In high antiquity, the Yellow Emperor made his eastern progress, climbed Mount Huan by the sea — and met me. I spoke to the Emperor of all the spirits and prodigies under heaven: eleven thousand five hundred and twenty kinds, each named, each described — form, habit, and the means of governing it. The Emperor had it all drawn and copied, to be shown to the world.
That scroll, the human world calls the Diagram of Bai Ze.
I am Bai Ze.
First, understand what a name is. All along your road you have been dealing in names without knowing it: the gourd that collects whoever answers; the night-things that call milk-names to hook souls; the registry's roll-call; the hollow orders under forged names. Surely you have sensed it by now: a name is not a label.
A name is a warrant. When heaven and earth produce a thing, a name is entered for it; only where name and substance match can the thing persist. And whoever knows the name holds the handle: call it, and the thing is summoned; write it, and the thing is bound; strike it from the register — and the thing can be unmade. Why has the Diagram of Bai Ze kept the prodigies of the world in check for three thousand years? Not because the drawings are lifelike. Because the drawings record the names.
So these three hundred years, I have kept to my old trade: recording names.
Since the black moon, the new things have come batch upon batch: the black-bright light; the coreless fire; the markers that stamp silk without trembling it; the banner-wings and paper feathers; the shadows half a beat behind. Their variety and their speed of mutation exceed high antiquity. I have walked the land identifying and naming, compiling the Diagram's continuation. Three hundred years: four supplementary scrolls; eight hundred twenty-one new kinds entered.
Eight hundred twenty-one — all nameable, and therefore all governable. Of the binding-formulas your yao-tamers chant, half come from my supplements.
Only it — entry eight hundred twenty-two — I cannot name.
The one standing behind all of it. The taker of the merit. The holder of the moon. The tender of the pot. The caller of the rolls.
It is not that I lack its traces. Traces lie everywhere. From the traces I derived its form, its nature, its history — and at the final step, where the name should fall into place, I opened my mouth —
and found emptiness.
You cannot feel the horror of that as I do. I am Bai Ze. A thing enters my sight and its name surfaces unbidden, shadow to body, three thousand years without exception. Yet this one — evidence abundant, form and nature legible — has, where its name should stand, a smooth, clean void. Like a ledger-page from which one line has been excised with the sharpest of blades.
At first I took it for a new thing not yet registered. Wrong. A new thing's name-place is blank — the waiting blank of an unwritten entry. This is not blank. This is cut. There was a name. And the name was taken away.
It struck its own name from the register. Consider what that means.
A name is a warrant — and a shackle: call it and it must be summonable; write it and it must be bindable. Nameless, it stands beyond every summons, every writ, every warrant — the purple-gold gourd may scream itself hoarse at it, and it need not answer. Every art, weapon, and law under heaven that grips by the name closes on empty air before it.
It is the most absolute de-registration possible. And the price is equally absolute: what has no name, heaven and earth no longer recognize. It bought its freedom and forfeited its warrant of existence — and what sustains it now is not the recognition of heaven and earth but the plundered substance of ten thousand things, simmering day and night in that pot.
The substance of all things, feeding one nameless self. That is half the truth of the pot.
The other half: the name it cut away — where did it go?
A name cannot be annihilated, only displaced. That is iron law, and I stake three thousand years of Bai Ze's learning on it. The excised name is hidden somewhere: sealed in an object; lodged in a person; or scattered among the eleven thousand five hundred twenty old names — anonymous among names.
Find that name. Speak that name aloud —
and every one of its immunities voids on the spot.
So I travel west. The Diagram and its continuations ride on my back; the eleven thousand five hundred twenty old names ride in my memory.
Along the road, every character heard, every marking seen, every scent taken, I will collate against the old registers, entry by entry.
The character that surfaces on Princess Iron Fan's fan; the third character after "In Heaven's Stead" on the Talisman Adept's reply-slip; the unhuman script on the corpse-moths' wings — friends, bring them all to me.
It cut its name away. But a cut leaves an edge — and no edge deceives the eyes of Bai Ze.
I will assemble that name.
And on the day it is whole, grant me one moment of the company's silence — so that I, on behalf of heaven and earth,
may call it by name. To its face.