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Chapter 42: Notes in a Sweet Tin
“You do not believe me,” said the stranger.They had moved out of the square. The crowd had been drifting closer, drawn by the strangeness of two identical faces, and Yan Shuo had said, in a voice that carried, that anyone who came within ten paces would be asked to explain themselves to his sword. Now the five of them stood in the lee of the monument’s plinth, in the thin shade of the figure with no face.“I believe that you believe it,” said Lin Fan.“That is generous.” The man looked mildly amused. “Then let me ask you something. You have been told, over the last few weeks, that you are a good man who did a terrible thing. A sovereign, a teacher, a soldier. You have taken all of it in, with a sort of dreadful dignity. But tell me.” He folded his arms. “Which of those are you now? When you wake in the morning, in that thin little body, with its bruises. Who stands up?”Lin Fan did not answer at once.“Lin Fan,” he said. “I woke in a hospital bed on a morning of plum rain.”“That is
Chapter 41: The Man Who Was Before
The mountain tried to bury them on the way out.They ran up the long ramp through falling dust, with blue lamps going out behind them one by one, and when they reached the great door at the top, it was already sagging on its hinges. Yan Shuo threw his shoulder against it. Stone shrieked. They burst out into the Tellers’ cavern in a cloud of grit, and for a moment nobody could see anything at all.Then the dust cleared, and Lin Fan saw what the collapse had done.The city was in chaos.People stood in the streets, in the doorways, on the bridges across the black canal, and they were wrong. Not hurt. Not afraid, exactly. They stared at their own hands, at each other, at the sky of rock, with the helpless face of someone woken in a strange room.A woman near the canal was screaming at a man in a dockhand’s jacket. “The Gull! Where is the Gull? I had her moored at the third pier, you idiot, I had her—”“Madam,” said the man, bewildered. “I am a baker.”“I am not a woman! I am the captain
Chapter 40: The Throne That Said No
The palace let them out of the hall, but only in one direction.The great slabs that had sealed every corridor ground back up into the ceiling, all except one. At the far end of the library, a pair of doors swung inward on a passage lit by the same cold blue flame. They stood open, like the mouth of something patient.“It wants you,” said Yan Shuo. His sword was drawn and his knuckles were white. “That is not a place you go.”“I know.”“Then don’t.”“I don’t think it’s a request.” Lin Fan looked at the sealed doors behind them, thirty feet of black stone. “We could wait here until we starve, and it would ask again.”Bai Lu came up beside him. She did not say a word. She took his sleeve in her fist, as she had in the pass, and held on.They went in together. The palace seemed to approve.The throne room was round.It had no windows. The ceiling rose in a shallow dome, painted black, scattered with tiny points of silver that might once have been a map of the stars. The floor was polishe
Chapter 39: The Avenue Of Faces
The passage went down for an hour.It was a wide ramp of black stone, cut so smooth that their footsteps made no echo, lit at intervals by lamps that burned with a cold blue flame. Ke Ling had pressed one into Yan Shuo’s hands at the door, and said only, “We will not follow. We are not allowed.” Her face, as she said it, had been the face of a woman standing at the edge of a grave she had been told to leave.Lin Fan walked in front. He did not speak. He was still reaching, again and again, for the place where a well had been, and every time his mind slid off it, like a tongue over a missing tooth.Bai Lu walked beside him and said nothing either. But twice, when he stumbled, a hand came under his elbow.The ramp ended in a gate.It was open. It had been open, Lin Fan thought, for a very long time. Beyond it was a darkness so vast that the lamplight simply stopped. Yan Shuo lifted the lantern high, and the gate’s lintel swam into view, with a line of writing cut across it in letters a
Chapter 38: The Tellers
Nobody answered the mask.It seemed to expect that. The silver face rested on Lin Fan for a long moment, patient as a stone in a stream. Then it raised one gloved hand and pointed, not at him, but at the ground between the frozen ranks.“They have waited a good deal longer than I have,” it said. “Go and ask them.”And it stepped back among the soldiers, and the pale grass did not bend, and when Yan Shuo lunged after it there was only a captain with his hand on his sword and a reared horse in the half-light.“I said I would show you where it began,” said Mo Chen, tapping his ladle against his boot. He had not moved from his donkey. “I had hoped to do it with a better breakfast.”He led them across the valley to the foot of the southern cliff, where the civilians crouched in their frozen huddle. Behind the last of them, the rock was seamed with a crack no wider than a hand. Mo Chen laid his palm against it, and the crack breathed out a long, cool, ancient sigh, and a stair appeared.It
Chapter 37: The Price of a Name
The net let them go at dawn.Lin Fan came back to himself on his knees in the frozen grass, with the taste of iron in his mouth and a grey light creeping over the cliffs. The pale glow that had filled the valley was thinning like breath on a window. Around him, the others were stirring. Jiang Chen sat hugging his knees with his face in his arms. Yan Shuo lay on his back, staring at the sky, and did not seem to see it.Bai Lu was already crawling toward him.“I’m here,” she said hoarsely. “I’m here. Say something.”“I’m here,” said Lin Fan.He was. But he was not alone.Something had arrived behind his eyes, the moment he spoke the truth on that mountain. It had been waiting there a long time, he understood, folded up small, behind a door that only opened from the inside. Now it lay in his mind, whole and heavy and perfectly clear, like a stone dropped through water.He closed his eyes, and let it unroll.He stood at the mouth of a broad, grey valley, in a wind that smelled of rain.Be
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