Sect Year 1 · ninth month · day 20 · Azure Stream Sect, Sect Master’s Hall
Lin held the Elder against the edge of the table. His right hand was locked on the grey wrist, and the forearm lay pinned across the split oak like a bar across a gate. The torn wood bit into the skin. Through the bite he could feel the pulse, quick and uneven, a heart running without knowing where it was going.
“One,” he said.
Under the smell of hot oil and bronze there was the sweetness he had been told about and still could not name. It was much stronger here. It came off the Elder’s skin the way a sickroom smells when the window has been shut too long, and it got into the back of Lin’s throat and stayed there.
He said the count aloud, because a count he could hear kept his chest slow. He breathed in with the Lamp-Breath, the throat open and the shoulders down, and let the breath go long. Around him the hall was full of noise: the lamps hissing in their brackets, the Elder’s breath tearing in and out of his mouth like cloth pulled off a nail.
