Agarwood Six Records · Side Story Four: The Seventh Note

Agarwood Six Records · Side Story Four: The Seventh Note

The blood ledger lay open under the lamp like a strip of old wall peeled away. Liu Zhiqiang worked a bamboo lifter under the stuck pages of page thirty-seven; scraps of paper fell rustling into a bronze tray. Wang Wanshu stood half a step behind him, holding half an incense seal — the Liu family's character for "guarding," a corner of it missing, snatched from the fire years ago.

"Turn faster," she said. "Wen Ye has been waiting downstairs half a watch." "Let him wait." Liu Zhiqiang did not lift his head. "What he waits for is Grain Rain, not today." The pages turned, and the breath of ink came at his face. Northern Song ink was pine soot mixed with musk; nine hundred years on it still bit the paper.

But this page was wrong — across the lower half of page thirty-seven were seven lines of small regular script, each beginning with the three characters "the seventh note," where a name should have followed; all were covered in thick ink, packed so dense no breath could pass, as if someone had stabbed the page seven times with a brush.

"Covered seven times." Wang Wanshu bent close to look. "The same hand. The last coat was the heaviest — the brush tip tore through." "Count the lines," Liu Zhiqiang said, trimming the wick brighter.

Seven lines. From the Northern Song to the Republican era, from the Liu family to the Wang family, each generation's incense keeper had added a line for "the seventh note" to the ledger and covered it at once. At the seventh line the ink suddenly broke off — the eighth line carried only the three characters "the seventh note," and after that nothing, clean and blank, as if waiting for someone to fill it.

"Blank." Wang Wanshu's voice softened. "Blank means…" "Means still alive." Liu Zhiqiang turned the ledger sideways to the light. To the right of the blank line was a very faint scratch, left by a brush tip that had hovered too long. He took out a magnifying glass; set in the scratch was a touch of cinnabar — the cinnabar used for incense seals, a formula unique to the Liu family, diluted with agarwood water.

"Your father's inkstone," Wang Wanshu said.

"Your father's ink," Liu Zhiqiang returned.

Both fell silent at once. Wang Shouzhuo had died in the fire that took the incense hall, yet his inkstone remained in the Liu house. The ink was the last pool Wang Shouzhuo ground in his lifetime, mixed with fragments of Ranjatai sent from the Shosoin — the token of the mother incense, used only for verification, never entered in the ledger. Yet this very entry had used it.

From downstairs came Wen Ye's voice: "Boss Liu, I've brought the Grain Rain invitation — the least you could do is give me a straight answer." Liu Zhiqiang closed the ledger. "Send him up." Wen Ye came in carrying the smell of damp earth before rain. He wore plain clothes, a bulge at the back of his waist — a gun. Wang Wanshu stepped aside, revealing page thirty-seven of the ledger.

"The seventh note." Wen Ye glanced at it and smiled. "Your Liu family's hereditary riddle. My grandfather Wen An wrote one line in his notes to the *Dongjing Menghua Lu*: 'The seventh note is not an incense — it is the one who keeps the incense.' At the time I thought the old man had gone muddled." "He wasn't muddled." Liu Zhiqiang pushed the magnifying glass over. "Look here beside the blank line — someone has added something new."

Wen Ye bent his head. Below and to the right of the blank line, three characters in minuscule regular script, the ink so new it seemed to glisten, not yet dry: *Grain Rain*.

"Three days from now." Wen Ye straightened. "Who wrote it?" "Don't know." Liu Zhiqiang said. "But the ink is the old formula of the Liu family's incense hall — agarwood water mixed with pine soot, unchanged for nine hundred years. Only three people know how to grind this ink: myself, Wanshu, and…" "And my father," Wang Wanshu took it up. "But he's already dead."

Wen Ye stared at the three characters a long while. "Grain Rain is the day the incense market opens its vaults. The Jiuju side — Liu Shengjingma arrived in the Capital yesterday and is staying at the Japanese club on Dongsi Twelfth Lane. Among his luggage was a box of incense ash; customs examined it and said it was soil from a battlefield site in Kosovo." "He's mixed his sister's ashes into the incense," Liu Zhiqiang said. "Jiuju rule: the bone and blood of the dead enter the incense — it's called 'soul-joining.' He means to burn one large piece on the day of Grain Rain." "Burn it for whom?" "For the one still living — the seventh note."

Wang Wanshu turned the ledger back to its first page. "Look beneath these seven covered lines — I scanned them with raking light. Under the Northern Song line there's a faint 'Wen'; under the Southern Song line, a 'Wang'; under the Yuan line — 'Qu.'" Wen Ye's eyebrows jumped. "Qu Huaisha?" "The Qu family are descendants of the people of Chu, the incense lineage of Qu Yuan's line. The people of Chu honored the orchid and used division to revere the gods — directly opposed to the Jiuju's 'gathering incense through the chrysanthemum.'"

Liu Zhiqiang closed the ledger. "Seven lines, seven surnames beneath the ink — all incense keepers. Not incense; people. In every generation one 'seventh note' stays alive, charged with watching that the six fragrances never gather. This person cannot be written into the ledger — once written, he dies; so it gets covered. And in the end, even the one who covered is gone."

"Then this blank line now…" "No one has covered this line, which means this generation's seventh note is still alive — and someone knows who he is." Liu Zhiqiang tapped the two characters *Grain Rain* with his finger. "He's asked to meet in three days." Wen Ye pressed the gun back against his waist. "Or he's asked Liu Shengjingma." "Same thing."

Wang Wanshu spoke suddenly. "If the seventh note falls into Jiuju hands, the six fragrances really can gather. My father left one sentence before he died — 'where the incense stays, the family stays; the incense scatters, the family ends.' At the time I thought he meant the flame of the incense hall. Now I understand — he meant the people. While people live, the incense can be guarded divided; when people die, the incense goes to those who gather it."

From downstairs came a car horn. Wen Ye looked out; his face changed. "Liu Shengjingma's car. He's coming this way." Unhurried, Liu Zhiqiang put the ledger into a camphor-wood box. "Officer Wen, on the day of Grain Rain, bring a few men to the Agarwood & Sandalwood Shop. Not many — three will do." "What will you do?" "Wait for someone." Liu Zhiqiang locked the box. "Wait for the one who should be written in that blank line to walk in on his own."

Wang Wanshu saw Wen Ye down. At the turn of the stairs he looked back suddenly: "Your father's inkstone is still at the Liu house?" "It is." "Before Grain Rain, let no one touch it." Wang Wanshu did not answer. She watched Wen Ye's car merge into the traffic and turned back inside. Liu Zhiqiang stood at the ledger table, half the "guarding" seal in his hand, holding it to the lamp to see the cinnabar trace on its base.

"Wanshu." He did not turn. "When your father ground that pool of ink, were you there?" "I was." "What did he put into the ink?" Wang Wanshu was silent a long time. "A hair. His own." Liu Zhiqiang turned the seal over; set in the cinnabar of its base was indeed a very fine white hair, its break clean and even, as if snipped with scissors.

"The seventh note," he said softly. "So you were on the ledger all along."

Outside the window the wind rose; the rain had not yet fallen. Countdown to Grain Rain: three days.

— *Agarwood Six Records*, Side Story Four, end · next: Side Story Five

> 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.