The Enforcer Hunting My Pen Name Reads Every Chapter novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Frost Plank
Mo is a neighbour by sound and lamplight; on the frosted bridge Shen stumbles on purpose and Mo asks before he takes his elbow. That night Shen writes the hunter into the story as a character and sets the wet page on the sill, window open.
By the third day Shen knew the Chief Enforcer by his sounds.
The door across the courtyard opened at the fourth watch, never the fifth or the third.
Boots crossed the flagstones in nineteen steps, and the gate latch lifted and fell without a click.
A light came on in the guest cell at the hour Shen wrote, and it went out only after his own did.
He did not call it company.
He called it a patrol that happened to follow a schedule he had published himself.
At dawn the frost lay thick on the ravine bridge.
It was the only way from the Cold Pavilion to the Sword Hall, fourteen planks across a drop of three hundred feet.
Shen stopped at the bridge head.
"Go first."
Mo Chengyan looked at the bridge, and at the rule he had been given, and nodded.
"You do not like a man at your back. I will go ahead."
He stepped onto the first plank.
"I will not look round."
Shen watched his back. "You may look round."
"Then I will not look round unless you slip."
He walked out over the ravine with a straight back, and Shen counted his steps.
On the seventh plank, Shen's heel went out from under him.
It was a neat slip, short and plausible, with the left hand catching the rope in time to look like skill.
He had practiced it for two nights on the cold flags of the courtyard.
It was not a trap.
It was an offered hand, and he did not mind who knew it, so long as nobody said so.
Mo turned at once.
He did not rush.
He stopped on the plank ahead, held out his hand palm up, and kept it a full arm's length from Shen's sleeve.
"May I?"
"Yes."
Mo closed the distance, and two fingers and a thumb took Shen's elbow through the cloth.
The grip was light and certain and cold from the morning.
They crossed three planks like that.
The rope creaked, and neither of them spoke.
Mo let go at the moment the bridge stopped swaying.
Shen's elbow remembered the grip for the rest of the day.
Shen turned back to him.
"The slip was on the seventh plank."
"The eighth. The first board is the sill, not the bridge."
Shen's eyebrow rose. "The Hall has always counted the sill."
"The Hall has always counted wrong." Mo's face stayed grave. "I counted."
Shen looked at him for as long as it took the frost to melt off one plank.
"I will note the correction." He walked on.
At noon he ate alone.
He had eaten alone since the autumn he was twenty-seven.
His table stood at the north wall of the dining hall behind a low screen.
A junior set down the bowl and retreated before the steam rose.
Eighty disciples ate in the room, and none of them sat within four tables of him.
The Chief Enforcer came in, took a bowl, and looked at the screen.
"I eat alone." Shen did not look up.
"I know. I will sit here."
Mo took the stool at the farthest table, exactly the length of the room away.
From there he could see the screen, and the screen could not hide Shen's left hand.
Shen ate his rice.
He was aware of every grain.
That night he took half a Quiet Lotus pill.
The sect gave it to anyone who asked, to buy a night's sleep.
He had been splitting one each night for eleven years, so that it lasted exactly until he finished writing.
Then he sat at his desk and wrote the Warden.
In the book there had never been a Warden.
There was a Prince, who was good and tired, and a Prince's brother, who was a pedant.
There was a Court of nine hundred servants who looked away.
There had never been anyone whose work was to look back.
Shen wrote him tall and pale, with an ink-stained cuff.
He wrote that the Warden read the Prince's letters standing up.
He wrote that the Warden took the stair two steps at a time and bowed to a rule exactly as far as the rule asked.
He wrote that the Warden did not eat with the court, and watched the Prince's door from the farthest table in the hall.
He wrote that the Warden's hands were warm through a sleeve.
Then he read it through once and struck out nothing.
It was not cruel, and it was not flattering.
It was a portrait, in the plain hand of a man who looked a great deal, and it offered the hunter a face to recognize.
The light was still on across the courtyard.
From now on the sheets would come every tenth day, not every twentieth.
He had decided that on the bridge.
A hunter who read each chapter the day it printed would learn the rhythm.
A man who learned the rhythm would learn when the author was at his desk, and then where.
Shen wanted him to learn it.
He blotted the page and carried it to the window.
He laid it flat on the sill to dry in the dawn air.
He opened the shutter wide, as any man would who wanted the ink to set.
Across the court the guest cell's window stood open too.
He put on his robe, tied the grey cord back into his hair, and went out to the Sword Hall.
He did not look behind him.
It was the hardest form he had ever practiced.
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