Sect Year 2 · fifth month · day 12 · the milestone road above Sallow Basin
Pei could walk to the tenth stone without stopping by then, and she didn’t let him forget it. She counted the stones aloud as she went, in her own voice, flat and quick, and when she reached the tenth she turned with her hands on her hips and waited for him to catch up, the way a carter waits for a slow mule.
“Eleven,” she said, when he reached her. “I counted it. You were behind.”
“I was carrying the blanket.”
“You were counting the dead.” She looked past him down the road. The milestones ran away across the plates one behind another, each with its dead man at its foot and his hands held out at the height of his chest. The sun had not yet cleared the shoulder of rock behind them. The salt was grey and flat, and at the far end of the road a brightness lay along the edge of the world. There, the basin was. “You move your lips when you do it. Like Su does with a bill.”
Lin did not deny it. He had been counting since the Abbot’s men took the road in front of them, and he hadn’t stopped in the night, when the count turned into the hum of the rim behind his ears. He could feel it now, a steady pressure there, like a thumb laid on a bruise that had stopped…
