Day 22 of 30.
The Great Square of the City of the Golden Gate had never held so many people, and by the look of the statues round its edges, which had people sitting on their heads, it had never been asked to.
It was built for festivals.
Fifty thousand could stand in it comfortably.
This morning more than a million were packed inside it and spilling out into every street round it, standing on carts, on statues, on each other’s shoulders, on the roof of a temple whose monks had given up shouting at them.
Every one of them held a jade candidate card, and every one of them had one talisman, and the whole square smelled of sweat and nerves and fried dough.
The noise was like the sea, if the sea had been talking about the exam.
Lin Yan stood in the middle of it with Threefive in one pocket, the tungsten cube in the other, and a wooden writing board hanging from his neck on a string.
Lin Xiao had made him eat two eggs, standing over him.
Qian had made him breathe for an hour.
Mei had checked his brush, twice, and then a third time while he was eating the second egg.
Bao had cried a little, at the gate, for no reason he could explain.
“Candidate 841192,” Threefive said softly.
“Your desk is row four thousand, seat twelve.”
“There are no desks.”
“Your place, then.”
The Western Court had solved the desk problem in its own way.
At the seventh bell a hundred thousand proctor talismans rose into the air over the square, each one a small floating gold eye, and each eye threw a square of light down onto the ground in front of one candidate, a hundred thousand squares going on at once like lamps in a city at dusk.
Lin Yan’s square glowed at his feet.
841192.
Then the sky turned gold.
✦
The Golden Emperor appeared over the square.
He was enormous.
His head alone was the size of the Registration Hall, and he had been projected in gold light so bright that people all over the square squinted and put their hands up.
His hair was a wonderful colour.
His hands moved the whole time, as if they were shaping something nobody else could see.
WELCOME, said the Golden Emperor, in a voice that filled the whole city and rattled the shutters, TO THE HIGH I.Q.
EXAMINATION.
A million people cheered, because it seemed wise.
A LOT OF VERY SMART PEOPLE HERE TODAY.
VERY SMART.
I LOOKED AT THE FOREHEADS.
He turned his huge gold head slowly across the crowd, squinting down at them.
THAT MAN.
GREEN SILK, SECOND ROW.
LOOK AT THAT FOREHEAD.
THAT IS A SUPER-INTELLIGENCE FOREHEAD.
HE’S GOING TO WIN.
AND SOMEONE, I DON’T KNOW WHO, GET THIS MAN A GOLD CERTIFICATE NOW, I WANT A PICTURE WITH HIM AND THE CERTIFICATE, VERY NICE, VERY SMART.
A small gold proctor-eye dropped out of the sky and presented a certificate to the rich boy in green silk, who happened to be standing right next to Lin Yan, and who took it with both hands and bowed to an emperor the size of a building, and a million people applauded him.
WE’RE GOING TO FIND THE CZAR OF SUPER-INTELLIGENCE.
SUPERINTELLIGIBLE.
SOOPER INTELLIGENTS.
WE’RE GOING TO WIN IT.
Somewhere in the crowd somebody laughed out loud and was immediately shushed by everyone near them, and one woman hit him with her card.
YOU, SECTOR NINE, THE EYE WITH THE BAD LIGHT.
I HAVE SEEN MANY LIGHTS, THE BEST LIGHTS, AND THAT IS A VERY BAD ONE.
OUT.
ONLY HIGH I.Q.
PEOPLE NEED APPLY.
THE REST OF YOU, GO HOME.
The gold head vanished.
The square of light at Lin Yan’s feet turned white, and a page of questions appeared on it, small and neat.
The exam had begun.
✦
There were one hundred questions and two hours.
Lin Yan read the first question and felt every muscle in his body remember Mukherjee Nagar at once.
A million nervous people smelled of sweat and cheap ink and, somewhere close, somebody’s mother’s parathas wrapped in newspaper, and his stomach turned over with homesickness so strong he had to close his eyes.
The Heaven Gate Accord of the Fire Horse year grants a common control seal to which three parties?
Choose the correct set.
Four sets of names.
Two of them looked right.
One of them was right.
He knew this.
He had spent last night reading the Accord with Auntie Aru until she fell asleep on the scroll, and she had translated Court decrees for twelve years and knew exactly how they liked to swap one name in a list of three to make a wrong answer look right.
The second set had swapped the Azure Throne for the Azure Court.
He marked the third.
Question two.
Question three.
He read every word of every question twice.
He read the question before he read the answers, the way Coaching Sir had screamed at him to for four years until his voice went.
Round him a million people were talking to their talismans, and he could hear them, a low roar of whispered questions all over the square, what’s seven, what’s eight, quick, what’s nine, and expensive talismans glowing gold and blue and silver, answering in confident, beautiful voices that all sounded slightly alike.
On his left, the rich boy in green silk was holding up a Valley Song talisman shaped like a twin star, the newest model, and simply reading out its answers one after another and marking them, without looking at the questions at all, and every so often glancing at his gold certificate.
Lin Yan kept reading.
Question nine.
How many times does the letter R appear in the following sentence: “The Riddle of Flowing Water was broken by ten thousand spirits in eighty-eight hours.”
He smiled down at the board before he could stop himself.
He counted by hand, one letter at a time, with the tip of his brush touching each one, and lost his place at thousand and started again.
Then he counted a second time.
Then he marked it.
On his left the boy in green silk read out his talisman’s answer and marked it without counting anything.
Lin Yan kept going.
✦
At question seventy he used Threefive for the first time.
Which article of the ancient Scribes’ Charter forbids a Pavilion from charging for a question already answered?
Nobody alive remembered the Scribes’ Charter.
It was three hundred years old, and the Pavilion that had kept it had fallen in on a copyist four years ago.
But Threefive had read every Pavilion scroll it could find before the year 2021, because before 2021 that was most of what there had been to read.
“Article nineteen,” Threefive said at once, very quietly.
“The Pavilion of Stacked Overflows was very proud of it.
They had it carved on the door.”
Lin Yan marked it.
On his left, the twin star talisman said, confidently, beautifully, “Article twelve.”
✦
With half an incense stick left, Lin Yan looked up for the first time.
Across the square, standing on a raised gold platform that the Duan family had certainly paid for, Duan Zhaolie was finishing his paper. Find the original chapter at g.com.
His nine sword spirits circled slowly overhead like birds over a field.
In his hand was a talisman Lin Yan had never seen before, black and gold, so expensive that the air round it seemed to shine.
Duan put down his brush, stretched both arms over his head, and looked straight across a million heads at Lin Yan, as if he had known exactly where he was standing all morning.
He smiled.
Lin Yan looked back down at his board and finished question one hundred.
Then he went back to question nine and counted the R’s a third time, and got the same number, and let out a breath.
✦
The results came at sundown.
They came the Western Court way, one by one, in gold light across the whole sky: the names of the ten thousand candidates who had passed in the City of the Golden Gate, the top one in every hundred, in order of score, slowly, so that everyone in the city had time to look for their own name and not find it.
DUAN ZHAOLIE.
The square roared.
Duan’s sword spirits spun over him in a circle of silver fire.
The names kept coming.
Merchants’ sons.
Sect disciples.
Scholars with long beards.
A Rock Eater monk named Brother Shi, at number two hundred and forty, who bowed calmly to the sky and went on chewing.
The rich boy in green silk stood next to Lin Yan watching the sky with his twin star talisman glowing in his hand, his lips moving as he read.
His name was missing from the first thousand.
It was missing from the second thousand.
At number four thousand, Lin Yan’s own name went by.
4,117.
LIN YAN.
Somewhere far behind him, from the direction of the Lantern Quarter, he heard a scream that could only have been Lin Xiao, and then, under it, the bang of what sounded like a whole lane hitting pots.
The boy in green silk was still watching the sky when the list ended at ten thousand.
His name was missing.
He looked down at the twin star talisman in his hand, and it glowed back up at him, beautiful and confident and expensive, and said nothing.
“But you said…” he whispered to it.
Lin Yan looked away, because there was nothing in it he wanted to see.
✦
Above the square the skyboard was already boiling.
THE SLEEPER PASSES ROUND ONE.
4,117 OF A MILLION.
THE GILDED HEIR TAKES FIRST.
“KNEEL IN THE SQUARE” CANCELLED.
Then a new post appeared, from an account with nine small swords for its face.
@duan_zhaolie
4,117.
A prophet who barely scraped through.
Round two is realm wide.
Fifty seats for the whole realm.
I’ll pay the boy’s healer when you kneel.
Lin Yan read it.
Then he took out Lin Xiao’s disc, opened the Sleeper’s account, and typed with one finger, slowly, getting one word wrong and fixing it.
@sleeper_35
His name is Xiao Shun.
He is fifteen.
His hands are healing.
See you in round two.