The Classic of the Western Mountains, under the Hill of Kunlun: there is a god there, tiger-bodied and nine-tailed, human-faced and tiger-clawed; this god governs the Nine Departments of Heaven and the seasons of the Emperor's park.
Luwu. God of Kunlun; gate-warden of the Celestial Emperor's lower capital.
Brother Yingzhao keeps the garden; I keep the Nine Departments — which you may crudely picture as heaven's nine ministries seated at the lower capital. The Bureaus of Rain and Thunder you have heard of along your road: those are field-offices of merely two of the Nine. Each department governs its sphere, and the common gatehouse stands on Kunlun, in my charge: opening, closing, verifying seals, registering all who pass.
Tens of thousands of years at it, and these tiger-claws have seized hardly anyone — but a ring of keys, they have burnished smooth as jade.
The month before heaven went silent was the busiest the Nine Departments ever knew.
Dispatches like snow; immortal officials weaving through in haste; every face harried, every mouth shut. I kept the gate and asked nothing that was not mine to ask — the gate-warden's rule — and only registered: on such a day, such a department drew such archives, issued such dispatches; who entered; who left.
That register I keep to this day. The final month's traffic runs forty times the norm.
And then, one by one, the departments began to close.
Not in rout. In order — following some list I was never shown — department after department gathered its files, sealed its vaults, doused its lamps, and locked its doors. On each closing day, the presiding official came in person to my gatehouse and delivered three things: the seal, the key, and one sentence.
One sentence — that is old procedure: at an office's closing, its chief leaves a word with the gate-warden, so that whoever reopens the door may be verified against it.
Nine sentences for nine departments. I have kept them, syllable by syllable, for three hundred years:
The First, handing over its seal: "The accounts are settled; the people are not." The Second: "We cannot go, and cannot stay; being both, we go." The Third's chief was an aged immortal lady who said two words only: "Wait for us." The Fourth: "The seal is dead; the office is alive; the office lives in human hearts." The Fifth: "Tell whoever comes after: nothing in the vault is missing." The Sixth: "Our department's duties are hereby transferred — to the human world." The Seventh: "The fault is not the gate's; let the gate-warden not blame himself." The Eighth's chief left last of all; he set the key in my palm and pressed it there a long moment: "Luwu — the Nine closing is not the Nine disbanding. It is… a different way of opening."
A different way of opening. I have chewed those words for three hundred years.
And then — the Ninth.
What the Ninth Department governs, I may not say — the gate-warden keeps the secrets; that is celestial law, and though heaven fell, the law still sits on my shoulders. I will say only what may be said:
the Ninth never came to surrender its seal.
On the last day of the closings I waited in the gatehouse past midnight. In the Ninth's direction the lamps went out one by one, in the same order as every other closing. But no chief came. At dawn I went myself —
the office stood empty. The vault: sealed in perfect order. The lamps: fully doused. Everything according to rite. Except:
the great door stood ajar. The seal was gone. The chief was nowhere.
By procedure, a door ajar with seal unsurrendered means: office business unconcluded; the official is temporarily absent. On the books, the Ninth Department has never closed.
So for three hundred years I have kept eight keys and one door ajar. Each morning at the dragon hour I walk the gates: eight, locked as ever; the ninth, ajar as ever. I do not enter — the gate-warden does not enter the offices; the rule — I only look from the threshold and enter one line in the register: on this day, the Ninth: door ajar; seal unsurrendered; chief not returned.
One hundred nine thousand entries and more. Not one day missed.
You will ask: the Ninth's seal, and its chief — where did they go?
I do not know. But the strange affairs of these three hundred years — the accounts you have gathered mile by mile: the seal that should not exist on the hollow warrants; the "In Heaven's Stead" endorsement on the Talisman Adept's reply; the registry-rolls brother Silver Horn heard being turned — every one of them I have taken into my ears and collated, silently, against my gatehouse register.
Of that collation I will say one sentence, walked to the very edge of what the rules allow:
the seals required to wield such powers — of heaven's nine, eight lie in my keeping, and not one has moved.
The remainder, count for yourselves.
The day the boy knocked at Kunlun's gate, I showed him the eight keys and recited the nine sentences. When I finished, he asked the one question a gate-warden loves to hear:
"Elder — will the ninth door still see the day its seal comes home?"
I said: while the door stands ajar, the business stands unconcluded. And unconcluded business obliges the official to return to his office — or,
to be brought back to it.
So I have left Kunlun and joined the westward company. The eight keys ride against my body; the ninth door, brother Yingzhao walks in my stead each dawn.
For the first time in tens of thousands of years, Luwu has left home —
to find the unsurrendered seal, and the un-returned official,
and to complete, at long last, the paperwork.