I Hold the Pen to Settle Old Sins

The grandson of the pawnshop keeper wants the ledger his grandfather left behind emptied of its entries, and the people who owe are households that never expected to be asked. Ten years ago the keeper of the Tianji pawnshop vanished. The book stayed, with the debts of the world set down in it, and those debts are counted in years of life. He comes to a family's birthday feast blindfolded, feeling the floor ahead of him with a cane, and asks for the ten years the household borrowed. He has the ledger and a pen that closes contracts, and he works through the names one at a time: the family at the feast, the man who took the Divine Eye, the man who borrowed the Divine Bone. A man arrives from the imperial capital, and behind him is an arrangement in which people are kept prisoner so that a treasure can be taken. The grandson goes to the capital and up the Star Observatory Tower to meet whoever set it up.