Sect Year 3 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the twenty-eighth life: the old city steps at Duanwei, his seventy-first year
Yun sat on the top step with a blanket over his knees. The stone beneath him was dry, though the flight below had gone under the silt, and the sun came down on the grey river and lay on it without warmth. His face was smooth around the eyes and lined everywhere else, as Ning had seen it across the dinner table. His hair had gone the colour of old ash.
Ning climbed the last flight on his own feet. Two steps below his brother he stopped and looked at the wheel in Yun’s palm. It lay in the open hand as a child holds a stone it has picked up and forgotten. Its rim had a break in it, a jagged gap, and the bronze inside the gap was dark.
“You came alone,” Yun said.
“You asked me to.”
“I did.” Yun did not look up from the river. “Sit, if you like. You’re too tall for the step above me. You always were.”
Ning sat on the step below. The stone was cold through his trousers. Neither of them spoke for a long time. The river made almost no sound. A grey bird came down onto the mud below the steps, looked at the two old men, decided they weren’t worth the trouble, and flew off. A breath of wind came up off the…
