In the winter of the fifth year of the Tiansheng era, heavy snow fell over Bianjing.
In the Imperial Secretariat's archives, a low-ranking clerk, only ninth rank, was copying an ordinary requisition for grain and fodder. His name was Qian Mo, a younger son from a collateral branch of the Wu-Yue Qian clan. His monthly salary was three strings and four hundred coins. He wore an official robe of blue cloth and lived in the clerks' quarters. In three years at the archives, he had handled more than a thousand documents, copying each one three times: the first time to study the writing, the second to understand the matter, and the third to look for inconsistencies. He could not explain what purpose copying records served. He just felt that if you looked at certain things long enough, they would eventually surface on their own. Tonight, he had finally spotted the gap: the name of a trading house appeared in records from three different years and three different trades. In a ledger he kept hidden, he wrote down a single character: Ding.
From that moment on, he was no longer merely a copyist.
From Shunhe Trading House to the Transport Commissioner, from the Transport Commissioner to the Deputy Privy Councilor, and from the Deputy Privy Councilor to the line carved five years ago by an inspector on a roof beam in the Jade Clarity Hall of Auspicious Response. Holding up a candle, he examined the beams one by one and discovered the same words carved on six supporting beams: "Insufficient diameter. Rejected. Select another." The inspector who had carved those words had his right hand broken by someone and could never write again. Someone had erased all the witnesses. Someone had deregistered the trading house. Someone had buried two old beams beneath a pile of scrap in the deepest part of the Forbidden City's lumber storehouse, where no one had asked about them for five years. But the wood remained. Wood cannot speak. Wood cannot die.
On the twentieth day of the twelfth month, the Empress Dowager set a deadline for closing the case. Lü Yijian was closing in, not because Qian Mo had ensnared him, but because he was ensnaring Qian Mo. Five impeachment memorials, each building on the last: trespassing in the Forbidden City, exceeding his authority to access records, privately hoarding documents, a concubine-born son overstepping his station, and conspiring to destroy evidence. And Qian Mo's clan uncle, Qian Weiyan, as the Deputy Privy
