Sect Year 7 · ninth month · night of day 29 · Azure Stream Sect, lodging above the Outer Court
In the morning of the twenty-ninth Lin did as Pei had told him and counted the flags in the light. He went down the lodging steps with a stick of chalk in his right hand, because it seemed the honest thing to mark each stone as he passed it. The flags were grey granite, worn pale down the middle by years of brooms. There were forty-one from the steps to the gate. The sixth had a crack running across it like a hair, which he had stepped over in the dark on the night the writ came and had never once looked at in the light. He chalked a small mark on it. Then, because the first count had come out right, he walked back up and counted again, and got forty-one a second time.
He counted the flags a third time, for no reason he could have given, and it came out forty-one again.
Gao Wen had watched him from the gatepost with the broom leaning against his shoulder. He didn’t come over. When Lin reached the top of the steps again, Gao Wen said, “Forty.”
