Chapter 155: The Half Page from the Inner Room

Dust still drifted inside the doorway.

Xu Yan stood outside the threshold, one hand braced against the charred frame, and lowered the water flask from his shoulder, setting it beside the door. The daylight from the outer room spilled in, reaching two paces past the door before it died. Beyond that was blackness, and in the blackness, flecks of ash drifted down, floated halfway, then rose again—up to where no hand could reach, where they vanished from sight.

Cheng Banshan sat on the stone steps at the storehouse door, his hand pressed flat on the oilcloth, head down. "Wait until it settles before going in. Swallow a bellyful of ash and you won't pick ten pages all day."

Xu Yan answered and stood outside the threshold to wait. While he waited he looked in: near the door the floor was still recognizable as floor, but further in it was all ash; a shallow groove ran through the ash at an angle from the door frame, left by the beam when they'd dragged it out yesterday. The writing desk was at the very back, against the inner wall, one end collapsed, the other still standing.

Jiang Wan came over from the east wall, with Shao Ming, Shi Po, and Qi Qi behind her.

"I'll take the storehouse," she said.

"The shelves are empty; pick what's in the ash too," Xu Yan said. "Tap along the walls, listen for hidden cavities. Stone slabs on the floor, base of the walls—wherever something looks off, leave it be. Don't pry hard."

Qi Qi wiped his hands on his sleeves. "Sect Master, if I pick out money—"

"Note where you found it. Note first, claim nothing."

"Understood." Qi Qi said. "I'm not greedy. I just want to know how much there is to find."

"We'll talk after the picking's done."

Jiang Wan stopped at the threshold and glanced in. The ash inside still floated. She watched for a moment, then rolled her sleeves up a turn and looked back at Shao Ming and the others: "Let's go."

She led Shao Ming, Shi Po, and Qi Qi around behind the accounts office. Bai Xiaoman and Du Xiaochuan stayed in the outer room, starting from the southernmost row at the east wall's base, going over what hadn't been picked clean yesterday. By the time the sun had dropped west yesterday they'd gathered eighty percent of the pages out there; what remained was wedged in the seams between stone slabs, paper stuck to stone, requiring fingertips to pick out bit by bit. Bai Xiaoman pried one page free, held it up to the light by the door, looked it over, then placed it on the stack at the east end. Du Xiaochuan swept the crumbs she'd pried loose off to one side. The two of them moved slower than ants.

"Don't tear what's stuck," Cheng Banshan reminded from the step.

"I'm not tearing." Bai Xiaoman said. "It's splitting on its own."

"If it splits, put it on the stack too. Don't throw it out."

Qian Duoduo came back from the stone trough, water flasks in hand, shoulders weighed down. He set them one by one in a neat row at the bottom of the storehouse steps. After the last one, he turned and looked at the black doorway of the inner room: "How long has the Sect Master been in there?"

"Half the day," Du Xiaochuan said.

Qian Duoduo walked to the inner room door, not daring to step in. He set one flask beside the threshold and called out: "Sect Master, water's here."

A voice answered from inside, saying leave it. After a while, Xu Yan came out, crouched on the threshold, drank two mouthfuls, stoppered the flask, set it back where it was, and went in again. Qian Duoduo stood watching for a couple of seconds, said, "Dark in there," and turned to set out the rest of the flasks.

You had to crouch within the first ten steps. There weren't as many pages in the inner room as outside, but they were scattered wider—the ones farthest from the desk were still whole, some lying two sheets together; the closer to the desk, the more they shattered, piece by piece, flipping over whenever the breeze from the door caught them. He picked up the first page, carried it to the threshold, and held it to the daylight: the red "Qingya Accounts" seal at the head was still there, and below it a line read, "The seventeenth day of the Ninth Month: Received one sack of spirit rice; paid two spirit stones for lamp oil. Balance on hand: forty-one."

Lamp oil. He put the page on the stack outside the threshold and went back for the next.

Only the patch by the door had light in the inner room. Going deeper, the characters became unreadable, so he gathered four or five pages at a time, carried them out, crouched on the threshold, examined them one by one, set the ones he'd gone through outside, and went back for more. After a dozen trips, kneeling on the stone slabs, his knees went hot, so he shifted to a half-crouch and spread the pages over his knees.

One page recorded, "The fourth day of the Eleventh Month: Received one load of charcoal; paid three spirit stones for stove repairs. Balance: one hundred twenty." The next page continued, also reading "The fourth day of the Eleventh Month," with a few strokes written, then below that, "The eleventh day of the Eleventh Month." No blank line between, and nowhere did it say which year this was. Another page had its closing balance soaked through; the numbers blurred. He scraped with a fingernail and couldn't scrape it off—that patch wasn't ash. It was burned in.

No one had touched the area near the counter in the outer room yet. Huo Qing crouched outside the counter, picking up pages one by one, wiping the ash off with the back of his hand before reading. At the corner of the counter, he reached underneath and pulled out a half-burned page, then walked over and placed it in Xu Yan's hand.

Only half the page remained. The head of the page was burned away, but two lines at the bottom were still there. Xu Yan held it to the light at the door, then flipped it over to check the back: "Nothing recorded."

"Mm."

"Set it aside. The farthest stack at the east end."

Huo Qing took the page back and asked, "Which stack?"

"The one by the courtyard wall, the outermost pile."

He nodded, walked over, put it down, and returned to the counter to keep picking. Xu Yan went back to crouching by the desk and resumed.

The collapsed end of the desk pressed against the stone floor, a hole burned through its surface, black so deep you couldn't gauge it. The desk's three stone feet still stood; the foot at the collapsed end had gone crooked, and beneath that crooked foot something was pinned.

He first cleaned the area in front of the desk. A few pages stuck to the desktop, burned down to a corner each, too fragile to pinch up. He used a piece of broken tile to scrape underneath, lifted them out on his palm, carried them to the door to examine, then returned. On the third scrape, the tile snapped; he got another piece.

Moving beside the crooked stone foot, the back of his hand struck something hard in the ash. He switched to the tile shard, brushing the ash away from around the foot little by little, uncovering a stone base: the foot wasn't standing on the slab—it was set into it, a half-finger's gap on each side, the gaps packed with ash.

Between the foot and the slab, a corner of paper showed.

He brushed the ash clean. The paper corner jutted out from beneath the desk foot, its edge black, curling upward. He reached to pull it—wouldn't budge. The paper was pinned dead by the stone. He worked both hands under the foot, gripping the stone's edge, and lifted. The stone foot rose a hair off the slab; the paper loosened. He pulled the half page free, and the foot dropped back with a knock, a layer of ash puffing down from the desk surface, landing on his eyebrows.

The half page in his hand was light as a dry leaf. The left half was gone, the break a crooked line, the edges curled, brittle to the touch—a thin, crisp char that crumbled at a touch.

He walked to the threshold, crouched with his back to the outer room, laid the half page on the threshold stone, and pinned both ends with two fingers. On the remaining half, the characters were smoked brown, with a black streak running horizontally through the middle; below that streak everything was a smeared mess, unreadable. In the upper portion one spot stood clear: "The eighth day of the Ninth Month, night."

Half an inch lower, another spot, the characters written tighter than the rest: "Not a Beast Tide."

He drew the half page closer and read it over again from the beginning. Both places were still there. He turned it over to check the back—smeared too, only a single brushstroke-mark left near the break, impossible to tell what it was. Half an inch above the break, the writing had been burned off mid-character.

He folded the half page in half, then in half again. On the second fold, a crumb dropped from the broken edge. He stopped, pinched up the crumb, folded it in with the paper, and creased it into a palm-sized square.

The thin ledger against his chest pressed close. He tucked the folded square in front of the ledger and smoothed it flat through his clothes. Not a single character more had appeared in the thin ledger.

He sat on the threshold for a while. The ash in the inner room still fell—onto his hair, his shoulders. He brushed himself off twice, leaving two white streaks, wiped the ash from his hands onto his knees, and got up to go back for the rest.

He finished the circle around the desk only when the sun had climbed overhead. He gathered the pages in his arms without counting: mostly daily entries, stroke by stroke, income, expenditure, balance copied on the last line; some half pages had a single entry left, with a balance copied below it all the same. He came out through the door, and the light outside made his eyes swim. He stopped, waited for his sight to steady before he could make out the courtyard.

Cheng Banshan was bending over a stack, squaring it up. Hearing footsteps, he reached out. Xu Yan handed him the pages.

Cheng Banshan took them, flipped through with the page heads facing out: "From the inner room?"

"Inner room."

"Is that all of them?"

"The floor inside isn't like outside. The fire started at the desk."

Cheng Banshan pressed the pages onto the oilcloth, crouched down, checked the stack's alignment from the side, then stood and dusted his hands. "The inner room gets its own stack. Don't mix it with the outer room's."

"Separate stack." Xu Yan said.

Cheng Banshan moved those pages to the inner end of the oilcloth and laid another tile shard on top, and asked nothing more.

Flatbread was handed out in the courtyard at Horse hour. Qian Duoduo untied the bundle and counted the cakes out one by one to everyone, pinching the opening shut at the end: "Four flasks still full. Bread, one per person per day. Enough." He retied the bundle, pulling two hard knots tight, his cheeks puffing with the effort.

Bai Xiaoman came over from the outer room, wiping her hands on her clothes—didn't help; the creases of her fingers were black. "The three rows at the south end of the east wall are done. There's still stuff stuck in the slab seams, and what came out was all little half-pieces. One had no writing at all on it." She thought a moment, then asked, "Does that still count as Qingya's?"

"Yes." Xu Yan said. "Collect the unmarked ones too. Don't number them yet."

"Where do they go?"

"Set them aside, separate from the marked ones."

"Oh." Bai Xiaoman crouched down, took half a cake, and broke off half of that for Du Xiaochuan.

Jiang Wan came back around from the storehouse side, brushing the ash off her sleeves as she walked.

"Nothing on the shelves," she said. "Not a single bracket remains on any of the four walls. The floor's just ash, and there are no whole pages in it—only fragments."

"The walls?"

"Shi Po tapped them twice," Jiang Wan said. "East end to west end, listening spot by spot."

Shi Po came up behind, wall dust still on his hands. He stood straight and said: "Solid. That middle section sounds dull—thick stone."

Xu Yan nodded, broke his flatbread in half, and held it out. Shi Po took it, folded a small corner away into his robe, and finished the rest in a few bites.

Sounds still came from the storehouse—someone moving a shelf leg. Across the courtyard it was unclear; just a clink of iron on stone, then nothing.

Then Qi Qi's voice carried across half the courtyard: "Empty, Sect Master. Not a single page."

Xu Yan answered.

His hand, through his clothes, pressed once against his chest.