Sect Year 1 · third month · day 10, dusk · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
The lanterns went up on the posts as the sun dropped behind the east wall and the terrace turned from gold to blue. Two kitchen boys climbed the posts with long hooks and hung the paper lanterns from the cord, one at each corner and a fifth in the middle of the ring. It swung whenever anyone walked too near it. Moths came up out of the stream reeds to see what the light was for. The ring smelled of lamp oil and wet canvas, and under those, faintly, of the bitter green of the herb beds, carried over the wall on the evening wind.
Lin sat on the bench at the rope with his hands in his sleeves. Hou Meng had told him to keep his fingers out of sight for the rest of the day, and he had obeyed. Even so, it was a strange thing to be told to hide the one part of himself that seemed to be working. The Elders’ oilcloth had gone dark above the terrace. The servants had lit small lamps on the rail, and their light lay on the faces of the Elders in a way that made them look older than they had at noon, and more patient.
Yao Zhenbei came in last, after the lanterns were lit. He was tall and narrow in the shoulder, and he carried a spear as long as the ring was wide, its shaft of pale ash and its head a flat leaf of steel. He didn’t bow to the terrace. He bowed to the spear, which was new, and then to Lin.
“Cang,” he said. “The Deacon says you have sharp elbows.”
“The Deacon says a great many things.”
Hou Meng rang the bell-rod. Yao did not come in. He kept Lin on the far side of the sand and pricked at him from there, and the steel wobbled at the top of each thrust. Lin did not step into the line. He watched the wobble, and under the lantern light he saw that the ash had been cut green and never seasoned, the grain running slightly off true near the grip. A shaft in that state would hold until it was asked to do something it didn’t expect.
“Stand still, Cang,” said Yao, through his teeth. “So I can hit something.”
“I’m breathing,” said Lin, and let the next thrust come.
Yao over-committed. He drove the point at Lin’s chest with his whole back behind it and stepped in after it, and the shaft came down across the fourth lantern post as he went past. It cracked short and dry, a green stick snapped over a knee. Lin stepped into the open side the thrust had left, laid two fingers on the broken shaft below the grip, and held it lightly.
“Let go,” he said, “before it lets go of you.”
Yao’s fingers opened. The spear fell, and its head struck the sand with a soft flat sound and lay still. The rope made the noise it had been waiting all day to make: a breath, a laugh, and then a silence that was not quite test. Hou Meng wrote a line in his ledger and sighed through his nose.
“You’re a bad winner,” said Yao, his face the colour of the lanterns.
“I’m a tired one,” said Lin.
Yao looked at him a moment in the moving light. Then the corner of his mouth went up, against his will. “Then be tired at somebody else,” he said, and gathered the two halves of the shaft and carried them off under one arm, the leaf-head dragging a line through the damp.
Jin Hui stepped over the rope while Lin was still watching him go. He was a small man with his grey healer’s sleeves turned back to the elbow and a case of black leather under one arm. He had looked at Lin’s spirit veins in the first winter after the duel. He had told the Deacon the channels were broken, and then, a month later and in a different room, he had told the Inner Court that they weren’t, and since then he had been careful about which of the two he said aloud. He didn’t ask anyone’s leave to come over the rope. He came straight to the bench.
“Your wrist,” he said. “Come to the tent.”
“Tomorrow,” said Lin.
“I have been waiting four years for an excuse to look at that wrist. Come now, before the Elders hear I let a man walk off the sand without being tested.” Jin’s mouth was thin, and there was no unkindness in it, only a great deal of old patience. “I’ll bring the lamp. You bring the arm.”
* * *
The healer’s tent stood beyond the posts at the corner of the Outer yard, a square of oiled canvas lit from inside by a single brass lamp. It smelled of wormwood and hot wax. Jin sat Lin on a stool and took his left wrist in both hands, as a man takes up a bird he doesn’t want to hurt. His thumbs went along the bones. They pressed, moved on, and pressed again, and at last they found the place where the ache lived, under the wrist’s inner edge. There, the Cold Ash had gone in and never quite come out. Jin’s mouth pinched.
“Cold?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“That is not the bone.” Jin said it slowly, to the wrist and not to Lin. “The bone is whole. It is the old channel. The cold lives in there and does not leave when it is told to.” He let go and turned the lamp a little on its hook. “Sit there. Don’t move your hand.”
Beyond a curtain of grey cloth at the back of the tent, someone was working in low, careful voices. The gap at the edge of the curtain showed a padded board and a forearm lying on it, the hand open and slack. A physician was rewinding white cloth from the wrist upward, turn by turn, with the neatness of a man who was paid by the yard. Under the wrap. There, the light touched it, the skin was pale and finely veined. A thin grey thread ran along the inside of the arm toward the elbow, so faint that Lin would have missed it if he hadn’t been looking for it since the spring.
“That’s a grey thread,” Lin said. “Along the inside of the arm.”
“There are a great many threads in the Outer Court,” said Jin, without turning. “Most of them are in the laundry. I don’t show grey things to men who are still sitting on my stool. Your wrist is not broken. Keep it warm and keep it still, and whatever you think you have to prove, prove it with the other hand.”
“Whose arm is that?” Lin asked.
Jin did not look round. He was writing something on a slip of paper with a stub of charcoal, and his hand did not pause.
“The Elder’s nephew,” he said. “He’ll be fine. Don’t worry about him yet.”
“What will you write on the slip?” Lin asked.
“Whatever I am told to.” Jin blotted the slip and held it to the lamp. “Someone in the Elder’s house has already said sprain. I have written one, because it is a short word and the stores don’t read long ones. I have also written a second slip, with what I actually found. That one goes to the Deacon, who does not like being told things, and to the Elders, who like it even less. Between the two of them it should be very hard to lose.”
“How long does it last?” Lin asked.
“In a sound arm, a day. In an arm that is fed, for as long as someone keeps feeding it.” Jin did not look up. “Old tracks fade. This one has been kept open. Someone has been pouring the thread back in, measure by measure, and the arm has learned to take it. Whoever is doing the pouring knows exactly how much a body will bear, and has never once given it more.”
Lin did not ask him about the second slip. He sat still while the lamp hissed, and he noticed, with some surprise, that he was counting the turns of the white cloth until the grey thread was covered over and gone.
When he came out of the tent the terrace was nearly empty. The lanterns had burned down to their last inch of oil, and the sand had been raked again for the morning. At the top of the stair a sallow clerk in Gao grey stood with his book closed under one arm, looking down at the ring as though it were a page he had already read. Below him Hou Meng was already calling the next pair, and the rope had begun to talk again about the ghost who had broken the Elders’ spear. Lin went down the stair with his left hand held loosely at his side, and he didn’t look back at the clerk.