Sect Year 2 · fifth month · day 6 · the milestone road above Sallow Basin · before dawn
Lin woke because the ground under his blanket was humming. It wasn’t loud. It sat in his back teeth and in the hinge of his jaw, a steady pressure that came up through the stones from the basin and into the bone of his spine. The rim’s note had always climbed that way. He lay still and listened. The hum did not rise and did not fall. He found that he could feel the names inside it, one after another, like stones under a stream.
He thought he could say the rest of them if he went now. Before the light came, before the day set its heat on the salt, before the hum became something a man could learn to ignore. He could say them from the lip, if he got close enough to the rim to be heard.
Pei was asleep in the shadow of the milestone. She had the grey blanket to her chin and one arm flung across her face. The wax was in his coat, wrapped in its cloth, lying against his ribs beside the jade slip in its own grey wrapping. He put his hand flat over the place to be sure of it, then took his own blanket off the stones and went.
