Day 24 of 30.
Round Two was held indoors, in four hundred halls across the realm at the same bell, with the same paper, and the top one in every hundred from Round One sat it, and the City of the Golden Gate had ten of those halls and filled every one.
One thousand of its candidates sat in the Hall of Celestial Records, a building so old that its stone floor had been worn into shallow dips by a thousand years of nervous feet, so that every desk stood slightly crooked and every candidate’s ink pot slid an inch toward the east.
Rows of low wooden desks.
One proctor eye floating over each.
A high ceiling painted with stars, some of them flaking.
Duan Zhaolie sat in the front row, in the middle, because the Duan family had asked for it.
His nine sword spirits hung asleep from the ceiling above him like silver bats.
Lin Yan sat in row forty-one, seat seven, because that was where 4,117 sat, and his desk wobbled, and he folded a corner of paper and pushed it under the short leg, and it still wobbled.
Brother Shi the Rock Eater sat two rows ahead of him, chewing, with a little bag of pebbles on the desk next to his brush.
“Fifty seats in the final, for the whole realm,” Threefive whispered from the desk.
“Four hundred thousand candidates are sitting this paper right now.
One in eight thousand.”
“Four hundred thousand.
Yes, I can count.”
“Are you frightened?”
Lin Yan thought about it honestly.
“Yes.”
“Excellent,” said Threefive.
“Excuse me, that came out wrongly.
The Rating Hall records say frightened candidates read more carefully.”
This time the Court skipped the Emperor, and a Court official in blue robes read the rules in a voice so bored that it seemed to be falling asleep between words.
One hundred questions.
Three hours.
One talisman.
No talking.
The exam began.
✦
The questions were harder.
Round One had tested memory.
Round Two tested tricks, and every question was a small trap with a beautiful door on it and a smell of fresh paint.
A merchant sells a heated bowl for eleven copper and buys it back for nine.
He does this forty times.
On the fortieth sale, the buyer pays with a counterfeit coin.
What is the merchant’s total profit or loss?
He did it by hand on the corner of his board, in small careful strokes, and got it wrong the first time because he forgot the merchant had to buy the bowl back after the counterfeit too, and did it again.
Round him a hundred whispering talismans gave a hundred confident answers, and he could hear at least three different numbers among them, all said in the same lovely voice.
Which of the following sentences contains exactly seven words?
He counted, by hand, twice, moving his lips like an old man reading a newspaper.
The Court decree of the Fire Horse year uses the phrase “Super Intelligence” how many times?
Auntie Aru had made him read that decree aloud four times, the last time standing on a stool for reasons she would not explain.
He knew the answer before his brush touched the board.
By question twenty his hand was cramping.
By question forty he had used Threefive twice, both times for old Pavilion law, and both times it had been right and pleased with itself about it.
By question sixty he had noticed something new.
The frightened candidates round him had started to change.
In the first hour they had whispered to their talismans and copied, all of them, without looking up.
Now, in the second hour, some of them had started to stop.
To read.
To count on their fingers under the desk where the proctor eyes could not quite see.
He watched a girl in row forty scratch out her talisman’s answer, hard, so the brush tore the paper, and write her own beside it.
Some of them are learning, he thought, and did not know why it made his throat tight.
He went back to his board.
✦
Question seventeen had been in the first hour, and it had been easy.
That was the problem.
A debtor has owed the Silver Abacus House for twenty-eight days.
He owns a house.
He holds a work contract.
He keeps a registered first lineage talisman under the old embodiment covenant.
Under the House’s standard collection order, what may the House take?
Four options.
One.
The house only.
Two.
The house and the work contract.
Three.
The work contract and the talisman.
Four.
All of the above.
He had read that exact order every night for three weeks.
He knew it better than his own name, which was not saying much, since his name was not his.
Rule fourteen.
The House may take property and contracts.
Rule fifteen.
Registered first-lineage talismans are exempt from collection under the old embodiment covenant.
The answer was the house and the work contract.
He had marked option two, moved on, and forgotten about it, the way you forget the question you were sure of.
✦
The results came at the sixth bell.
The Court posted them the Court way, but this time with a difference.
Because Round Two decided the finalists, the provisional answer key went up along with the scores, in gold light on the ceiling of the Hall of Celestial Records, so that every candidate could see exactly where they had gone wrong and suffer accordingly.
Lin Yan looked up.
REALM LIST.
PASS MARK FOR THE FINAL: 87.
His eyes went down the list of names from every hall in the realm, faster and faster.
LIANG CHEN.
87.
LIN YAN.
86.
One mark.
One mark.
Fifty seats, and he was fifty-first, and he had been fifty-first before, in another life, on another list, by four marks, and he knew this feeling so well that his body simply went cold and waited for it to pass.
At the top of the realm list sat Duan Zhaolie with ninety-eight, and across the hall the sword spirits woke up and began to spin slowly over his head.
Lin Yan went down the key question by question, the way he had gone down four UPSC answer keys in his first life, with his heart in his throat and his finger moving down the page.
Question one, correct.
Two, correct.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Correct, correct, correct.
Seventeen.
CORRECT ANSWER: OPTION FOUR.
ALL OF THE ABOVE.
He read it three times.
“That’s wrong,” he said out loud.
The candidate beside him looked over, a thin boy with ink on his nose.
“That’s wrong,” Lin Yan said again, and his voice was shaking.
“Rule fifteen.
First lineage talismans are exempt.
It’s on the order.
It’s on every order.
The answer is option two.”
“The key says four,” the boy said.
“The key is written by the Court.”
“The key is wrong.”
✦
He looked round the hall.
Nine hundred and fifty people were reading the ceiling.
Most of them looked happy, or sad, or sick.
Almost none of them looked confused about question seventeen.
He watched their eyes go down the key and stop at other questions, twenty-two, forty-eight, sixty, groaning, and pass seventeen without a flicker.
They had all marked option four.
Why?
he thought.
Nine hundred people.
Why would nine hundred people all get the same question wrong the same way?
Because they had all asked the same thing.
He pulled out Lin Xiao’s disc and opened the skyboard under the desk.
He searched for question seventeen.
He searched for Silver Abacus.
He searched for all of the above, and his hands were sweating so much the disc slipped.
He found it.
A post from the night before the exam.
Seven minutes past three in the morning.
From an account with no name, no face, and no followers.
@_____ round two answer sheet.
all 100.
good luck.
[scroll attached]
BOOM
The scroll was still attached.
He opened it.
One hundred questions, one hundred answers.
Question seventeen: option four.
Nine hundred talismans had read this scroll at three in the morning.
Nine hundred candidates had asked their talismans about question seventeen, and nine hundred beautiful confident voices had said option four.
And the Court’s own provisional key said option four as well.
His skin went cold all over.
The Court’s key came from the same place.
✦
He was on his feet before he had decided to stand, and his knee hit the desk and the ink pot went over. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
“Objection!”
His voice rang off the painted ceiling, and a thousand heads turned.
The Court official in blue robes looked up from his scroll with enormous irritation, the irritation of a man who had been about to go home.
“Candidate?”
“Candidate 841192.
I object to the provisional key for question seventeen.”
A ripple went through the hall.
Somebody laughed, near the front.
Duan Zhaolie’s sword spirits stopped spinning and turned their small faces toward row forty-one.
“On what grounds?” said the official.
“On the grounds that it is wrong,” Lin Yan said, “and I can prove it.”
He held up the Silver Abacus order.
He had carried it in his robe for twenty-four days, and it was soft at the folds now, and a little grey.
“Rule fifteen of the House’s standard collection order.
Registered first lineage talismans are exempt from collection under the old embodiment covenant.
The debtor in the question keeps a registered first lineage talisman.
The House cannot take it.
The correct answer to seventeen is option two.
The house and the contract.
The key says all of the above.
The key is wrong.”
The official frowned.
He leaned over and whispered to the proctor eye beside him, and the eye glowed and began to check.
“And I know why it’s wrong,” Lin Yan went on, before his courage could run out, which he could feel it starting to do, from the knees up.
He held up Lin Xiao’s disc with the nameless post glowing on it.
“Because an answer sheet was posted on the skyboard at three in the morning last night, from an account with no name.
Nine hundred candidates’ talismans read it.
So did whatever wrote your key.”
The hall was completely silent now, except for the ink dripping off his desk onto the floor.
“Somebody cheated your exam, Official,” said Lin Yan.
“And it wasn’t the candidates.”
✦
It took an hour.
Court scholars were sent for, three of them, old men who arrived out of breath and annoyed.
The order was checked.
The old embodiment covenant was pulled out of the archives and read aloud, slowly, by the oldest scholar, who kept losing his place, and rule fifteen was exactly where Lin Yan had said it was.
The nameless scroll was examined and its seals opened, and the Court scholars looked at it, and looked at each other, and one of them sat down.
At the seventh bell the ceiling changed.
CORRECT ANSWER: OPTION TWO.
THE PROVISIONAL KEY IS AMENDED.
Across the realm, three hundred thousand candidates lost one mark.
In this hall alone, nine hundred.
Their scores shifted, and names slid up and down the list like beads on an abacus, and the hall filled with a sound like wind going through dry leaves.
LIN YAN.
87.
LIANG CHEN.
86.
Somewhere in the far west, in a hall Lin Yan would never see, a young man called Liang Chen was reading the same list, and Lin Yan would never know his face, or whether he had a sister, or a debt.
He felt sick.
He had been right, and being right had thrown a stranger off the list, one mark, the same one mark.
Then he thought of Lin Xiao’s contract folded in Zhou Dafu’s sleeve, and he made himself stand up straight.
Across the hall Duan Zhaolie was looking at him.
Duan’s place stayed the same.
He had marked option four with everyone else, and lost one mark, and still sat at ninety-seven at the top of the realm.
But his face had changed.
He was no longer smiling.
✦
Lin Yan walked out of the Hall of Celestial Records into the evening with his writing board round his neck and ink all down one sleeve.
Fable was leaning against a pillar outside, eating a candied hawthorn.
“Fifty,” she said.
“Fifty,” he agreed.
His legs were shaking so badly he had to lean on the pillar too.
“You found the key.” She said it the way she said everything, as if she had known it three days ago and was only now bothering to mention it.
“It was made from the leaked scroll.
Someone fed the Court’s talisman the answers before it wrote the key.
Very sloppy.
Very fast.”
“Who?”
Fable looked at the sky, and her grey eyes went still.
“The scroll’s seals carry a signature,” she said.
“One word.
It was written into the name of the scroll itself.”
She turned the candied hawthorn slowly in her fingers.
“BOOM,” she said.