Sect Year 0 · tenth month · day 6 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court lane
Hou Meng kept his window open in the mornings, which was how the whole lane learned what the Deacon thought of everything.
The Outer Court woke in pieces at that hour. The kitchen fires came first, a roar of kindling and a smell of scorched millet. Then the cart from the Inner stores rattled down the lane with its wheels wrapped in sacking, and the water-carriers began to shout at one another about who had cut in front.
Lin had come up from the stable with an armful of split logs. He had cut the sixth notch at first light, and his palms were already rough from the carrying. The lane was wet from the night’s rain. Steam came off the kitchen drains, and somewhere behind the wall a dog that belonged to nobody was barking at the bell rope. He stopped at the woodpile because the window was open, and because the voice coming out of it was one he hadn’t expected to hear in the Outer Court. It was cold and exact, and it didn’t rise.
“The Outer Court is counting one month short, Deacon, and you know the count.”
“The Inner Court does not tell the Outer Court how to count.”
“It does when the count is wrong.”
Along the lane the sweepers had stopped. A kitchen hand with a basket on each hip set both baskets down and took a long time over it. Lin stood with the logs against his chest and did not move, because moving would have been a kind of admission.
The Deacon’s door opened. Su Yanqing came out with an Inner ledger under one arm and walked down the lane alone. She wore grey-blue silk without a crease in it, and her hair was pinned with a plain stick of wood, which was the only plain thing about her. She was twenty-one. Lin had known her for three years the way a man knows the weather on a particular hill, by the bad turns it takes. She didn’t look at the baskets or the sweepers. The outer students stepped aside without being told, and the lane closed up again behind her.
A kitchen hand let out a breath beside the baskets. “She’s never once said good morning to anybody,” she whispered to the boy beside her. “Not in three years.” Lin did not turn round. He had the sense that the whisper was meant for him, and he didn’t want to be the one who answered it.
She stopped at the woodpile. “You’re standing in the drain.”
“I’m carrying wood.”
“You’re carrying it badly.” She looked at the logs, and then at his hands, which were holding them against his chest. “Show me your palms.”
He didn’t show her. He shifted the logs a little higher. Su waited with the patience of someone who had decided in advance that the waiting would cost him more than it cost her.
“Then I’ll say it without them,” she said. “The duel report was sealed in Elder Gao’s name. The seal is his. The hand is not. An Elder does not hurry his strokes. The man who wrote that page was hurrying. Then he slowed down to copy the seal, and the copy came out too careful. I have read four Elders’ hands this year. None of them wrote that line.”
She said it flatly, the way someone reads a column of figures back to check the sum. She didn’t lower her voice. She didn’t glance up the lane to see who was listening. Lin had the sense that she had already looked once, before she came down.
The report had been read to him three years earlier, in the Deacon’s office, by a man who did not look up from the page. Nobody had asked him whether it was true, and he hadn’t thought to ask himself. He had been carried out of the courtyard that week with his spirit veins like cracked pipes. The report had been the last thing anybody read to him for a long time.
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because the report is wrong, and nobody else in this sect will say so in an Outer Court lane.” She tucked the ledger more firmly under her arm. “The Deacon has agreed, grudgingly, to count the month from the first, as the rules allow. Thirty days. You’ll have them.”
“Then say it in the hall.”
“The hall would want to know who I had been talking to. I don’t intend to answer that in front of Gao’s clerks.” She said it without heat, as a plain fact about the hall. “How much do you know about your own channels?”
“Enough.”
“Three open?”
He didn’t answer. She waited, and then she nodded very slightly, as though he had.
“The report says the fourth was torn in a fair exchange,” she said. “It wasn’t a fair exchange. Gao Wen used the Cold Ash, and the report leaves that out.”
“Was there anything true in it?”
“The date,” said Su. “Nobody had the wit to forge that.” She looked at his face for a moment, and then at the post beside the woodshed door. “You’ll have your thirty days. That is what you are owed. The rest is not yours to carry yet.”
“Why do you care what I’m owed?”
“I don’t have to say why.”
Lin found the answer could end a conversation or start one, and he couldn’t tell which. He had thought for three years that she was the sort of person who would walk past a dying dog to check the margins of a ledger. He still thought so, most days. He was less certain now that she would walk past anything at all.
“What do you write in that book of yours?” he asked.
“What I hear. What I’m told. What happened, once someone has bothered to check it.”
“Why?”
“Because the people who decide what happened can’t be trusted to remember it.” She looked at him as if he had asked whether the water in the lane was wet. “Which people does not matter. Any of them. The Elders forget their own orders by the next moon. The Deacon forgets his own count by the next quarter. I don’t forget what I’ve written, and I don’t write what I haven’t checked.”
“Do you sleep, Su Yanqing?”
It was the first time he had used her name aloud in the Outer Court. She noticed, and did not pretend otherwise. “Very little, most nights. I write that down too.”
She opened her free hand. In it was a small black book with its cloth binding worn soft at the corners. She opened it against her palm. “Say the date.”
“The sixth. Tenth month.”
“The sixth. Tenth month.” She wrote it in a narrow, upright hand, then looked up. “Say it back to me.”
“The sixth. Tenth month.”
“Good. I write what I hear, and I check it twice. You’ll find I’m usually right, and it’s tiresome for everyone.” Her eyes went to the post beside the woodshed door. There, the cuts ran down the grain in a row. “Six.”
“Six.”
“You count.”
“I’m told it’s a habit.”
“Told by whom?”
“By myself, mostly.”
She wrote something short. Lin could not read it upside down, and he suspected that was intended.
“The sixth,” she said again, to the page or to herself. She closed the book, slid it into her sleeve, and turned back the way she had come.
Lin carried the logs to the woodshed and went in by the door. On the way past the post he knocked the wood with his knuckle, once, the way he had tapped the gate on the fourth morning. The sound was clean.
He set the logs down in the corner and began to stack them, and while his hands worked he did the sum. Twenty-four days, if the thirty began on the first and ran to the thirtieth, and the Deacon had said they did. It was a sum he could hold in his head without dropping it, which was more than could be said for most of the Deacon’s sums. Then he thought about the days themselves, and what a man was supposed to do with them once he had them, and he found that question was harder than the sum. He stacked another length of oak and did not answer it.
The lane emptied slowly after the Inner woman had gone. The kitchen hand picked up both baskets and carried them off without a word to anyone. The sweepers swept again, though nothing on the stones needed sweeping. Lin stacked the logs three high against the post and found that his hands, after all that carrying, were steady in a way they hadn’t been a week before.
Pei had come up from the kitchen with an empty pot on her hip. She was standing in the woodshed doorway when he turned from the stack. She had seen the Inner woman go, and she was looking at him as though he had been sold to someone at a fair.
“Was that the one with the book?”
“Yes.”
“She writes you down, you know. Half the kitchen’s seen her do it. The cook says she’s making a list of who the Elders will hang first.”
“Is she?”
“I don’t know. She’s never asked me for a list.” Pei shifted the pot to her other hip. “You’ve got a face on like someone’s shown you the price of the Inner Court’s bread.”
“I’ve got the thirty days.”
“Good. Then you’re not being stupid today.” She looked at the post beside the door and frowned at the cuts, as if somebody else had made them. “Six. That’s the sixth, is it?”
“It’s the sixth.”
“Then it’s not the first, and nothing stupid happens on the sixth.” She turned for the kitchen. “Get the rest of that wood in before the cook sends someone to shout.”
When he came out for the second armful, Su had stopped at the top of the lane. She was looking at his hand. He saw her take out the black book again, open it against her palm, and write one more line before she went on toward the Inner stair without looking back.