Still disturbed by his conversation with Min, Chang-li set to work organizing the large pair of rooms that had been designated to serve as the sect’s record-keeping chambers while they were here in the Capitol.

  The rooms were situated on the second floor of the main building, farther back from the street than Min’s spacious headquarters. The inner room had no windows and was instead packed with rows and rows of chests and cabinets for documents. The outer room had one long wall filled with tall windows, letting light in from outdoors, as well as a pair of valuable lux lamps. Neither was on right now, as the natural light was more than sufficient.

  Several long scribe tables were set up here for a total of five desks. As Chang-li had yet to find anyone to help him, the place was all his. He checked over the opened crates and boxes that had arrived while he was out, and began unpacking the various supplies he had asked Min to lay in for him.

  There were multiple different colors and weights of parchment here: bottles of black ink, green ink, red ink, blue ink; charcoal sticks, new brushes, and sealing wax, everything he would need to get their records in order.

  On one long table lay all of the disciples' provisional licenses. He set to work sorting them out into piles based on the actual level each disciple had attained. The four who had reached the Peak of Spiritual Refinement would be his first focus.

  Brother Stone’s record sat on the top of the pile. He was amused to discover that Stone’s personal name, Yahan, was written with the characters for “Little Rock”, doubtless explained his nickname. His license was actually a full license good to the Peak of Bodily Refinement. He had been the single member of the Oaken Band Brotherhood to have done any cultivation before Morning Mist came along. While Chang-li and Min had left him behind in their own progression, Brother Stone had done well for himself, climbing from the Peak of Bodily Refinement to the Peak of Spiritual Refinement over the last few months. Now he was serving as one of the chief instructors for the incoming acolytes to Morning Mist.

  Chang-li tried to focus on the other records, but Min’s face kept coming back to his mind, the way she had snapped at him, her words and tone angry, but her face showing fear and insecurity. He cursed the Gem Court in his mind.

  It didn't matter if Min’s noble connections weren’t much good to Morning Mist anymore. She was his wife, and the only woman he cared to be married to. How dare anyone attack their marriage? It hadn’t exactly been planned by either of them, but in the months since their wedding, Chang-li had come to appreciate and depend upon Min more than anyone else in his whole life. Anyone who hurt her had him to answer to.

  Chang-li let the provisional licenses fall back into their stack. He wasn’t doing any good here. He crossed to his scribe’s station and took out a piece of the lightest weight parchment he had, then found a charcoal stick to use on it and began addressing a letter to his mother and brother back home in Yellow Sky City. They would need to find someone to read this to them; his mother was completely illiterate, his brother knew a bare hundred or so of the most common characters.

  After he assured them of his good health and gave a very nondescript accounting of what he’d been doing recently, he added a section of words only for his brother’s ears:

  My sect will be here for some months, and we are stable and able to provide for ourselves. I am enclosing a letter of credit from the Bankers’ Guild that I beg you to use to bring our mother and your family here. I assure you, with my connections, I can help you find a stable position here in the capital. If your youngest is still sickly, we can afford the best healers and medicines.

  What he really wanted was to induct his brother’s family into the Sect of Morning Mist, but that would wait until he could speak to him face to face.

  The climate in the capital is very favorable, and I believe Mother would do well here. I at least can promise she will never have to work another day in her life. Please, I beg you, come.

  He put down the charcoal pencil and considered what else to add, as the door to the room opened and a wizened old man entered.

  The man wore a simple tunic over pants. His white beard fell past the bottom of his tunic. As it waggled, Chang-li could see gold toggles on the black tunic. The man wore small glass spectacles sitting on the bridge of his nose and leaned heavily on a stick.

  Chang-li stepped away from his scribing desk. "May I help you, elder?” he asked politely.

  The man fixed rheumy eyes on him that narrowed as he took in Chang-li. He pointed his stick at Chang-li’s midsection. "Young man, I am here to see the master of Morning Mist’s records."

  "Oh, yes," Chang-li said, hurrying forward. "That would be me."

  The old man peered closer at him. "Are you a scribe then?"

  "I’ve had scribe training," Chang-li agreed. "My name is Wu.”

  “Scribe Wu." The old man set his stick back down and leaned heavily on it. The end was a lump of polished amber in which something was trapped. “I am retired Senior Auditor Biah."

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  "Ah," Chang-li said. "You’re the one that Min mentioned."

  The senior auditor cocked a head to one side.

  "Eh? What’s that? Yes. Gao Min. Her grandfather and I were friends in our boyhood, or rather, he and I made use of each other."

  The old man shuffled farther into the room, his querulous voice echoing off the wooden floors. He put a finger in one hairy ear and dug about in it. "That is to say, when her grandfather was merely his own father’s aide, I frequently helped him to falsify any reports that would have put him in a bad light." He let out a high-pitched cackle. "In return, once he had become Governor, he kicked me to the Capitol for a rewarding career as an auditor. Now his granddaughter says that she’s in need of my aid."

  He looked up at Chang-li. Age had stooped him so he was barely five feet tall now, but it had gifted him with copious eyebrows, chin, and ear hair. He waggled enormous bushy eyebrows at Chang-li now. "I told her I’d do what I could to help." He let out another "Hee, hee, hee" of laughter.

  "That is most appreciated," Chang-li said. He ushered the man farther into the room.

  "What exactly are you having trouble with?"

  Chang-li’s mind raced as he thought how to explain this to an auditor. "Our sect has experienced rapid growth," he said. "While all of our disciples have provisional licenses, most of them have achieved a rank higher than what they are rated for. We need to have as many of these acquire permanent licenses as possible."

  The auditor was nodding. Despite his age, he seemed to be taking all this in. Chang-li showed him the stacks of licenses. “Your sect has experienced growth recently?" auditor Biah repeated. "What’s your sect status? Are you on a full or a partial license?"

  "Actually, we’re a charter sect," Chang-li said. He didn’t entirely understand what all of that meant just yet. He intended to query Noren when they next met, but he did know that phrase had opened several doors for them already.

  "Charter sect?" The man’s eyebrows shot up so high they disappeared into his hair. "Is that so? Well, wonders never cease. Morning Mist, eh?" Leaning heavily on his stick, he clucked his tongue. "Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but while I’ve seen plenty of dodges in the past, if you say the Office of Cultivation has recognized your claim to be a charter sect, that’s not something that can be faked, or not for very long."

  "It was publicly acknowledged by the Inquisition," Chang-li said. Noren had said as much.

  Apparently, it did, because Auditor Biah nodded. "Yes, indeed. All right then. Let’s see... you’ve got an acceptable ratio here of acolytes to Peak of Bodily Refinement cultivators to Spiritual Refinement cultivators," he said, looking at the piles of licenses. "Nothing here that would have struck me as strange back in my auditing days. How about the senior ranks? If you’re a charter sect, you must have at least one Lux Dominator."

  "Our Grand Master," Chang-li said, though he wasn’t sure what Noren’s license would declare. It was an absolute certainty that Noren must have achieved that rank. After all, Chang-li was already at Lux Embodiment, and he had no doubt Noren was much stronger than he.

  "One Lux Embodiment cultivator," he said, modestly not saying it was him, "and one at the Lux Endowment level."

  "Huh. A bit bottom-heavy, but that is not completely unexpected," the auditor said. "Still, to have so many at the beginning ranks and so few on the top end could be a signal that your senior members are not passing along the sect’s path correctly. Where are the certifications of path mastery for your senior members?"

  Chang-li had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He went and fished his own license out, presenting it to the auditor. "Our Lux Endowment cultivator is in the process of upgrading his license with his upcoming marriage," he explained, as the wizened old man, one hand still on his stick, set down the brand-new red-covered license and began thumbing through it.

  He clicked his tongue. "This license is... I’m surprised that you’ve had something this peculiar issued by the Office of Cultivation here in the Capitol." He lingered on the page with the Imperial commendations, and then again at the last entry stating Chang-li was permitted to learn to crack, Lumos. "It’s clear that either this cultivator is a genius who is violating most basic guidelines of how to advance, or this is a complete forgery."

  Chang-li’s heart beat a little too fast at that particular word. He calmed himself, reminding himself that every single page of this license was newly issued today by the Office of Cultivation. Even if his original license had been half-forged, this one was issued by the Office of Cultivation, which surely made the lies in it acceptable.

  Or so he’d like to think.

  Auditor Biah looked up. "I wouldn’t worry too much about this senior disciple. As long as you can demonstrate that he and everyone else at or beyond the Peak of Spiritual Refinement is able to master your sect’s path you won’t have any further questions. Auditors like me know better than to question the paperwork of those in the second tier of cultivation."

  "And what if we can’t demonstrate the path?"

  Auditor Biah let out a laugh, as though Chang-li had just said something particularly funny. "Amusing. Well, if that were the case, there would be fines and possible sanctions levied against the sect. Seniors who are not able to adequately pass down a sect path to their juniors are taken fairly seriously by the Office of Cultivation. But most of the scrutiny is going to be on your lower-level members. Let’s go back to those."

  He moved with a bit of spry grace back to the piles of provisional licenses. "For each of these, you’re going to need to have evidence and certification that they’ve passed their trials to be ranked at these peaks. I don’t see any of that, so hopefully you’re just storing all of that paperwork elsewhere."

  Chang-li shook his head. "I don’t quite follow..."

  Biah clicked his tongue, looking impatient. "Your sect’s testing and certifications. Surely you have all of that on hand?"

  Chang-li felt like sinking through the floor. The old man peered at him. "Are you new at this? You said you were a trained scribe. Perhaps it’s cultivation you don’t know anything about?"

  Chang-li nearly choked as he tried to think how to answer that question. "I’m still learning the lines when it comes to being a sect scribe," he said. "My initial postings were on the other side of things, as a junior scribe for a Tower Cull."

  Auditor Biah nodded. "That explains it. Still, it will be difficult to explain some of the missing paperwork without you understanding how cultivation works. Just what level of cultivation have you achieved?”

  The old man leaned forward and peered intently at Chang-li, who shifted uncomfortably. “Ah, that one.” He pointed to the red license booklet laying on the table.

  The Senior Auditor looked down and then back at him, eyebrows drawing together like bears hugging. “Eh? What’s that?”

  “That’s… my license.”

  The Auditor just gaped at him. After a minute his eyebrows reappeared below his hairline. “Oh. This is going to be much more complicated than I expected.” He cackled. “It was worth getting out of bed this morning after all!”