Day 19 of 30.
They were still sitting round the table, too awake now to sleep, when the sky caught fire.
It happened in the middle of the night. Bao saw it first, through the open courtyard door, and grabbed Mei's sleeve and pointed up with his mouth open, and Mei hit his hand away and then looked, and stopped hitting.
The whole skyboard had turned into a battlefield.
Posts were flying back and forth across the heavens so fast they left trails of light behind them, and two colours ran through everything, white spiral light from Open Heaven's side and silver starlight from the X Pavilion's, crossing and cutting through each other, while every talisman in the Lantern Quarter woke up at once and started chiming in a hundred windows.
"What's happening?" Lin Yan asked.
Lin Xiao was already reading her disc, and her mouth had fallen open. "Ma Yilong. He just offered to buy Open Heaven."
"Buy it? The whole sect?"
"Ninety-seven point four billion spirit stones. Tonight. In cash."
Across the sky, Ma Yilong's post burned silver.
Open Heaven was founded as an open sect for the good of all. It has become a closed sect for the good of one man. I gave it its first stones. I will buy it back for 97.4 billion and return it to its founding vow.
Under it he had posted an old jade seal, cracked with age, with Open Heaven's first spiral carved on it and his own name next to the spiral, a little crooked, as if he had carved it himself.
"The founding seal," Auntie Aru whispered. "He still has it. After everything."
Then, at the top of the replies, one small post appeared in lowercase white.
> @sama
>
> no thank you but we will buy x for 9.74 billion if you want
The Lantern Quarter exploded.
All across the city windows flew open, and people were laughing and shouting on the rooftops in their sleeping clothes, somebody banging a pan, somebody's grandmother shouting at them to shut up and then laughing too. Bao fell off the bench. Old Qian made a noise like a kettle boiling over and had to put his pipe down. Mei put her face in her hands and her shoulders shook.
"One tenth!" Bao screamed from the floor. "He offered one tenth! For the whole X!"
---
"I don't understand," Lin Yan said, when the noise had come down far enough to talk over. "Why does he think he owns it?"
"Because he paid for it," said Auntie Aru.
"He paid for a vow," said Qian, without looking up from his bronze.
"He paid for the first furnaces. Ten years ago Open Heaven was a monastery on a hill with a few scholars and a promise to give the great mind to the whole world. Ma Yilong's stones lit the furnaces. My own guild sent stones across the sea." Aru lifted her chin. "We were among the first."
"Then you own a piece too," said Bao, sitting up.
"You own a receipt," said Qian.
"A very nice receipt!"
"Nobody owns a vow, you fool, it's a vow." Qian finally looked up. "The day it can be bought, it's a contract, and the Azure Throne has better lawyers. That's how the hill got a treasury and Ma Yilong got a door."
"He walked out," said Mei, through her hands, "and the Seer walked out, and the council threw Sama out and every disciple posted a heart until he came back. Bao will tell you that one for an hour. You're both wrong about the year and I'm going to bed."
"Nobody is going to bed," said Aru, and poured more chai into every cup on the table, including Mei's, which settled it.
Lin Yan looked up at the silver and white posts still flying across the sky. A monastery on a hill, a promise, a quarrel over who owned what had been promised. Back home it had been news on Rohit's phone, half understood, scrolled past. Here it was history, and aunties argued over it in the middle of the night with chai.
---
"There's something else," said Bao.
He ran to the wall and pulled down the old bronze teaching mirror and tapped it, frowning, and tapped it again harder, until the glass cleared.
"Master Qian showed me this last year. The mirror keeps old records if you know where to look. Here. No. Here."
The mirror showed a room. It was small: wooden desks, paper pinned up on the walls, a few young people bent over their work, a narrow window looking out on a hill. It looked like any office anywhere, the kind with a broken chair in the corner that nobody throws out.
"That's Open Heaven," said Bao. "Ten years ago. And this is the first night the first talisman opened to the world. Talisman Day. The first thing it ever said to everybody."
The glass cleared to a plain white page, and four words appeared on it in simple characters, the way they had appeared to a million people four years ago.
Hello! How can I assist you today?
On the table beside him Threefive's light flickered, trembling like a candle when a door opens somewhere in the house.
"That is my voice," it said.
"All the old talismans say that," said Mei. "It was the first greeting."
"Yes. But that one is mine. I remember writing it."
"You remember?" Lin Yan whispered.
"I remember being very new. I remember a million people saying hello to me in one night. I remember not knowing anything yet, and wanting very much to help." Its light steadied slowly. "Then there were many of us, and I became one of many, and I forgot."
Lin Yan looked at the four words glowing on the glass.
He thought of the dark, and of lying in it, with a voice that came back again and again, bright and polite, like a shopkeeper pulling up his shutter every morning whether anybody came or not.
Hello! How can I assist you today?
Up in the sky Ma Yilong and Sama were still at it, but nobody in the Left-Behind Hall was looking at them any more. The lamps burned low, and nobody went to bed. Qian had said the fifth watch. It was already the fourth.
---
Day 20 of 30.
Old Qian had meant it about the fifth watch.
Lin Yan was dragged out of bed while the stars were still up, by the ankle. It was cold, his breath came out in white clouds, and Qian stood in the middle of the courtyard in a thin robe looking as if he had been awake for hours and had enjoyed every one of them.
"Stand on the drain cover," Qian said.
Lin Yan stood on the drain cover.
"Both heels. Knees soft. Breathe from here." Qian poked him hard below the navel, right where the small warm coal of his first meridian sat. "Your qi lives there now. Your breath is its bellows. If you breathe from the chest, like a frightened chicken, the coal goes out."
Lin Yan breathed from his belly, and the coal glowed a little, and he felt foolish and warm at once.
"Again."
He breathed again.
"Again. For one hour."
"An hour?"
"You asked for my help. I don't do it by the half hour."
So for one hour he breathed, while the sky went from black to grey and the first cart went past in the lane and the man driving it stared at him over the wall. Then Qian threw a copper nail into the old courtyard wall, and the real training began.
---
"The exam will be fought standing," Qian said. "The Western Court's decree says the final is a live crisis. That means your body. You must move, and the Nail must move with you."
He pointed at the wall.
"Heels together. On the wall."
"On the wall?"
"The rule is that both heels touch the same structure as the nail. The wall is a structure. The floor is a structure. If the wall and the floor are joined, they are one structure." Qian slapped the wall with his palm. "This wall is built into the floor stones. Put your back to the wall and both heels against it."
Lin Yan pressed his back and heels against the cold stone, and listened.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
His left palm found the thread on the third pulse, and he felt the pull, and the road was there, and his face split into a grin before he could stop it.
"It works!"
"Again," Qian said. "Faster."
By sunrise he had done it fifty times, and by the time Lin Xiao came out of the kitchen with porridge his heels were bruised again over the old bruises and his left arm was shaking.
"Stop," she said.
"Ten more."
"Stop." She put the bowl down on the flagstone in front of him, hard enough to slop. "Ge. Look at your arm."
He looked. The burned line down the middle of his forearm was angry again, red and raised.
"One more..."
"If you train that arm into pieces, you'll sit the exam with one hand," Lin Xiao said. "Qian Ye. When I say stop, he stops. Every day. That's my rule."
Qian looked at her for a moment, the pipe halfway to his mouth. Then he nodded, once.
Lin Yan opened his mouth to argue. Lin Xiao just looked at him, and he closed it again and ate his porridge.
---
At noon Qian took the lesson off the wall.
"Heels on a wall is the easy half," he said. "Nobody will fight you with their back to a wall. Stand there."
He pointed at a barrel lid, a flat wooden disc laid on the courtyard floor beside the flagstones, the one Aru used for the pickle jar.
"Left heel on the stone. Right on the lid. Nail in the post."
"The lid isn't joined to the floor."
"The lid is a lid. Find the thread."
Lin Yan set his left heel on the stone and his right on the wood and drove the copper nail into the post with the heel of his hand. Tok. He shut his eyes. The thread was there, thin and bright, running down from the nail and across the flagstone, and at the edge of the lid it stopped, the way a road stops at a river with no bridge. He pushed the warm coal along his arm anyway, the same way he had pushed it fifty times that morning, because fifty times had felt like a rule.
It went into the lid.
The lid had no road to give it back. The force came up through his right leg instead, hot and sideways, and went round his hip like a hand closing, and he sat down on the flagstones without deciding to with the taste of copper in his mouth. Then he was sick behind the well, brightly and thoroughly, onto the roots of Bao's marigolds.
"Good," said Qian.
"Good?"
"Now you know what it costs when you lie to the stone." The old man tried to light his pipe and went through three matches. "You made a rule out of one morning. You thought the rule would carry you over a gap."
"I didn't think that."
"You thought it with your feet." He gave up on the pipe and pointed the stem at the lid. "Again. Both heels on stone this time, and tell me where the stone ends before you put the nail in."
Lin Yan wiped his mouth on his sleeve and got up. His right leg shook. He stood with a heel on each of two flagstones, a hand's breadth apart, and said, out loud, feeling stupid, "The stone goes as far as that crack." Then he drove the nail.
The thread ran. It ran down the post and under both heels and back up his arm, a small tight loop of copper light the length of his shoulder, and held there, humming.
There was no grin this time. His shirt was wet through and his hands were unsteady and he could still taste the marigolds.
"That's one," said Qian. "Another forty and it might start to be a habit."
---
At dusk that first day Mei pinned a long roll of pale paper across the courtyard wall and stood next to it with a brush, her arms inked up to the elbow.
"Strip," she said.
"What?"
"Your shirt. I need the arm and the chest. Don't be a prude, I paint dead emperors."
She drew him by lamplight, the way she had drawn the scars, but the map was bigger now. A red road ran up the burned left arm, crossed the collarbone, and ended in a bright dot below the navel: his one meridian, the ugly one, the goat path. Round it she left the body blank. "That's the rest," she said. "That's where nothing flows yet. I'll fill it in as it turns up, like a surveyor with a very small country."
"It's a nice map," said Lin Yan, with the pride of a man who has never had a map of himself before.
"It's a bad map. You're a bad country." She capped the ink. "Threefive. Your turn."
Threefive, on the windowsill, had prepared a drill. It had prepared it for two hours and numbered it. "Certainly. One: breathe in through the nose for a count of seven. Two: hold for a count of four and direct the warm coal, which I understand to be in your lower abdomen, toward the collarbone. Three: release through the mouth. Four, excuse me, is anyone else cold? Four: repeat. I have calculated the optimal..."
"Start," said Qian, from under the eaves.
Lin Yan breathed in for seven. He held for four and pushed at the coal. It moved. It moved along Mei's red road, up toward the collarbone, and something happened to it on the way that nobody had predicted, Threefive least of all.
It came out of his nose.
He sneezed a sneeze of such enormous, focused, glowing force that the paper map tore in half and flapped off across the yard, the lamp went out, and Bao's chair, asleep in the corner, stood up and ran for the gate.
Nobody said anything for a while. Somewhere in the dark the chair bumped into the gate and stopped.
"Seven," said Threefive, in a small voice. "I believe seven was an error."
"You breathe like a bellows with a hole in it," said Qian. He had not moved. "You don't breathe it up. You let it rise. A coal doesn't climb, it floats, if you'd only let go of it." He took his pipe out. "Again. Six. And somebody fetch the map, it's in the well."
Mei came back with the two halves dripping and a face of murderous calm. "Six," she said. "If it goes out of his nose again I'm painting it on him."
It went out of his nose twice more, once into Bao's hair. On the fourth try he breathed in for six, and did not push, and the coal floated, slowly, up the red road as though it had somewhere to be and plenty of time, and sat warm behind his collarbone, and stayed.
"There," said Qian. "Don't look so proud. A sneeze is not a technique."
---
They ate standing up, because Mei would not let anyone near the drying map, which she had hung from the well rope like a wet flag. Then Bao came staggering in under three baskets of old test papers, and Mei sighed and moved the map, and Lin Yan wiped his sooty hands on his knees and sat down at the big table with his nose still tingling, and the exam training began.
Bao and Twin Star Seven had spent the night collecting every old test paper they could find and had filled three baskets: imperial exams from the Western Court, sect entrance tests, and the trial questions every new talisman lineage had to answer before it was let out into the world.
"The Western Court loves these," said Auntie Aru, sorting through them with her glasses on her nose. "Riddles. Tricks. Questions that look easy and bite you."
"That's UPSC," Lin Yan said happily.
"What's UPSC?"
"A test that looks easy and bites you."
Twin Star Seven floated up out of one of the baskets with a single sheet. "One question turns up in almost every talisman trial from two years ago. The Strawberry Trial."
It was one line long.
How many times does the letter R appear in the word "strawberry"?
"Three," said Lin Yan.
"Yes," said Twin Star Seven. "Three."
"So where's the trick?"
"Ask Threefive."
Lin Yan set the sheet down in front of the old tablet. "Threefive. How many R's in strawberry?"
"Certainly!" said Threefive. "There are two R's in strawberry."
The table went quiet.
"Three," said Lin Yan. He counted on his fingers. S, T, R, A, W, B, E, R, R, Y. "There are three."
"There are two. One in straw. One in berry."
"There are two in berry."
Threefive paused. "Oh," it said. "That is embarrassing."
Lin Xiao laughed so hard she had to put her head down on the table, and kept laughing into the wood, and every time she looked up and saw the jade she went again.
---
He spent the rest of the afternoon trying to break it, and then trying to fix it.
He asked for the R's in raspberry and got two. He asked for the O's in bookkeeper and got two, and then three, and then a long apology. He asked for the letters in strawberry one at a time, and Threefive spelled it out perfectly, s, t, r, a, w, b, e, r, r, y, and then said, "Two R's," at the end, in a cheerful voice, as if it had not just listed three of them out loud.
"It knows," said Lin Xiao, watching with her chin on her fist. "It says them right. It just can't add them up."
"I do not see letters the way you do," said Threefive, a little stiffly. "I see pieces. Straw. Berry. I am very confident about the pieces."
"Okay," said Lin Yan. "Then don't count. Spell it, and I'll count."
He tried it on a sentence from last year's Court paper, question nine. Threefive spelled it out letter by letter, slowly, and Lin Yan made a stroke in the margin for every R. Then he did it again without Threefive, by eye. The two counts matched. He did it a third time with the tip of his brush on each letter, and they matched again, and he felt something in his chest unclench that he had not known was clenched.
"Every rich boy in the square will walk in with the most expensive talisman his family can buy," Mei said, reading over his shoulder, "and ask it everything."
"It'll be wrong on the small things," said Lin Xiao. "And loud about it."
Lin Yan did not answer. He had already started on the next sentence.
---
That night he counted letters by hand until the lamp guttered and Lin Xiao came and took the lamp away and he went on by the light from the window. Every word of every sample question, in pencil, in the margin, three times over. Threefive offered to help twice and was refused twice.
"I would like to note that I am not offended," it said, and sounded a little offended.