Chang-li arrived in Fai-Lan City at dusk, and then spent a good hour going from inn to inn, only to find most of them full thanks to the governor's tax tour of the province. Finally, with nowhere else to turn, he had tried the Royal Peacock as Min suggested. The bouncer at the door, the woman behind the bar, and the girls waiting tables all wore the brown-and-gray rosette of the Oaken Band Brotherhood on their tunics.

The woman at the bar told him sharply, "We have no rooms available."

On a whim, Chang-li stepped closer and lowered his voice. "Elder Sister Min sent me."

Her eyes widened at that before she nodded. "All right, very well." He was shown to a narrow garret room, barely big enough for the sleeping mat. He dumped his pack, took off his dusty shoes, and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

In the morning, he donned the Morning Mist cultivation robes over his tunic and leggings, carefully cinching the belt around his waist. He placed all of his papers and his own cultivation license inside his satchel, along with Wulan’s pen case, his cultivator journal, and several blank journals he had acquired from the scribe's office back at camp, in the hopes they might prove useful. Then he asked directions from the girl who was serving rice porridge, and she laughed in his face.

"The cultivator's library is in the Hall of Records, of course. You can't miss it. It's in the center of the district, across from the mayor's palace. It’s the tower.” She rolled her eyes.

When Chang-li stepped out onto the street, he understood why. The tower dominated the city. It was three tiers high, though he couldn't perceive the lowest tier clearly through the wooden buildings that lined this street. The top two tiers were round and windowless, framed in by a circle of columns painted gold. The area between each column was painted in the seven rainbow shades, from red up to violet, and then starting over at red again. It looked like the pattern repeated three times on the middle tier, and only a single time on the topmost tier, which was quite small.

Chang-li made his way through the bustling streets. He had grown up in a city, so he knew how to avoid being knocked down by overloaded carts full of vegetables as farmers brought their produce into the market, how to get out of the way of more important people, and how to avoid meeting the eyes of the beggars. He was feeling pretty good about his savviness until he turned down a broad street that led straight to the Hall of Records and stopped dead.

The bottommost tier of the hall was far larger than the top two. At a guess, the colored pattern must repeat at least seven times as it wrapped around the huge circular building. Between the closest pair of red and violet wall sections was an arched doorway, twice as tall as a man, with double doors thrown open, and there was a line of people waiting. There must be fifty people in front of him in the queue.

He joined the end and tapped the shoulder of the man in front of him. The fellow turned on him. He was a middle-aged man, broad-featured, plain, with a worker's well-worn hands and a clean tunic with a darned seam at one side. He had close-cropped, balding hair.

"What do you want?" he asked in broad tones. Chang-li had a bit of difficulty with the accent.

"I'm new to this city and I don't know your customs. Which line is this for?"

The farmer shrugged. "It's just to get inside. They'll be calling on us all in turn.”

Chang-li settled in to wait. He made tedious progress toward the door. Every few minutes, the person at the head of the line would disappear inside and the whole queue would move up one. A couple of scribes joined the line behind Chang-li, complaining about how long it had taken them to be served breakfast that morning. Now here they were, stuck at the end of a long queue.

After about an hour, Chang-li had nearly reached the building. He shifted his weight from foot to foot as he waited, still eager to get inside and begin unlocking the secrets of the Morning Mist sect. At long last, he stepped in through the doors.

It felt as though he had stepped inside a cultivation tower. Chang-li halted in the doorway.

"Keep moving!" the woman three places back shouted. "We don't want to be here all day!"

He finished stepping over the threshold into an enormous round building. The ceiling was at least twenty feet overhead and painted the color of a summer sky. The floor underfoot was marble shot through with veins of gold and silver. In the center of the room was an enormous circular counter manned by clerks, a familiar enough sight that Chang-li felt himself smiling. The counter was large enough for seven clerks to man stations. At intervals along the wall were little rooms. Every now and then, someone at the center counter would be directed to one of the rooms to disappear inside, come out a while later, then rejoin the queue here inside before being called up to the counter again.

It looked to Chang-li like an inefficient operation, but he was more curious about the lux he could feel prickling against his skin. The air here was dense with it. He inhaled and felt the lux flowing into him, cycling it through his body. He felt it replenish his slightly diminished reserves.

It felt like tower lux. He was still waiting for his turn to be called forward, so he reached out with his senses, just as he would to feel the strength of a tower beast, and then he caught it. Behind the counter were four tall wooden candelabras, and on each sat a crystal about the size of a head, cut with dozens of facets. The crystals shimmered and gleamed. They were leaking lux into this building.

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Now it made sense. He knew the basics of lux crystal usage. The crystals could be refilled at a tower, though he wasn't sure of the exact mechanism, and then used to transport lux elsewhere. The lux powered the empire's great wonders. Why they were being used to raise the ambient lux in this building, he didn't know.

At last, he was called forward. The clerk serving him was a short woman with sleek dark hair falling into her face. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here to request my sect’s records, stored here by our predecessors some centuries ago.” Chang-li presented the document Joshi had sealed.

She peered at it. "This seems in order. Where is your sect record book?"

He had an answer for that, the same one he had told Min's people to tell Magistrate Bao and Inspector Dah.

"During our journey to participate in the Tower Cull at Golden Moon City, my master's party was attacked by bandits and we unfortunately lost some of our possessions, including our sect record."

She frowned. "Well, then you'll need a new one, won't you?"

"Yes, I suppose we shall. Now I—"

She cut him off, reaching under the desk for a form. "Form 2713B. Request for duplicate sect record. You'll want to be sure to check the box on the fourth page that says your previous record was destroyed and cannot be accessed. Then you'll need to provide all of the relevant information here. In triplicate," she added, producing another stack of papers.

Chang-li's eyes began to widen as he saw the stack. "Oh, and you'll need to fill out a 418C, provisional request to endorse records on behalf of a sect member who is not present. What is your rank in the sect?" she asked.

"I am sect scribe and I have achieved the Peak of Bodily Refinement," Chang-li said.

"License?"

He handed it over. She scrutinized it. "Yes, that seems to be in order. That form will suffice, then. In triplicate, of course." She saw him hesitating and waved a hand at him. "I haven't got all day. Fill it out in one of the rooms there along the wall, and then bring it back up and we'll help you with the next step."

Chang-li snatched up the sheaf of papers and hurried off to one of the empty booths at the back of the atrium. These were little more than closets, with a single chair and a tiny desk attached to the wall. The doors, however, could be closed. He stepped inside the first unoccupied one, closed the door, and set to work, glad that he had brought his pen case along.

Chang-li's scribing experience so far had all been with the various Imperial organizations associated with the climb. These forms all bore the seal of the Riceflower Province Municipal Government Office of Records and Statutes, which would be a municipal organization, not an imperial one. The scribes here were almost certainly not licensed scribes like Chang-li.

He couldn't help but feel a stab of pride. While anyone who could hold a pen and keep character sets straight could manage the year or so of training that a municipal scribe required, being a licensed scribe took three years and required memorization of imperial law, history, and literature. A licensed scribe was expected to be able to fill any role the emperor could ask, whether cultivation sect scribe, military aide, or, like Chang-li, assistant to a tower climb.

When his forms were filled out, he returned to the desk. The same clerk summoned him forward. She rifled through his pages. "These look reasonably complete. We'll need an eight kwam fee for processing."

He winced. That was a good chunk of the money he'd brought with him. "All right," he said.

"And you'll need to allow five to seven days for records to be processed.”

"Five to seven days?" he sputtered. "Ah, forgive me, that isn't possible. We're engaged in a tower climb right now. I need the records a lot sooner."

She frowned. "Well, if you need expedited processing, it'll be another eight kwam, but we'll have it ready for you tomorrow."

"Fine," he said, wincing at the thought of how light his purse would be.

"That'll be these forms," she said, giving him another eight pages to fill out.

Chang-li started to pick them up, then paused. "Is there anything else I'll need to fill out? I have been told by my master that our sect left records here several hundred years ago. He wishes to reclaim them."

"Oh, that'll be the deep archives. You'll have to file a request to have the records pulled. That's Form 419-7, Parts A, B, and D. You won't need Part C, I think, since this is your sect requesting its own records. So you don't need to have it approved by an official from the mayor's office. Then, of course, there'll be the copying fee, which comes to one kwam for every fifty pages."

"I don't need them copied. I can copy them myself. I need the originals."

"The withdrawal form is 814-42." She bent and came up empty-handed. "Scribe Qian, do you have a 814-42?"

"Fresh out, I'm afraid."

The scribe helping Chang-li frowned. "Oh, all right. I'll let you fill out a 814-43, and I'll waive the discrepancy fee, since it wasn't your fault. Oh, and of course, you'll need to log your own details in the ledger once the records are provided for you. But that'll be filled out when you receive the records."

He picked up the stack. "If I bring these all to you, can you have the records searched at the same time you're processing my other paperwork?"

"That's inefficient. If your sect paperwork processing request is denied, we will not be able to turn your records over to you, after all."

"But if you do them both today, I can get my records tomorrow and be able to return to my sect in time."

She shrugged. Behind him, the line of waiting people seemed to be getting more impatient by the minute. Chang-li leaned forward. "Please?"

The scribe looked him over, glanced down at his hand, where her eyes fell on the iron band on his thumb. "You're a licensed scribe?"

Chang-li nodded. "I am."

"And now you're a scribe to a sect." Her eyes softened. "That's like something from a story. All right. I'll file both of the requests simultaneously, as long as you fill them out properly."

Deciding not to press his luck again, Chang-li hurried off back to a booth, filled out the second batch of papers, then brought them back to the helpful clerk, who looked them all over, took his money, and sent him on his way.

By the time Chang-li stepped back into the street, it was well into the afternoon. His stomach rumbled. He hadn't eaten all day, having been too impatient to wait for the rice porridge at the inn, and he was nearly broke. He decided to go back to the inn and see if Min's name could get him a bowl of stew on the house.

It had been a frustrating day. He trudged back to the inn, no longer caring about the sights of this city. All he wanted was to get his documents and get out of here.

He forgot all about the stew when he saw who was waiting for him at the inn.