A shadow can watch a house. To take it apart, you need a key to the doors, and Xiao Yan gave me one in the least suspicious way an emperor's son could: he had me promoted.
It was elegantly done, the way he did everything. A quiet word moved through the household office — nothing to do with the prince, heaven forbid, only that the medicine-woman Granny Lin, overburdened with the care of the inner apartments, had requested an assistant, a girl with a steady hand and a strong stomach, and there happened to be one on the deathwatch of the Eastern Palace whose services were no longer required now that His Highness's condition had stabilized. Which was true, in its terrible way. The prince had stabilized. The palace had simply drawn the wrong conclusion about which direction stability meant.
So Shen Yao passed out of the deathwatch and into the Taiyiju proper, at the very bottom of it, as a yipo's apprentice — a rank so low the lettered physicians did not know it existed and would not have cared if they did. And I walked, at last, through the front doors of the machine that had helped kill my patient.
The Bureau of Physicians was a world unto itself, and I hated it with a completeness that surprised me. Not because it was primitive — I had made my peace with the tools of the age. I hated it because it was exactly, precisely the thing I had spent my first life fighting in a building with far better plumbing: a hierarchy that had confused rank with knowledge, in which a man's place was decided by his family and his examinations and the color of his robe, and in which the actual work of keeping people alive was done, invisibly, at the bottom, by people the top would never name. The physicians of the upper offices diagnosed by the classics and the pulse and the alignment of a patient's fate, and prescribed decoctions of extraordinary subtlety, and would sooner have died than touch a wound with their hands, because touching was for the yipo, for the bone-setters and the birth-women and the lancers of boils — the caste that actually opened bodies and actually saw inside them and was actually, therefore, correct more often than their betters, and was never, ever promoted.
I had fallen, in other words, into a version of every hospital politics I had ever survived, run four hundred years earlier and with the sexism turned up to a setting I had only read about. It was almost restful. I knew this game. I had been winning it my whole life.
The Grand Physician Que ran the place, and being inside his house taught me things about him that a sickroom visit never could. He was not, I decided, watching him move through his domain, an evil man. He was a frightened, comfortable, deeply mediocre one — a physician who had risen on connection rather than skill and knew it in the marrow of his bones, and who lived in daily terror of being found out, and who had therefore made himself perfectly, fatally useful to anyone powerful enough to protect him. Such a man does not plan a murder. But such a man will burn incense over a wound for two months and call it fate, if the alternative is a powerful person's displeasure, and he will not ask himself too closely why he has been told to. He is the softest kind of accomplice: the one who has arranged never to know what he is part of.
"He reports to someone," I told Xiao Yan, in the nights, which remained the only safe hours. "Que does nothing without permission and takes no risk without cover. Everything he did to you, someone told him to do, and someone promised to protect him for doing it. Find who reassures him when he's frightened, and you've found a thread that runs upward."
"Watch who he runs to," Xiao Yan agreed. "A coward always has a patron. He cannot help it; fear needs a place to kneel."
And I watched. And what I saw, in those first weeks inside the Bureau, was the first thing that did not fit my growing suspicion of the obvious — because when the Grand Physician Que was frightened, when a case went wrong or an inspection loomed or the whisper reached him that the Crown Prince was somehow, impossibly, still alive, the person he ran to was not the Empress Dowager's faction, and not the Third Prince's, and not any of the hard visible powers I had been taught to watch. He sent his frightened little notes, by a trusted boy, to the inner apartments — to the household of charities and poetry, to the softest and most beloved office in the palace. I saw it, and I did not understand it, and I filed it in the place where I keep the findings that do not yet fit the diagnosis, and I went on watching the wrong suspects, exactly as I had been built to.
