Sect Year 2 · first month · the twenty-third life: the Reincarnation Hall, Qiao’s ninth year
The young man was called Little Quan. The Hall had given him the name when he was small, and it had stayed on him since, the way a borrowed coat stays on a boy who has outgrown it. He answered to it without looking up. Qiao learned this on the second morning, when the Hall-Master’s clerk called Little Quan down the gallery and the young man rose and went. Every head in the room lifted for a breath before it bent again.
On the third morning Little Quan took the stool at the end of Qiao’s table without asking and set a clean sheet of fine paper in front of him.
“Sit square,” he said. “Take the brush.”
Qiao had held a brush since he was seven. He picked it up in his right hand, the way the old copyists did, dipped it, and wiped the belly of the brush on the rim of the inkpot. The ink was thin and grey. He lowered the brush toward the paper and began a character he knew well, the one for count, which the Hall had made him write a hundred times.
