The Enforcer Hunting My Pen Name Reads Every Chapter novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Guest Rule
Shen walks the Chief Enforcer through the sect, baits him with a lantern, learns that oaths bind to the seat, and watches the Master's brother correct a count of steps. Mo asks to lodge across his courtyard, and Shen gives him the key.
At the first bell the Chief Enforcer was standing at the gate of the Cold Pavilion, and he had not knocked.
Shen found him there in the dark before the mist lifted, holding a lantern.
The man's coat was dry, so he had been waiting under the eave for some time.
"You are early." Shen kept his hands in his sleeves.
"The bell is the bell." Mo Chengyan bowed. "I would rather be early by a little than late by a step."
He began to fall in behind Shen's shoulder.
"Not behind me."
Mo moved to Shen's left without a word and kept pace at exactly an arm's length.
He did not ask why, and Shen filed that away with the rest.
The Sword Stair ran down from Cold Peak in four hundred broken steps.
The lantern in Shen's own hand lit only the first ten of them.
He held it a little away from his body, the ring hooked on two fingers, where the other man's hand could see it.
It was not courtesy.
It was a baited line, cast with the same care as the first sentence of every sheet he printed.
He wanted to know whether anything would bite.
On the ninety-first step Mo spoke.
"May I carry it? You will want your hand free for the sword."
"Why would I need a sword on my own stair?"
"You would not." Mo's eyes stayed on the step.
"But a man who carries a lamp in his right hand has chosen not to draw with it."
He paused on the next stair.
"I would like you to have the choice."
Shen held out the ring.
Mo took it by the loop, a finger's width from Shen's hand, and did not touch him.
Shen noticed the finger's width.
He allowed himself to notice it for one step and no more.
The Oath Hall stood on the Summit terrace, a low black building with no windows.
Elder Fu Huaiyi came out to meet them with his hands in his sleeves.
He was two hundred and twelve years old and looked seventy, and he kept every rule of the sect in his head.
"Chief Enforcer. You may read the tally book. You may not touch the tallies."
Mo kept his voice mild.
"I would only like to know what they bind."
"Heart-oaths. Sworn to the sect, held on jade, kept by me."
Fu's gaze moved to Shen and did not stay.
"They bind to the seat, never the man," he went on. "The Master's seat is the one thing here that does not die."
He folded his hands.
"A man may be replaced. An oath may not."
"And if the seat changes hands?"
"Then I would be out of work." Fu's tone was dry. "And glad of it."
Shen kept his face still.
He had sworn his own oath in this building.
The jade for it lay in a drawer thirty paces behind the Elder's back, warm to the touch, as it was every day.
He did not look at the drawer.
Mo Chengyan did, once, and then he looked at the sky.
They went down by the east stair to Ember Peak, where the Alchemy Pavilion stood in its own cloud of herb smoke.
Yuan Qianhe waited on the steps.
He was the Sect Master's younger brother, a neat man of forty in a green robe.
He tapped a jade ruler against his palm while he spoke.
Mo pointed across the courtyard.
"The Pavilion's tea garden. Ninety steps from the gate."
"Ninety-one." The ruler tapped. "And it is the southern court."
Mo frowned. "The southern court?"
"It was never a tea garden. The tea was a gift in the thirtieth year of my service. It was moved, and it died."
Mo took out a slip of paper. "I will correct the record."
"Do." Yuan Qianhe smiled. "I would not like the Hall to put a falsehood in a file. You will find that I am exact."
"I am beginning to."
Shen listened to the ruler and thought of the Prince's brother, who gave the clerk the date and the weather in one breath.
He had never described a living man more cleanly.
He did not think the living man had ever read it.
Rain Peak was the last stop.
Its healing clinic kept a line of waiting patients in the courtyard from dawn, forty people on stools.
When the Sword Saint came through the gate, the line bent.
Nobody told it to.
Stools slid to the left, and a mother pulled her child against the wall.
A girl with a bandaged hand stood up, sat down and stood again, without knowing she had done it.
The Lord of Rain Peak, a shameless flirt, stepped out of the herb room with a flute at his belt and a covered plate in his hands.
He was fifty-two and looked twenty-eight, with a laughing mouth and no shame at all.
"Zhiheng. You came down on your own legs. Is the world ending?"
"It is the Guest Rule."
"Of course it is." The Rain Lord held out the plate. "Lotus-seed cake. I made it myself."
He smiled.
"I have made it for you every spring since you were thirty-two."
"I take no gifts."
"I know. I keep making it." The Rain Lord's glance slid toward the Chief Enforcer and back. "Take the whole plate."
Shen repeated it, in the same tone.
"I take no gifts."
He never repeated himself, and so it was as close to kindness as he came.
The Rain Lord put the plate on the nearest stool with great dignity.
Mo had stayed silent the whole time.
He kept his place at Shen's left, and he carried the lantern all the way back up.
On the last step of the Sword Stair the mist rolled back, and the sun lit the roof of the Cold Pavilion.
Mo spoke again.
"Is there a gift you do accept?"
"None." Shen did not turn his head.
"I thought so. I will note it."
He did not say what he would do with the note.
He held out the lantern by its loop, and Shen took it, careful of the finger's width.
Not careful enough.
A cold knuckle brushed the back of his finger, and it was over before it began.
He thought about it for the rest of the morning.
"One more regulation, Sword Saint." Mo straightened. "An officer lodges at the house nearest the matter under inquiry."
"Yes."
"The empty guest cell across your courtyard is the nearest I can find."
It was a fair rule.
Shen had cited it himself years ago, to a visiting examiner, to get rid of him.
He could refuse, and refusing would look like a reason.
Shen kept his voice level.
"The key is on the nail by the gate."
Mo thanked him gravely.
Then he crossed the courtyard to the small door that had been shut for eleven years and put his hand on the latch.
The latch lifted without a key.
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