The fishing families along the coast use us to frighten their children: keep crying, and the sea-patrol yaksha will come.
In the Bureau's dispatches we are "remnants of the East Sea Water Court, vicious of temperament; avoid on sight." Even Elder Pearl-Weeper says the sea patrols these days seem too fierce for patrolling — more like creatures hunting for something.
She is half right.
We are hunting for something. What it is, we ourselves do not know.
It sounds absurd, but that is the plain truth of the patrol corps these three hundred years. Every shift that swims out carries a sealed order. Sharkskin envelope. The inner hall's wax. Four characters on the face: You will know it when you meet it.
You will know it when you meet it.
And if you never meet it? Then the seal stays unbroken. You carry it back intact and pass it to the next shift. Three hundred years, the sealed order has passed through thousands of shifts; the wax has been renewed generation after generation; no shift has ever broken it. And no shift has ever dared claim it met the thing.
You ask why we may not speak of it, may not question it? Corps regulation, article two: What the patrol sees is not discussed within the shift, not carried beyond the corps. Violators: reassigned to the gate-bottom.
Reassigned to the gate-bottom. Those words enforce better than any military law ever written.
So we of the patrol iron our faces flat, grip our tridents white-knuckled, and glare first at everything we meet — not cruelty. Fear. Fear that if we open our mouths, something forbidden falls out. Fear that one extra question from a stranger demands an answer we cannot give. Ferocity is how we sew our own lips shut.
That is how my uncle was taken. His shift ran the night circuit through the Blackwater Trench, and on the way home the youngest of the shift vanished. My uncle couldn't swallow it — he went picket to picket, asking. On the third day the transfer order came: effective immediately, gate-bottom duty. He came to see me before he went. Said almost nothing all night. At the door he pressed half a ration biscuit into my hands and said one thing:
"Nephew. On patrol — never count heads."
Never count heads. What kind of parting gift is that?
But I understand now. There is one thing in the patrol corps that everyone knows and no one names: now and then, a shift comes home one short. And that is all. By morning, the missing one's line in the muster roll is clean and blank, as if no such soldier ever existed. Whoever grieves aloud, whoever investigates — gate-bottom.
That old bridge-keeping shanxiao on Flower-Fruit Mountain counted seven-in, six-out, and hurried down the mountain to report it. When word of that reached me, my trident hand would not stop shaking.
So it happens on land too.
So this is not the East Sea's disease. It is the whole world's.
When the children heading west crossed our waters, my shift held the watch. By order, no stranger approaches the gate. But looking at the boy in front — the one with the medicine basket — some ghost moved my hand, and I drew the sealed order from its sharkskin sleeve and pressed my thumb across the wax —
and for the first time in three hundred years, the sealed order was hot.
Hot as live charcoal. I nearly dropped it.
You will know it when you meet it.
I said nothing. I resealed the sleeve, stepped back half a pace, and let them pass. Article two, I can recite in my sleep — what the patrol sees is not discussed, not carried beyond.
But no article anywhere forbids me to hone my trident a little sharper. And wait.