Three days later I went to the prison to see him.
I hadn't meant to. My feet took me.
Wei Changsheng sat in there, still in brown silk, hair still combed to a shine. Nobody dared handle him roughly yet — Tongyuan hadn't been confiscated, and half the capital owed him money; nobody wanted the enmity.
He looked up when he saw me.
"A-Zhen."
I didn't answer.
He nodded to himself, as though whether I answered or not had been in his calculations all along.
Then he said:
"Jiang Jingzhi."
I went rigid.
"Grand Secretary now. Minister of War three years ago," he said, as level as reading a ledger line. "General Pei's report came home through his hands."
"Uncle..." My voice came out dry. "I didn't haggle with you."
"I know." Wei Changsheng looked at me. "I named a price. You didn't take it. But I named it."
"Sixty years in this trade, A-Zhen. I have never taken money and failed to deliver."
I stood with my hands on the bars and could not tell what I felt anymore.
"You're angry with me," he said. "Fine."
"But hear me out once. Go up there. Look at him properly."
"Then come back and tell me which of us is the forgery."
The Grand Secretary's house was on Qingyun Street. No red lacquer on the gate, no stone lions, only two old locust trees.
Jiang Jingzhi received us in his study.
He was about seventy, thin, in cotton, a book in his hand. On the desk was a cup of tea gone cold and a bun with a bite out of it.
He looked at Pei Yan a long while.
"I remember you," he said. "Last year. The dinner at Cuiyun Tower."
"Yes," Pei Yan said.
"The fish was good."
"Twelve hundred taels," Pei Yan said. "The inkstone the late Emperor granted my grandfather."
Jiang Jingzhi put the book down.
He didn't startle. He didn't deny it. He only sat still a moment, then let out a breath.
"Sit," he said.
It took the Court of Judicial Review four days to open the War Ministry archive.
Nobody had hidden it.
That is the thing I will never get over.
There was no secret room. No false bottom. Nobody had burned anything. General Pei Zhongyan's report was in file box number forty-seven, twentieth year of Jinghe, filed in order, tied with the correct cord, stamped into the register, signed for by the clerk who received it, with the date and hour written on it.
It had lain there for three years. Clean. Tidy.
Your servant Pei Zhongyan respectfully reports: the new consignment of armor I have weighed and measured with my own hands. Two fen under regulation. Soft iron. Three times I have asked for replacement; three times no answer has come. I will stake my head upon it: if this goes to the field, the three thousand men under me will not hold the pass.
In the top right corner, in vermilion, four characters.
Discuss it later.
Wangsha fell twenty-one days after that.
There was no later.
I stood in the archive with the paper in my hands, and looked at the second sheet in the same box — the judgment written after the battle.
Vermilion also. Four characters also.
Rash, and overrun.
The same hand.
"I read it," Jiang Jingzhi said.
We were sitting in his study. The tea he'd poured for us had gone cold.
"I read it carefully. I even sent for men from the Board of Works to question." He said. "I knew Pei Zhongyan was not a man who talked nonsense. If he said the armor was thin, the armor was thin."
Pei Yan sat beside me.
He didn't move. I didn't dare look at him.
"Then why write those four characters?" I asked.
Jiang Jingzhi looked at me.
"You're a pawnbroker's daughter."
"Yes."
"Then you understand," he said. "I sat in that chair, I held that sheet of paper, and I had to name a price."
"If I opened it, what was I opening? Three thousand sets of armor is one lot. Behind that lot were eighty more, across nine garrisons, over twelve years. Pull one thread and the whole net comes up. The War Ministry, the Board of Works, the Board of Revenue — thirty-seven men, two of whom taught me."
"We were at war. The north wasn't settled. Open it up, and the army's heart goes; a man on the frontier stops believing in the armor on his own back. Do you know how fast an army loses when it doesn't trust its armor?"
He said it perfectly calmly.
"I did the arithmetic. Open it: lose nine garrisons, lose thirty-seven men, lose two years of chaos, possibly lose the frontier."
"Close it: lose one old general, and three thousand men."
He sipped the cold tea.
"I never took a copper, girl. Not one. Go and look. There isn't a vase in my house worth a hundred taels."
"I only calculated. And I calculated correctly."
Pei Yan stood.
I thought he was going to kill him.
He didn't.
He only stood there and looked at an old man sitting in a bare study, drinking cold tea, with half a bun in front of him.
Then he sat back down.
I understood.
Three years he had gone looking for a monster. He had sold his whole house to buy a monster.
And at the end of the road was this.
"You," Jiang Jingzhi said, turning to me. "You price things for a living. Tell me. Where is my arithmetic wrong?"
I sat there a long time.
In my head the abacus ran.
"Your arithmetic is right, sir," I said at last.
He nodded.
"You only left out one line."
"Which line?"
"The interest, sir."
Jiang Jingzhi raised his head.
"You're an official; you wouldn't know," I said. "My family has kept a pawnshop three generations. Let me tell you the first rule of the trade: everything pawned carries interest. You take a thing in today, you price it at today's value. But you don't redeem it. You leave it lying."
"It has been three years, sir."
I counted it off on my fingers. I have counted that way since I was ten. I don't know how to count any other way.
"That day, you owed three thousand men at Wangsha, plus one old general."
"Three years on, you also owe: a warehouse officer named Xia Yuan, dead in a well at Binzhou. A workshop that fed forty people, burned on the eleventh of the eleventh month. A three-generation pawnshop, burned the night before last. The eyes of an old man who had nothing to do with any of it. An old craftsman who cut off his own thumb and has been mending pots in a ruined shrine for three years. And forty-one objects in a house, every one of them a grave."
"And a man called Wei Changsheng — who, if you had written investigate instead of discuss it later, would have been beheaded three years ago, and would never have had the time to grow into the thing he is now."
I looked up at him.
"You took a thing in pawn three years ago. You never redeemed it. You never paid the interest. And now you come to the counter meaning to settle at that day's price?"
"You can't afford it anymore, sir."
Jiang Jingzhi sat still.
For a long time.
The afternoon sun came through the lattice onto the desk, onto the cold tea, onto the half-eaten bun.
Then he did something I hadn't expected.
He bowed his head.
"I can't afford it," he said. "You're right."
I thought I would feel vindicated.
I felt nothing at all.
He raised his head. His eyes were clouded, like my father's, except that they could still see.
"But hear one question," he said. "I ask it honestly, not to argue."
"That year you were fifteen. Suppose someone had picked you up and set you in my chair. Handed you that sheet. Given you a quarter of an hour to write on it."
"Are you certain you would have written differently?"
I opened my mouth.
And nothing came out.
Because two months ago I pointed at a basket of dead stock and said rubbish, all of it, and sold four hundred taels for one.
I wasn't crooked. I wasn't greedy. I was busy.
I simply couldn't be bothered to bend down and look.
I sat in the study of Grand Secretary Jiang Jingzhi and understood, for the first time in my life, something that put more cold in my spine than the night I found the false pin:
You don't have to be a monster to kill three thousand men.
You only have to be busy.
We walked back.
Not because the estate had no horses — by then Tongyuan had been confiscated and the prefect had sent two good horses to our gate by way of compensation.
He just didn't get on his. So I didn't get on mine.
Qingyun Street is long, planted with locusts both sides. Halfway down, it began to get dark.
"Pei Yan."
"Yes."
"Was it worth it?"
He walked on about ten paces.
"Forty-one pieces," he said. "My grandfather's inkstone. The horse my father rode out to the pass. Autumn Mountains — my mother's favorite. She used to sit in front of it a whole afternoon. I remember."
"Three years."
He stopped.
"For one line of writing in a file box."
He didn't say anything after that.
I didn't ask anything after that.
In my trade there are things a customer puts on the counter that you know at once you cannot price. Not because they're too expensive. Because they aren't on any scale you own.
For those, my father taught me: don't name a price. Just stand there with them.
I moved a step closer and took his hand.
It was still wrapped in cloth. Callus on the second joint of the index finger, and the middle. A man who holds a brush.
He didn't turn his head.
But he closed his hand.
We walked the length of Qingyun Street like that, two people with bandaged hands, saying nothing, under two rows of locusts letting go of their leaves.
