Sect Year 2 · fourth month · day 9 · the rim of Sallow Basin
The masked men held the slope. There were four of them, spaced along the rough ramp of broken salt-stone that climbed from the basin floor to the lip. They stood with their hands at their sides and their blind faces turned down toward the white. They hadn’t moved since morning. When Pei took a step toward the lowest of them, he lifted one hand, not high, and she stopped the way a dog would stop at the end of a rope.
Five days had gone since Lin woke with his palm on the bronze. The first rope had come down on the fourth evening, and it had come down at every dusk since.
Lin did not go to the slope. He turned the other way, along the foot of the rim, and walked. Nobody stopped him. The masked men turned their faces to follow him as he passed, slowly, as the mask at the milestone had once turned to count him. Then they turned back toward the lip, having counted him and found him of no further use.
The basin floor was harder underfoot than he had expected. Under the crust of salt the ground was soft and grey, and it took his boots to the ankle and let them go with a sound like a mouth closing. The air smelled of salt water and of something beneath the salt water, sweet and faintly rotten…
