Extra 16 · Old Accounts

I. Returning to the Shop

The rain in Bianliang was colder than in Nara.

When Liu Zhijiang pushed open the wooden door of the chen-tan shop, the hinge creaked once, like someone coughing in a past year. Wang Guanshu followed behind, fine droplets of water on her shoulders, carrying the case that held the porcelain bottle.

No one was in the shop. The incense boxes on the shelves were arranged according to the old custom—orchid, green, purple, black, yellow—each in its place, with the slot for White She Dai left empty. That was the rule left after the main tale: the six incenses do not gather together; in the slot there was only a piece of paper with the word “separate” written on it.

“Boil water first,” Liu Zhijiang said.

“Look at the ledgers first,” Wang Guanshu said, setting the case on the counter.

He did not argue. Both knew that if the origin of that grain was not clarified, neither would sleep peacefully that night.

II. The Ledgers

The old ledgers were in the third layer of the camphorwood cabinet in the inner room, wrapped in kraft paper, one bundle for every ten years.

Liu Zhijiang took out seven bundles covering the past thirty years and spread them on the long table. Wang Guanshu turned on the lamp, poured the agarwood grains from the porcelain bottle onto a sheet of white paper, and leaned close to smell them.

“Sweet base, with a coolness behind it. Not material purchased in recent years.”

“Mm. I handled the material that came into the shop over the past ten years; there was no such note.”

He went through them bundle by bundle. The ledgers used the Liu family’s old format: year and month, place of origin, weight, handler, and a incense seal at the end. Half of the character “shou” was in Liu, half of the character “ji” was in Wang.

When he reached the seventh bundle, Wang Guanshu’s hand stopped.

“Look at this entry.”

III. Unsigned

It was a page from the winter month twenty years earlier. The handwriting was that of Liu Zhijiang’s father, the strokes ending hurriedly, as if written in haste.

Winter month, seventeenth day: received one box of agarwood, weight four liang seven qian. Origin: South. Handler: Wen.

There was no incense seal at the end.

“Where is ‘South’?” Wang Guanshu asked.

“When my father recorded origins, he always wrote place names. He wrote directions in only one situation—when the delivery person refused to say and would only give a direction.”

“Wen.” She pronounced the character. “The Wen Ye family?”

“That branch of the Wen clan was still running incense twenty years ago.” Liu Zhijiang turned the ledger page over. There was no writing on the back, only a very faint oil stain, as if someone had set something on this page.

He took a magnifying glass and examined the oil stain. At its edge was a thin, straight impression—the edge of an incense stamp.

“Someone stamped this page and then wiped it away.”

IV. The Margin

Wang Guanshu suddenly lifted the ledger and held it to the lamp to look at the page edge.

“Here.”

On the outer side of the page footer was a line of small writing in pencil, almost worn away. She recognized the handwriting.

“My father’s.”

The words were: A frost guest arrived; in the box there were two, one genuine and one fake.

The room was quiet for a moment. Rain struck the window, once, once.

“One genuine, one fake,” Liu Zhijiang repeated. “That box of four liang seven qian—only half was real.”

“And the other half?”

“It entered the shop and went out again. Or—” He stopped. “It never entered the shop at all, and only passed through the ledger.”

Wang Guanshu set the ledger down. “My father left writing on this page, which means he investigated. He did not mention it to us because—”

“Because when he investigated to this point, something happened to him.”

V. The Grain

Liu Zhijiang picked up the grain again and held it under the lamp.

“If that box in the ledger was one genuine and one fake, the genuine half should smell like this grain. The fake half was used to make up the count.”

“To show whom?”

“To whoever read the ledger.”

He put the grain back into the porcelain bottle and capped it. “Twenty years ago someone used the Wen clan’s hand to slip a batch of fake material into the Liu family’s ledger. The fake material was for outsiders to see; the real material went by another route. My father recorded it but did not stamp it; your father investigated it but did not finish.”

Wang Guanshu looked at the small writing in the margin. “A frost guest arrived. People who travel with incense on winter nights.”

“Frost guest is not one person,” Liu Zhijiang said. “It is a type of person. People who travel with incense, who travel in winter, who leave no names.”

He closed the ledger.

“Tomorrow we go to the old Wen family house and ask. Wen Ye said his ancestors still kept an empty room in Bianliang.”

VI. The Hook

The rain had let up a little. Wang Guanshu was tidying the papers on the table when she suddenly said, “Hm.”

“What is it?”

“The oil stain on this page—when I looked at it against the lamp just now, there were characters inside.”

She held the ledger page up to the lamp. The oil stain was translucent, faintly revealing two reversed characters, printed through to the back when the stamp was applied.

Liu Zhijiang leaned in and studied them for a long while.

“Quan,” he said. “And one more character, I cannot make it out completely.”

“It looks like ‘ji.’”

The two looked at each other. Quanzhou, Wen Ji. The origin of that box of material twenty years ago and the route Liu Shengjingma was about to take south at that moment were the same line.

Liu Zhijiang slipped the ledger page into the notebook he carried.

“Sleep first,” he said. “At dawn, send a message to Wen Ye.”

Wang Guanshu turned off the lamp. In the darkness, the grain lay quietly in the porcelain bottle, like a word not yet spoken.

—To be continued · Extra 17 follows