Sect Year 9 · fourth month · day 9, morning · Azure Stream Sect, forge shop at the foot of the mountain
The Qingliu road had dried in two days of wind, and the walk down was easier than it had been on the fifth. The pale dust rose at each step and settled again behind them. Pei went ahead with the empty basket on her arm, and every few paces she looked back to see whether he was keeping up, and every few paces he was. His knees had made their objections at the top of the path. By the third bend they had stopped making them, and he couldn’t have said which of the two of them had given way.
“Did you ask for anything last night?” Pei said, without turning round.
“No.”
“Good,” said Pei. “You’d have got it wrong.”
She had told him, a little further down, that Su had written the day into the record before the sun was on the cliff. “What did she put?” Lin had asked. “The ninth. Forge. Sing,” said Pei. “Nothing else. She doesn’t write more than that when she means it.”
Below them the valley had begun to show its colours through the last of the haze, the terraces green and the river a dull silver where it bent toward the county. Lin stopped to look at it for the length of a breath. He couldn’t see Qingliu from the path, and he didn’t need to. He knew the…
