Sect Year 0 · tenth month · dawn of day 23 · Azure Stream Sect, Inner Court
The Cloud Breath hall stood at the top of a flight of stone steps behind the Inner Court’s lower yard, and its doors were open to the cold. Lin reached the foot of the steps while the sky was still the grey of a pewter cup. He climbed them slowly, counting each one, because the count was steady and the steps were not. Halfway up he passed a row of shallow hollows worn into the stone by the feet of ages of new students, and without meaning to he set his heel into one of them and found that it fitted.
The porter at the top took the chit from his hand and read it twice, once for the seal and once for the name. He was a broad man with a wool cap pulled low over his ears, and he looked Lin up and down as if he were measuring a cart for a wheel that did not exist.
“An Outer rat with a chit,” he said, to the doorway.
“The chit is the rat’s only hope,” said Lin.
The porter did not laugh. He stood aside.
Inside, the hall was a long room with a stone floor and thirty posts in five rows, each post dark with the polish of many hands. Someone had burned bitter pine-resin in the corners to keep the damp out. The smell lay low over the floor and stayed there for the morning. The wind came in off the terrace and moved through the room without hurrying. At the far end a scroll lay open on a lectern under a glass weight, and the wind lifted one corner of it and let it fall. Master Feng Qiao stood before a row of Inner students. She was a small old woman with a bead cord hanging from one wrist and a face as dry as a walnut, and she was drilling the row through the first breath. Her cord clicked once on every beat.
Lin counted the posts. There were thirty, as the porter had promised, and he counted them a second time before he let himself look at the students. There were eleven in the row, all in Core blue or the grey of the junior seats, and every one of them had the same straight back and the same faint look of being measured. None of them looked at him for longer than it took to decide he wasn’t worth the trouble.
Feng did not stop the row when Lin came in. She let them finish the breath, and then she turned, slowly, and looked at him over the cord.
“Outer students don’t learn Cloud Breath.”
“I have a chit, Master.”
“Chits are paper. Cloud Breath is three years of stairs.” She let the cord fall still against her wrist. “You have no stairs. You have a cripple’s chest and a fourth layer the Deacon does not believe.”
“Then I’ll count the stairs,” said Lin.
“Stairs don’t count back.”
At the end of the row an Inner student laughed under his breath. Feng did not turn her head to see who it was. She went on looking at Lin until the laugh had quite finished, and then she said, “What do you have?”
“The first three breaths. I watched your row from the lower wall yesterday.”
“Watching is cheap. Come here, and stand.”
He crossed the stone. She didn’t step back to let him pass, so he stopped at the edge of the row. There, the posts began. Feng came round him, close enough that he smelled bitter pine-resin on her sleeves. Then he set his feet with two dry, quick fingers: heels here, toes there, the weight on the bones and not on the muscle. She pressed once on each shoulder and let go. He felt oddly fitted into the stance, like a coat taken from a peg and shaken out, and he didn’t like how quickly his body accepted it.
“Breathe,” said Feng.
He breathed. The first breath came in slightly behind the cord and dragged, like a boat behind its rope. The second caught up and landed on the bead exactly, and held there. He let the third go out too long, and did not know he had counted it until he saw Feng’s face change.
“Who taught you to stand?” she asked.
“Nobody.”
“Then somebody did it badly once, and your body remembered the mistake and fixed it without asking you.” She frowned. The breath was out of time, she said. Then, after a moment, it was exactly on time, and she didn’t like that either.
“Xu sent you,” she said, not as a question.
“Yes, Master.”
“Gao Shun was supposed to come up these steps this morning and refuse you at the door. He has not come.” Her mouth moved at one corner, very slightly. “Men who are meant to refuse you are always late. It is the only useful thing about them.”
She walked to the lectern, lifted the glass weight, and took from beneath the scroll a single sheet of thin paper written in a fine old brush. She carried it back to him and stopped at the threshold, the sheet held out at the end of two fingers, the way one might hold a thing that had been near a fire.
“Read it,” said Feng. “It doesn’t leave the hall.”
He took the page. The wind turned it under his hands, and he turned it back, and he stood on the threshold with the cold at his back and read the first form in the hall hand. The first line said that a cloud is only the breath that has been allowed to be seen. The lines after it described the body as a set of gates that opened in turn, each one a breath, each breath a cloud that rose and hung and went. He read the paragraph twice and then a third time, moving his lips without meaning to, and he didn’t look up until the words had stopped moving. Under the last line, in smaller script, someone had added a note in a different hand. Count with the feet, not the mouth. He wondered who had written it, and whether it had been Feng, and whether she had written it for someone like him.
An Inner student snickered again, louder this time.
“Your breath is shorter than his,” Feng said, without turning round. “Go and lengthen it.”
The student went red to the collar and faced the posts. At the front of the row the bead cord clicked once, and the whole line went back to its breathing. The student, who was perhaps two years older than Lin and a good deal more comfortable, leaned an inch toward him. Just then, he thought Feng was not looking.
“You’ll never hold the form,” he murmured.
“Probably not today,” said Lin, without taking his eyes off the posts. “Master Feng says your breath is shorter than mine, though.”
Lin held the page out to her. “May I have the second?”
“Come back when the first is in your feet.” Feng took the sheet from his hand and set it back beneath the glass without looking at it, as if she knew the exact place it belonged. “Not in your head. In your feet. Heads are where the Outer Court keeps its opinions.”
He had climbed a keeper’s stairs in other years, every night with a lamp in one hand, testing each pin on the way down. Those stairs had never once told him how many there were. He had kept the count himself, and the count had kept him.
Lin went and stood on the threshold again, because it was the only place he was allowed, and he put his attention down through his heels into the stone. It was cold, and it went on being cold. He found the breath there, a little below where he had been looking for it. The first turn came up through his shins and into his hips and hung for an instant at the backs of his knees before it let go. It wasn’t much. It was more than he had at the wall.
Behind him Feng walked the row. She touched a shoulder here and a hip there, and each student she touched corrected a little and then went still. Lin heard the bead cord come nearer, pause at the end of the line, and turn back toward the front. At the same moment the breath in his heels settled, without his asking it to, the way a pier settles when the river has finished arguing with it. He didn’t look round. He didn’t need to.
A shadow filled the doorway behind him. Lin stepped aside to let it pass, and Gao Wen came up over the threshold with his left forearm held against his chest. The forearm was bound in clean white cloth, wrapped from the wrist to a hand’s breadth below the elbow, far neater than any physician would bother with for a cut. Nothing showed through it. Lin, who had heard about the grey thread from a kitchen girl two nights before, thought that nothing wounded was ever bound so tidily. Something in his own left wrist went cold and stayed that way.
Gao Wen’s eyes went to Lin’s feet, then to the row, and last of all to the back of Feng’s head. He had the look of a man who had come up the steps expecting a fight and found only an old woman and a stone floor, and did not know what to do with his hands.
“Master,” said Gao Wen. He spoke to Feng and not to Lin, in the voice of a man who had been to the lower gate that morning and had come back with something to say. “The Outer rat should be watched. He is not what that chit says he is.”
“Everything in this hall is watched,” said Feng, still facing the row. She didn’t raise her voice. “That is why it is so slow.”