After the den was cleared, I didn't leave. I stayed to sweep it.
It's a job no one fights for. Centuries of filth — blood soaked into the stone seams, and when the torches warm them, the smell knocks you flat. I sweep one stretch a day, flush it with water, cover it with charcoal ash.
People ask: why sweep? However clean it gets, yao lived here. I say: wrong. Three hundred years ago this was Water Curtain Cave's ground. A home. When someone dirties your home, someone has to sweep it back.
I have one rule for sweeping: when I reach a name, I stop.
On the pen walls, the yard posts, the arena pillars — names are cut everywhere. Carved by captive monkeys, captive people, stroke by stroke, the marks of those who refused to vanish nameless. Beside Tiewei's map there are twenty-one names. Eleven are circled.
The circled ones are gone.
None of these names get swept. My rule: the blood sweeps out; the names stay. When the troop comes home, let them see it: every soul held in this den is remembered by someone.
Last night, sweeping the main hall, I found the king's old seat. Under the seat, cut small, by a yao's claw:
"He was taken too."
I looked at it a long time. Didn't sweep it.
Listen. The further I sweep into this den, the less I dare conclude anything. Why would those words be under the king's seat? Who cut them? For whom?
I've circled the line and left my own knife beside it. Whoever knows the answer—
Come find me where I sweep. I'll lend you the broom.