I am the bearer of the Deer Power title. Let me first settle my predecessor's account.
The Deer Power Immortal of three hundred years ago died in the wager of guessing-behind-boards and self-disembowelment. The storytellers say he gambled away his cultivation and deserved his death. But consider what his two wager-arts actually were: one was seeing through, and the other was cutting himself open for others to see — the two defining skills of a physician.
Before he entered court, the old Deer Power was an itinerant healer-immortal. Reading sickness through skin was how he saved lives. Then he entered politics, the skill became a gambling device, and the man died at the gambling table.
That was the first lesson the old shrine-keeper taught me at my investiture: the skill follows the heart. Heart set on healing, the penetrating eye is the King of Medicine. Heart set on wagers — the same eye is a death-warrant.
I am of the Lushu clan, human-formed, born with the penetrating eyes. Taking the name, I bent my predecessor's crooked road straight again: I opened an infirmary in Cart-Slow Kingdom. No signboard — a signboard would empty it; the title State Preceptor is a curse-word here — only a reputation, passed door to door: the illness no one else can find, Master Deer Power sees through the skin.
The consumption-spots on a lung; the clot in a bone-seam; the growth hidden between organs — I see it, tell the family, and prescribe to the target. Thirty years on, the path to my door has been trodden three feet wider by the sick.
But penetrating eyes, turned on the world, see other things too. I have accumulated a ledger of wrongness.
Entry one: the drought. I have looked through the ground — three zhang down, the water-veins are alive. The water never left. The water is sealed — like blood-vessels pinched by fingers, pinched with perfect evenness, every vein in the kingdom pinched to a single rhythm.
Entry two: the ceremony's incense. Others watch the smoke drift heavenward. My eyes watch it reach mid-air, turn, bend west, and braid into a thin stream flowing beyond the horizon. In three hundred years, not one stick of Cart-Slow's incense has ever reached the sky.
Entry three — the foulest: the Bureau's new documents.
When Miss Red Ling was made a fugitive, the city was papered with wanted notices. I glanced at one in passing — and under the penetrating eye, the page was blank.
Do you understand? These eyes read writing through paper without fail: ink is matter, matter has form, form cannot hide. That notice was true paper, true ink, a true seal stamped above — and beneath it all, nothing. An empty order. A sheet of something that merely looks like a command.
A forged seal, Miss Red Ling said. My eyes testify further: not only the seal — the entire order, through and through, is hollow. And a hollow order can set a nation's Bureau hunting a person. Whoever issues them needs no reasons. Only the appearance of orders.
Who issues the empty orders? How many have been issued? How many offices under heaven are, at this hour, executing a blank page?
I handed all three entries to the medicine-basket boy. In the battle for the grand altar, my eyes called the traps from outside the array: three levels beneath the altar — which held the mechanism, which held the captives, and which held — which held the one thing I could not see through.
Yes. Could not. These eyes pass three zhang of earth, three fen of flesh, three layers of paper without resistance. But the casket pressed beneath the altar's lowest level — my gaze fell onto it, and fell as into a well. No echo returned.
The Taibai-sending took the casket away afterward, saying only: this is not a thing to look at. What looks at it is remembered.
Remembered. My eyes touched it for one instant.
So I travel west with the company — half in a physician's duty: the road's wounds and fevers are mine to tend. And half in a patient's certainty:
since it has remembered me,
someday it will come looking.
And when it comes, these eyes that have not missed in thirty years will sit down to one open wager with it —
whether it sees through me first, or I see through it.
My predecessor died at a gambling table. That does not frighten me.
He staked his cultivation. I stake my diagnosis —
for to my eyes, that thing is simply the largest lesion in the world.