Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 21 · Azure Stream Sect, Inner Court
A household steward took him in by lamplight, through a side gate Lin would never have found alone. It was set into a wall of old grey brick, low enough that the steward stooped under the top door beam without thinking about it. It opened on a garden Lin had only ever seen from the lower road. There was raked gravel, a pond gone black and still, and beyond the pond a house with paper screens lit from within. The air smelled of wet leaves and of the bitter herb the alchemists burned in their fire bowls. It caught at the back of his throat.
“The Elder keeps this gate open for physicians,” the steward said. “The Outer Court comes in by the back.”
“Which door is the back?”
“The one you came through.” The steward did not smile. Lin decided he would remember him kindly.
The boy lay in an inner room on a low bed under two quilts. The grey had not left his lips, but the breath had lost its saw. It rose and fell with the careful evenness of someone crossing a plank over moving water, and Lin, who had sat by more sickbeds than he could count across the other lives he carried, thought that somebody had been patient with it for a long time. The boy’s eyes opened a crack. “Grandfather?” he said, to nobody Lin could see, and slid back under before anyone could answer.
The boy’s mother knelt beside the bed with her forehead nearly on the matting. When Lin came in she didn’t look up. She began to thank him for his hands, and for his skill, and for a honour the house would never forget, which he hadn’t asked to be remembered. Then she bowed lower.
“Get up,” Lin said.
She didn’t get up.
“Please get up. Get up.”
She rose slowly, with a maid’s hand under one elbow, and stood with her own hands folded over her robe. She was older than he had thought at the gate, and her eyes were red at the rims. Lin put a hand on the iron foot of the bed to steady himself, and the iron rang faintly under his knuckle, clean and true. She heard it. Her shoulders eased, very slightly, as if the sound had told her something she had been waiting to be told.
Elder Xu Bairen sat under a plum tree at the far end of the garden, on a bench with a tea tray beside him. The tree had dropped most of its leaves, and the few still hanging had gone the colour of old brass. Xu wore dark robes without ornament. He didn’t rise when Lin came down the gravel. He poured a second cup, set it on the far end of the bench, and waited until Lin understood he was meant to sit. Lin sat.
“Walk me through it,” said Xu. “In order. Do not tell me what it was. Tell me what you did.”
Lin told him. He had taken water from the bedside cup in the boy’s room and tasted it before anyone could stop him. He had sat on a stool and laid two fingers on the boy’s wrist. He had felt the balance through the skin, full above the jam and empty below. He had drawn his own qi down the empty channels a little at a time, stopping whenever the jam tightened and waiting until it gave.
“And so you mended what the alchemists broke.”
“No, Elder. I filled what the boy had lost. I didn’t mend anything.”
“Mending is for the Inner Court’s paper,” said Xu. He drank his tea and set the cup down with great care, as though it had complained to him. “Written in brush by men who have never felt a jam in their own wrists. Go on about the filling. Slower this time, and use your hands.”
Lin did it again, his palms resting on the cold bench, lifting one finger for each step. Xu listened without interrupting. When Lin finished, the old man sat without speaking. A shutter banged somewhere in the house and was caught by someone who did not want it to bang.
“You didn’t look at the boy’s mother when she bowed to you,” Xu said. “My steward tells me your eyes were on the boy’s chest.”
“Yes, Elder. I was counting his breaths.”
“Good. Watch the chest when people bow. Anyone with five years at court can arrange a face. The breath is harder to arrange.” He turned his cup a quarter turn on the tray, the way a man turns a coin he is not sure of. “I have watched Gao Shun’s breath across a council table for thirty years. He keeps it short, so that nobody notices when he has stopped.”
“Gao Shun will not like you,” Xu said after that. “He doesn’t like anything that works in a room he didn’t arrange. I should like you to be seen working in mine.” He took a folded paper from his sleeve and laid it on the bench between them. “Present yourself at the Cloud Breath hall at dawn on the twenty-third, when the masters sit. Take this chit.”
“Why the Cloud Breath hall, Elder? I have seen the first breath of it from a wall, and that is all I have. The masters have never once looked at me.”
“Because Gao Shun would refuse you, and I want the masters to watch him do it.”
Lin picked up the chit. It was thick paper, with Xu’s seal in red at the foot and a line of brushwork above that said nothing except a name. He thought of the notches on the woodshed post, twenty-one cut and nine to go, and of how little any of them had to do with an Inner Court hall. “I’ll be there,” he said.
“Good. My secretary is writing a fair copy for the porter. He writes slowly. Wait for him in the hall by the wall gate. Do not wait in the garden. Gardens are for people who have finished their business.”
The hall ran the length of the house behind the screens, its timber floor complaining under every step. At the far end a low door of iron-strapped wood gave onto the lane that ran outside the garden wall, and the door had a grille at the height of a man’s face. Xu’s secretary came down the hall with an ink-stained sleeve and a lamp, nodded to Lin without speaking, and went into a side room. A brush began to scratch.
Lin stood by the grille. The night air came through the bars, cold and damp, with the smell of the drains in it. A dog barked somewhere and was ignored. He kept his hands loose at his sides and his breath slow, the way he had learned to keep them on the stool, and he listened.
Two men had stopped in the lane on the far side of the wall. One stood close to the grille, close enough that Lin could hear the rub of a sleeve against stone.
“You will not touch him again until I say.” The voice was low and dry. Lin knew it the way he knew the float in the basin, an old voice that had never needed to be loud.
“He is an Outer rat with a borrowed balance.” The second voice was younger and thinner, and it shook at the edges. Gao Wen.
“He is a rat the Sect Master has noticed. Stop it.”
Nothing, for a breath. Then one set of footsteps went up the lane, quick and angry, and the other stayed where it was. Lin counted. He reached nineteen before the second man moved, and the tap of a walking stick came along the stones, unrushed, testing each one before it trusted it.
Lin did not move from the grille until the sound had gone. He found that his right hand had closed on the edge of the wooden frame, and he opened it one finger at a time. He remembered the cold of the palm that had come out of a sleeve at the Azure duel more clearly than he remembered the faces of the men who watched it. The Sect Master had noticed him. Gao Shun had said so, flatly, as one reports weather, and it was the most frightening thing Lin had heard all day, because it meant the old man would not forget him either.
Xu’s secretary came back with the chit fair-copied and sanded. Xu came down the hall behind him, not hurrying. He looked at Lin’s hands, then at his face, and his mouth moved very slightly.
“Walls are thin in this garden,” he said.
“I heard nothing, Elder.”
“Good.” Xu took the chit from his secretary and held it against the lamp. “It is a skill this Court rewards, and it doesn’t reward it enough.” He gave the paper to Lin. “Dawn on the twenty-third. Do not be late, and don’t be early. Early men are watched coming up the path.”
* * *
Lin went out by the front of the Inner Court and down the lower road in the dark. The gate lamps were lit. Between them the path crossed a little stone bridge over a runnel of black water, and as he reached the bridge a lantern came toward him from the other side. Gao Shun walked slowly, hands folded in his sleeves and a stick under one arm. His face was long and pale, with the Sect Master’s heavy jaw and none of his elder brother’s warmth. He stopped when he saw Lin. The lantern light came up under his chin and left his eyes in shadow.
“Cang,” he said.
It was one word. It was the first word Gao Shun had given him in a year. It was said in the tone one uses for something found in the road, before one has decided whether it is worth carrying. Then the old man walked on across the bridge, and the stick tapped twice on the stones and was gone.
Lin stood at the gate. The iron pin in the gatepost was cold under his fingers. He tapped it with one knuckle and listened. The note came back even and unbroken, and he went on tapping until the lantern had turned the corner of the wall and there was nothing left to listen for but the water.