Sect Year 3 · third month · day 10 · Azure Stream Sect, the outer kitchen and the cookhouse door
There was nothing where the Wheel should be. Lin noticed that before the cold in his arm, and before the rain on the tiles, which had stopped in the night and left the outer court steaming in the first light. It wasn’t a silence. A silence had something in it, a faint pressure, as the air in a room tightens before a door opens. This had none of that. He stood with his right hand on the water-butt and felt for the place where the calling used to come, and the place was flat and swept.
He went to the wall before the bells for the porridge. The wardens on the east tower had no news for him, only the same thing they had said at dawn. The fords were holding. The near bank was dug in. The Court’s column had not moved off the far side of the flats since the night of the crossing.
“Anything from Su?” he asked the nearest warden, a broad man with a sunburnt neck who had carried a spear at the fords and come back with a bandage on his thumb.
