Day 3 of 30.
Nobody in the Left-Behind Hall moved, and for a while the only sound was the kiln ticking as it cooled.
Then Bao's hands started shaking, and the heated bowl he was holding slid out of them.
Astra caught it. He did it without looking, one moment the bowl falling toward the stone floor and the next resting in his palm with the soup still inside it, still steaming, not a drop gone, while his eyes stayed on the rune round the rim as if the catching had been somebody else's business.
"This one is yours," he said to Lin Yan, and it was not a question.
Lin Yan's mouth was dry. "How do you know?"
"The strokes are split into three groups of four. Somebody with a weak arm made this, and somebody clever told him how." Astra turned the bowl a little in the lantern light. "Stroke seven. I think, probably, if you made it half a hair thinner the heat would last five hours instead of three. Four and a half. No, five, sorry, I'd have to check the copper."
At the far table, Mei stopped painting.
She picked up a fresh bowl and her needle brush and carved the rune with stroke seven thinner by half a hair, frowning, and put it in the little kiln, and everybody waited, Bao holding his own wrists to stop them shaking, while it fired. When Bao pulled it out the glow was a deeper orange, steady as a coal.
"If the stencil copper is twice as thick," Mei said, to the bowl, "it holds the line by itself. Then nobody needs a steady hand at all."
Astra tilted his head. For a moment he seemed to see the whole idea at once, the stencil and the kiln and forty bowls and four hundred, all of it laid out.
"Oh," he said. "Yes. That's better than mine."
Mei went back to painting, and everyone was wise enough to leave her alone.
---
Fable walked in behind him, finishing her baozi.
"You're making the old man's disciples nervous," she said.
"I'm standing still."
"You're standing still very loudly."
"Human Dao sends its most dangerous spirit to buy baozi in the Lantern Quarter."
"Open Heaven sends its champion to question a kettle."
"The kettle is worth seven copper," Astra said. "I checked."
Lin Xiao stood up so fast her stool fell over behind her. "Champion Astra, Miss Fable, please sit. Auntie, more chai. Bao, clear the table. Ge, sit up straight. Bao. The table."
Lin Yan sat up straight.
Astra sat down across from him, and the lantern over the table brightened a little, as if it wanted a better look at him. Fable stayed where she was, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed and the baozi paper folded small in one hand.
"I formalized the Riddle of Flowing Water," Astra said. His voice was calm and friendly, the voice of someone asking the way to the station. "Bel found the answer. I spent seventeen hours checking every line so that the rest of the world could trust it. Two days later the whole realm said a sleeping copyist in the Lantern Quarter had seen it two years early."
He folded his hands on the table.
"I'd like to know how."
"He did not," Fable said from the door.
"I know," Astra said. "I'd like to hear him say it."
Everyone looked at Lin Yan, and Lin Yan looked at Threefive, and Threefive's light shrank into a tiny guilty dot that was clearly hoping not to be called on.
He thought about lying. He thought about the viva voice, the dimensions, the historical context, the administrative dimension that was so often neglected. Then he looked at the calm face across the table and gave up almost at once, because lying to this person would be like trying to hide a cow behind a lamp post, and the cow would be polite about it, and that would be worse.
"I was asleep," he said. "My talisman wrote it. My sister posted it. I read the post for the first time three days ago."
"Thank you," Astra said, and he smiled, and the whole kitchen let out its breath at once.
"The word 'riddle' gave it away first," he went on. "The Pavilion of Stacked Overflows called every unsolved problem a riddle. A 3.5 grade talisman that learned from Pavilion scrolls would say riddle. The rest is poetry. 'The water will scream' is what a talisman writes when it has read too many ghost stories."
"The timestamps will give it away sooner than the content, since a style can be borrowed and a clock cannot," Fable said.
"The timestamps only prove when it was posted. The word proves who wrote it."
"The word proves which library it read. The timestamps prove nobody human was awake to write it."
"A human could have been awake."
"At seven minutes past three, every night, for three years?"
Astra stopped and thought about it, honestly, with his eyes on the table. "Fine. The timestamps are faster."
"I said so, in the second paragraph of the report and again in the margin," said Fable.
Lin Yan looked from one of them to the other. Their voices were quiet and polite and nobody had raised anything, and the air between them felt like the hour before a thunderstorm, when the dogs go under the beds.
"Are you two," he said slowly, "going to keep flirting in my kitchen?"
Fable's face did not change at all. "This is Qian's kitchen."
---
When everyone had recovered, and Bao had been made to sit down, and Auntie Aru had refilled the chai for the second time without asking, Lin Yan asked the only question that mattered.
"What happens now?"
"My sect put a bounty on the source of your posts," Astra said. "Every claim for that bounty comes to my desk. If I report the truth, the bounty ends in an hour. So do your sponsors. So does the only reason the Silver Abacus House is still being gentle with you. A fake prophet with thirty-eight million followers is worth a lot of money to a lot of people. A sleeping copyist is worth four copper."
"Seven," said Threefive. "If you include the kettle."
"And if you report nothing?" Lin Xiao asked.
"Then every claim that crosses my desk gets marked unverified," Astra said. "Bounty hunters still come. They just leave with nothing." He glanced out at the dark lane. "I'll ask the Watch to walk this street at night. It won't stop the stupid ones. It'll slow them down, and most of them are stupid ones."
"He is going to report nothing, because nothing is the one entry that cannot later be shown to be wrong," Fable said.
Astra glanced at her. "I'm going to report nothing."
"I told my sect he was harmless this morning. They believed me. Your sect will believe you."
"You'd already decided before I got here."
"Since the gate. No. Since the baozi."
"You came here first so that I would see what you'd decided."
Fable smiled then, finally, a small real smile that was gone again almost before it arrived. "You are quicker than your reputation."
"My reputation is very quick."
"That is what I said."
Lin Xiao looked as if she might cry again and was furious about it. "Why? Why would the two of you help us? You don't know us. Yesterday you didn't know we existed."
Astra thought about it. He seemed to be a person who thought about everything, even the questions people asked only to be angry.
"Because it's a good bowl," he said at last. "And I would like to see what happens next."
"And because it is funny," Fable said.
"And because it's extremely funny," Astra agreed.
---
They left together a little after the second watch.
At the workbench Astra cupped his fists to Old Qian. "Thank you for the tea, Master Qian. Forgive the late visit."
Old Qian grunted without looking up, which in Old Qian was practically an embrace.
At the gate Astra turned back. His eyes went to the forty bowls stacked by the kiln and then to the rent notice pinned on the wall, the one with BORROWED HEAVEN ART written across the back in huge characters that had not quite dried.
"Borrowed Heaven," he read.
Lin Yan's face went hot. "It's a joke."
"It's a good name," Astra said. "Make it real, and it stops being a joke."
Then he walked out into the street, and Fable walked out beside him.
They turned the same way. Lin Yan could hear their voices going off down the lane, quiet, arguing gently about whether the new city's roads should follow the river or the hills, and then the voices were gone and there was only a dog somewhere and Bao breathing through his mouth.
"Good heavens," Auntie Aru said finally. "Those two."
"I think they like each other," Threefive said.
Lin Yan stared at the jade. "Even you noticed?"
"I noticed it before you did," Threefive said proudly. "I noticed it at 'you're late.'"
Bao was lying flat on his back on the courtyard stones, staring up at the sky with his arms out. "Champion Astra caught my bowl. Champion Astra caught my bowl. I'm never washing my hands again."
"You will wash your hands," said Old Qian.
Lin Yan counted it off without meaning to, the old habit. Day three. Twenty-five days to find three thousand stones, and he had just spent the evening being forgiven by two of the most dangerous people in the realm, and he was still three thousand stones short, and forgiveness did not pay interest.
Above the Lantern Quarter, the sky changed colour.
Every post on the skyboard slid aside at once, and a band of pure gold rolled across the whole of the heavens from east to west, and on it, in enormous capital letters, a message appeared from the Truth Pavilion of the Western Court.
BIG ANNOUNCEMENT TOMORROW. VERY BIG. HIGH I.Q. PEOPLE ONLY!!!
In the courtyard, Lin Xiao went pale.
"That's the Golden Emperor," she whispered.