Sect Year 3 · ninth month · night of day 6 · Azure Stream Sect, lower lane, the east well
The families came up the terrace steps, not the lane. Nobody had told them to. They had simply found out, in the dark of the first night, that the steps led to the water and the lane led to the rope. They came up the steps in ones and twos from the black below the wall, with their cups held against their chests like something they were afraid of spilling.
Lin drew for them. He let the bucket down into the pit, felt it fill, and hauled it up hand over hand. The rope burned his palms at the heel. There, the skin had already split twice. He tipped the bucket into the clay cup a woman held out. The cup went down the line from hand to hand, and each one came back to him a finger lower than it had gone. The cups were old and chipped at the rims. The water in them was grey.
A boy of six or seven came up the steps with his mother’s hand in his. He drank his cup in one long pull, then coughed it back, bent double against the wall, and grey ran from the corner of his mouth. His mother held him and said nothing. Lin knew that cough. He had heard it once before, in another river city, and he didn’t let the memory finish its sentence.
