Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 22 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
The north wall of the Outer Court was the one place in the sect where a man could sit above the roofs without being told to come down. Lin had found it the way he found most things lately, by sitting still until nobody bothered him. The coping was broad enough to sit on if he kept his heels against the stone and his back to the drop. Below him the sect’s lamps made small yellow pools across the courtyard, and beyond the wall the valley lay black and wide, full of farmhouse lights, each one very far away.
The Outer Court was quieter at night than by day, but it wasn’t silent. The night gate-watch changed at the second bell with a clatter of pikes and a grumble. Someone in the kitchen was singing badly and stopping to swear at the stove. Under everything ran the faint hiss of the pines along the outer wall. There, the wind came up from the valley and combed through them. Lin had learned to hear the sect at this hour one sound at a time, without deciding in advance which one to listen to.
He had spent the afternoon on the lower wall, watching a row of Inner students breathe. They breathed the way men carry water up a stair, shoulders set and eyes on the stone in front of them. The master at the end of the row counted them through a bead cord that clicked each time it passed her thumb. He had watched until the light went. He had three breaths in him now, or he thought he did. They sat in his chest heavy and round, and he didn’t yet know what they were for.
While he waited for the walkway to show someone, he tried the first breath, quietly, with his back to the drop and his heels against the stone. It went in behind the rhythm of the valley and came out a little ahead of it. He couldn’t tell whether that was progress or only a different kind of mistake.
He tapped the iron staple by his hand, where a lantern hook had once been bolted into the stone. It rang once, dull and friendly. He listened to the ring fade and did not touch it again.
Su Yanqing came along the walkway from the stair without a sound. She carried a lantern wrapped in grey cloth so that only a slit of light escaped, and she stopped a few paces off and studied him with exactly the expression she used on ledgers.
“Are you counting the lamp oil?” he asked.
“The wall is on my list,” said Su. “So is the lamp oil. You are not on it, which is a relief to us both.” She set the lantern on the coping, turned the cloth back a finger’s width, and sat down beside him, not close, with her skirt folded under her knees. She wore the grey-blue silk of the Inner Court under a plain outer coat, and the silk showed at her wrists whenever she moved her hands. She was twenty-one, two years older than he was, and she sat as though the coping had been built for her and had only recently been informed.
“You move like someone who has been old,” Su said.
He didn’t answer. He looked out over the valley and let the words sit on the cold stone between them. She took a small black book from her sleeve, its cover worn pale at the corners, and opened it on her knee. She wrote a line in pencil. The point made a dry sound on the page.
“What did you write?”
“What I said. I write what I hear, and then I check it twice.” She closed the book over the pencil to keep her place. “Somebody should keep a record of this place. It will not keep one of itself.”
“Is that what the black book is for?”
“The black book is for reasons of my own.” She glanced at him sideways. “You may keep your own. I have not asked to see them.”
They sat on in silence. Somewhere down in the lower court a bucket was set down with too much force, and a man swore, and then the court went quiet again. Lin found that he was counting the lamps in the valley, and stopped, and found he had started again.
“You were counting just now,” said Su. “I watched you from the walkway. The Inner students count with their mouths. You count with your chest, and your lips don’t move at all.”
“I don’t know where I learned it.”
“Then I will write that you don’t know.” She wrote it, and tilted the page to the slit of light to be sure of the words. “It is more honest than most of what the Elders put in writing.”
The silence went on long enough to be comfortable, and then Su said, “The kitchen girl tells me you taste the water before you drink it.”
“Pei talks too much.”
“She talks exactly as much as she has seen. I checked her against the cook.” Su turned the lantern a fraction, so the slit of light fell across his knee. “Why do you taste it?”
“Habit.”
“Whose habit?”
He didn’t answer that either. Su wrote something short in the book, and did not show him what it was. He was grateful for that and suspicious of being grateful.
He didn’t tell her about the lane. He didn’t tell her about the grille, or the old voice behind it, or the words that had come through the bars. He noticed himself leaving them out, and he turned the noticing over the way he turned a pin in his fingers, listening for the flat note. It wasn’t a lie to leave a thing out. He was almost sure of that.
“You argued for the thirty days,” he said. “The kitchen says so.”
“I argued for the count. Not for you.” Su turned the pencil over in her fingers. “A deadline with no reason written against it is a bad entry. It makes the ledger look careless, and the Deacon would sooner be cruel than careless. So I asked for a reason to be written down beside it.”
“And what reason would you have written?”
“I haven’t decided.” She put the pencil away. “Possibly that a boy with cracked spirit veins was made to wait on a wall and count, and did not complain about it.”
Lin laughed, once, and the sound surprised him. It went out over the roofs, and nobody below turned round. Su did not laugh. She looked pleased in the way a column of figures looks when it finally comes right.
“I asked the record room for the sealed original of the Azure report this afternoon,” Su said. “The copy the Elders keep is a copy of a copy. Nobody has read the first one since the spring.”
“And?”
“A clerk told me the originals are kept in the east hall. He didn’t look up when he said it. I asked him to look up, and he looked at the inkwell instead.” She tapped the cover of the book. “That is written down too. I want to see the wax on it, if they ever let me. Wax keeps the shape of the hand that pressed it, if one looks closely enough.”
“Who signed it?”
“I haven’t finished checking.”
“You think it is forged.”
“I think a report that is written by one hand and sealed by another is either careless or careful. I have not yet decided which I would rather it was.” She gave him another sideways look, longer this time. “Do not walk alone past the lower gate for a while. I mean it as a line in a ledger, not as a kindness.”
Lin thought of the lower gate, and of the grille at the end of a hall, and the thought was cold, and he turned it away.
“I’m sitting on a wall,” he said.
“Yes. I can see that you are.”
“Su—”
“Yes?”
He didn’t finish it. He had been about to say that he had once sat on a wall in the rain, a long time ago, on another river, and that his hand had been warm on the iron there. He couldn’t tell whether the memory was his to give her or only something he was carrying for somebody else, and so he let it go.
“I’ll write that you started to say something,” said Su, and did.
“What will you do with the book?” he asked.
“Keep it.” She said it as though the answer were obvious. “A record is for the day somebody says they didn’t do a thing, and someone has to be able to open the page.”
“And if the page says I did?”
“Then I will have to read it aloud to you, and you will have to listen.” She didn’t smile, quite. “That is the arrangement, I think. I have not yet been asked to agree to it.”
He turned his head then, and looked east along the top of the Outer Court roofs, toward the grander buildings where the Elders kept their halls. The lamp in the east hall was still burning. It was a small steady light behind a single screen, long after the sect’s other lights had gone out, and it didn’t flicker when the wind came over the wall. He wondered who sat up with a lamp at that hour, in a hall where the Elders kept their business, and whether they were counting anything at all.
Su saw him look. She took out the black book again, and the pencil, and wrote one more line without a word. Then she closed the book over the pencil. Neither of them mentioned the lamp again. She had the time written down, though, and that was the same as saying it.