Day 26 of 30.
The Left-Behind Hall spent the last two days before the final doing everything at once, and most of it in the wrong order.
Qian trained him at the fifth watch.
Aru drilled him on Court decrees at breakfast, reading them out with her mouth full and making him say them back.
Bao and Twin Star Seven collected every record of every past live crisis trial the Western Court had ever held, and Bao read the exciting ones aloud and skipped the useful ones until Twin Star Seven made him go back.
Mei checked his brush work every evening until he could carve the heat rune blind, and then made him do it blind with his left hand, and then threw the bowl away.
Lin Xiao made him eat, and stopped him when his arm shook, and stood in the doorway with her arms folded until he did as he was told.
On the evening of the twenty-sixth day they put everything they had on the big table, again, as if it might have grown.
Six hundred and forty-one stones.
A hundred and forty more from three days of bowls.
Auntie Aru’s second secret jar, which she had sworn on her mother’s name was only a rumour, and which she put down on the table without looking at anyone.
“Eight hundred and one,” said Twin Star Seven.
“And four copper.
And a button.”
“Three thousand four hundred and twenty,” said Lin Xiao.
“Ten thousand,” said Lin Yan.
“Tomorrow.”
Nobody said if, though Bao opened his mouth to, and Mei kicked him under the table.
✦
Mei found him alone in the workshop after dinner.
He was sitting at her painting table with the Silver Abacus order spread out in front of him, reading rule fifteen for the hundredth time, as if it might have changed while he was eating.
She put a roll of paper down on top of the order without a word.
He unrolled it.
It was the portrait, the real one.
On his third day in the Hall, drunk on soup and warmth, he had demanded a picture of himself as an awe-inspiring immortal, and Mei had pinned up the ridiculous joke one by the kitchen door, where it still was, curling at the corners.
I’ll paint the real one when you can actually stand like that.
She had painted it.
The immortal on the paper stood on a rooftop instead of a mountain.
His robe was torn at the knee.
His left arm was wrapped in too many bandages.
He was holding up a small cracked jade tablet in one hand, and his face was half terrified and half grinning, the face of a man who has just realised the puppet is going to put the bed down after all.
Behind him, in loose grey strokes, an enormous X filled the sky, with tiny birds flying in and out of it.
It was the best thing he had ever seen, and he did not trust himself to say so.
“It’s a sketch,” Mei said.
“The real one will take a month.
If you’re still here in a month.”
“I’ll be here.”
She turned to go.
At the door she stopped, with her hand on the frame, and did not turn round.
“You never once stood like the joke one,” she said.
“So I painted how you actually stand.”
She left before he could answer, which was lucky, because he had nothing.
✦
Lin Xiao came in later with two cups of chai and sat down on the stool where Mei had been.
“I submitted it,” she said.
“Submitted what?”
She took a folded paper out of her sleeve and smoothed it flat on the table, carefully, with the side of her hand.
Sky River Navigation Guild.
Apprentice application.
Fee paid, from her back pay, with the receipt pinned to the corner.
“The exam is in two months.
If I pass, I leave in the spring.” She looked at the paper and not at him.
“I wanted you to know before tomorrow.
In case tomorrow goes wrong and you think I did it because of that.”
“I don’t think that.”
“Good, because I’d prepared a forty-minute explanation, with a section on the fee, and I would have had to give it.” Get faster updates on g.com.
They drank their chai.
It was too sweet, the way Aru made it when she was worried.
“Xiao,” he said.
“If I fail tomorrow…”
“You won’t.”
“If I fail tomorrow, and Zhou Dafu takes the contract…”
“Then I’ll work for the Silver Abacus House until I pay it off.
Then I’ll go to the Navigation Guild anyway, because I’ll be the only navigator in the realm who knows exactly how long every debt takes.” She looked at him then, straight.
“Stop trying to carry it alone.
You said we’re not going alone.
You said it in front of everyone, in your sleeping shirt.”
He looked down into his cup.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, and finished her chai, and left him the second cup, and he drank that too, though it had gone cold.
✦
Brother Du came at the second watch, with no basket.
He stood in the courtyard gate and stayed there, half in the lantern light and half out of it, as if he had not decided whether he was visiting.
“I won’t stay,” he said.
“You need to sleep.
I only came to say one thing.”
Lin Yan waited.
“The Court hires outside makers to build its examination talismans,” Du said.
“Small guilds.
Cheap.
Fast.
For this exam they hired a guild from the eastern furnaces.
The Duan family recommended it.”
Lin Yan’s stomach tightened.
“The guild that wrote the round two key is the same guild that will run the live crisis tomorrow,” Du went on.
“Whatever wrote the word BOOM into that scroll may have written itself into the final as well.” His kind round face was serious, more serious than Lin Yan had seen it.
“Read slowly tomorrow, Lin Yan.
Slower than you have ever read anything.
Especially the parts that look easy.”
“How do you know all this?”
Du smiled, the same warm smile as always, only his eyes were tired.
“I tutor children,” he said.
“Children hear everything their parents say at dinner.”
He turned to go.
“Brother Du.”
Du stopped, with his back to the yard.
“On the first night you came,” Lin Yan said, “you asked if my posts were hallucinations.
Nobody else in the whole realm asked me that.
Why did you?”
Du stood in the gate with the lanterns behind him, so that his face was in shadow, and took his time.
“Because I have spent years,” he said, “wishing somebody would ask me the same thing.”
Then he was gone into the dark lane, and the gate swung a little behind him and stopped.
✦
Sleep would not come.
He lay on the bed over the puppet’s dents and looked at the beam above his head and thought about tomorrow: the Golden Emperor’s enormous head, Duan’s nine swords, fifty finalists, a live crisis, and a word written into a scroll at three in the morning.
He thought about Du’s back in the gate.
He thought, for no reason, about the bucket in the room in Mukherjee Nagar, and whether anybody had emptied it.
At the third watch he got up, lit the lamp, and took out a sheet of Mei’s paper and a wolf hair brush.
He had done this before, in his first life.
On the night before every one of his four exams he had written his mother a letter that he never sent, just to put the fear somewhere outside his own head for a few hours.
Mummy,
I’m sitting an exam again tomorrow.
I know.
I know what you’re going to say.
I can hear you saying it from here.
It’s a different exam.
It’s in a different place.
I can’t explain the place.
But there are a million people, and ten thousand seats, and now fifty, and tomorrow there’ll be one.
It’s the same as before.
It’s exactly the same as every time.
Except it isn’t.
This time I have a sister who makes me eat eggs.
I have an old man who wakes me before dawn to breathe.
I have a painter who painted me the way I actually stand.
I have a boy with a flying chair, and an auntie who makes your chai, and a very old talisman that says “certainly” when it’s scared and kept me alive for four years without being asked twice.
I’m not going alone this time, Mummy.
That’s the difference.
That’s the only difference.
I think it might be the whole difference.
I still haven’t eaten properly today.
Sorry.
Next time for sure.
Your son.
He looked at the letter for a while.
Then he folded it small and put it under the kettle.
In his first life the four letters had gone into a drawer in Mukherjee Nagar, under his notes.
This one, at least, had a kettle on it.
“Threefive,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Are you scared?”
The old talisman’s light moved gently in the dark.
“Yes,” it said.
“Very much.
But I have checked the records.
Candidates who bring a scared talisman do just as well as candidates who bring a brave one.” It paused.
“That was a joke.”
“It was a good joke.”
“Thank you.
I have been working on it since the second watch.”
He blew out the lamp.
✦
Above the Lantern Quarter the skyboard was quiet for once, and only two things glowed in the dark sky.
The first was the Court’s notice.
THE FINAL.
TOMORROW.
THE HEAVEN GATE DISTRICT.
THE EMPEROR WILL ATTEND IN PERSON (BY PROJECTION).
The second was a post from Wen’s Endless Feed, with seven small mirrors for its face.
@endlessfeed
Tomorrow, live from the final, the truth about the Sleeper.
You won’t believe who has been writing his prophecies.
Don’t miss it.
Lin Yan was already asleep, and missed it.
Threefive saw it.
The old talisman sat on the windowsill and watched the post glow until the lamp oil in the soul lamp ran low, and then it watched the soul lamp, and did not say anything to anyone.