Chapter 11: The Keeper's Key

The Abbot's hall was a bare wooden room on the highest terrace, with a rack of practice swords on one wall and a kettle on a brazier.

Su Jingzhi was making his own tea, with his sleeves pushed up.

"Sit on the floor," he said. "The chairs are for people I want to impress."

Cen Yu sat.

"Your mother takes the grey pill," the Abbot said, pouring. "The Hall sends it down every month."

"Yes, Abbot."

He set a cup in front of Cen Yu.

"My healers have taken a grey pill apart with every test the Qi Hall owns. It holds herb, cinnabar and salt."

"It also holds something no herb on this mountain has, and none of them can name it."

"What do you want me to do?" Cen Yu said.

"The Council has no key to the Pill Room. A Medicine Brother does."

"Find out what is in your mother's pill. Tell me, and tell nobody else."

Cen Yu held the cup in both hands and did not drink it.

"If it is only herbs, you will have wasted my morning," he said.

"Then I will have one fewer thing to wonder about," said the Abbot.

The Elder was waiting at the foot of the terrace stair, with his hands folded in the thin sun.

"The Abbot likes to give advice at dawn," he said. "Walk with me. The Hall is short a clerk."

They went down together, and Cen Yu kept to the outside of the stair.

"The brothers have voted," the Elder said. "A Kept Vessel who cured the Black Ancestor before six hundred people cannot stay a vessel."

"You are Keeper of the Pill Room, in the clerk's place."

He took a ring from his sleeve and held it out.

"One key, for the first lock. The second lock stays mine, for stores only an Elder may handle."

Cen Yu looked at the key.

It was iron, plain and worn, and it was the one thing the Abbot had asked him to find a way to touch.

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