The Enforcer Hunting My Pen Name Reads Every Chapter novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Cabinet of Dates

Mo Chengyan had known since the third week that the Sword Saint wrote the book.

He had told nobody, because there was nobody to tell.

The proof was not one thing.

It was a requisition slip for ink, written once in a hurry, in a hand that sloped left at the end of each line.

It was the hour.

Cold Peak's lamp burned at the third watch, and the sheets were always finished by the fourth.

It was a pickle-shop paper bag.

It was a pickle boy who sat near the Sword Hall door on market days, looking innocent.

And it was a bridge of fourteen planks.

Mo had walked it on three mornings before he understood that the man ahead of him counted the first board as a sill.

He sat now in the bell loft of the Discipline Hall, at a bare table, with twelve oak boxes along the wall.

Each box held a year.

Each sheet inside had been folded once and laid flat.

Each carried the red date stamp of the Cress Ford printers' guild in the lower corner.

There were two hundred and five sheets, in order.

Beside them, under a cloth, stood the six hundred copies of two hundred and four that he had bought.

A sheet that was burned was gone.

A sheet in a Hall box was evidence under seal, and the Master himself could not strike it from the record without striking the Hall.

Mo had learned to think in that kind of arithmetic a long time ago.

He took a slip of paper and wrote, in a column, what the Sword Saint had done to him in three weeks.

He wrote: the lantern, held out on two fingers at the ninety-first step.

He wrote: the plank, a heel slipped on the seventh board, a rope caught with the wrong hand.

He wrote: a wet page on a windowsill, with the shutter wide.

He had counted all three the moment they happened.

They were small, and they were deniable, and a stranger would have taken them for accident.

They were also a hook, and the hook was baited with the one thing in the world Mo would walk down a mountain for.

What he could not tell was whether the Sword Saint knew that.

He could not tell whether the man across the court believed himself the hunter or the hunted.

He knew only that the elbow had been warmer than he expected through the cloth.

He had not washed that hand.

He knew that was foolish, and he had gone on not washing it.

A knock came at the loft door, three times, and the Deputy Enforcer came up the ladder with his cap in his hand.

"Chief. The steward from the Alchemy Pavilion bought two jars of pitch and a cart of lamp oil in Cress Ford this noon."

Mo set down his brush.

"Where was the cart sent?"

"Lane end. Three Pines Press."

The Deputy shifted his feet.

"They mean to burn it tonight. They will say it was a lamp."

Mo looked at the boxes along the wall.

In Box Four there was a sheet about a printer's shop on fire at midnight.

A lamp was blamed, and a clerk died in it.

It had been printed seven years ago.

The shop in that sheet had been real, and Mo had checked the town records to be sure.

His voice was quiet.

"Who gave the order?"

The Deputy cleared his throat.

"The steward says the Master's brother."

Mo's eyes did not leave him. "In writing?"

"No."

"Then it is a rumor."

Mo slid a drawer open and took out the Hall's seal case.

"And the Hall has a rule for rumors that smell of oil."

He wrote the order in the plain official hand he used for things that must survive a challenge.

By the Discipline Hall, the premises known as Three Pines Press are held under seal as evidence in an inquiry now open.

No person may enter, remove, damage or destroy any item on the premises without the Chief Enforcer's written leave.

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