Sect Year 4 · sixth month · day 2 · Ketch Shoal, the Bell tower on the flats, at dusk on the lowest water
He didn’t finish it. The lip came down the last hand’s breadth and settled onto its rest with the sentence still open in his mouth, and the moment went out of him all at once. Gao Wen let out a long breath against the rail. Vosk let her palm slide off the frame. On the mud the clerk wrote a line on his board, and the line said not sworn, and the council went back up the raised stone road with its wet coats and its shrugging shoulders.
The water tank would have to wait for the next low water to fall as far as the last one had. The sentence had been left open at the end, and the Bell would not ring for half a word.
For a fortnight Lin lived on the stilts and did not climb the tower. He walked the sea wall in the mornings. Meanwhile, the mud was still soft and the birds came down to it in grey drifts. He drank from the well on the lower lane and let the cold run down his throat. In the birth-house loft, with the shutter open, he tried the two words once, very quietly, to see whether his mouth would still make them.
