The printing workshop of the Shazhou Gazette was never silent. Even in the deepest hours of the night, when the rest of Dunhuang lay wrapped in darkness and the only sounds in the streets were the occasional bark of a feral dog or the distant cry of a night watchman calling the hour, the workshop hummed with activity. The oil lamps burned until their wicks charred to ash. The engravers' chisels clicked against pearwood blocks in a ceaseless rhythm. The great wooden presses groaned like living beasts as the apprentices pulled the levers that transferred ink from block to paper. Zhang Shouyi had been watching the workshop for three nights before he found his way in. He had returned to Dunhuang by a circuitous route, traveling only at night and hiding in dry riverbeds during the day. The riders who had pursued him to the abandoned post station had not followed him into the deep desert, but he knew they were still looking. Kang Mojie had resources that Zhang Shouyi could only guess at, and a man with something to hide would spare no expense to keep it hidden. But Zhang Shouyi had something that Kang Mojie did not. He had the truth. Or at least, he had pieces of it—the identification tags of four dead men, the fake travel documents with their five unfamiliar names, the fragment of the wax seal from the strongbox. He had carried these things across a hundred li of desert, wrapped in oilcloth and pressed against his chest, and they had become more precious to him than water. Now he needed more. He needed evidence that would hold up in a court of law, evidence that could not be dismissed as the ravings of a convict clerk with a grudge against his betters. And he knew where to find it. The workshop occupied the rear half of Kang Mojie's compound, a sprawling structure of interconnected rooms and courtyards that had once been a caravanserai. The main entrance was guarded day and night by two Sogdian mercenaries with curved swords and the flat, expressionless faces of men who had seen too much violence to be impressed by any threat a lone clerk could offer. But Zhang Shouyi had no intention of using the main entrance. On the third night of his surveillance, he found what he was looking for: a delivery door in the alley behind the workshop, used by the paper merchants who supplied the raw materials for the gazette's endless appetite. The door was locked, but the lock was old and poorly maintained, and Zhang Shouyi had learned a great deal about locks during his years in the Ministry of Justice. It took him less than a minute to pick it. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him. The workshop's interior was a labyrinth of drying racks and storage shelves, the air thick with the smell of ink and paper and the underlying musk of the animal-hide glue that the engravers used to fix their blocks to the press beds. Zhang Shouyi moved carefully through the darkness, navigating by the faint glow of the banked lamps that the night crew kept burning at their workstations. He had timed his entry carefully. The night crew consisted of three engravers and two apprentices, and they worked in the main press room at the front of the building, as far from the delivery entrance as possible. Between midnight and dawn, they rarely left their posts except to fetch fresh blocks from the storage room or to empty their bladders in the alley. Zhang Shouyi had mapped their movements over the previous nights, and he knew he had perhaps two hours before anyone would have reason to come near his position. His target was the composing room. Every gazette had a composing room—the place where the individual blocks were assembled into complete pages, where headlines were matched with articles and articles were matched with illustrations, where the raw material of news was transformed into the polished product that would be read by thousands of people across the frontier. The composing room was where stories were built. It was also where stories could be unmade. Zhang Shouyi found it at the end of a narrow corridor, behind a door that bore a sign reading ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN TO ALL BUT AUTHORIZED COMPOSITORS. The door was unlocked—the compositors were among the most trusted members of Kang Mojie's staff, and there was little in the workshop worth stealing except paper and ink. He slipped inside and closed the door. The composing room was a rectangular chamber perhaps thirty paces long, its walls lined with slotted shelves that held hundreds of carved blocks, each one labeled with a strip of paper indicating its contents. In the center of the room stood three large composing stones—flat slabs of polished granite where the compositors arranged the blocks into page forms. The stones were illuminated by oil lamps suspended from the ceiling on iron chains, their flames burning low but steady. Zhang Shouyi began to search. He did not know exactly what he was looking for, but he trusted his instincts. The gazette's story about Zhao Shihui had been too polished, too complete, too perfectly designed to evoke a specific emotional response. It was the work of a master storyteller, and master storytellers left traces of their craft behind. He found the first trace on the second composing stone. The blocks for tomorrow's front page were already locked into their iron frame, waiting for the morning crew to ink them and run them through the presses. The headline read: WIDOW OF FALLEN SOLDIER SPEAKS—'MY HUSBAND DIED A COWARD.' Zhang Shouyi stared at the words, his stomach clenching. He knew that widow. Sun Dali's wife had given birth to a daughter three weeks before her husband's departure, and she had been one of the few people in Dunhuang who had refused to accept the gazette's version of events. She had told anyone who would listen that her husband was a good man, a loyal soldier, incapable of the betrayal that the gazette had implied. And now the gazette was putting words in her mouth. Zhang Shouyi knelt beside the composing stone and studied the blocks more closely. The article beneath the headline was a first-person account, written as though the widow herself had dictated it to a reporter. It described Sun Dali's alleged cowardice in vivid detail—how he had tried to desert the party on the second night, how he had begged the Hu bandits for mercy while his comrades fought and died, how he had wept like a child in his final moments. Every word of it was a lie. Zhang Shouyi knew this because he had seen Sun Dali's skeleton. He had seen the wound in the back of the man's skull, the blow that had been delivered without warning by someone Sun Dali trusted. A coward does not die with his back turned to his killer. A coward does not die without defensive wounds. A coward does not die with his identification tag still around his neck, a silent testament to his identity and his service. But the people of Dunhuang would never know this. They would read the gazette, and they would believe, and the widow would spend the rest of her life trying to convince a city that her husband was not the monster the newspapers had made him out to be. Zhang Shouyi's hands trembled with rage, but he forced himself to remain calm. He was here for evidence, not for revenge. He searched the composing room more methodically now, opening drawers and cabinets, examining the files of old blocks that the compositors kept for reference. In a locked cabinet in the corner of the room—a lock that yielded to Zhang Shouyi's skills as easily as the delivery door had—he found what he was looking for. The file was labeled ZHAO SHIHUI—BACKGROUND MATERIALS. It contained perhaps fifty sheets of paper, each one covered in the dense, precise handwriting of a professional scribe. Zhang Shouyi carried the file to one of the composing stones and began to read by the light of the hanging lamp. The first document was a memorandum dated three days before Zhao Shihui's return to Dunhuang. It was addressed to Kang Mojie from someone identified only as "Source Four," and it read: The man is Zhao Shihui, formerly of the Dunhuang garrison. He was selected for the Yizhou detail on the recommendation of Captain Wen. He is known to be reliable under pressure and amenable to financial incentives. His debts at the gambling houses exceed his annual pay by a factor of three. He will be receptive to our proposal. Zhang Shouyi turned to the next page. It was a transcript of an interview—no, not an interview, a rehearsal—conducted with Zhao Shihui two days before his public return. The transcript showed the evolution of the hero story across multiple drafts, with notes in the margins indicating where details should be added or removed. Draft One: Zhao Shihui describes encountering three Hu bandits near a dry riverbed. He killed two of them; the third fled. The dispatches were never in danger. Marginal note: This is not heroic enough. Add danger to the dispatches. Draft Two: Zhao Shihui describes a running battle lasting two days. The bandits pursued him relentlessly, trying to seize the dispatch case. He killed all three bandits but sustained injuries. Marginal note: Better. Add details about the injuries. Draft Three: Zhao Shihui describes crawling through the desert for three days with a broken leg, the dispatch case strapped to his chest, refusing to abandon his duty even as the vultures circled overhead. Marginal note: Excellent. Print this version. Zhang Shouyi turned to the next document. It was a memorandum from Kang Mojie to the compositor-in-chief, dated the day of Zhao Shihui's return: The public must be made to understand that the four missing men bear responsibility for their own deaths. Develop a narrative that establishes cowardice, desertion, or collaboration with the Hu bandits. The details are not important; the impression is. Zhao Shihui must be seen as blameless. The gazette's reputation depends on it. And beneath that memorandum, a sheaf of papers that made Zhang Shouyi's blood run cold. They were confessions. Each one was written in the first person, in the voice of one of the four dead men. Each one admitted to cowardice, to desertion, to betrayal of comrades and empire. Each one was signed with a name—Sun Dali, Liu Erlang, Wang Jianguo, Li Wu—in handwriting that varied from document to document, as though different scribes had been assigned to produce each forgery. But the signatures were the same. All four of them had been written by the same hand. Zhang Shouyi had spent years studying handwriting. It was one of the fundamental skills of a legal secretary, the ability to compare documents and determine whether they had been produced by the same person. He could see it clearly now—the way the character for "Sun" was written with a slight hook at the bottom, the way the character for "Dali" was compressed at the end to fit a space that was too small. The same idiosyncrasies appeared in all four signatures, variations that no four different men would have produced independently. The confessions were forgeries. And someone in this workshop had created them. Zhang Shouyi gathered up the documents and folded them carefully into his satchel, next to the identification tags and the travel documents and the fragment of the wax seal. He had enough now. He had more than enough. He had evidence of conspiracy, evidence of forgery, evidence of a deliberate campaign to manipulate public opinion and destroy the reputations of four innocent men. He was about to leave the composing room when he heard the footsteps. They were coming down the corridor—two people, from the sound of it, walking quickly and speaking in low, urgent voices. Zhang Shouyi looked around wildly for a place to hide. The composing room had no windows, no closets, no secondary exits. The only cover was the composing stones themselves, and they were not large enough to conceal a grown man. The door began to open. Zhang Shouyi did the only thing he could think of. He dropped to the floor and rolled under the nearest composing stone, pressing himself flat against the cold flagstones. The space beneath the stone was barely eighteen inches high, and his satchel dug painfully into his ribs, but he did not move. Two pairs of feet entered the room. One wore the embroidered slippers of a wealthy merchant. The other wore the plain cloth shoes of a working man. "The widow has been causing problems," said the first voice—Kang Mojie's voice, smooth and cold as a blade. "She's been talking to the garrison wives. Telling them her husband was no coward. Telling them the gazette is lying." "I've heard." The second voice belonged to Liu, the master engraver. "What would you like me to do?" "What you always do. Write a rebuttal. A strong one. Quote her neighbors. Quote her own family if necessary. I want the city to believe that she's either a dupe or a liar." "And if she keeps talking?" "Then we escalate. The gazette has been kind to her so far. We could easily be less kind. A woman whose husband was a traitor, living alone with an infant daughter—there are vulnerabilities there. Imply that she's taken lovers. Imply that the child isn't her husband's. The public will believe whatever we print, as long as we print it often enough." Zhang Shouyi lay beneath the stone, his heart pounding so loudly he was certain the two men must be able to hear it. He had known that Kang Mojie was ruthless, but this was something else. This was a calculated campaign of destruction, aimed at anyone who threatened the narrative he had constructed. "Is there any word from the riders?" Kang Mojie asked. "No, Master Kang. They returned yesterday. They followed the clerk into the Moheyan but lost his trail near the abandoned post station. They searched the area but found nothing." "And the clerk?" "Also nothing. He may have died in the desert." "He may have." Kang Mojie's voice was thoughtful. "But I doubt it. Zhang Shouyi is more resourceful than he looks. I want a watch placed on every gate. I want his description circulated to every innkeeper and wineshop owner in the city. The moment he returns to Dunhuang, I want to know about it." "And when we find him?" "Bring him to me. I want to know what he found in the desert. I want to know what he knows. And then—" There was a pause, long and deliberate. "Then we will decide what to do with him." The two men left the composing room, their footsteps fading down the corridor. Zhang Shouyi waited until the silence had stretched for a full hundred heartbeats before he crawled out from beneath the composing stone. He had what he came for. Now he had to get out alive. He slipped back through the delivery door and into the alley, the cold night air hitting his face like a slap. The documents in his satchel felt heavier than they had any right to, as though the weight of the lies they contained had physical mass. He had enough evidence now to destroy Kang Mojie. He had the forged confessions. He had the memoranda. He had the transcripts of the rehearsals. He had the names of the dead men and the proof of how they had died. But evidence was only useful if there was someone to present it to. And in a city where the gazette controlled public opinion, where the military was complicit in the cover-up, where the governor himself had toasted the hero at a banquet paid for by Sogdian silver—who would listen to a convict clerk? Zhang Shouyi walked through the dark streets of Dunhuang, the satchel clutched to his chest, and tried to think. There was one person who might help him. One person who had warned him to stop investigating, and who might know more than she had told him. He turned his steps toward the house of Han Shierniang. The female reporter lived in a narrow alley near the Drum Tower, in a two-story building that she shared with three other unmarried women who worked in various trades—a weaver, a midwife, and a woman who painted devotional images for the Buddhist temple. It was a respectable establishment, as respectable as a house of unmarried women could be in a frontier city where respectability was a fragile thing. Zhang Shouyi knocked on the door and waited. Han Shierniang answered in her nightclothes, a robe of undyed hemp thrown hastily over her shoulders. She did not seem surprised to see him. "You're still alive," she said. It was not a question. "For now." She looked past him, scanning the alley for watchers, then pulled him inside and closed the door. The interior of the house was dark and smelled of incense and lamp oil and the faint, pleasant musk of women living together. "Kang Mojie knows you're back," Han Shierniang said. "He has watchers at every gate. How did you get in?" "The eastern wall. There's a breach near the old watchtower that the guards don't patrol properly." "You'll need to leave again before dawn. If they find you here, I'm dead too." "I know." Zhang Shouyi pulled the documents from his satchel and spread them on the low table in the center of the room. "But first you need to see these." Han Shierniang lit a lamp and bent over the documents. As she read, her face went through a series of transformations—surprise, then anger, then something that looked almost like fear. When she finished the last page, she looked up at Zhang Shouyi with new eyes. "You found the bodies," she said. "Yes." "In the cellar of the abandoned post station." "How did you know about the post station?" Han Shierniang was silent for a long moment. Then she reached into the folds of her robe and produced a key—a small, brass key, the kind used for locking strongboxes. "Because I was supposed to be the sixth," she said.
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