Day 3 of 30.
Lin Yan ran.
It was the worst running in the history of the world. His legs were four years old in every wrong way, the tungsten cube banged against his hip with each step like someone knocking to be let in, and behind him the whole alley woke up at once and came after him.
"The Sleeper! That's the Sleeper!"
"Ten thousand stones! Grab him!"
"Grab the talisman! The source is the talisman! Didn't you read it? The source!"
A hand caught the back of his collar. He twisted, the robe tore with a sound he felt in his teeth, and he stumbled free straight into a stack of clay jars, and the Thousand Questions girl screamed as her noodle spirits went rolling off in every direction, one of them shouting its own price as it went.
"Sorry! Sorry, sister! Sorry!"
He looked up. The young Rock Eater with the square face was coming through the crowd toward him, calm and steady, not hurrying at all, chewing.
Clack. Clack.
"Threefive," Lin Yan gasped. "Exit. Shortest one. Now."
"There are three possible exits," Threefive began. "The first..."
"SHORTEST."
"Left. Under the red cloth."
He dived left under a red cloth, crawled on his elbows through a stall selling jade slips while the owner hit him on the back with a fan, came out into a smaller lane on the far side, got up, ran four steps, and went straight into a flying chair.
It was an ordinary wooden chair, the kind every house in the quarter had, and it was floating at chest height and wobbling like a drunk uncle at the end of a wedding. On it sat a boy of about nineteen with messy hair, a torn jacket, and the biggest grin Lin Yan had ever seen on a human face.
"Lin Xiao's brother? The Sleeper? Get on! Get on, get on, get on!"
Lin Yan got on, mainly because his legs had decided to stop.
The boy slapped the armrest. "Chair! Home!"
The chair shot straight up, spun twice, and flew forward over the rooftops in a zigzag line, as if it was trying to remember where home was and kept getting it slightly wrong.
Behind them the crowd poured out of the alley and pointed at the sky, and far below Lin Yan saw the Rock Eater stop in the lane and tip his head back and watch them go, still chewing, in no hurry at all, which was somehow worse than if he had run.
"Bao Tiantian!" the boy shouted over the wind. "Vibe forger! This chair was my first product! I told it 'follow me' and now it follows me everywhere! Even the toilet! It's a feature, people keep calling it a bug, it's a feature!"
The chair dipped, bounced off a tiled roof, clipped a laundry line, and carried off three pairs of somebody's trousers, which flapped behind them like flags.
"HOME!" Bao screamed, happily.
They crashed into a courtyard full of washing, rolled through a whole line of wet bedsheets, and stopped with the chair upside down in a flowerpot and Lin Yan wrapped in a sheet like a body at a funeral.
---
When he finally fought his way out of the sheet he was lying on his back looking up at an old wooden plaque over a gate.
Someone had painted over the original gold characters by hand, and the old name was still faintly there underneath if you knew to look for it: HALL OF SCRIBES. Over it, in fat black strokes that had dripped a little before they dried, someone had written:
LEFT-BEHIND HALL.
"You finally woke up, then."
An old man sat at a workbench under the eaves. He was thin as a bamboo pole, seventy at least, with copper nails stuck through his white bun of hair like hairpins, and he was bent over a bronze bowl, carving a rune into its side with a steel needle, and he did not lift his eyes from the needle to see who had fallen into his courtyard.
"Your sister carried you here on her back every seventh day for four years," the old man said, "so this old man could put needles in you. You owe me about two hundred needles. I've been keeping count. The needles weren't free."
Lin Yan got up slowly, in stages, with the sheet still round one ankle.
Then he bowed low, all the way down, the way his grandfather had taught him to touch an elder's feet, and his back made a noise about it.
"Thank you, Qian Ye."
The needle stopped, once.
"Hmph," said Old Qian. "Polite. The old Lin Yan was too proud to bow to anyone. Get up before you fall over. I can't afford to fix you twice."
He went back to carving.
A plump woman in a bright orange shawl came bustling out of the kitchen with reading glasses on a chain round her neck and a steel tumbler in her hand, already talking before she was through the door.
"Look at him! Like a dried chilli! Bao, did you drop him? You dropped him." She pushed the tumbler into Lin Yan's hands. "Drink, child. Drink first, then talk."
The smell reached him before the heat did. Ginger. Cardamom. Milk boiled with too much sugar, boiled twice, the way it was done at the stall outside the coaching centre by a man who never washed the pan.
His hands froze on the tumbler.
"Ginger chai...?" he said, before he could stop himself.
The woman's eyes went wide behind her glasses. "Where did you learn that word? Nobody here says it. Nobody. I say it, and they look at me."
"I read it," Lin Yan said quickly. "In a scroll. Once."
She looked at him a moment longer, and then she smiled a small, strange smile, as if she had decided to let him keep that one. "Auntie Aru. Translator. Twelve tongues. Or I was, before the talismans learned all twelve in one night. Drink your chai before it gets a skin."
He drank. It tasted so much like home that he had to look down at the ground for a while and pretend to study the stones.
"Sit, sit," said Auntie Aru, steering him onto a stool by the shoulders. "This Hall doesn't take people who are pretending. We've all been found out already."
At the far table, a young woman was painting.
She had ink on all ten fingers and a sharp face with sharp eyes, and she was painting runes on yellow paper with a brush as thin as a needle, stroke after stroke, very fast, the paper piling up beside her. She looked up once, at him, briefly.
"The prophet," she said coldly, and went back to work.
"That's Sister Mei," Bao whispered loudly, climbing out of the flowerpot. "She hates talismans."
"I hate what they did to painters," Mei said, without looking up. "Learn the difference or keep your mouth shut, Bao."
---
There was an order.
The Jade Dumpling House wanted forty heated serving bowls by sundown. Each bowl needed Old Qian's heat rune carved round the rim, so that food served in it would stay hot for three hours, and the Dumpling House would pay twelve spirit stones for the lot.
"Twelve stones is one month's rent," Bao explained. "We're two months behind. The landlord nailed a notice on the gate. It says 'last warning' in three colours. He did the colours himself. He's very proud of them."
The problem was simple. Old Qian carved by hand, and one bowl took him almost an hour, and it was the fourth bell already.
Mei had cut stencils from thin copper, trying to make the rune something you could copy. Bao had asked his talisman for a faster version, and then another, and another, and half of Bao's versions cracked the bowl in the kiln with a little pop like a knuckle, and the courtyard had a heap of halves in one corner to prove it.
"Show him the Master's lesson," Old Qian grunted.
Bao ran to the wall and propped up an old bronze mirror and tapped it twice, and the glass filled with light, and a lean man with messy hair and a kind face appeared in it, smiling out into the room as if he could see them.
"Hi everyone," said the man in the mirror. "Okay. So. Here is the whole method. Describe what you want. Make the smallest version you can. Look at what actually happened. Fix one thing. Do it again."
In the mirror his own first bowl cracked neatly in half, and he laughed out loud, delighted, as if it had done something clever.
"See? Keep your mistakes where people can see them. That's where the learning is."
"Master Kapaxi!" Bao said, with shining eyes. "The Name-Giver! He's the one who named vibe forging!"
"He calls it vibe forging," Old Qian said. "I call it finding out if the bowl leaks."
---
Lin Yan wanted to help. His hands wanted to help; they were already twitching on his knees.
Mei slid a copper stencil and a brush across the table to him without a word, like a teacher handing a test to a student she expected to fail and was looking forward to marking.
He tried.
After ten strokes his hand was shaking so badly that the ink splashed, and his left arm was worse, weak and heavy, like an arm that belonged to somebody else and had been lent to him without instructions. The rune came out crooked. When Bao fired the bowl it gave off a feeble warmth for about as long as it took to say so, and then went cold in Lin Yan's hands.
He looked at the ruined bowl. He knew this feeling very well. He had four years of it.
Then he remembered the puppet, and how it had only started going right when he asked it what it could lift.
He took Threefive out and set it on the table.
"Threefive," he said. "Listen carefully. My right hand shakes after ten strokes. My left arm is weaker than my right. Qian Ye's heat rune has twelve strokes. Make me a short practice drill for this body. And tell me what to watch for when it goes wrong."
Threefive glowed, and for once its answer was short.
"Split the rune into three parts of four strokes each. Rest for two breaths between parts. Hold the brush in your right hand and brace your right wrist with your left elbow on the table, so your weak arm becomes a stand. Watch the joint at stroke seven. If the ink pools there, you moved too slowly."
At the workbench Old Qian stopped carving and turned his head, the first time he had turned it since Lin Yan arrived.
Lin Yan tried it. Four strokes. Breathe. Breathe. Four strokes.
"Wrist lower," Old Qian said.
He lowered it. Breathe. Breathe.
"Stroke seven is fat," Mei said, without looking up from her own paper. "Make it thin."
He made it thin, and his hand wobbled, and he made it thin again over the top. Four strokes.
Bao put the bowl in the little kiln and they waited about as long as it takes to drink a cup of tea, and nobody drank any tea, and Bao kept opening his mouth to say something and being looked at by Mei.
When he pulled it out, the rune round the rim was glowing a soft, even orange.
Auntie Aru poured hot soup into it, and they all stood round the table and watched the soup steam. And steam. And go on steaming, while a fly landed on the rim and thought better of it.
A thin warm thread moved inside Lin Yan's right arm, from the palm up toward the elbow, like warm water finding its way through a pipe that had been dry for years.
He gasped out loud.
Old Qian's eyes went sharp as needles. "Hm. Give me that wrist." He took it in a hand like a root and pressed two fingers into it and scowled at the wall as if the wall had said something rude. "Four years of nothing and it stirs for a bowl. Don't get ideas. It's a trickle. A trickle isn't a river. A trickle is a trickle."
Mei had stopped painting. She was looking at the bowl, then at the stencil, then at the jade tablet sitting on the table, and her face was doing something complicated.
"Do it again," she said.
He did it again, and it worked again, and the second bowl was slightly better than the first, and he was ashamed of how much he wanted someone to say so.
"Brother Lin, you're a genius!" Bao shouted. "A genius! Two hundred bowls by the ninth day, no, the eighth, no, the day after the day after, no, wait..."
---
They finished the fortieth bowl as the sun went down, and Bao delivered them on the flying chair, and he only dropped one, and Auntie Aru said one was good for Bao and gave him an extra spoon of sugar for it.
That night they ate soup out of the rejected bowls, the cracked ones and the crooked ones, and the soup stayed hot all the way to the last spoonful, even in the one with the fat stroke seven.
Lin Xiao came in from her shift halfway through dinner. She stopped in the doorway and saw her brother sitting at the table laughing with his mouth full and a bowl of steaming soup in front of him, and she stood there long enough that Bao waved at her twice. Then she sat down beside him without a word, and Auntie Aru put chai in front of her, and she held it without drinking it.
"Sister Mei hates talismans because of the Painting Week," Bao said, eating fast.
"Bao," Auntie Aru warned.
"It's fine." Mei put down her spoon.
"Last spring," she said, "for seven days, the whole world painted itself. Every face, every dog, every wedding, every street, all painted in the style of one old master from across the eastern sea. A talisman did it for anybody who asked. It was beautiful. I painted shop signs then. By the eighth day nobody needed me, and by the tenth my landlord didn't need me either." She turned her spoon over once. "That old master once saw a machine draw a picture. He said it was an insult to life itself. I used to think he was a grumpy old man."
She picked her spoon up again and ate, and that was apparently the end of it.
Lin Yan looked into his bowl for a while.
"Your stencil made the bowls work," he said finally. "The talisman only told my arm how to hold still."
Mei looked at him. Then she pushed the last dumpling across the table, without a word, to his side.
He felt warm. His arm was warm, his stomach was full for the first time in two lives, and he was sitting at a table with people who had looked after this body for four years and were now arguing about who had to wash the pot.
And so he said something stupid.
"One day," Lin Yan said, "the great sects will send their disciples here to learn from us."
Nobody said anything for a bit. Bao stopped chewing.
"Will those disciples also expect free soup?" Old Qian asked.
The whole table burst out laughing. Bao fell off the bench and stayed down there laughing. Even Lin Xiao laughed into her chai, and some of it went up her nose.
Lin Yan reached over and pulled the landlord's rent notice off the nail by the door, three colours and all, turned it over, and wrote on the back in big clean characters with a wolf hair brush.
BORROWED HEAVEN ART.
"What does it mean, child?" Auntie Aru asked.
"We borrow from every heaven," Lin Yan said. "Open Heaven. Human Dao. Valley Song. The Whale. All of them. And we use it with our own two hands."
Mei's mouth twitched at one corner and then behaved itself.
He was drunk on soup and warmth by then, so he said a second stupid thing.
"Mei. Paint me. As an awe-inspiring immortal. On a mountain. With the heavens bowing."
Mei looked at him for a long, flat second. Then she pulled a sheet of yellow paper toward her and painted, fast, in about thirty strokes.
When she turned it round, the whole table screamed.
It was an immortal on a mountaintop. His hair blew in a wind that came from four directions at once. He had a jaw like a cliff, a robe that had somehow fallen open to the waist, and one hand raised to the heavens in a pose that no human spine could hold for more than a second. He looked extremely seductive. He looked nothing whatsoever like Lin Yan.
Mei pinned it on the courtyard wall by the kitchen door, where everyone would see it every single day.
"That's the joke one," she said. "I'll paint the real one when you can actually stand like that."
---
Late that night, someone knocked on the gate.
"Only two kinds of people knock at this hour," Old Qian said, setting down his cup. "Collectors. And trouble. Sometimes the same person."
Bao went and opened the gate, holding a ladle, for some reason.
A young man in simple white clothes stood outside. He was tall, with a calm face and eyes like a still lake, and as he stepped forward into the lantern light every lantern in the courtyard grew a little brighter, as if they had all sat up.
Every talisman in the Hall went quiet at once, like servants when their master walks in. Bao's talisman dimmed. Mei's brush stopped glowing. On the table, Threefive's light shrank down into a small nervous dot and stayed there.
"Sorry for the late hour," the young man said politely, and bowed a little toward the old man at the workbench. "I'm looking for the man who predicted my proof."
Lin Xiao's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.
"Astra," she whispered.
From the dark street behind him came a dry voice.
"You're late."
Fable was leaning against the gatepost with her arms crossed, eating a baozi.
"I got here first," she said.
Astra turned his head and looked at her, and something went across his calm face, quick and bright, like a fish under clear water, there and gone.
"You always do," he said.