Sect Year 2 · sixth month · day 13 · the rim of Sallow Basin · dusk
Lin had lost the count somewhere after noon, and he hadn’t gone looking for it since. There were still souls at the rim’s foot. He could see them from where he sat, a loose scatter of figures standing in the grey mud with their hands at their sides and their faces turned toward the slope where the rope hung. There were fewer than yesterday. He thought the word fewer, and then he stopped, because a word like that was a count, and he had asked himself not to make any more of those.
He sat with his back against the bronze. The metal had taken the day’s heat and given it back, and now the cold came through his coat in a slow, even pressure, like damp climbing a plaster wall. He had left the coat open. There was no point in closing it. The cold in his left side had climbed past the shoulder. It lay along the collarbone and across the top of his chest, a band of dead air that did not warm when he breathed into it. He had stopped asking the arm to do anything except hang at his side.
