Sect Year 1 · eighth month · day 17 · the lower gate store, Azure Stream Sect
The evening bell had rung and the lamps were being lit along the Outer Court terraces when Lin went down the lower path. Su had asked him that afternoon, at the record room desk, whether the kitchen had ever said anything about the Inner boys and the lower store. It had, once, at the pots: a jar that was not tea, and a cousin who said so. The question had not grown any simpler all afternoon. He wanted to see the thing with his own eyes before anyone else decided what it was.
The lower store lay behind the gatehouse. There, the Outer Court’s millet came in on carts and went out again on carrying poles. Its floor had been worn into shallow dips by a century of sacks, and it smelled of dust and dry grain and the sour ghost of spilt rice. A single shuttered window let in one bar of light, and the bar fell across the sacks and stopped there. Ma Jiqing’s cousin kept the store. He was a thin man whose face blinked often, and he stood with his back against the millet and did not offer Lin a stool.
