Sect Year 1 · seventh month · day 12 · Azure Stream Sect, lower gate
Ruan Tiao kept the lower gate the way some men kept dogs, by knowing exactly which sound each thing made when it was touched. He had kept it since before Lin came to the sect, and he had a fondness for iron that he wouldn’t admit to the Deacon. He walked Lin through the gatehouse to the inner face of the great door. There, the hinge pin sat in its iron sleeve at the height of a man’s hip, and he rapped it once with a knuckle.
It rang. Not loud, and not flat.
“A year ago that rang like a cracked pot,” Ruan said. “I told the Deacon so. He said a cracked pot still holds soup.”
“Did anyone fix it?”
“I replaced it myself, after the business with the boy’s arm.” Ruan’s mouth moved under the grey stubble. “Hou Meng wrote a chit for the new pin and put at the foot of it, Thank the stores. I took that to mean he was pleased.”
Lin tapped the pin himself. It rang clean, the note climbing and then settling into the iron, the way a bell settles once the hand that struck it has let go. He had been testing iron since a bridge in a life that was no longer his to name, and the habit had never once lied to him.
