City of Ink

by Elsa Hart

  Sun looked down at the report. “It is neatly crafted. It gives a plausible explanation of what happened. It might even be true. Should the Emperor choose to review it personally, he will find no fault with it.”

  “I understand that this is the report you will submit,” said Li Du. “But perhaps I could continue my inquiries. There is no reason not to conclude what we started.”

  Now Sun did look away. “That will not be possible. I’m sorry, but it has fallen to me to tell you that you no longer have a place in this office.”

  Li Du stared. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that there are consequences for disobeying orders, and for attracting the ire of a palace official. This wasn’t my decision, but it is one I cannot challenge.”

  When Li Du did not answer, Sun began to search through the papers on his desk. He produced a document, and handed it to Li Du. “You are not to be unemployed. You are being reassigned to Tongzhou.”

  “Tongzhou?” Li Du was stunned. Tongzhou was a day’s hard journey north of the city.

  Sun nodded. “The governor has found himself embroiled in a controversy over grain shipments. He requires additional clerks to help untangle the problem. You are to be one of them.”

  “But—when am I to go?”

  “The sub-prefect expects you by the end of the day tomorrow. If you do not report to him by then, you will be in violation of these orders, and I will not be able to protect you.”

  Li Du took the paper, noting the dense layer of official seals appended to the text. Sun watched him read it. “You are an intelligent man,” he said, once Li Du had slipped the paper into his bag. “More intelligent than I am. I’ve never understood why you wanted to work here, notwithstanding our family connection. I am not ashamed to admit that I preside over an office of little significance to the city. But you—you could be a man of influence. This assignment may be Kirsa’s vengeance, an attempt to disgrace you, but perhaps it will be an opportunity. Perhaps, one day, you will have the authority to prevent men like Kirsa from getting what they want.”

  There was little more to say. Li Du rose, bid Sun farewell, and went to his office, where he packed away the objects that were his, left those that were not, and departed. Through the open windows of their offices, the clerks, feigning absorption in their tasks, watched him go.

  Chapter 41

  Chaoyang Gate was routinely crowded with merchants and tax officials coming and going from Tongzhou, the northern shipping terminus of the Grand Canal. This afternoon was no exception. Mules waited passively as laden baskets were adjusted on their backs, their sides twitching in response to biting flies. Horses stood proudly beside armed Bannermen radiating confidence in their sturdy travel attire. Vendors with streaks of charcoal on their cheeks stoked fires while customers shouted orders. The muddy ground was sprinkled with spilled grain and imprinted by boots, hooves, and cart wheels. Barrels and boxes teetered in crooked stacks, through which inspectors slowly circulated, paper and stylus in hand, making notes and issuing receipts. As the sun sank and the hour of the dog approached, guards prepared to close the gates and set the watch.

  On the opposite side of the Outer City from Chaoyang, Li Du and Hamza sat at a stone chess table in the tall grass of a neglected park. In place of chess pieces, an earthenware bottle and two cups rested on the outlines of the game board, faintly incised in the stone, worn down by years of rain and snow and city grit.

  “I have been wondering what stories I will tell to entertain my audience at the mansion of Baldan tomorrow night,” said Hamza. “I am inspired by secret tunnels. Perhaps I will invent some. I am considering a kingdom inside a mountain, vast caverns lit by rocks charmed to believe themselves stars. I was told, once, of a piper who entered a cave on the coast of a small island and was never heard from again. Perhaps I will cast him as the adventurer in my story, and say that he found his way to that stone city.”

  After several cups of wine, it was easy for Li Du to envision the subterranean world. He saw the stones glowing blue and violet and white, and the tunnels leading from rocky chambers like spokes from a wheel. But as the song of a myna reached him from somewhere in the tangled branches overhead, he felt grateful to be above ground.

  “What is in Tongzhou?” asked Hamza. He had found a lost chess piece in the grass, a pawn, and was flicking it so that it spun over the stone surface of the table.

  “Granaries,” replied Li Du, picturing the immense repositories of the capital’s grain supply, delivered from the central provinces along the Grand Canal. Complex and ever-shifting policies of grain distribution made it a haven for officials who enjoyed bureaucratic puzzles, and a nightmare for those who didn’t.

  Hamza refilled their cups. “And what will happen tomorrow evening when the sub-prefect who is expecting you realizes you have not arrived?”

  Li Du looked up. The sky was a churning, unsettled gray. “I suppose he’ll write to Chief Inspector Sun. Or to Magistrate Yin.”

  “And?”

  “And someone will come looking for me.”

  The chess piece had stopped spinning. Hamza placed a finger on it, and began absently to move the disk along the lines of the game. “I would like to know which puzzle you are staying to solve. Are you disobeying the command to leave in order to find the Black Tile Factory murderer? Or are you remaining for the same reason you came back to Beijing two years ago? Are you still determined to uncover the truth about Shu?”

  Li Du picked up his full cup and drank half of it. “I don’t know. Ever since we went to the home of Feng Liang, I have felt—” He hesitated.

  “Discouraged,” Hamza said. “It has not escaped my notice.”

  “It’s more than that,” said Li Du. “After two years of letters and reports and records leading only to more letters and reports and records, I’d finally found someone who was alive, someone who could speak to me.”

  Hamza was studying the solitary disk now resting at the center of the table. “But Feng Liang had no answers, which means you face once more the dim ministry corridors and their silent shelves.”

  “If there is no one living who can tell me what happened,” said Li Du, “then those corridors are all that remain before me. And I begin to think you were right. I begin to think I have been losing my way in documents so filled with lies that there is not enough truth among them ever to tell the whole story. I begin to feel that all the words I’ve read, all the papers connected to that day in the library nine years ago, are starting to char in the back of my mind, turn to ash, and disappear.”

  “And what is left?” asked Hamza.

  As the question hovered between them, Li Du perceived that there was more color in the gray sky than he had initially noticed. The tall grass whispered around him, but instead of conjuring the dry hiss of unsettled ghosts, it reminded Li Du of children playing. He thought of Shu watching his grandchildren make boats of leaves beside the pond at sunset, of the smile on his face when he chose books to give as gifts, and of his impassioned diatribes against sunning books too early in the spring. “What is left are memories,” he said slowly. “And I realize now that I am ready to leave the maze, and keep that which has always belonged to me—the memory of a friendship.”

  They sat in silence. The light started to fade. Finally, Hamza spoke. “What you have said sounds more like a reason to leave the city than to stay.”

  “And I expect, whether by choice or by force, I will leave,” Li Du replied. “But not yet. I came back too late to discover why Shu died. Too much had been buried in my absence.”

  “But you are not too late to solve the murders at the Black Tile Factory,” said Hamza. “I see.”

  Li Du lifted his cup again. “The killer hasn’t had time to hide.”

  “On the subject of time,” said Hamza, “we will have to work quickly, if we are to succeed before it’s discovered that you have not gone to Tongzhou. What will we do?”

  Li Du was silent. He allowed his gaze to wander the hillside
, picking out the other stone tables almost lost amid the tall grass and trees. As a child, he had come to play in this park. He remembered populating it with the conjurations of his mind. The stone tables and benches had become the scattered bones of monsters. The chess pieces hidden in the grass had become tokens to present to gods in exchange for information. Children’s games, he thought. Tunnels. “Where did we hear of tunnels recently?” he asked.

  Hamza’s brows lifted, and he glanced at Li Du’s empty wine cup. “Have you forgotten?”

  “No,” said Li Du. “I don’t mean what Bai overheard in the pavilion.” He closed his eyes, saw a maze of hedges lit emerald green in sunset light, and heard the patter of running steps, light as raindrops on courtyard stone. He was thinking, he realized, of Mentougou. “Mei’s children,” he whispered.

  Hamza was staring at him. “What about them?”

  Li Du spoke with his eyes still closed. “Do you remember the evening we went to Mentougou? The children were playing a game when we arrived.”

  “I remember,” said Hamza. “They had turned the boxwoods into the walls of a labyrinth.”

  Li Du nodded. “And they said they were playing tunnels. Why were they playing tunnels?”

  “Because children cannot study calligraphy all the time,” said Hamza reasonably.

  “I wasn’t talking about playing in general,” said Li Du. “I was talking specifically about tunnels. Mei spoke to us about the children’s recent exploits. She said they had been regularly sneaking into the Glazed Tile Factory to collect broken shards of colored tile.”

  “Yes.”

  “A child’s imagination turns whatever enters her game into a part of the game. What if the children overheard something in the Glazed Tile Factory that inspired them?”

  “You think they heard something about tunnels,” said Hamza, beginning to understand.

  Li Du tried to focus. “At Hong’s party, Pan discussed the tunnels with Kirsa and another man. What if it was Ji Daolong?”

  “The owner of the Glazed Tile Factory,” said Hamza. “The man who claimed to know so little about his old family friend. You are suggesting that he lied to us?”

  “I am. Consider the old temples Pan and Kirsa used in their scheme. The roofs might have required glazed tiles as well as black ones. Pan could manipulate the paperwork at the Black Tile Factory, but who would manipulate it at the Glazed Tile Factory?”

  “So you think that Ji was working with them all along,” mused Hamza. “And that the children might have overheard Pan and Ji talking about the tunnels at the Glazed Tile Factory, the same tunnels they were discussing in the pavilion.”

  “I think it’s possible,” said Li Du. “We will have to ask Ji himself.”

  “Then we are to return to Mentougou?”

  “That won’t be necessary. Ji told us he would be at the examination yard the day before the exams begin.” Li Du looked at the darkening sky. “Which means we’ll find him there tomorrow.”

  Chapter 42

  Overcrowding was beginning to take a toll on the area surrounding the examination yard. Intermittent odors of sewage fouled the air. Efforts to sweep litter into shadowed alcoves had been undone during the night by dogs and rats. A small army of laborers toiled with brooms and buckets, preparing the space for the day of pomp and ceremony to follow, while soldiers patrolled the vast examination yard.

  Li Du, recognizing that an appearance of authority was the only authority left to him, had taken some pains with his dress that morning. He had shaved carefully, washed his boots, brushed the dust and grit from his hat, and donned his newest robes. While not drawing attention to himself, he wanted to appear capable of commanding obedience from any nearby soldier simply by stating his own name and rank.

  Ji Daolong was standing among several stacks of green glazed tiles that gleamed in the morning light. He was pointing up at the roof, at the corner of which temporary scaffolding had been erected. As Li Du and Hamza approached, they heard Ji speaking to a laborer who stood beside him. “The black tiles are well laid. We’ll have no trouble mounting ours to the ridge.” He bent to pick up one of the tiles. Then, noticing Li Du and Hamza, he set it back down. When they reached him, he bowed.

  “We spoke at Mentougou,” said Li Du.

  “Of course,” Ji replied. “I have since learned of the death of Hong Wenbin.” He raised a muscular arm to indicate the roof behind him. “It cannot have been easy for Hu Gongshan to assume responsibility for replacing the black tiles, given all that has happened. If the Hong family chooses to close the factory, and Hu is in need of employment, I will encourage him to come work for me.”

  “From what I know of Hu,” said Li Du, “he is averse to illegal activities.”

  Ji regarded Li Du quizzically. “My apologies, sir, but either I misheard you, or you have made a mistake. I meant I would hire Hu to assist me at the Glazed Tile Factory. I am not involved in anything illegal.”

  “You did not mishear, and I did not make a mistake.” Li Du spoke in a calm, direct tone. “I know about Narcissus Temple.”

  “Narcissus Temple?” Ji glanced away as if to check the progress of the laborers, who were passing the green tiles up the scaffolding. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You were commissioned to replace the glazed ornaments on the roof of Narcissus Temple,” said Li Du. “You installed a row of small black dragons along its ridge.”

  “Ah, I remember now,” said Ji. “It was a modest commission. I only had to produce a few pieces to complete it. But there was nothing illegal about the work.”

  “Who commissioned it?” asked Li Du.

  Ji hesitated. “There have been so many projects this summer. Forgive me, but I cannot be certain. If this matter is not urgent, may I beg you to allow me to continue my work? With the examinations set to begin tomorrow, there is little time for error.”

  “We, too, have little time for error,” said Hamza. “Therefore, may I suggest that we put an end to prevarication. Here is what I will do. I will tell you what we already know. When I am finished, you may decide whether you wish to continue your denials.” Without waiting for a response, he began. “We have already mentioned Narcissus Temple to you. Now I will add two names. The first is Pan Yongfa, your friend who is now dead. The second is Kirsa, a man in the employ of the palace.” Ji’s flinch at the sound of Kirsa’s name was unmistakable. “We know about the Ministry of Rites,” continued Hamza. “And we know about the Imperial Agency of—the Agency—”

  “The Imperial Household Agency,” Li Du said quickly.

  “I conclude my list,” continued Hamza, “with duplicated contracts, a secret meeting in a garden pavilion at the home of the deceased Hong Wenbin, and finally, tunnels. Now, may I suggest that you cooperate with my friend?”

  Ji’s jaw was so tense that a twitching muscle was visible below his right ear. “H-have you come to arrest me?”

  “At present, we are here to speak with you,” said Li Du. “You are being given the opportunity to answer my questions in a context other than an official interrogation. I strongly suggest you take advantage of it.”

  After a tense silence, Ji nodded slowly. “I accept with gratitude. I will tell you what I know.”

  Masking his relief, Li Du indicated an unguarded booth not far from where they stood, and suggested it as a place to speak more privately. They entered, and found it full of garlands, pennants, and painted signs being stored for the following day. Ji cast an assessing eye over the ornaments, as if, despite the gravity of the situation, his fascination with color compelled him to evaluate their brightness and saturation.

  “We know that Pan and Kirsa were defrauding the Ministry of Rites and the Imperial Household Agency. We know you were involved because your conversation in the garden pavilion at Hong’s manor was overheard.”

  “I thought I saw someone that day,” murmured Ji. “A gleam of silk through the rain and leaves. How beautiful, I thought at the time, the red amid the green.” He
turned away from the ornaments and looked at Li Du. “Yes, I was involved. They approached me over a year ago with the idea.”

  “Pan and Kirsa approached you? How did that happen?”

  Ji crossed one arm over his body and rubbed his shoulder, as if he was trying to ease the tension from it. “How did it happen? That question has been in my mind ever since I learned of Pan’s death. How did any of it happen?” He drew in a breath, and exhaled with weary resignation. “When you spoke to me at Mentougou, I told you I hadn’t known Pan Yongfa well. That was not true. Back home, I was as close to him as an older brother. I watched him grow up. When he came to Beijing, it was like welcoming a member of my family. But—” Ji paused.

  “But he had changed since he was a child?” asked Li Du.

  Ji smiled sadly. “No,” he said. “Pan hadn’t changed at all. As a child, he was the cleverest boy in our village, and the most mischievous. Adulthood had only enhanced both qualities. Soon after he arrived in Beijing, he came to visit me at Mentougou. He was so sophisticated, so handsome in his official robes, but I recognized at once the boy who had stolen his sister’s jewels, hidden them in the forest, and made up a game of riddles to lead his friends to their locations, the boy who had learned to bribe officials by the time he was seven, the boy so adept at deception that it seemed he could turn a lie into truth. Pan was still that boy, and I was still the boy who was grateful for an invitation to play his games. When he asked me if I knew anyone in the city who could make his life here more—” Ji searched for a word. “—more stimulating, I wanted to impress him. So I introduced him to Kirsa.”

  “How did you know Kirsa?”

  “I had met him some years ago at the Imperial Market, when I went in search of rare agates for my glazes. I was told that the stones I wanted were reserved for use only at the imperial kilns. But before I left the market, Kirsa approached me and said he could make arrangements for me to acquire what I sought. We made a deal, and until Pan’s arrival in Beijing, that was the full extent of my transgressions. But I wanted to impress Pan, and Kirsa was the only man I knew who seemed dangerous. So I introduced them. They must have discovered common interests quickly, because only a month later, Pan came to me with an idea to make some extra money.”