Sect Year 0 · ninth month · day 28 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
Dawn came into the woodshed through the gaps between the planks, in thin pale bars that lay across the cot, the floor and the sleeping man’s face. Lin Cang lay still and let them find him. Three years of waking in this shed had taught him that the first breath of the day belonged to nobody. Nobody had yet told him what the day wanted.
His left arm ached from the shoulder down, the dull ache that rain brought on, though it hadn’t rained in four days. He opened the fingers one at a time. They closed slowly, and he watched them with the mild interest a man gives a strange dog. He had stopped expecting them to do anything else. Three years of that had made him an expert in small disappointments, and he was tired of being an expert.
Through the gap beside the door he could see the notice.
It was nailed to the outside of the planks at eye height, a sheet of thick paper with the Deacon’s red seal at its foot. From the cot he couldn’t make out the characters, and he didn’t need to. The clerk had put it up after the evening bell. Lin had read it through the gap while the clerk’s lantern swung away down the lane, then again at midnight when sleep would not come, and once more before he finally slept. By now every line sat in his head as neatly as the notches on the post.
Cang, Lin. Released from the Outer Court at the close of autumn, by order of the Deacon.
He folded the blanket into a square, got to his feet, and pushed the door open with his shoulder.
Cold air came in with the light. The Outer Court was still dim, the kitchen chimneys just beginning to smoke, a dog barking somewhere past the stables. Someone had already swept the path. Someone always did. Lin had swept it himself every morning for three years, and the broom handle had worn a pale, smooth place under his grip. He had stopped noticing the place long ago.
A pot of porridge came round the woodpile before he saw who carried it. Little Pei was twelve and as thin as the broom, with kitchen string tying back her hair and a smear of ash across one cheek that she hadn’t noticed. She stopped when she saw him. Then she saw the notice, and her face changed in a way Lin did not want to watch.
She set the pot on the step. The porridge was thicker than the Outer Court’s ration, with a spoonful of brown sugar stirred through it, and Lin knew the cook had sent it that way and would deny it at the next meal. She reached up and pulled the nails out with her thumbs, one and then the other, and the paper came away in her fist with a sound like a sheet shaken out to dry.
“They spelled your name with the wrong tone,” she said.
“Did they.”
“Cang has the falling tone. This one has the flat tone. It makes you sound like somebody’s uncle.” She folded the sheet into a square, then into a smaller square, and held it flat against her apron. “Nobody in the kitchen has ever called you somebody’s uncle.”
“Nobody in the kitchen has ever called me anything I could repeat.”
She gave a short laugh and bent to the pot. “Gao Wen has picked a cot by the Inner gate. The one with the good window. He wants everybody to know he’s moving up in the world.”
“Good for him.”
“He cheated.”
“He won,” said Lin.
She opened her mouth to argue. He held out his hand, and after a moment she gave him the notice. He unfolded it on his knee, smoothed it against the planks, and set it back on its two nails, one blow each, with the heel of his palm.
He stepped back and looked at the paper. His name sat in the middle of it in black characters that were perfectly ordinary, and yet they looked to him like someone else’s handwriting. His master had called him Cang when he wanted to be patient with him. The Elders had called him Cang when they wanted him to know he was in trouble. Gao Wen had called him Cang and added a word after it every time, and the word had always been cripple. Nobody had ever spoken the whole name in a way that allowed it an ending.
Pei watched him do it. “It was rigged,” she said, very low, so the kitchen would not hear. “Everybody in the kitchen knows it was rigged.”
“Somebody said so, three years ago. Nobody listened.”
“I listened.”
“Then you’re the only one who did,” said Lin, and he didn’t say it unkindly.
The duel at Azure had been three years ago, in the spring when the peach trees were in flower. Gao Wen had struck him once, an open palm to the chest, and something cold had gone through Lin’s channels the way water goes through a cracked pipe. He could still smell the peach blossom on the wind that afternoon, sweet and faintly rotten at the edges. The bout-master had called the match closed a breath after the palm had already landed, and nobody had hurried to the ring. The healers came later, and the Elders later still. Their verdict was that the spirit veins might close again on their own, or might not. They hadn’t closed. Since then the sect had found a name for him, and the name was the cautionary tale. He was nineteen. He swept, he carried water, he ate in the corner of the kitchen and was passed over by everyone who might have needed a favour. When he tested his spirit power at the water basin under the east wall, the bronze marker did not float up even an inch. For most of those years the anger had held him upright. This morning, with the notice in Pei’s pocket and the porridge going cold on the step, he found the anger had gone somewhere, and what was left was only tiredness.
He carried two pails of water to the Deacon’s office at midmorning. Hou Meng sat at a table beneath the roof edges, with the quota board propped against the wall behind him. Lin’s name was near the bottom of it, in the same black ink as the kitchen’s order for pickled plums. He was a heavy man with ink on both cuffs and the patience of someone who has been paid to be patient, and he didn’t look up when Lin set the pails down.
“Don’t loiter by the board, cautionary tale.”
“I’m not loitering. I’m carrying.”
“Then carry it somewhere that isn’t here.”
Lin did not move. “Which day is the last?”
“The close of autumn. You’ll be told the morning of.” Hou Meng dipped his pen and wrote on a slip of paper that, as far as Lin could tell, had nothing to do with him. “Go on. The Inner Court has its own water.”
Lin picked up the pails and went. On the way out he passed two outer students leaning on the well-kerb with their arms folded. One of them looked at his shoes and said, “Is it true they’re giving you a donkey and a map?”
“It’s true the donkey is the Deacon’s idea.”
The students laughed. Lin walked on, and the laughter followed him as far as the kitchen steps and no farther, which he counted as a small mercy.
At noon he ate in the yard, on the low wall by the water butts. That was because the cook had come out of the kitchen with a bowl in each hand and said that the Deacon had decided the cautionary tale was to eat outside now that he was leaving. “Eat it outside, then,” the cook had said, and pressed a second spoon into his fist. “The Deacon never said anything about spoons.”
In the afternoon he split kindling until the basket was full, because the kitchen always needed kindling and because the work gave his hands something to do besides think. The axe was dull. He didn’t stop to sharpen it. He took each stroke as it came, and the wood opened along the grain, and the pieces fell into the basket with a dry knock.
Later he swept the lane between the kitchens and the woodsheds twice, because the first time the wind had brought the leaves back. By the time the sun slid behind the east wall his shoulders were tight and his palms were damp. Pei came out of the kitchen with an empty pot on her hip and found him at the gate.
“I’ll tear it down again tomorrow,” she said. “Every morning, before anyone’s up.”
“You can.”
“I can.” She looked at the two bare holes in the planks. “Then I’ll read it every morning. And so will you.”
He lifted one shoulder and let it fall. She went away down the lane toward the kitchen, and he watched her until the corner of the stables took her.
Then he went into the woodshed and reached up to the rafter over the door. The jade slip lay there in its grey cloth, where he had put it the week after the funeral and had not touched since. It weighed almost nothing. He took it down and turned it over in his palm, feeling the edges through the cloth, and did not unwrap it. He wasn’t sure why. He pushed the bundle into his sleeve, where it lay cool against the inside of his wrist, and went out again.
Pei sat on the back step with her chin on her knees and the kitchen lamp lit behind her. She saw the way he was going, and her eyes went to the sleeve.
“You never go up there,” she said.
“I’m going today.”