Sect Year 2 · first month · the twenty-third life: the Reincarnation Hall, Qiao’s tenth year
The Hall’s method was written on a single sheet of paper, pinned at the foot of the stair behind a wooden shutter that was always kept half closed. Qiao had walked past it every morning since he was seven, and he had never read it. The copyists did not look at it, so he hadn’t either. He had supposed it was a notice about the lamps, or a list of the days on which the Hall did not take new boys.
Then one morning the steward unhooked the shutter and held the sheet up toward him.
“The Hall-Master says you may read this,” the steward said. “Only this. The rest is not yours yet.”
The paper was thin and yellow at its edges. At its head someone had drawn a bowl, one clean curved line, with nothing inside it. It was the Hall’s own mark, the one set small at the head of its sheets, and Qiao had never once looked at it closely. He couldn’t decide whether the bowl was meant to show something or to show that nothing was there. Beneath it a short paragraph was written in the Hall’s square script.
