The stance was the problem and Doha knew it by the end of the first hour.
Everything else about the draw was merely impossible. The stance was arithmetic. The woman — he had started thinking of it as a woman on the second morning, and could not have said why, except that the shape of the hips said so and the shape of the hips did not lie — had begun from a seat so low that her thigh was level and her back was vertical, and she had come up out of it in a spiral over four beats without her spine ever leaving the perpendicular.
Doha could get down there. He could get down there and stay for about nine seconds before his knees started sending messages up his legs in a language that got less polite each time.
Nine seconds. The draw was five beats long, and each beat in that shape was slow, and slow was the entire point of it — it was a technique built by somebody who had all the time in the world because nobody had ever managed to take any of it away from her.
Twenty-two seconds, he estimated. Start to finish.
"Then hold it for twenty-two seconds," said Chan-i, who had come out to the practice yard with two lamps because it was the fourth watch and Doha had not come in.
"I'm at eleven."
"How long did the wrist take you?"
"Two days."
"So."
"So the wrist was a thing I didn't understand," said Doha. "This is a thing I understand perfectly and can't do."
He went back down into the stance.
The cold room was forty paces away. Two and a bit paces of range, which meant the practice yard was useless, which meant he had spent the last three nights doing this in the doorway of the stone-carvers' shed with the coffin trestled six feet away and Hong Yeohwa sitting against the wall on the other side of it, not speaking, exactly as she had promised.
She had been there every night. She did not sleep either, as far as he could tell. Twice she had gotten up and gone out and come back with tea, and both times she had put a cup down within his reach without a word, and both times he had not thanked her because he had a sense that thanking her would end something.
"Fourteen seconds is a knee problem," said Chan-i. "You're holding it with the front of your legs."
"Where else would I hold it?"
"You're a rite-keeper. Where do you put weight?"
Doha stopped.
He looked down at his own feet.
Eight years. Two hours a day since he was six years old, in a stance so low that your thighs stopped being part of you, breathing on a count of nine, driving everything you had down through the soles of your feet into whatever you happened to be standing on.
The fourth rite. The Weighting. The single most mocked martial art in the Thousand Li, whose highest expression was standing there.
He had been holding a swordswoman's seat with a swordsman's legs.
Doha went down again — and let go of it. Let the whole structure of himself drop out of his thighs and through his heels and into the packed dirt of the shed floor, the way he did every morning of his life without thinking about it, the way he did with a spade in his hands and two hundred pounds of stranger over his shoulder.
The stance stopped costing anything.
He sat in it for one minute. Two. His knees said nothing at all. Somewhere in the third minute Chan-i started laughing, quietly, in the way of a man who has just watched something both wonderful and extremely irritating.
"Four hundred years," Chan-i said. "Four hundred years of sect masters telling us we dig holes."
The knot stood up at the sixth hour of the third day, which was nine hours early.
Doha was asleep — the first sleep in two days, forty minutes of it, sitting up against the shed wall with the sword across his knees. What woke him was not a noise.
It was the two and a bit paces.
He had been inside it for three days, and by now his body had learned the edge of it the way you learn a doorframe in the dark, and what woke him was the shape moving. The alien draw slid past him — through him — and away, six feet, ten, and the wrongness of a thing that had sat still for nineteen days going somewhere brought him up off the floor before his eyes were open.
The coffin lid was on the ground.
The cold room's outer door stood open at the far end of the yard, which was impossible, because they had moved him to the shed and the cold room had been empty since—
No. Not the cold room.
Doha turned.
Hong Ji-an was standing in the doorway of the stone-carvers' shed with his back to the moon.