The Heretical Path of Occult Immortal novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Elder's Terms

The Elder offers a bed and a doubled pill for one gu a month; the Insect House keeper has counted his empty bowl and offers to hide the next one.

The Elder received him in the Hall's long front room, at a low table with a pot of tea on it.

Cen Yu stood, because he could not trust his legs to bend and come back up.

His mouth tasted of nothing, and his stomach felt scraped.

"Sit," the Elder said. "You have earned a chair."

Cen Yu sat.

The Elder poured two cups and pushed one across.

"The pill is in my desk," he said. "I kept it back to hear what you would say when you thought it was gone."

"I want my mother to have it," Cen Yu said.

"Then it goes today, and it goes doubled. Two pills a month, in your name, for as long as you stay."

He reached over and took Cen Yu's wrist in two fingers.

His hands were warm, hotter than the tea. Cen Yu felt the heat of them go up his arm.

"Slow pulse," said the Elder, pleased. "A body that has stopped being afraid of what is inside it."

Cen Yu did not say that he was afraid of everything, all the time, and that this was exactly why he lay still.

He drank the tea and tasted nothing, and put the cup down.

Through the paper window he could see the whole mountain laid out in steps.

At the top, on the broad terraces, was the Qi Hall in blue robes, running through its sword forms in rows of two hundred.

Qi was the mountain's living breath, and the Qi Hall spent their lives drawing it in.

The best of them lived to a hundred and fifty.

Below them, on narrow ground that got no sun until noon, stood the Hall.

It had crooked roofs, white-grey sashes and a smell of boiled roots.

"They call us the outside way," the Elder said, following his eyes. "They have called us that for two hundred years."

"They will not seat us on the Council."

"Seven Seats govern this temple, and ours has sat empty since before my master's master."

"And every pill on their table, every tael in their treasury, every bag of rice they eat comes down from this Hall."

"The lowland villages buy our grey pill. The lowland rich buy our other pills, and pay more."

"So the Qi Hall breathes, and the Hall pays for it, and nobody thanks us."

He smiled, gently.

"But you did not come to hear me complain."

"The Hall keeps you, Cen Yu. You are a Kept Vessel from this morning."

"A numbered bed in my own wing, not the Long Shed. Your own bowl. Your name on the board by the gate, where the courier can read it."

"One gu a month, chosen by me. Each one you live through, your mother's pill goes down doubled."

"And if I don't live through one?" Cen Yu said.

"Then you will not be the one who minds."

He said it kindly.

Nobody in this Hall had ever spoken to Cen Yu unkindly, and he had learned that this was not the same as being safe.

"Gao Tie," he said. "The man beside me. Can he have a bed in the wing?"

"Gao Tie has taken nine gu and nearly died of two. He is a vessel, not a Kept Vessel. He stays where he is."

The Elder lifted the teapot again.

"One more thing. The Black Ancestor's body. A vessel brings it to the Insect House in his bowl, so the keeper can record it."

"It went down in me," Cen Yu said. "I think it dissolved."

The Elder looked at him over the cup.

"Gu do not dissolve," he said, in the same soft voice. "But the keeper will tell me. Go and see her now."

At the gate the courier was loading his mule.

Cen Yu stood in the cold and watched two small grey bundles go into the saddlebag, each tied with its own slip.

He read the slips from across the yard.

Charity of the Hall, no cost to the family.

His shoulders came down for the first time in a day and a night.

The Insect House stood at the back of the Hall, a long low building with its shutters nailed half closed.

Inside, the air was damp and sweet.

Clay jars lined the walls from floor to rafters, each with a number chalked on its lid.

Something in the jars ticked, and ticked, and ticked.

The keeper sat at a high desk with a ledger.

She was a small woman in grey sleeves rolled to the elbow.

Her hands were scarred from her fingers to her wrists.

"Pei Ruo," she said, without being asked, and did not look up. "I count them. Do not touch the jars."

"The Elder sent me. The Black Ancestor," Cen Yu said.

"I know why he sent you. He asks me every year."

She turned the ledger around.

It had a column for every vessel and a row for every gu he had taken.

In his column there were nineteen rows, each with a small tick.

Beside every other vessel's tick, someone had written a weight in grams.

Beside his, there was nothing.

"Dead gu come back in the bowl, and I weigh them," Pei Ruo said. "Nineteen gu, and you have never once brought me a corpse."

"They dissolve."

"No. They don't."

She said it flatly, with no accusation in it at all.

"I have counted gu in this house for four years. I have never seen one dissolve."

Cen Yu's mouth went dry, though he could not have said what it tasted like.

"I am only the one who counts," Pei Ruo said. "I don't tell the Elder what I think. I write what is in the bowl."

She closed the ledger.

"Your next one comes in seven days. The Elder's window looks onto this courtyard. Mine does not."

"The north room of this house has a shutter that faces the wall. Nobody has a reason to look at it."

She finally lifted her eyes, and they were steady and dark and tired.

"Bring the bowl empty, like always," she said. "I will write that it was full."

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