Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 23 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
Lin sat on the chopping block with the lamp on the floor beside him and breathed the first form from memory. The woodshed had been his for three years and had never once been warm. The walls were split pine, and the gaps between the planks let in the wind, and the wind had a note in it that he had stopped hearing months ago. Tonight he heard it again. The woodshed was cold. His breath clouded in front of his mouth and hung there in the lamplight, and he watched it because that was easier than watching his own chest. The first turn held. He let it run down through his ribs and out along his arms, and for the space of a count he felt the whole length of him lift and settle, the way a barge settles. Just then, the last sack is loaded. The second turn broke at the fourth count. He let it go and began again.
Last night, on the cot, he had practised the three breaths until the cot creaked and the rats in the rafters gave up on him. Tonight was different. Tonight he had the shape of the form, and the shape was harder to hold than the breaths had been, because it asked him to keep going after every part of him wanted to stop.
Pei came in with a borrowed lamp and a bowl of cold millet, and sat down on the woodpile with her knees drawn up. “You’re breathing like a bellows with a hole in it.”
“I’m breathing somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else smells of wet wood.” She set the bowl beside her, found her spoon in her sleeve, and ate without looking at it. “Go on. I’ll count.”
She counted aloud. She counted in a sing-song that rose at the end of each number, and at seven she stopped and said, “Eight, nine, three hundred,” and laughed at her own joke. Lin did not laugh. He reached for the iron ring fixed to the chopping post, the one the old axe-handle had worn bright. Then he tapped it with the back of a knuckle to mark the beat. The note rang low and steady. Pei put her hand over her mouth.
“You’ll wake the pigs,” she said through her fingers.
“The pigs have heard worse.”
“The pigs have heard you. That’s the trouble with them.”
She was quiet for a while after that, which was unusual for her. The lamp hissed on the floor. Outside a dog began to bark and thought better of it.
“The first winter you were in here,” Pei said, “you lay on that cot with your face to the wall. You looked like somebody who had come up to die and found the woodshed was the nearest place.”
“It was the nearest place.”
“I brought you porridge anyway.”
“I remember.”
“You don’t. You were asleep, and you didn’t say thank you.” She picked at the rim of the bowl with a thumbnail. “I thought you’d be the kind who never got up again. Then one morning you got up and started cutting notches, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t. So I count the notches with you, because it’s the only thing I can do about it.”
Lin did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing, and tapped the ring once more, lightly. Pei watched his hand.
“The sallow clerk came to the kitchen gate this afternoon,” she said, as though she had only just remembered it. “He asked whether you slept in here or somewhere else.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you sleep like a sack of potatoes. Mostly on your back and not moving.” She sniffed. “He wrote that down too, and then he asked what the potatoes were called.”
She turned the lamp on the floor so that its light fell along the notched post. There, the notches ran in a column beside the door. He had cut each one at first light with the blunt knife, and he had kept the knife. There were twenty-three of them now, in tidy groups of five, and the last cut was still pale at the edges. Each one was a little deeper than the one before it, because his hand had grown surer on the knife, and the wood had grown used to being cut.
“Seven to go,” said Pei.
“I’ll cut all thirty.”
“The Deacon withdrew your expulsion. You don’t have to cut anything any more.”
“A notch is a promise,” said Lin. “Not a demand.”
“That’s stupid.”
He agreed that it was. He had cut the first notch on the morning he had nothing left to lose, and he had gone on cutting them after they were no longer needed, and he couldn’t have said exactly why. It had something to do with the count. The count was a thing he could hold in his hands, and very little else in the sect would sit still long enough for that.
There was no anger in him. He noticed it now the way one notices a sound that has stopped. It had gone out of him slowly, until one night he had lain down and found the silence in its place. He didn’t know whether that was the Wheel’s doing or only his own, and he had stopped asking, because the answer did not change what he had to do in the morning.
He thought about the masters on their cushions at dawn, backs straight, bead cords ready, waiting to watch the Outer rat fall over. He waited for the fear he had expected, and it didn’t come. What came was tiredness, and under the tiredness a plain clearness, as the stone under his heels had felt that morning. It was enough to stand on.
Pei had asked him once whether he dreamed. He had said no, and it had been true as far as he could tell, which was the trouble with it. He hadn’t dreamed since the woodshed. Whatever the Wheel did in the night, it did without leaving a trace he could find in the morning.
What he feared, if he was honest with himself, was not the masters. It was the moment after a failed breath, when the room would go quiet and he would have to decide whether to try again in front of them. He had made that kind of decision alone for three years, in the cold, with nobody watching. He wasn’t sure he wanted the next one to be a public one.
He stood, shook out his shoulders, and found his stance by the lamp. His left wrist ached a little in the cold, as it always did now, a dull tightness where the Cold Ash had gone in and the bones had never quite forgotten it. He ignored it and began the first form again. Breath in, through the first gate. Breath out, and the cloud rose. Second gate. Third. He let the air go slowly through his teeth, as the hall’s page had said. The cloud came off his lips and climbed above the block, and for one long breath it hung in the lamplight, pale and still and perfectly shaped, as if somebody had drawn it there with a brush and then stepped back to check the line.
It drifted out through the open door and was gone into the dark over the pigsty.
From across the yard the cook’s voice came up over the wall. “Whoever’s in that woodshed with a lamp, put it out. The pigs have written to the Deacon.”
Pei had stopped counting. She was staring at the empty air where the cloud had been. “Is that the impossible one?” she whispered.
“It’s the one they’re sure I can’t do.”
“Can you?”
“I did most of it tonight. Ask me again at dawn.”
“I’m asking you now.” She picked up the spoon and held it like a pointer. “The cook says every lamp you light in here is a dinner he doesn’t get to serve. He’s going to be very cross in the morning, and you’ll be the one he’s cross at, so you’d better be good.”
“I’ll be good.”
“You’ll be on those stairs of theirs at dawn, that’s what you’ll be.” She set the spoon down on the bowl, and her face went serious, as it did when she had been thinking of a thing for longer than she had been willing to say. “It feels like being lifted, doesn’t it. The one with the cloud. I saw the Inner boys at the wall once. They went up the wall with their faces screwed shut.”
“It doesn’t feel like that.”
“What does it feel like?”
He thought about it, honestly, with the cold in his wrist and the lamp hissing on the floor. “Like standing still while the ground agrees to move.”
Pei considered this with her head on one side. “That’s a strange thing to say,” she said, and then, after a moment, “I’ll remember it.”
“Show me the first gate,” she said, and before he could tell her no she had shut her eyes and drawn a breath as the Inner boys did on the wall, with her shoulders hunched up near her ears. She let it out in a rush and coughed into her sleeve until her eyes ran.
“That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever done,” she said, when she could speak.
“You drew the breath in the wrong order.”
“I drew it in the right order. The order was wrong.” She wiped her eyes on the shawl. “Don’t tell the cook.”
She stood, took the lamp, and went to the door. Before she stepped out into the yard she turned back, the light on her face and the bowl of cold millet forgotten on the woodpile behind her.
“Dawn is when the masters test,” she said. “Don’t be late, or they’ll say you were never here.”