The Door Grader

In the city of Anlu, the doors that open onto the abyss are graded like cattle, and the man who grades them owns the market. A gate filed B pays triple. A gate filed D feeds a crew to the winter. The grades are written by the Graders' Guild, the Guild answers to no one, and for four hundred years every number in the trade has passed through the same few pens.

Tan Qi is a Guild apprentice with a two-day job and a cheap bed, the boy they hand the files nobody reads twice. Then the East Mill gate comes up for re-check, the file says B, the rope line is full, and Tan Qi puts his palm on the stone and reads what the grain actually says: a true grade of C, a tide due within three days, and a filed number that is about to kill thirteen men. He writes the withdrawal himself. His captain laughs at him. Three days later the tide comes early, thirteen go in, four come out, and the survivor who kneels at his door with a red silk banner is the same man who flipped a table over the report.

What begins as a downgrade that saved a crew becomes a war over every number in the city. Stripped of his cases and posted to a cellar, Tan Qi finds the pattern in ten years of closed disputes: one stamp, one flower, one office where inconvenient grades go to die. Backed by the iron abacus of Granny Nie, the last teacher of a murdered school, he opens the Plain Scale, a shop with a scale in the window that prints the true grades and the true tide tables on a public wall. The Sunlight Bulletin makes him famous, then makes him a target, because every true number on a wall is money out of the same few purses.

And behind the moved grades, something older is feeding. A death-zone filed D, where eleven men walked in on a printed window that did not exist. An insurance house that pays the claims smooth as rent. A treasurer who licks his thumb before he counts your life. A Guildmaster who straightens his cuffs before he explains, kindly, that a rank is not a fact, it is a price. At the bottom of it all: a slate in the Guild vault that should have been closed ten years ago, still open, still drawing, still spending the remaining years of the dead teacher who taught Tan Qi that a signature is read twice.

Every read costs Tan Qi days of his life. Every deep read costs months. To certify nine new gates against nine sealed lies, he will have to pay in years, in public, one door at a time, with the mountain scheduled to kill him at the ninth.

A professional fantasy of ledgers, tide tables, ink order, and sixty witnesses at a rope line. For readers who like their power earned by arithmetic, their conspiracies audited to the day, and their heroes priced honestly.

The number on his slate is public now. The trade is learning to read it. And the line, at last, is going up.