Sect Year 3 · fifth month · day 8 · Azure Stream Sect, the east gate
The wardens on the east tower swore they had heard nothing. The night watch had been two men and a boy, and the boy had been asleep against the drum with his mouth open. Nobody had heard a chisel on the oak. Nobody had seen a lantern on the road between the cage and the gate.
Lin came down the terraced path in the grey light. Then, with Pei at his shoulder and Gao Wen swinging behind on his pole, the names were already there, cut into the inner face of the east gate at the height of a seated man’s eye.
He stopped at the foot of the gate-stair and looked at them for a long time.
The cut was fine. It had been made with a point no thicker than a hair, and the lines ran down the wood in columns so even that a copyist might have ruled them with a straight-edge. Forty-one names, in the order of the beds in the sick room, the first at the top and the last at the bottom. Below them a single paragraph ran the width of the gate.
