Chapter One: The Poem on the Temple Wall
By the sixth hour on the rafters, Yue had counted three hundred and twelve cobwebs, two sleeping bats, and one mouse so devout that it had been praying to the goddess’s left foot since noon.
She had not counted the prisoners. She was making a point of not counting the prisoners.
There were thirty of them, kneeling in the courtyard of the hill temple in the long red light of an autumn evening, wrists bound behind them with hemp. War captives from the western marches: dust-grey, hollow-cheeked, wearing the stunned stillness of people who have run out of things to say to the sky. Beyond them the great doors stood open onto the hall, and in the hall Nüwa waited on her plinth, Mother of Mankind, Mender of the Broken Heavens, twice the height of a man in painted clay. Her face was serene. The temple smelled of river mud, which no incense had ever managed to cover.
Yue lay along the beam above the doorway, small and white, her nine tails wrapped around her like a muff. A fox in the rafters of a goddess’s temple ought to have been easy to spot. But the Office of Sacrifice was not in the habit of looking up. The Office looked down: at the altar, at the bronze knives, at the ledgers where each death was entered in a tidy hand and a better quality of ink.
Three nights ago a voice like water under ice had spoken inside her sleep. Attend the autumn rite. Watch. That was all. The goddess did not explain herself to foxes.
So Yue watched, and the drum began.
It was an ordinary drum with an ordinary beat. The Deputy Sacrificer, a plump, damp-lipped man named Shu who wore his ash-white sleeves like a bridegroom, kept time on his thigh with one finger while two assistants hauled the first captive to his feet. A boy, perhaps fifteen, with a split lip and a way of staring at the goddess’s painted face as though he meant to memorize it and curse it properly later.
Yue appreciated that. She also found, quite suddenly, that cobweb three hundred and thirteen was deeply interesting.
The bronze knife went up. The drum struck its seventh beat.
“Put it down.”
It wasn’t loud. That was what stopped the courtyard. The voice came from the gate, where a chariot had slewed to a halt in a spray of gravel and been abandoned, and the man who owned the voice was already halfway across the yard on foot, boots grey to the ankle with road dust.
He was not, as the songs in the taverns of Chaoge insisted, nine feet tall with a tiger’s claws and a taste for infant livers. He was a little over six feet, thin through the shoulders, with a long face made for scowling at account books and a way of walking as though the floor owed him money. There was ink ground into the knuckles of his right hand. Yue had seen a great many kings over the centuries, and most of them wore the same expression, which was I am being looked at. This one looked like a man who had been awake since yesterday and had not enjoyed it.
Di Xin, she thought. King of Shang. Eater of children. She waited for the claws.
His guards fanned out behind him, lacquered leather and bronze halberds, and the knife came slowly down with the dignity of a thing that has noticed it is outnumbered.
“Great King.” Shu’s voice had gone high and wet. “We were not informed. The autumn rite is the goddess’s due, the oldest of her dues, since the days of—”
“Show me where it’s written.” Di Xin’s tone was dry, unhurried, almost courteous. “I’ll wait.”
“The oracle bones—”
“Which I have read. Which your office casts, reads, and files.” He stopped before the boy and looked him over the way a man looks over a field. “Three thousand, four hundred and eleven. That is what the ledgers show for the realm this year, pits and altars together. I added it up last night. It took a while; your clerks spell creatively. Do you know how much millet that many men would have raised, in the years you’ve taken from them?”
“The gods are not fed by millet, Great King.”
“Then the harvest festival is a strange custom.” He turned his head. “If the goddess wants these thirty, she can tell me so herself. She made them, I’m told. I’d expect her to be proprietorial.”
Nobody laughed. Shu looked as though he might be sick on his sleeves. Up on her beam, Yue bit the inside of her cheek, which is difficult to do in fox form and which she did anyway.
“Cut the ropes.” The guards moved. “Feed them. They go to the granary works at Chaoge, where they will dig and haul and eat, and in ten years they will have done more for the goddess’s children than this pit did in ten breaths.” He held out a hand without looking, and a terrified scribe put a brush and a bamboo slip into it. The king wrote an order in a quick, ugly, upright hand, every downstroke finishing in a small hook, and thumbed his seal into the clay. “Yuan Shi may bring his objections to court. He knows where it is. Lately he prefers it when I’m not in it.”
He tossed the brush onto the ledge by the hall door, ink still wet, and the scribe flinched as though it had been a thrown knife.
Then he did something Yue had not expected. At the threshold of the hall he stopped, looked up at the goddess’s serene clay face, and bowed. Not a king’s nod. A full bow from the waist, hands joined, the kind you give an elder whose house you have just walked into with muddy boots.
“Forgive the interruption, Mother,” he said, low enough that only the rafters heard. “I’d just like them to live.”
Then he walked out, and the dust followed him.
That was the monster, Yue thought. That was the whole monster. A tired man with a very good memory for numbers.
She told herself it had been dull. She told herself so firmly that it was a moment before she noticed her tails were clenched tight around her paws.
Below, the ropes fell away. The thirty stood up slowly, rubbing their wrists, as if standing were a skill they had to relearn, and were walked down the hill between the guards in the failing light. Halfway to the gate the boy with the split lip began to sing, a marching song, badly, wildly flat, and after a moment two others took it up.
Yue did not look at them. She was making a point of not looking.
The Office withdrew in a muttering cloud of ash-white sleeves. The sun went. Nobody lit the torches. In the hall the little oil lamps burned low before the goddess, and the mouse, having decided the danger had passed, resumed its prayers.
“You can come down. I can smell you from here.”
The woman standing in the doorway wore the grey of a palace attendant, and her beauty was the arranged kind, like a drawn bow: tense, lovely, and pointed at something. She had a smile like a fresh-cut peach. The last light fell across the courtyard behind her and threw her shadow up the wall of the hall, a shadow with a great many more necks than one woman ought to own, each one turning gracefully to inspect a different corner.
Yue dropped from the beam. Somewhere in the fall she stopped being a fox. She landed barefoot on the flagstones as a young woman with hair as white as bone and eyes the color of old amber, in her own face, which she had not worn in a long while and which settled on her like a coat that had hung too long in a cupboard.
“Hu Ximei.”
“Sister.”
“Don’t. Pheasants aren’t sisters to foxes. Pheasants are lunch.”
“Only for foxes who can catch one.” The smile did not move. One of the shadow’s necks bent to preen. “I was told you’d be up there sulking.”
“I was observing.”
“You were counting cobwebs. I could hear you.” Hu Ximei strolled into the hall as if it were her own garden and plucked the king’s brush from the ledge with two fingers. “Still wet. How considerate of him.”
Yue followed, because something in her did not like the way that brush was being held. The plaster of the wall beside the plinth was new and white, freshly laid for the autumn rite. Hu Ximei found the scribe’s abandoned inkstone, dipped the brush, and began to write.
She wrote quickly, and she wrote in his hand: the same quick, ugly, upright strokes, the same hooked downstrokes, a perfect echo of the order Yue had watched dry a quarter-hour ago. Eight lines. The first couplet addressed the goddess’s painted face. The second addressed the rest of her. By the fourth line the poem had stopped speaking to the goddess at all and was describing what its author would do to her if she ever stepped down from her plinth.
It was filthy. It was also, Yue noted with professional irritation, rather well made. It scanned. Hu Ximei had always had a better ear than conscience.
“He bowed to her,” Yue said. “Ten minutes ago. In front of thirty witnesses.”
“I know. I was behind the pillar. It was very touching.” Hu Ximei stepped back to admire her work, head tilted, like a woman hanging a picture. “That is why it will sting. Do try to look surprised when the priests find it at dawn.”
“It’s a forgery.”
“It’s a gift.”
“Hu Ximei.”
The voice did not come from either of them.
The air in the hall changed. The oil flames leaned all one way, toward the plinth, as if the room had drawn a breath. The smell of river mud rose like a tide, and with a sound like ice breaking on a pond a crack ran down the center of the clay face, brow, nose, lip, chin, and the painted eyes, which had been painted open for two hundred years, looked at them.
Hu Ximei was already on her knees, her nine-necked shadow bowed to the floor. Yue knelt with the grace of a cat that has fallen off a table and wishes it understood to have been deliberate.
“You watched him,” said Nüwa.
“I watched a man put a knife down, Mother.” Yue kept her eyes on the flagstones. “It was a very long afternoon.”
“He has put down every knife in the realm. Three years, little lamp, and my altars are cold. Do you know what the gods become when the altars are cold?”
“Thin,” Yue said, because she had noticed. Everyone had noticed. The wind-gods had begun to sound like drafts.
“Thin.” The word fell like a stone down a well. “Heaven has noticed too. But Heaven does not unmake a king without a reason, and the reason must be a decent one. Hu Ximei has just supplied it.”
“It’s a forgery,” Yue said again, because someone had to say it in the goddess’s own hall. “He bowed to you.”
“Yes.” There was no anger in it, which was worse. “I saw that, too. It will make no difference. The Court of Heaven will be told that a king defaced my temple in his own hand, and it will believe, because it needs to.” The cracked face turned a few degrees, and Yue felt the weight of the painted eyes settle on her. “The Marquis of Zhongzhou has sent his daughter to Chaoge as a hostage for the peace. Su Fuji. In three nights she will sleep at the post-station in Enzhou. She will not wake in Chaoge as herself. Hu Ximei will see to the dying. You will see to the wearing.”
“Wearing,” said Yue.
“Her face. Her name. Her place at the king’s side. No one looks closely at the thing wearing a queen. You will take his court from the inside, and when it is done there will be nothing left of him but a reason.”
“I’m a fox, Mother, not a plague.”
“You are a lamp.”
Silence. The mouse stopped praying.
“And remember the covenant,” said the goddess. “No wonder before mortal eyes. The old law, the old price: every miracle costs a tail. Spend them wisely.”
“I know the price of tails.”
“Do you?”
From a niche behind the plinth a hand came forth, not clay now but something that clay was only the shape of, and in it lay a small bronze lamp with nine spouts, each fitted with a wick of white thread. Yue had seen it exactly once, on the day she was made. She had hoped she’d misremembered.
Her tails unfurled behind her, all nine, white as frost, and rose as though strung on wires. At the tip of each one a flame woke: a small cold flame the color of moonlight, one for every wick in the lamp.
It did not hurt. That was the worst of it. It felt like being read.
“Nine tails,” said Nüwa. “Nine lives. Nine wicks. Succeed, and I will snuff the lamp, and you will be free of it.” The flames burned steady and white and patient. “Fail, and they burn together.”
