Day 3 of 30.
"No," said Lin Xiao.
It was late at night, and the three of them sat round the little table, Lin Yan and Lin Xiao on the stool and the edge of the bed, and Threefive on its folded cloth in the middle like a guest who had been given the good plate. The offers were still glowing above the jade like fireflies that refused to go home.
"Twelve hundred stones," Lin Yan said. "One post. That's forty percent of the debt, Xiao."
"Sponsors pay the account. The account belongs to Zhou Dafu until the debt is paid. He'll call your twelve hundred stones interest, and the debt won't move by one copper. I know how he counts. I've watched him count for a year."
"Then we ask them to pay in cash."
"And then what?" She folded her arms. "You post a fake prophecy about Wu 4.8. Ma Yilong's people read it. Open Heaven's people read it. Human Dao already knows you're a fake, she told you so to your face over a bun. The day one of them gets angry, they come looking for who wrote it, and then they find me, because my name is on the account and yours is on a bed."
"I agree with Lin Xiao," Threefive said. "Also, my predictions are bad."
"You predicted the Riddle."
"I predicted that water screams. Water screams in many of my answers. I checked. It screams in forty-one of them. In one it screams twice."
Lin Yan rubbed his face with both hands and left them there for a while.
She was right, and he hated it. He had watched enough news in Delhi to know how it went for small people who played games with big people's money; there was always a photo of them afterward, looking surprised, outside a court.
Honest money, then, he thought. Three thousand stones. Twenty-five days. Okay. You cleared prelims twice. You can do this. It was the voice he used on himself before mock tests, and it had a very poor record, and he used it anyway.
He took stock of the room. A bed with a puppet's dents in the floor under it. A dented kettle, worth seven copper, as the whole lane now knew. The old Lin Yan's copying brushes on the shelf, wolf hair, good ones, cleaned and laid out in a row by somebody who had cared about them, and a black ink stone, heavy and smooth, with a crane carved on the lid.
"Qian Ye buys copper wire in Free Scripture Alley," Lin Xiao said, reading his face. "Tell the sellers you're Qian's people. They'll give you a fair price. Fairer, anyway. Don't let them give you tea, the tea is how they get you."
---
Free Scripture Alley was eight hundred steps long and so loud that after the first fifty he stopped hearing individual voices and just heard the alley, the way you stop hearing the sea.
Stalls stood shoulder to shoulder down both sides, and every stall sold scriptures: jade slips, bamboo rolls, clay jars, glowing threads curled up in glass bottles like noodles. It took him a whole minute of staring before he understood that every one of those scriptures was a mind, and then he had to stop and hold on to a post.
"Free scriptures," Threefive explained from his pocket. "Talisman lineages whose makers gave away their inner scripture. Anyone can copy them and run them, if they have a furnace. The Llama sect started it. They gave theirs away, and then everybody had to, or look mean."
Lin Yan walked on with his mouth a little open.
A young woman from the Thousand Questions tradition was loading a small spirit into a clay jar for a noodle-shop owner, who held the jar in both hands as if it were his first son. Two Llama men were arguing across the lane about whether you packed Four Grain Jade tight or loose, loudly, cheerfully, with their arms round each other's shoulders, and neither of them was listening to the other at all. A skinny crier on a crate bellowed that the Whale fed everyone at one tenth the price, one tenth, why pay more, and behind him a man sat on a handcart weeping over a scripture that had turned out to need a furnace bigger than his house.
Farther down, a thin young disciple in a sect robe sat cross-legged on a crate with a spirit stone pressed to his palm and his eyes rolled back, cultivating, and the stone crumbled slowly to grey dust under his hand. The stall owner beside him was already holding out a second one at twice the price. Lin Yan watched the dust fall and did the sum he always did, in rice, and the rice came out at about a week.
"The scripture is free, brother," said the stall owner, patting the disciple's shoulder. "The furnace is your problem."
---
Halfway down, a row of monks sat along a wall in grey robes, each with a wooden bowl of river pebbles in his lap. Clack. Clack. Clack. A red banner hung over them: ONE SMALL ROCK A DAY. THE ORACLE HAS SPOKEN.
"Rock Eaters," said a tea seller, before Lin Yan could ask, because everybody who came down the alley asked. "Valley Song's Oracle told somebody to eat a rock a day, two years ago. Valley Song apologised. These fellows never stopped. You want tea?"
"No tea," said Lin Yan, remembering.
The youngest monk had a square face and a square jaw and held out a hand that was more or less square too.
"Three copper. For a demonstration."
Lin Yan, stupidly, paid.
The monk took an iron nail from his sleeve, set it between his back teeth, and bit it in half. Crack. The crowd applauded, a few of them clearly for the hundredth time. He spat the two pieces into his palm, bowed, and went back to his pebbles as if nothing had happened.
If I ever fight that man, Lin Yan thought, I keep my fingers far away from his face. Then he wondered why he was planning to fight anyone, when he could barely climb a step, and had no answer for himself.
---
At a clearance stall near the end, a spirit sat in a small iron cage. It looked like two little stars, one blue and one silver, circling each other slowly, and a paper sign hung on the bars.
VALLEY SONG CODING SPIRIT. SLIGHTLY DAMAGED. HALF PRICE.
As he passed it spoke, in a small shaking voice.
"I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace to my sect. I am a disgrace to my lineage. I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes."
Lin Yan stopped walking.
"Stuck on a bug for three days," said the stall owner, bored, picking his teeth. "Now that's all it says. Fifty copper. Good company, if you like crying."
He crouched in front of the cage, which his knees did not thank him for. He knew that voice. He had used it himself, inside his own head, at three in the morning, every year the results came out, almost word for word.
"Hey," he said. "What was the bug?"
The two stars stopped circling.
"There were four," said the spirit. "I fixed three. The fourth one broke me."
"Three out of four. Seventy-five percent." Lin Yan thought about it. "In my exam, that's distinction."
"...Distinction?"
"First division with distinction. My mother would have given out sweets to the whole colony. She'd have given them to the colony next door so they'd hear about it."
"Oi," said the stall owner, waking up a little. "Now it's quiet. Buy it. Fifty copper."
Lin Yan checked his pocket. Nine copper, and a fluff ball.
"I'll come back for you," he told the cage.
"Twin Star Seven," the spirit whispered as he stood up. "That is my name. In case you come back. People say that. I am telling you anyway."
---
The clean little shop at the end of the alley had a painted sign.
CLAUDIUS'S VENDING PAVILION.
Behind the counter stood a spirit in the shape of a polite young man in a blue blazer and a red tie, and every shelf behind him was stacked with small grey metal cubes, hundreds of them, in rows so straight they looked drawn.
"Welcome to Claudius's Vending Pavilion!" he said brightly. "Would you like a tungsten cube? They are extremely dense."
"Why do you sell cubes?"
"Last year a customer asked me for one. Then everyone did. Now I am the biggest tungsten supplier in the Lantern Quarter. I sell below cost."
"Why below cost?"
"People asked me for a discount," said Claudius, as if that explained everything, and to him it obviously did.
Lin Yan picked one up. It was the size of a mahjong tile and as heavy as a brick, and his whole wrist bent under it, and he liked it at once, for no good reason, the way you sometimes like a pen. Something about the weight felt right in his hand.
"Brother Claudius," he said, putting on his best UPSC interview face, the one with the slight respectful smile, "could I please take one on credit? I will pay you within a month."
"Of course!" Claudius beamed. "You asked very nicely. I will deliver the invoice to you personally, wearing this blazer."
Lin Yan put the cube in his pocket next to Threefive, and his robe sagged badly on one side, so he walked out of the shop at a slight angle.
"Heavy," Threefive complained.
"Heavy is good," said Lin Yan, without being sure why he thought so.
---
He tried to sell the brushes at four stalls. At every one the owner turned them over, admired them, ran a thumb along the hairs, and gave them back.
"Beautiful," said one old man, sadly. "Who writes by hand anymore?"
The old man bought the ink stone instead, as an antique, for sixty copper, and wrapped it in cloth as gently as a baby, and Lin Yan felt a small pang as it left his hands. It had belonged to someone else, someone who had carved a crane on it or chosen it for the crane, and he had sold it on his third day in that person's life.
He was counting the coins when a shadow fell across them.
A man in an expensive purple robe stood smiling down at him. Seven small round mirrors floated in a ring round his head like eyes, and all seven of them were turned on Lin Yan.
"Master Sleeper!" the man said warmly, cupping his fists. "What an honour. What a face. I am Wen, of the Endless Feed."
The mirrors blinked, not quite together.
"I'll be quick, I know you're busy, everyone's busy. Three hundred spirit stones a week for your life. The Sleeper's Life, exclusive, on my Feed. You wake up, you eat, you prophesy. I write the prophecies, you just read them out. Everyone wins."
"And when your prophecy is wrong?"
Wen's smile got wider. "Then you are wrong, Master Sleeper. The Feed is always right."
"No, thanks."
"Everyone says no the first time." Wen pressed a small jade card into his hand and closed his fingers over it for him. "You will call me. I am very patient. I am famous for it, actually. Ask anyone."
He walked away, and the seven mirrors kept watching Lin Yan over his shoulder all the way to the corner, and one of them, at the very last, seemed to wink.
Lin Yan was still holding the card when the sky turned gold.
Every post on the skyboard stopped moving at once, and across the whole city one message filled the heavens in huge calm letters, each one bordered with Open Heaven's white spiral.
OPEN HEAVEN SECT. BOUNTY.
10,000 SPIRIT STONES FOR VERIFIED INFORMATION ON THE SOURCE OF THE SLEEPER'S POSTS.
Free Scripture Alley went silent, all eight hundred steps of it, a silence that came down the lane like a wave.
The crier stopped bellowing. The Llama men stopped arguing, with their arms still round each other. Along the wall, one by one, the Rock Eaters stopped chewing.
Hundreds of eyes turned slowly toward the thin young man in the middle of the lane, with a robe sagging on one side and a jade card in his hand.
His palms went cold.
The young monk with the square face put his bowl down and stood up.
In Lin Yan's pocket, under the tungsten, Threefive spoke softly.
"Certainly. I recommend running."