Sect Year 1 · third month · day 19 · Azure Stream Sect, Inner Court north ridge and north gate
The patrol maps showed a pass where there was no pass, and a ridge drawn where the ridge was not. Lin spent the morning of the sixteenth walking the real one, with two patrol students behind him who kept their eyes on the map and their feet on the stones with the same dutiful care. At noon they came to a cairn that appeared on no sheet at all. The younger student asked whether they should note it. The older one said the map would not be interested.
They came down to the mess with grit in their boots and learned that their ration tokens had been withheld for the month. The clerk who issued the tokens had ink to the second knuckle and a long, mournful face.
He said the Elder’s office had no record of Lin’s name on the patrol roll, and therefore no record of any tokens owed to a man who was not on it. He said this to the tokens rather than to Lin, and he didn’t seem to find it strange that a roll could forget a student who had walked its ridge since dawn.
