The Rooster Who Would Be Immortal — Chapter 9: The Gift Where Two Lines Cross

Senior Brother Hua had been digging holes in a straight line for eleven days. Nobody knew what he was looking for, and that was exactly why the whole outer dormitory was talking about it.

"The Founder's Gift," said Ling Yue, setting down two buckets in the kitchen yard. "That is what they are saying. He found a verse in the Scripture Pavilion, and it tells where the founder hid something before she left. A technique, they say. Whoever finds it breaks through a realm."

On the woodpile, every feather Brass owned stood up.

She left something for the next one, Grandmother Pine had said. I kept it safe. I am almost certain I kept it safe.

Hua's line began at the head of the Dawn Terrace, at the Founder's Chair, the old stone chair where the elders sat for the dawn lesson. Every disciple knew that chair. No disciple had heard of any other seat, and no disciple went up the forbidden peak to look for one. He did not dare dig up the paving of the terrace itself, so his holes began where the paving ended, and ran in a perfect line down the mountainside, toward Crane Rock, the stone spire across the valley. Every morning there were more of them. Every evening Hua came back up with mud to his elbows and nothing in his hands.

"He is not going to stop," said Ling. "He lost the tournament. He needs something to make them look at him again." She hesitated. "I want to read that verse."

So did Brass.

The Scripture Pavilion had one guardian, and he was asleep. Keeper Wen was so old that his eyebrows reached his beard. He did not stop anyone from coming in. He simply answered exactly what he was asked, and not one word more.

"Keeper," said Ling politely. "What did Senior Brother Hua read?"

"The founder's last verse," said Keeper Wen, without opening his eyes. "Page one."

"What does page one say?"

"'From my Seat, my gift lies under the line to Crane Rock.'"

Ling bowed and turned to go. Brass did not move. He stood in front of the desk and stared at the old man, very hard, the way he stared at the sun.

Ling looked down at him. Then back at the keeper.

"Is there a page two?"

Keeper Wen opened one eye.

"Nobody ever asks that," he said, and he took a scroll down from the shelf behind him.

Ling copied both pages onto a scrap of paper. Page two said: The second look. From the Gate Stone, my gift lies under the line to the Twin Pines. One look digs forever. Two looks find it.

"Two places," said Ling, outside on the steps, very fast. "There are two places. Hua is digging toward one of them, so we take the other. We start at the Gate Stone and go toward the Twin Pines, and we dig before he does..."

Brass was not listening. He was somewhere else entirely.

A board. A map of a coastline, and a ship drawn on the sea. A lighthouse here. A church tower there. A hand that had once been his, drawing two straight lines.

If you know where two places are, and which way a thing lies from each of them, the thing is where the two lines cross. One direction alone is a line that could run for miles. Two directions, from two different places, meet at only one point.

But it only works if you stand in the right places. Start from the wrong place, and the lines still cross. Just somewhere wrong.

[SYSTEM] Brass learned: two known directions from two known places locate a distant point · cost: start from the wrong place and the lines cross somewhere wrong

It was not two hiding places. It was one. And Hua had been digging for eleven days along a single line, which is to say, forever.

Brass hopped down the steps, scratched a patch of dirt flat, and laid two rows of pebbles across it, one slanting left, one slanting right, so that they met. Then he pecked the place where they met. Hard. Three times.

Ling looked at the pebbles for a long moment.

"Not two places," she said slowly. "One place. Where they cross." Then her face fell. "But we would need Hua's line, and Hua's line starts at the Founder's Chair."

Brass shook his head. He turned and pointed his beak up the mountain, at the forbidden peak, at the cloud.

"Up there? There is a seat up there?"

He nodded. He knew. He had put his own foot into its tracks.

Ling stared at the cloud, and then at the rooster, and then, being Ling, she stopped asking questions and started making a plan.

"Then you look from your seat," she said. "And I will mark mine."

He went up the cliff the next morning, spurs first.

[SYSTEM] Iron Spur — one cliff, climbed again · cost: his feet remember the last time

By noon he stood on the Founder's Seat, at the cloud line, with the root of Grandmother Pine coming down beside him out of the mist.

"You are back," said the old pine. "And you are in a hurry. I can hear it from here."

Where did you put it? Brass thought at her. The thing she left. You kept it safe.

"Oh, yes. Very safe. She buried it, down below, and I sent a root after it to hold it." A long, pleased creak. "Nothing is safer than something a root is holding."

Where below? Brass thought.

There was a pause of perhaps a century.

"Down," said Grandmother Pine. "Below is a big place, little rooster. That is why she wrote it down."

Brass set his feet in the ancient tracks, exactly where the founder had sat, and looked across the valley at Crane Rock.

From up here the whole sect lay below him like a drawing on a board. The roofs. The terraces. The kitchen yard, small as a handkerchief. He looked along the line from the Seat to the spire, and everything that sat under that line was in it: a corner of the dormitory roof, the woodpile, the coop.

And there was Ling's line. A row of tiny red flags ran from the Gate Stone toward the Twin Pines, straight as a ruler, and it ran right through the kitchen yard.

The two lines crossed at the coop.

His coop. The one he had slept in almost every night of his life.

[SYSTEM] Location found: two lines, one crossing · cost: it tells him where, not what, and not how deep

Then he saw the other thing.

Hua's holes. From up here they made a neat dotted line, starting below the stone chair on the Dawn Terrace and marching toward Crane Rock. The line did not run through the kitchen yard at all. It passed a stone's throw from the coop, and only crept closer to the true line the further it went, the way two roads to the same town close in on each other. The two lines would not meet until Crane Rock itself, far across the valley, and the gift was not hidden at the rock. It was hidden on the way to it.

Eleven days of digging, all of it along the wrong line. And if Hua ever found page two, his line would cross the red flags too, because a wrong start still crosses. It would cross them up on the Dawn Terrace, under the paving he had not dared to dig, right beside the great bronze bell.

Brass did not crow. It was very hard. He went down the mountain instead.

They dug that night, by lantern. Brass broke the hard earth under the coop floor with his spurs. Ling shovelled. Elder Mo held the lantern and complained about the hour, the noise, the hens, and the state of his coop, and did not once tell them to stop.

An arm's length down, Brass's spur struck clay. A jar, sealed with resin, buried long ago. And around it, round and round, a root as thick as a man's wrist, brown and old, that had come down out of the dark earth from the direction of the mountain, found the jar, and grown around it as if it never meant to let go. Past the jar, the root went on, under the fence, toward the bean bed.

Inside the jar there was no pill. No scroll of secret techniques. There was a writing brush, made from one long golden-red tail feather with a kink in it near the tip. There was a small black inkstone. And there was a strip of bamboo, written in a fine, careful hand.

Brass stared at the brush.

That was all?

He had climbed that cliff three times now, and the last time for this. He had wanted a breakthrough, a technique, a door. Not a brush.

Ling read the bamboo aloud, very quietly.

"'For the next one. They will not hear you until you can write it down. Begin with your name.'"

Elder Mo had picked up the inkstone. He turned it over in the lantern light. Pressed into its back, as deep as a seal in wax, were three toes forward and one behind.

Mo looked at it for a long time. Then he sat down on an upturned bucket, rather suddenly.

"My old master always said the founder never once stood up at a feast," he said. "I thought it was manners."

[SYSTEM] Found: the founder's gift — a feather brush, an inkstone, an order · cost: none of it is a technique

Brass looked at the brush again. They will not hear you until you can write it down.

He had laid pebbles. He had scratched clay. He had screamed at Ling across a breakfast table until she patted his head. It was not a door. It was a way to be heard, and it was going to be slow.

He wanted, more than anything, to run out into the yard and crow to the whole sleeping mountain that he had found the Founder's Gift. The first one in three hundred years to find what she left.

He did not. If he crowed, they would come. If they came, they would see the bird's tracks on the back of the inkstone. And the founder had kept her secret for three hundred years. It was not his to shout.

They filled the hole and put fresh straw over it. Mo wrapped the jar in oilcloth, the way he wrapped his own manual, and put it on the high shelf where nobody else ever looked.

Hua came at dawn.

He came through the kitchen gate with a spade on his shoulder and a terrible smile.

"The keeper says you read both pages," he said to Ling. "Give me page two. Unless you would like me to tell the Hall that an outer disciple is hiding the Founder's Gift."

Brass, on the woodpile, looked at Ling. Ling looked at Brass.

Then she smiled, politely, and took out her copy.

"Of course, Senior Brother," she said. "From the Gate Stone, under the line to the Twin Pines. One look digs forever. Two looks find it. It means where the lines cross." She even pointed at the red flags. "I marked it for you."

Hua snatched the paper. He looked at the flags. He looked up the slope at his own row of holes, starting from the Founder's Chair. He was not stupid. Brass watched him work it out, and run.

By the time the dawn lesson began, Senior Brother Hua had pried up the paving stones in the middle of the Dawn Terrace and was standing in a hole, exactly where his line crossed the flags, digging like a man who could smell gold.

His spade struck the stone footing of the bell beam.

The bell rang. It rang for some time.

"Senior Brother," said the Deacon of Duties, looking down at him with her ledger. "You appear to be digging up the Dawn Terrace."

"The founder's verse," said Hua. "The lines cross here. They cross here!"

"They do," said a thin, sleepy voice at the back. Keeper Wen had come out for the first time in a decade, to see the fuss. "If you begin at the chair."

Nobody asked him what that meant. Nobody ever does.

Back in the kitchen yard, Ling took down the oilcloth and unwrapped the bamboo strip again, because she had not been able to sleep. She turned it over.

On the back, in the same careful hand, there was one more line.

"'When you can write your name,'" Ling read, "'come up and find me.'"

She looked up at the peak, above the cloud, where no disciple had stood in three hundred years.

"Find her," she whispered. "Brass. She would have to be alive."

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