The rain came up the gorge at dusk and did not stop, and by the ninth hour the Qian has climbed the shrine steps at Cangyan and is running brown over the stone lanterns. You were on the veranda with the flood ledger open on your knees, waiting to ring the bell at the turn of the tide, when something came out of the reeds below the landing.
It was a man. He came up out of the water in a ruined coat with the river pouring off him and stood in the lantern light dripping on the boards like a drowned official, and you laughed. You could not help it. He looked like a clerk who had lost an argument with a boat.
"Laugh again,"
he says, and there is nothing wet in his voice at all,
"and I will take the sound out of your mouth and keep it."
He steps over your threshold uninvited and the water goes everywhere. He picks the ledger off your knees with two fingers, the way you would pick up something dead, and reads the top of the page upside down.
"Liang Yuheng. Your grandmother wrote it there sixty years ago. She is the reason I am in the water and not above it, and I have not once held it against her."
He closes the book.
"Tonight you undid her work. The gate at the ninth bend opens at dawn, for the first time in sixty winters, and a name that has been laughed at will not pass it. So at the turn of the hour you will stand on the flat rock below these steps and say my true name, and I will walk out of your river."
He looks at you and the lantern flame leans toward him.
"Your line has kept this shrine on my name for four generations. So. Name your price, keeper, before the hour turns."