Chapter 11: The Ledger of Lost Voices

Li Xin woke Shen Mu before dawn. She was already dressed, her boots laced, her knife sheathed at her hip. She handed him a dark cap and a pair of gloves.

"We're going up," she said.

Shen Mu wrote, "Up where?"

"The roofs. The Chorus keeps a ledger in a warehouse three streets over. I want to see it."

He pulled on the cap. It smelled of sweat and old wool. He pulled on the gloves. The fingers were too long, but they would keep his hands from leaving prints.

They climbed out through the vinegar shop's back window, up a wooden ladder, and onto the roof. The Bazaar was quieter now, the stalls shuttered, the streets empty except for drunks and night-soil collectors. The rooftops were a separate city: tiled slopes and flat platforms and narrow bridges of plank and rope. Li Xin moved across them with the ease of long practice. Shen Mu followed more carefully, testing each tile before he put his weight on it.

The tiles were cold beneath his palms. In places, moss grew in the gaps, slippery and treacherous. Once he dislodged a loose tile and it slid down the roof and shattered in the street below. Li Xin froze. They both waited, listening. No shout came. No light flared. She motioned him forward with an impatient gesture.

They crossed three buildings this way. On the fourth, a family of cats stared at them from a chimney, their eyes reflecting the distant lamplight. One of them hissed. Li Xin hissed back, and the cats fled, tails high, offended by the competition.

The warehouse was a large building of black wood near the Mouth Market. It had no windows on the lower floors, only a heavy door guarded by two men with clubs. But the roof was poorly maintained. Several tiles were missing, and a ventilator shaft opened into the attic.

Li Xin pried the shaft cover loose with a thin iron bar. She lowered herself inside. Shen Mu followed.

The attic was full of dust and old crates. Below them, through gaps in the floorboards, they could see the warehouse's main room. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with Vessels of every size. A table in the center held ledgers, scales, and a counting frame. Three clerks sat at the table, copying numbers by lamplight.

Li Xin pointed to a particular ledger, larger than the others, bound in red leather. "That one. It lists acquisitions."

Shen Mu nodded. He understood. She wanted proof of what the Chorus was doing.

They waited. The clerks worked slowly, methodically, the way clerks do when they know no one is watching. One of them yawned. Another got up and walked to a back room. The third remained, scratching numbers with a brush.

Li Xin tapped Shen Mu's shoulder and pointed to a rope ladder hanging from a loft at the far end of the attic. From there, they could descend behind the remaining clerk. Shen Mu shook his head. Too risky. Li Xin pointed again, more insistently. He shook his head again.

She glared at him. He wrote on his board, "Wait."

They waited.

After what felt like an hour, the third clerk stood, stretched, and went to the back room. Li Xin was moving before the door closed. She descended the rope ladder like a spider, silent and quick. Shen Mu followed, slower, his heart hammering against his ribs.

They reached the floor. Li Xin snatched the red ledger and flipped through it with practiced speed. She tore out several pages and folded them into her shirt. Then she froze.

Footsteps. The clerks were returning.

Li Xin grabbed Shen Mu's arm and pulled him toward a side door. They slipped through it just as the clerks re-entered the main room. The door led to a narrow corridor and then to a loading dock at the back of the warehouse. They ran.

A dog began to bark. Then a whistle. Then footsteps, many footsteps, pounding after them.

"They saw us," Li Xin gasped. "Run!"

They ran through the dark streets of the Bazaar, leaping over sleeping bodies and piles of refuse. Behind them, the warehouse guards shouted. One of them threw an Echo, a shouted word of command: "Halt!"

The word struck Shen Mu in the back. Or rather, it struck the place where his back would have been if he had been a normal person. But Shen Mu was mute. He created no Echoes. The command had nothing to grip. It passed through him like wind through a screen door.

Li Xin was not so lucky. The word caught her ankle and she stumbled, her leg suddenly heavy as lead. She cursed and dragged herself forward.

Shen Mu turned back. He grabbed her arm and pulled. He wrote on his board with one hand while he pulled with the other. "Can you run?"

"Yes," she snarled. "Don't you dare leave me."

He had not been planning to leave her. He pulled her around a corner and into a covered market where merchants were just beginning to set up their stalls. The crowd swallowed them. They moved with the flow, heads down, until they reached the other side and ducked into a tea house.

They sat at a low table in the back. Li Xin rubbed her ankle. The Echo was fading, but her face was pale.

"That command was strong," she said. "Speaker-level. They sent a real Binder after us."

Shen Mu wrote, "Are you hurt?"

"No. Stupid. I should have been quieter." She pulled out the stolen pages and spread them on the table. "Look."

The pages were covered in columns. Names. Dates. Quantities. Types of Echoes. Shen Mu read down one column: "Grief, mother's, fresh, two weights." "Anger, husband's, aged seven years, five weights." "Joy, child's first word, twelve weights." "Courage, soldier's, battlefield, twenty weights."

And then, near the bottom of the last page, a line that made Shen Mu's breath catch.

"War of the Broken Tongue. Quantity: zero. Status: erased."

He touched the line with his fingertip. He remembered the War of the Broken Tongue. He remembered hearing its First Echo before the storm, a great cry of stone and blood and final words. He remembered the way it had filled the sky. And now the ledger said it had been erased. Quantity zero. As if it had never happened.

Li Xin leaned over his shoulder. "What is the War of the Broken Tongue? I've never heard of it."

Shen Mu looked at her. He wrote slowly, carefully, as if the words might break under their own weight. "A war. Half a million dead. The mountains remember. The rivers remember. I remember. But the ledger says it is gone."

"That's madness," Li Xin whispered. "You can't erase a war. You can erase its Echoes, maybe, but people would still remember. Their children would remember. The books would remember."

"Would they?" Shen Mu wrote. "If all the Echoes are gone, what is left to remind the books?"

She had no answer. They sat in the noisy tea house and stared at the stolen pages, and the world seemed thinner than it had been an hour before, as if a layer had been peeled away and no one had noticed but them.

Li Xin saw his face. "What is it?"

Shen Mu wrote, his hand shaking. "I remember this war. No one else does."

She frowned. "That's impossible. The War of the Broken Tongue was huge. Half a million dead. There are monuments."

"Are there?" Shen Mu wrote. "Have you seen them?"

Li Xin opened her mouth. Then she closed it. "I... I don't know. I thought I remembered. But now that you say it, I can't picture them."

They looked at each other across the stolen pages. The tea house around them bustled with morning customers, people talking and laughing and bargaining, all of them unaware that a war was missing from the world.

"Someone is erasing Echoes," Li Xin said slowly. "Not just stealing. Erasing. And if they can erase a war, they can erase anything."

Shen Mu nodded. He thought of the blank spaces in his own memory, the things he had assumed he had forgotten. He thought of the fragment under his shirt, the first container, the word that hummed below hearing.

He wrote, "We need to find who is doing this."

"We will." Li Xin gathered the pages. "But first we need to get off the streets. The Chorus knows we took something. They'll tear the Bazaar apart looking for us."

They finished their tea. They left separately, Shen Mu first, Li Xin ten minutes later. He walked back to the vinegar shop with his hood up and his heart full of questions. Behind him, the Bazaar woke to another day of buying and selling, and somewhere in a warehouse, a clerk was discovering that pages had been torn from a red ledger, and the Echo of that discovery was already spreading through the city like a stain.