Day 4 of 30.
The decree came down at dawn.
The whole sky turned gold. Every post and picture and argument on the skyboard was shoved out to the edges like furniture before a wedding, and across the middle of the heavens, in letters so big that people in the next province could read them over their breakfast, the Truth Pavilion spoke.
THE HIGH I.Q. EXAMINATION!
THE WESTERN COURT WILL CHOOSE A CZAR OF SUPER INTELLIGENCE. THE BEST PERSON. THE SMARTEST PERSON. MAYBE EVER!
ROUND ONE: 22ND DAY OF THIS MONTH, IN EVERY GREAT SQUARE.
ROUND TWO: 24TH DAY.
THE FINAL: 27TH DAY, IN THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN GATE, WHERE THE AI PEOPLE ARE. VERY SMART PEOPLE. SOME OF THEM.
EVERY FINALIST WINS TEN THOUSAND SPIRIT STONES!
ONLY HIGH I.Q. INDIVIDUALS NEED APPLY!!!
Seating will be arranged by the Czar himself, according to how intelligent each candidate looks.
In the lane below, Auntie Wang put down her cabbages and said, "I am applying."
Little Hu said, "I am applying."
Old Liu, who could not remember where he had left his slippers and was at that moment wearing one, said, "I am applying."
By the time the sun had cleared the rooftops the registration count on the skyboard had gone past forty million and was still climbing so fast the last digits were a blur.
Lin Yan stood at the window of the little room and started laughing.
"What's funny?" Lin Xiao asked, tying her hair up for her shift with the rubber band between her teeth.
"It's UPSC."
"What's UPSC?"
"An exam where a million people fight for a thousand seats, and everyone's mother thinks her son is the one."
Lin Xiao frowned round the rubber band. "That's every exam."
He laughed harder, holding the window frame.
Then he read the prize line again. Ten thousand spirit stones. Three times the debt, more than three times, and every finalist got it, all fifty of them, not only the winner.
He stopped laughing.
---
He went to the Registration Hall at the fourth bell with a crate of heated bowls on his back for the Jade Dumpling House, because the Registration Hall was more or less on the way, if you went the long way, which he did. That was his excuse, and he said it to himself twice.
The street outside was a festival. Candidates queued round four blocks, some of them with their whole families and a basket of food. Stalls sold lucky brushes, lucky talismans, lucky underwear in red. A man was selling "High I.Q. Tea" for twice the price of normal tea, out of the same pot as his normal tea, and people were buying it, and one of them came back for a second cup.
In the middle of the square a crowd had made a circle, and the circle was quiet in the bad way.
A young man in a gold-threaded robe stood inside it. He was tall and handsome in a hard way, with a jaw like cut stone and eyes that looked bored by everything they had ever been shown, and nine sword spirits circled slowly round him in the air, each a thin blade of silver light with a small face at the hilt.
"The Gilded Heir," someone whispered next to Lin Yan. "Duan Zhaolie. The Duan family owns half the eastern furnaces. The other half owes them."
In front of Duan a boy of about fifteen was holding up a bronze target plate with both hands. He wore thick leather gloves, and his arms were trembling all the way up to the shoulder.
"Hold it steady," Duan said. "Your master sold you to me for a month. Earn it."
He lifted one finger.
A thread of red heat shot from his fingertip into the plate, and the bronze began to glow, dull red and then bright red and then orange, and smoke started rising from the boy's gloves, thin at first and then thicker, with a smell of burning leather that went round the circle and made people step back without stopping watching.
The boy's face twisted. Tears ran down his cheeks. He kept holding the plate up.
The crowd went "ooooh" at the colour of the bronze.
"Enough," Lin Yan said.
The word came out of his mouth by itself, too loud, from the middle of the crowd, and he heard it go out over the square and could not take it back.
The heat stopped. The nine sword spirits turned their small faces toward him all together.
Duan looked over, and his bored eyes woke up a little, like a cat's when something moves in the grass.
"Oh?" He smiled thinly. "It's the Sleeper. And your kettle."
A few people laughed, mostly the ones nearest Duan.
The boy dropped the plate, and it rang on the stones and rolled in a half circle and lay there ticking. He pulled off his smoking gloves, and his palms underneath were red and already coming up in blisters.
"He's a child," Lin Yan said. "His hands are burning."
"His hands are paid for." Duan walked closer, unhurried, and the sword spirits followed him like a flock of silver birds. "You know what I think, prophet? I think a man who can see the future should find a little examination very easy. Don't you?"
The crowd hushed, sensing a show and settling in for it.
"Register," Duan said. "Sit Round One. This young master will be generous. If you fail, you kneel in the middle of this square and tell the whole realm your prophecies are dog farts."
Every talisman in the crowd lifted at once, their little eyes glowing, and somewhere up on the skyboard a new post appeared and began to climb.
THE GILDED HEIR CHALLENGES THE SLEEPER.
Lin Yan looked at the boy's burnt hands, and then at Duan's easy smile, and it was a smile he knew.
He knew it from the coaching hall in Mukherjee Nagar: the rich boys from South Delhi who came in with private tutors and good shoes, and sat in the front, and laughed at the Bihar boys eating dry rotis out of newspaper in the back row, and never once got asked to stop.
"Fine," he said.
Duan's smile went wide. "Excellent."
"And when I pass," Lin Yan said, "you pay this boy's healer."
Duan laughed out loud, really laughed, head back. "When you pass, I'll pay every healer in the Lantern Quarter."
The crowd roared. Bookmakers' talismans were already chiming all over the square, and by the time Lin Yan had pushed his way to the registration desk the odds were floating over the square in red light for anyone to read.
SLEEPER PASSES ROUND ONE: 4 TO 1.
---
The registration clerk was a tired woman with ink on her sleeve and a cold cup of tea at her elbow that she had obviously been meaning to drink since dawn. She pressed a blank jade card to his wrist and waited for it to read the faded mark there.
"Name?"
"Lin Yan."
"Occupation?"
He hesitated, long enough for her to glance up. "Copyist."
She wrote it down. "Prophet would get you a better seat."
"Copyist."
The jade card glowed and printed itself, and she slid it across the desk to him without another look, already waving the next one forward.
HIGH I.Q. EXAMINATION. CANDIDATE 841192.
Lin Yan picked it up.
He looked at the number until it stopped being a number and became a shape he knew, a shape he had searched for with his finger on a cracked screen at three in the morning, four times, in four different years.
0841192.
His UPSC roll number. The same digits, with the zero dropped off the front, as if somebody had copied it out in a hurry.
The noise of the Registration Hall went very far away, as if he had put his head under water.
"Sir?" the clerk said. "Is something wrong? You're holding up the line."
"No," Lin Yan said. His own voice sounded strange to him, too calm. "Nothing. Thank you. Sorry."
He put the card in his pocket. It sat there next to Threefive and the tungsten cube, and somehow it felt heavier than both of them together.
---
Outside, the burnt boy was sitting on the steps with his hands open in his lap, staring at them as if they belonged to somebody else.
Lin Yan crouched in front of him, and the crate of bowls on his back clinked. "What's your name?"
"Xiao Shun."
"Come with me, Xiao Shun. There's an auntie at my Hall who makes a balm for burns, and her chai is better than her balm, and her balm is good."
The boy looked at him, then at the Registration Hall, where Duan's sword spirits were still circling lazily over the crowd.
"He'll be angry."
"He's already angry," Lin Yan said. "Come."
They walked back toward the Lantern Quarter together, Lin Yan bent under his crate of bowls and the boy holding his hands out in front of him like two cups of something hot that he was afraid to spill.
On the way Lin Yan took Threefive out.
"Threefive. That number. 841192. Is it common?"
"Candidate numbers are drawn at random from the Court's jade lottery," Threefive said. "Forty-one million numbers. Yours is one of them. It is a normal number."
"Right," Lin Yan said. "A normal number."
He put the tablet away and walked on, and did not say anything else for two streets, and Xiao Shun did not ask.
Over the rooftops the golden decree still burned in the sky, and under it, higher and higher, the new post kept climbing.
THE GILDED HEIR CHALLENGES THE SLEEPER.
40,512,000 VIEWS.
In his pocket the jade card was warm against his leg.
He had failed four exams in his first life.
He had just registered for his fifth in his second.