At noon the next day the Emperor had exactly where he wanted him: across a chessboard, in the palace, indoors, nowhere near a Dragon-Slicing Block.
It was going well. Then, around the middle of the noon hour, Wei Zheng's head dropped to his chest and he began, gently, to snore.
The emperor did not wake him. A minister who had worked himself to exhaustion in the imperial service deserved his doze; besides, sleeping men do not execute anybody. Taizong sat guarding the board, thoroughly pleased with his own statecraft, for about the length of a nap.
Then the ministers Qin Shubao and Xu Maogong came running in from the market with a crowd behind them, carrying a dragon's head the size of a cart, which had fallen out of a clear sky into the vegetable stalls, and was definitely, catastrophically real.
Wei Zheng woke up, looked at it, and bowed an apology to the throne.
That would be mine, he said. The body I left on the block. Your servant received a decree of Heaven yesterday evening. Since Your Majesty required my company at noon, I attended to the matter in my sleep.
In your sleep.
The soul travels, said Wei Zheng, with the mild regret of a man explaining a scheduling conflict. The dragon was brought to the block. It complained a great deal. I cut once.
Taizong said something gracious and went inside and was quietly, privately sick. He had given his word, king to king, and Heaven had routed the execution through his own house while he stood guard over the executioner.
The Guest
That night the dragon came back.
It stood in the dark of the royal bedchamber holding its own head by the horns like a lantern, and it wept blood, and what it said was reasonable, which was the terrible part.
You promised. Tang Taizong, you promised, and I am dead, and you owe me a life. Come down and be judged. Come down and say to the Ten Kings what you said to me.
It came the next night, and the next. The empire's best soldiers, Qin Shubao and Yuchi Gong, stood guard at the bedroom doors in full armour, and while they stood there nothing came; but soldiers must sleep. So the emperor had portraits of the two of them painted, life-size, terrible, and pasted to the doors, and the portraits worked as well as the men.
If you have ever seen the two fierce generals printed on the doors of a Chinese house at New Year, that is where they come from. They are guarding a bedroom in this story. They have been on duty for fourteen hundred years.
The portraits held the front of the palace. The ghost went round the back. Wei Zheng took the rear gate himself, and the noise stopped; but by then it had been three nights, and something in the emperor had already agreed to go. He called his ministers, gave instructions about the succession, and to the weeping court Wei Zheng said, dry as ever:
Majesty, before you set out. There is a judge in the courts below named Cui Jue. In life he served your father. I know him. We correspond. He produced a letter. Take this and give it to him. He will look after you.
He wrote letters to the dead, and the letters arrived. Nobody at the bedside found this strange, or if they did, they were too polite to raise it at the time.
The emperor died holding his mail.
The Clerk
The road down was grey and administrative. At the first court a figure in judge's robes was already waiting, bowing, delighted, like a stationmaster who has been told a very important train is coming.
read Wei Zheng's letter twice and tucked it into his sleeve.
Leave everything to me, he said.
In the Hall of Judgment the Ten Kings were courteous. The dragon's suit was read out. The kings agreed among themselves that a promise to intercede is not a murder, that the dragon had died for its own forgery, and that the plaintiff had in any case already been sent on to its next birth, the courts below being efficient about closure in a way the courts above are not.
But while they had him, procedure required a check of the register. Cui Jue went himself to fetch the book of kings, and walked back slowly, reading as he came, and what he read was: Taizong of the Tang: thirteenth year of the Zhenguan reign.
Which was this year.
Cui Jue stopped in the corridor. He looked at the entry for a while. Then he took the brush from behind his ear, wet it, and added two strokes to the character for one, so that it read three, and walked into the hall and laid the book open before the Ten Kings: thirty-third year of Zhenguan. Twenty years of life, added in a corridor, in the time it takes to write the number thirteen badly.
The kings looked at the register and pronounced themselves satisfied, and possibly they were, and possibly a book that has been edited in the corridor smells of ink in a way the Ten Kings have learned not to notice from a well-connected clerk.
Somewhere far above, under a mountain, sat a prisoner who had fought his way through this entire building with an iron bar to change one page, and brought down the armies of Heaven on his head for it. He would have appreciated the technique.
No thunder. No warrant. No siege.
The difference between power and administration
is that administration works.
The Tour
They took him back the long way, through the eighteen hells, because the courts below never miss a chance to educate a policymaker.
He saw the pits and the pounding, the sawyers and the scales, and he asked the right horrified questions; and then they crossed a bridge over a river of wailing, and on the far side the road was suddenly full of ghosts, and the ghosts knew him.
They were broken men. Sixty-four camps of rebels, seventy-two risings' worth; the dead of Taizong's wars, the men of the campaigns that had built the peace he governed. They had no money for the toll-houses of the dark, because they had died far from their families, in ditches, and no one had ever burned paper money to their names. They mobbed the imperial soul with their hands out, shouting Taizong has come, Taizong has come, and they did not want his life. They wanted cash.
All his reign he had said the fallen of the wars the way a man names a season. A thing that had occurred. Weather, on the road to the throne. Here was the weather, asking for money.
Cui Jue got him through it in the practical way. There was a man of Kaifeng, one Xiang Liang, a poor water-seller who with his wife had burned paper offerings all his life and never asked the dark for anything, and who consequently had, in the banks of the underworld, thirteen warehouses of gold and silver, the largest private fortune below. The emperor of China borrowed one warehouse from a water-seller, on a signed note, and scattered it to his own dead, and the road cleared.
At the gate Cui Jue named the repayment terms. Return the loan to Xiang Liang in the daylight world. And hold a Grand Mass for these souls, a real one, the full rite, and get them ferried on.
And one of the escorting judges added, almost shyly, that if it could be arranged, the courts below had everything except fruit, and were partial to melons.
The emperor promised the loan, the mass, and the melons, and woke up inside his own coffin, three days dead, shouting to be let out, to the considerable detriment of the officials keeping vigil.
He was back. He owed a water-seller a warehouse, the dead an opera of redemption, and the underworld a shipment of produce. Kings keep strange books. He set about paying.