It took the shed doorframe off at shoulder height and there was no sound at all until the roof came down on that side.
Chan-i had already thrown. The grave-rope went out low and took both of the corpse's ankles at the same instant the lintel dropped, and Chan-i had the other end around his own shoulders and sat down, in the fourth rite, on the packed dirt, and the corpse's feet came out from under it.
It did not fall like a body. It fell like furniture.
"NOW," Chan-i said.
Doha landed on it.
He got a knee into the small of its back and both hands on the right arm, and the right arm came around anyway, and there was a moment — perhaps a second and a half — where Doha understood in a personal and unhurried way that he was not strong enough for this, and that no amount of anything was going to make him strong enough, because the thing under him was not using muscle. Muscle had stopped being available on the eleventh day. It was using the last intention of somebody who had been at Standing Water for forty years, and it had no nerves to hurt and no lungs to run out of and no reason to stop.
It doesn't get tired, he thought. It gets finished.
The arm came up and around, and Doha, who could not stop it, went with it instead.
He rode the arm to the top of its arc, let go with his left hand, hooked the two crooked fingers under the wrapping at the corpse's shoulder, and then simply — stopped holding himself up.
All of it. Everything. Every pound he had and eight years of learning how to give it to the ground, dropped straight down through one point at the top of that arm at the exact instant the shoulder was highest and least supported.
Something in Hong Ji-an's shoulder let go with a sound like a tent rope.
The seam of nothing went into the floor and buried itself two feet deep and stopped being anywhere.
Beat four, interrupted.
And the whole thing — the corpse, the shape, the intention — hitched, and started over from the beginning.
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"It resets," Doha shouted. "It goes back to the start — every time you break it, it starts over—"
"How long!"
"Four beats! Five seconds!"
"Then we have five seconds every five seconds," Chan-i said, "which is the best news I have had all night, GET THE ROPE—"
They got the rope.
It took nineteen minutes and it took eleven people, and they did it the way the Hall did everything, which was slowly and correctly and with somebody counting out loud. Two on each limb. Two on the rope. Chan-i sitting in the fourth rite at the anchor end with his heels dug in and his face streaming, calling the count. Doha at the shoulder, breaking the fourth beat, over and over, every five seconds, forty-one times, because he was the only one who knew where the beat was.
Nobody cut anything. Nobody struck a blow. It was, from outside, the least martial thing imaginable: a crowd of grey-clothed laborers in a collapsing shed, wrestling a dead boy to the floor by inches and tying him up.
At minute fourteen, Elder Mo came in over the fallen lintel and put both hands on the corpse's left arm because the two men holding it were losing it.
At minute fifteen, the arm came free.
The seam of nothing was only about eight inches long that time. It went through Elder Mo's right hand between the second and third fingers and out through the base of the palm, and it did not make a sound, and the old man looked at it with mild interest and said, "Ah," and kept holding on with the other one.
They got the last turn of rope at the nineteenth minute. Doha put the final knot in himself, the Hall's knot, the one you learn at six, and pulled it down.
Hong Ji-an lay bound on the floor of a ruined shed with his cheek in the dirt.
Every five seconds, everything in him tried to sit down into a stance he no longer had the legs for, and the ropes went taut, and creaked, and held.
Doha sat back on his heels.
Somebody had lit more lamps. There were forty people in and around the shed and not one of them was talking. Chan-i was on his back at the anchor end with the rope still around his shoulders, breathing like a bellows. Elder Mo was sitting against the wall with his right hand in his lap, palm up, being extremely calm about it while Su Han knelt in front of him with a cloth and a face like a man reading a death notice.
Hong Yeohwa stood exactly where she had been told to stand.
Her sword was on the ground where she had put it down, in the dirt, unhandled, nineteen minutes ago.
Doha looked at her, and could not think of one single thing to say that would not have been an obscenity.
"You held him," she said.
"Yes."
"You had twelve men and a rope and nobody put a blade in him."
"That's the job," said Doha.
Hong Yeohwa's face came apart, all at once, completely, and she put both hands over it and sat down on the floor of the shed, and nobody in the Hall of the Ninth Rite looked at her, because they were extremely well trained, and it was the only kindness available.
Nineteen minutes. Eleven people. Forty-one breaks of the fourth beat.
Nobody in the Hall of the Ninth Rite had struck a single blow, and by the end of the month there would be four versions of it in the Thousand Li in which somebody had.