Agarwood Six Records · Prologue: The Seal in the Rainy Night

Agarwood Six Records · Prologue: The Seal in the Rainy Night

The rain began at dusk.

Once the capital entered autumn, the rain changed its manner of falling — no longer summer's hammering, but slanting, fine and unbroken, seeping layer by layer into the grey bricks of the hutong. By eleven at night the whole alley glistened as if soaked, and the streetlamps' light shattered into flecks of yellow in the standing water.

Liu Zhiqiang was about to close the shop.

First he switched off the lights beneath the two signboards at the entrance, then wiped the incense ash from the counter with a cloth. The shop was small — one storefront, two rows of shelves holding stick incense, coiled incense, incense seals, raw aromatic wood, and several glass jars of agarwood chips from different origins. The air carried a heavy scent — sweetness with a trace of medicinal coolness, like the clothes of an old friend.

The black wooden plaque with gold characters hung above the door. Six years ago he had dug it out of the cellar of the old house. He had traced the characters three times; they were still faintly worn.

The Liu Family's Agarwood & Sandalwood Shop.

He glanced up at it, as he did every day at closing.

Then he heard someone knocking at the door.

Not knocking — clawing: fingernails scraping at the wood, three times, very light, then a second burst, urgent. Liu Zhiqiang paused. This hour, this alley, this rain. He set down the cloth, walked to the door, and did not open it at once.

"Who?" The rain was too loud outside. No answer.

He pulled the door open.

Old Zhou was leaning against the frame.

He started. Old Zhou was sixty this year, a old servant left behind by his father — strictly speaking, "the one who minds the house." These six years Old Zhou had come twice a week: wipe the floor, sweep the fallen leaves, drink a cup of tea, and leave. He said little, and Liu Zhiqiang had always taken him for a quiet old man. Now Old Zhou was soaked through, his hair plastered to his forehead, his face a strange pallor, like paper that had been steeped too long.

"Old Zhou? What's—" Old Zhou said nothing. He raised his hand with great effort, drew something from inside his coat, and pressed it into Liu Zhiqiang's palm.

Cool.

A piece of jade. Round, roughly six centimeters across, with a hairline crack down its middle. Liu Zhiqiang looked down: six petals carved into the jade — only half of them, the other half's lines broken off at the crack.

"What is this?" Old Zhou's hand still pressed on the back of his, hard, nails biting into his skin. His lips moved.

"Don't go to Tokyo," he said.

Liu Zhiqiang was lost for a moment.

"What Tokyo?" "Don't look for those six pieces." Old Zhou was gasping, pronouncing it word by word. "Your father... wouldn't listen."

"My father?" Liu Zhiqiang's heart lurched. His father had "gone on a trip and never returned" the year he turned twelve; his mother had never spoken the words since, and even the photographs had been put away. That was twenty-three years ago, and no one had ever told him "your father wouldn't listen."

"Old Zhou, say it clearly—" "Remember." Old Zhou's eyes stared straight at him. "Where the incense stays, the family stays." With that his hand went slack.

The man simply slid down along the doorframe, came to rest on the threshold, his head tilted to one side. Rain dripped from the eaves onto his shoulder, one drop, then another.

Liu Zhiqiang stood there, the cool jade clenched in his palm, not moving for several seconds.

He would think of those seconds for years afterward.

Because in those seconds he caught a very faint scent — not rain, not Old Zhou's own smell. Incense. Very old incense, like a piece of long-stored wood slowly breathing out. The scent came from Old Zhou's body.

And he knew what incense it was.

He would only later come to know that he had known; at that moment he simply felt, instinctively — I have smelled this before. Long ago, in his father's cellar.

The police came. The ambulance came. The neighbors were roused, standing at the mouth of the alley in raincoats, watching. Someone said Old Zhou's heart had failed; someone said robbery, because the old man's wallet was gone.

Liu Zhiqiang finished the statement and returned to the shop at two in the morning.

He did not turn on the main lights, only the small lamp behind the counter. The plastic evidence bag lay on the table with the jade inside — the police had examined it, called it "ordinary jade, not worth much, probably something the old man carried on him," logged it, and returned it.

Under that small lamp alone, he laid the jade beneath the light.

Six petals. Half.

He turned it over and over. The jade was warm now, no longer cool. He looked for a long time, then found — there were characters on the inside.

Cut so shallowly they seemed merely grazed on. He brought the jade close under the lamp and looked at it sideways before he could make out three characters.

Ranjatai.

Liu Zhiqiang did not sleep that night.

The next morning he closed the shop, hung up the "Temporarily Closed" sign, and went to the old house.

The old house stood in the eastern district, a very small courtyard left by his father. In six years he had rarely been back, keeping one room for old furniture and clutter. As he entered, the pomegranate tree in the yard had already dropped all its leaves and stood there dripping.

He went to the cellar first.

It was the place his father had first taken him down to the year he turned twelve. The stone steps were short, seven or eight of them; below was a small room, wooden racks on all four walls, the racks empty — he remembered they had not been empty when he was small; the racks had held wooden box after wooden box, and his father had told him not to touch them. After his father left, his mother sold the boxes, saying they were "no use."

Now nothing remained in that room but dust.

He switched on his phone's flashlight and moved it along the wall, inch by inch. At the innermost wall — one brick was loose.

He did not know by what judgment he knew. Perhaps it was that when the flashlight passed, something looked wrong about the seam of that brick. He pried it out; inside was a very small hole, and in the hole an oil-paper packet.

Opening it, there was a booklet.

Very thin, the paper gone yellow and brittle, thread-bound, no title on the cover. He turned the first page: brush characters, very small, very dense. He knew the handwriting — his father's.

*In the spring of the thirty-seventh year of the Republic, I succeeded to the duty of guarding the incense, and only then learned that the ancestral trade was never an incense trade at all.*

*In the Liu line, one of the six incenses has been guarded for generations. My late father××, my grandfather××, upward nineteen generations, each with its keeper.*

*The guarding of incense has three rules: do not gather. Do not pass on. Do not resist.*

*I did not understand in my youth; only now do I know the weight of not gathering.*

Liu Zhiqiang sat on the cold brick floor and turned the pages one by one. His fingers began to tremble; he turned slowly.

Tucked in the middle of the booklet was a sheet of paper in his father's hand, written hastily, as if in a rush: *There are characters on the back of the old house's plaque. If I do not return, when Zhiqiang is grown, he may look.*

*But do not look at all of it.*

*I have looked at all of it.*

One more line below, barely able to be written: *Those who look at all of it must go.*

The last stroke of the word "go" dragged out very long, tearing through the paper.

Liu Zhiqiang sat in the cellar for a long time.

Outside it was morning; light leaked down through the skylight onto a small patch of floor. He looked up and saw extremely fine dust floating in the light.

Then he did two things.

First, he tucked the booklet inside his coat. Second, he stood and went to the back courtyard — to look at the back of that plaque.

The plaque now hung in his shop, but the old house's tool room still kept the other piece — cut from the same timber, the same black ground, but with no characters written on it. The offcut his father had kept when the plaque was made.

He turned the offcut over.

On the back was carved a very small image — not characters, but lines. Several lines, winding, like the course of a river, or the sweep of a single brushstroke. At the end of the lines was a very small round dot.

He looked for a long time, then suddenly felt — he had seen these lines before.

Where had he seen them?

Standing there, his mind went blank for a moment, and then a thought rose, so absurd that he laughed at himself: *Along the River During the Qingming Festival*.

He had seen the painting in textbooks as a child, on television, and his primary-school art teacher had explained it: the painting showed Bianliang of the Northern Song — a river, a bridge, the bridge and its approaches crowded with people.

He remembered that stroke.

In the painting there was a bridge, and at its eastern end a very small shop — too small to make out in the textbook, but in middle school he had once magnified a detail of that image, because the shop's signboard bore four characters he had found interesting and copied into a notebook.

Shang Se Chen Tan.

He had assumed it was merely a coincidence. His own shop was called "the Liu Family's Agarwood & Sandalwood Shop"; the painting had a "Shang Se Chen Tan" shop. Amusing, that was all.

But now — the six-petal pattern on the jade was half.

The line on the back of the plaque was one stroke.

And in the painting, that shop's signboard, the four characters "Shang Se Chen Tan" — the left-falling stroke of the character "se" ran in exactly the same course as the line on the back of the plaque.

Exactly the same.

Liu Zhiqiang stood in the tool room, the timber icy in his hands. He suddenly recalled what Old Zhou had said the day before.

Don't go to Tokyo.

He looked down at the timber in his hands.

Tokyo.

The Tokyo of the Northern Song was Bianliang. Present-day Kaifeng.

Since childhood he had known only that his shop used a name handed down from the ancestors; no one had ever told him that the name had first opened in Tokyo.

And it had first opened in Tokyo.

He returned to the shop at noon that day.

The rain had stopped when he came in; the alley still held water, reflecting light. He took in the "Temporarily Closed" sign and reopened the door. Then he dragged an old chair from under the counter, sat at the entrance, and clutched the jade in his hand.

One thought turned over and over in him: when had Old Zhou come to know all this? How much did he know? Had he come last night to find me — or had he come to find me because someone was pursuing him?

And the incense on him — which incense was it?

He closed his eyes.

That scent was still in memory. Very old, very heavy, like pine needles after rain mixed with the pages of an old book.

He suddenly found himself counting — among all the smells he had encountered in his life, only one resembled it.

That was the year he turned twelve, when his father took him into the cellar, and his father's palm had been clenched around a small piece of wood the whole time. His father had not let him see it, only let him smell.

"Remember this scent," his father said. "Later, if you can recognize it, you will understand everything." He had not understood then.

He did not understand now, either. But he remembered.

He remembered that scent.

At three in the afternoon, someone came in.

Liu Zhiqiang looked up.

A young woman, about thirty, in a plain shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wearing thin-rimmed glasses. On her back a half-worn cloth bag, its mouth showing a corner of a dark-blue notebook, on the cover three characters in regular script: Wanshu. She stood at the entrance, first glanced at the plaque above the door, looked for a while, and only then walked in.

"Boss," she said, "do you have agarwood?" "Yes," said Liu Zhiqiang. "Which kind?" She did not answer, but walked straight to the counter, her eyes falling on the jade beside his hand.

She looked for one second.

Then she looked up and said, very calmly: "How is it that your seal has only half?"

— *Agarwood Six Records* · Prologue: The Seal in the Rainy Night (Part One) · End. Next chapter: Volume One, "The Agarwood Affairs of Bianliang."

> This is an original serialized story from *Agarwood Six Records*; characters and plot are fictional. Common knowledge of agarwood and aromatics herein is compiled from public materials and does not constitute investment or medical advice.