The scholars love an allusion: the antelope hangs by its horns, and leaves no trace. They use it to describe perfect poetry — the antelope that sleeps at night with horns hooked over a branch, four hooves off the ground, so the hounds follow its trail to the tree, and there the trail ends.
That allusion is about my family.
Hanging by the horns to sleep is our inherited discipline; every fawn of our line learns to vanish before it learns to run. Not invisibility — trace-erasure: to walk without hoofprints, to pass through grass without bending a stem, to ford water without stirring silt, to fold even one's scent downwind. Three thousand years of hunters' bows have honed us into the finest tracelessness artisans under heaven.
In my generation, the craft found a new use.
These years, the fugitives of Cart-Slow Kingdom multiply. The corrupt ceremony wanted human offerings; the Bureau hunts on hollow warrants; and before those, there were always the war-fleers, the debt-fleers, the feud-fleers. Of those who run into the mountains, nine in ten die — not by the pursuers' hands, but of not knowing how to vanish: footprints, cook-smoke, scent, the snapped twig underfoot, the startled bird behind — each one a guide leading the hunters on.
The first I saved was a woman with an infant at her chest. Her pursuers crossed the ridge with torches; I could not watch it; I took human form and taught her three things: wear the shoes reversed, walk the streambed, mask the milk-scent with mugwort. She lived.
Since then I have kept a nameless school in these mountains. Fugitives find their way to it, and what I teach is the ancestral course, adapted from four hooves to two feet: how to walk without printing, cook without smoke, and leave your scent on the wrong fork of the trail before the dogs arrive.
More than a hundred have learned vanishing in my valley and scattered to their lives. Miss Red Ling, in her fugitive days, rested three nights there — that young woman learns terrifyingly fast; by the second night she could erase her own prints under my very eyes. Leaving, she asked: master, why do you save the hunted?
I said: my family has been hunted for three thousand years. No one understands the taste of it better.
Now, the matter that made me entrust the school to others and join the westward company.
My valley has been marked.
Understand first: that valley is the summation of three thousand years of our tracelessness. No path leads to it; the stream dives underground at its mouth; the wind detours around its rim; not even birds find the way down. In three thousand years, no hunter, soldier, or diviner has ever found it.
Last month, on my rounds, I found a scratch on the old rock wall at the valley's heart.
Hair-fine. Shallow. As if drawn by a fingernail. Its shape: a circle, with a dot at the center.
No human made it — nothing had entered the valley; my eyes do not miss. No beast clawed it — the line is too regular. It simply appeared, as though something passing by had idly laid one mark of presence upon our three thousand years of absence.
As if to say: I can see you.
I stood before that wall a day and a night. For three millennia, we have lived by disappearing. Now something has informed us that our disappearing, to its eye, is transparent.
That night I understood two things.
First: hiding has reached its end. From a thing that sees through tracelessness, no second method of hiding exists.
Second: it sees us — and yet leaves only a mark, and does not act. Which means acting is beneath it for now. Or its hands are full. It is busy elsewhere. It marks us the way a farmer, before autumn, ties a straw rope around the trees whose fruit he intends to take.
We have been entered into a harvest.
Then the discipline of vanishing must be turned inside out: not to hide ourselves — to find it. The best hiders under heaven ought to be the best seekers: these eyes that have erased traces for three thousand years know every species of erased trace on sight.
The medicine-basket boy asked what I could do for the company. I said: two things.
When pursuers come — I make the whole company vanish.
And when we reach the west, that thing which hides best of all —
I will make it appear.