Sect Year 1 · third month · day 10 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
Two kitchen boys were still raking the ring at dawn, and the sand held the teeth-marks of their rakes. It lay in a square between four posts wound with grey cord, damp at the edges where the thaw had seeped under the canvas. Lin stood at the south post with his feet bare on the sand. The rules of the tournament said bare feet for the Outer Court and boots for the Inner, and he had long ago decided that a rule was most useful when it was obeyed to the letter.
He wore the grey coat Pei had let out for him in the autumn. The shoulders were right now, and the sleeves stopped at the wrist where they were meant to. She had pinned the hem with her teeth, complaining the whole time that a ghost ought to look respectable.
The terrace was crowded. Elders sat under green oilcloth awnings, and their servants stood behind them with fans folded in their hands. Elder Xu sat near the centre with his brass-footed staff across his knees and a cup of tea he kept refilling from the kettle at his feet. Gao Shun sat at the far end. Hou Meng stood at the edge of the sand with a bell-rod in one hand and a brush behind his ear. His face said that the whole tournament had been his idea and he regretted it. Behind the rope the Outer students crowded three deep. Pei stood on the bottom rung with her shawl over her head and a copper in her fist, and the expression of someone who had come to see a thing through. At the top of the steps the two Inner students in Core blue leaned on the rail, pretending they had come only for the air.
Before the bout Hou Meng came along the rope, lowering his voice. “You’ll be in the Inner Court before the month is out, if Xu has any sense. Don’t make a fool of his clerk on the sand.”
“Xu’s clerk entered me. I didn’t enter myself.”
“That is exactly the sort of thing I would say, if I were you.” He tapped the bell-rod against his palm. “Don’t make it sound like that in front of the Elders.”
Ma Jiqing came into the ring from the north post with an iron-capped staff over his shoulder. He was stout, round in the face and round in the belly. He moved with the rolling ease of a man who has spent years being underestimated by people who had no idea what the staff could do. He bowed to the terrace. Then he bowed to Lin, a little lower.
“The Outer Court calls you a ghost in a good coat,” he said cheerfully.
“Pei let it out for me,” said Lin. “She says a ghost should look respectable.”
“Then Pei is a better tailor than the Deacon is a clerk.” Ma spun the staff once in his hands, and the iron cap whistled. “I’ll go easy on the coat.”
“Begin,” said Hou Meng. He rang the bell-rod once against the post and stepped back. “Ma, don’t split the staff on him. The Elders paid for the iron.”
Ma did not begin with the staff. He began with his weight, which came forward onto his front foot in a long easy lean. Then the staff came low and fast along the sand toward Lin’s left knee, the cap sweeping a finger’s width above the grit.
Lin did not block it. He didn’t step back either, and that was the part the Outer Court would tell afterwards, when it was telling stories. He stepped in. He moved inside the sweep on the footwork Master Feng had set into his heels. The cap went past his knee with a whisper. He was already at Ma’s side, close enough to smell the wet wool of the stout man’s sleeves.
Ma’s eyes widened. The staff was coming back up in a hard curve at Lin’s ribs, the way a man brings a bell-clapper round on its rope. There was no time in it for a second strike or a second thought.
Lin lifted his right hand and tapped the iron cap with two fingers.
The note was flat and dull, like a pot struck with a spoon. It had no ring in it at all. But the sound went down the staff into Ma’s hands, and Ma’s grip went wrong. The shaft turned a quarter on his palms, the cap dipped, and the swing that should have carried it into Lin’s ribs carried nothing at all. Ma stumbled half a step on the damp sand.
Lin caught the shaft behind the cap with his left hand and folded it down and back, not hard, as one closes a gate on a child’s fingers without wishing to hurt them. He held it. He didn’t strike. He could feel the tendons in Ma’s forearm drawn tight by the sudden turn. His own left wrist ached in sympathy, the old dull ache that had never quite gone out of the bone where the Cold Ash had been. He didn’t let the ache decide anything. He thought, very clearly, of the courtyard at Azure, and of an open palm coming in low and clean. He thought that he could end the bout with the same hand. That the terrace would applaud it, and that it would be the one thing he had promised himself he would never do in a ring.
“Point,” said Hou Meng, after a breath longer than was comfortable. He struck the post with the rod. “To the cautionary tale.”
Ma laughed, the laugh of a man who has been caught by a cart he didn’t see coming and is glad it was only a cart. He let Lin take the staff from him, and Lin set it down on the sand, cap first, with care. “I’ll tell them the ghost has a good grip,” Ma said, rubbing his wrist. “They won’t believe me.”
Nobody cheered. The Outer students on the rope made a soft sound that was not quite a murmur, and then went quiet, and Lin saw that they weren’t watching the ring at all. They were looking up at the terrace, at the Elders’ faces, the way a farmer watches the sky before he reaches for the sickle. Lin had the same habit himself. He had learned it in the first week after the duel, when every face on the steps had been a verdict. He looked up now, and saw Elder Xu’s knuckles whiten briefly on the head of his staff and then loosen. He saw that Gao Shun had not moved his hands at all.
Hou Meng came across the sand with the bell-rod on his shoulder. “Next bout after the midday bell,” he said. “Eat something, Cang. You look like a man with a pole through his back.”
“I feel like one.”
“Then sit down before you fall over on the Elders’ oilcloth. They dislike seeing a man fall. It upsets the awnings.”
Lin went to the bench at the rope. Ma had got there before him and was sitting with a cup of tea in both hands. He looked at the sand the way a man looks at a field he has been drawn to plough for nine years without a harvest. “Nine years,” Ma said, to his tea. “Nine years I’ve been put against somebody’s cousin in the first round. You’ve had a better draw than I ever did, ghost.”
“I’d have liked yours.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” Ma drank. “You’d have hit somebody.”
Two boys from the stables came onto the sand for the next pair. One carried a wooden sword he kept dropping, and the other kept stopping to pick it up for him, so that for a while the bout consisted mainly of stooping. The rope laughed. Lin watched it with something close to tenderness. That was because he had been that boy in the first year at Azure, with a borrowed blade that did not fit his hand and a face that had not yet learned to hide what it thought. Nobody had laughed at him kindly then. He had made sure of it by never laughing at himself.
Pei came under the rope while Hou Meng’s back was turned, which was against every rule the Deacon had ever written. She stood at the end of the bench with her hands in her apron.
“You didn’t hit him,” she said.
“No.”
“The cook will be cross. He had five coppers on a point and no one to win them.”
“I’m sorry for the cook.”
“You’re not.” She looked at his hand where it lay loose on his knee, and her mouth went thin, as it did when she was pleased and would not admit it. “That was the stupid thing,” she said. “Not hitting him. It was stupid and it was right. I’ll remember it.”
Hou Meng’s voice came down the rope, not loud. “Pei. Off the sand, or the cook loses his copper and the Deacon loses his temper.”
She went back under the rope at once, and Lin heard her tell the rope-boy that his face had been left out in the rain.
Then the courier came down the terrace stair at a run. He wore the grey coat of the Gao household, buttoned to the throat. The sallow clerk had come to the top of the stair to meet him. He drew a sealed letter from inside his own sleeve, passed it over without a word, and said something short. The courier nodded, tucked the letter inside his coat as if it were hot, and ran.
He went down the Outer path and out through the Outer gate. Lin heard the bolts drawn for him and the hooves go off down the lane toward the lower town, quick and then gone. The seal on the letter had been black wax, small and plain. Elder Xu’s seal was red, and so was the seal on the chit that had summoned Lin to the Inner hall. Lin noted the colour, as he had noted the grey coat and the sallow face, and did not follow.
He looked down at his left hand on his knee. It was steady. The ache in the wrist had settled to a low, patient hum, like a bell heard from another room. Across the sand Hou Meng was already calling the next pair, and somewhere up the terrace a man in Gao grey was writing something very small in a very small book.