You have read my brother's account. He spoke of the furnace. I will speak of the treasures.
When we descended to set the pilgrims' ordeal, the master lent us five treasures: the purple-gold gourd, the jade vase, the seven-star sword, the banana-leaf fan, and the gold-sheen rope. Every one a major instrument of Tushita Palace — and when the affair closed, they returned with us to heaven and re-entered the vault.
Besides the furnace, the vault is mine. For three hundred years I have dusted those five old things daily.
So no one under heaven knows better than I how, across these three centuries, they died — one by one.
A treasure is a living thing. Mortals never grasp this. An instrument's power resides not in its material but in its authorization. Why does the seven-star sword cut yao? Because the Bureau of Thunder's warrant of execution hangs upon it. Why does the gold-sheen rope bind gods? Because the statutes of celestial law are braided into its strands. Why does the purple-gold gourd collect whoever answers his name? Because at each call, the Registry of the Three Realms verifies the name — and only when name and person match does the collection proceed.
Every treasure is wired to an office of Heaven. The treasure is the blade; the office is the hand that grips it.
The black moon rose; heaven fell silent. And then I watched, from inside the vault, as five great instruments were cut loose one by one.
In the first year, the seven-star sword's ring went mute — the Thunder warrant cancelled, or simply never renewed. In the third year the gold-sheen rope went slack, the golden statute-threads dimming strand by strand; today it binds no better than hemp. In the seventh year, the sweet dew in the jade vase ceased replenishing itself — the vase still holds water, but it is dead water now, water without a source.
The banana-leaf fan — the small one in our vault, not the Iron Fan Immortal's — became, by the tenth year, an instrument for stirring air.
Only the purple-gold gourd died slowly. It is wired to the Registry — the name-rolls of every living being in the Three Realms. Rolls like that, I suppose, are the last thing anyone would fully decommission. For its first hundred years it still ran faintly warm. The second hundred, cold. The third — I would shake it and the emptiness inside couldn't trouble itself to echo.
Five instruments; five offices. Their deaths were five office-closure notices. I have kept a vault of obituaries, and dusted them for three hundred years.
Why keep dusting? My brother asked, before he went down. I said: the master's things must stay ready for use. Whenever the offices reopen their seals and the authorizations resume, these must wake within the hour.
Then — last month. The fifteenth. The eclipse.
I was trimming the vault lamps as usual. At the third quarter of the midnight watch, a single humming note shook every instrument on the racks —
the purple-gold gourd had lit.
One thread of golden light ran it from base to mouth — like a pulse, dead for centuries, giving one great beat. One. Then stillness again.
I sat holding the gourd until dawn, working out what that one beat meant. And the cold climbed me from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head.
The gourd is wired to the Registry's name-rolls. For the gourd to sound, there is exactly one possibility: someone used the rolls.
The name-rolls of the Three Realms — three hundred years dead — were opened on the night of that eclipse. And not by a page or two: to ring the gourd across three centuries of severed line, the rolls were being worked volume by volume. A roll-call.
Who holds the rolls? Whose names are being called? And when the calling is finished — what then?
The Sandstorm Shanxiao hears names recited in the storm's eye. The Clever Worm reports things calling milk-names in the dark. The Tiger Thrall tells of a voice summoning thralls to guide roads. I had taken these earthly "roll-calls" for scattered sorceries, each its own. The gourd has corrected me: they are not scattered.
They draw on a single book. The master register of the Three Realms.
I sealed the vault, took the purple-gold gourd, followed my brother's road down, and caught up with the westward company.
My brother watches the furnace. I watch the register.
In whose hands that register now rests, I do not know. I know only one thing, told me once by the Registry's old duty-officer in his cups:
the day the old rolls are called through to the end is the day the new register opens its first page.
Call the old through. Open the new —
he means to re-register the world. All of it.