On the seventeenth day of the twelfth month, the Luoyan Sluice burst. Thirty thousand people were waiting for their year's grain. Lu Zhao leaned over the water gauge and saw that the water had risen past the ninth mark. No one was assigned to the sluice that night. Someone had scraped two names off the third shift in the roster while the ink was still wet, using a fingernail.
He recited the figures from memory. The first entry: six people on the sluice's third shift. The second: raising the live gate by two levels required eight people and the time it took one incense stick to burn. The water reached the ninth mark at the second watch, second quarter. The breach came at the third watch, first quarter. A full hour lay between them. The water kept rising, but the gate remained closed. Someone raised it at the third watch, first quarter.
The canal guards didn't believe him. He said, "Old mud clings to the gate axle. If someone raised the gate tonight, the mud on the axle would have been scraped into a bright streak. The mark there is newer than the others, and its color is lighter. Go look beneath the ruined wall and see if that axle is white."
The black-armored man kicked the counting rods apart one by one and laughed. "So you'll be the one who raised the gate tonight."
The verdict had already been written in the court. The ink was dry. On Lu Zhao's household registry page, his name had been reduced to a blob of ink. When he heard the sentence, he asked, "My lord, where were the seven hundred and twenty bushels of star marrow stored? One bushel to a basket, two people to carry each basket. The nearest star marrow storehouse is at Broken Ink Ford, upstream by water, forty li away. Each delivery takes two boats, twenty trackers, and a record of every sluice crossed. I checked the sluice registers. In the twelfth month, the recorded amount of star marrow passing through Luoyan Sluice was zero."
