Sect Year 8 · third month · night of day 3 · the silent life: a valley with no name, his first year
The stone at the foot of the basin was wet under the mat, and Lin spread the mat anyway. He smoothed its frayed edge with the flat of his hand until it lay square against the rock, then stood back and looked at what he had done. The spring came out of the cliff’s foot in a thin silver thread and pooled in the basin well below its lip, because the water was low. Cut into the rock beside the pool, the gauge showed its old marks climbing one above another. The four highest stood bare and grey, dry for longer than anyone in the sect could remember seeing them wet.
He had sat at this spring a dozen times since the sect took him back. He had never once sat at it without a purpose waiting on the far side of the water, like a door he had been told to go through. Tonight there was no door. There was only the cold, and the sound of the water, and the lamp.
Su sat at the edge of the stone with the lamp at her knee and the record open across her lap. She hadn’t spoken since they climbed the terraced path. Her breath made small clouds in the air, and she kept one hand flat on the open page, though the night was still enough…
