summons as a leash and ridden north with his head down. Mu read it as an open door. The Second Prince, bleeding and proud and certain he was calling his own knife to heel, had just sent for the one man on the whole board who answered to another hand entirely, and invited him to walk into the heart of his house, to stand at his table, and to listen.
The wings beat once, and the beast threw itself off the mountain into the grey.
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