Midnight on the eastern spur of White Heron Hall brought a dry, biting stillness. The lower valley clouds rose to swallow the water tank walls. Inside his narrow corner room at the Guest Pavilion, Seyun had not lit the animal fat lamp or banked fresh charcoal into the small iron fire bowl. Half an hour after the third night-watch drum sounded from the middle spear courts, he had slipped out to the cold stone latrine at the end of the porch to wash the dried reed-ash crust from his wrists. That left his cloth-bound Account Book tucked half-visible beneath the corner of his unrolled straw sleeping mat as a deliberate test of the room’s security.
Now, walking back along the shadowed cedar porch in his stockinged feet—carrying his heavy boots hooked over one elbow so the guards around the water tank fire bowl thirty feet below would hear no returning footfalls on the hollow planking—Seyun stopped three paces short of his sliding door. In the pale silver glare reflecting off the snow-banked pines, he saw that the thin bamboo privacy peg he had wedged into the lower runner track at ankle height had been snapped neatly in two with a flat iron blade. The door panel stood ajar by the width of a thumb.
