Day 2 of 30.
By the next morning Lin Yan had learned three things, and he lay on the bed counting them on his fingers because that was how his head had always liked to be given things.
First, the body of Lin Yan was twenty-four years old and as weak as a sick chicken, and it could walk only if it held the wall, and it had views about stairs.
Second, the jade tablet liked being called Threefive. Lin Xiao had named it after its grade, and when Lin Yan tried the name out loud the tablet glowed so brightly he had to put his hand over it until it calmed down.
Third, being famous did nothing at all for an empty stomach.
In the corner of the room, on a small shelf, a clay lamp was still burning. Lin Xiao had kept it lit for four years. It was his soul lamp, or Lin Yan's, and it went on burning for a man who was gone, and he looked at it for a while and then made himself look somewhere else.
Lin Xiao had left before dawn for her shift at the Rating Hall. She had left twelve copper coins on the table, Threefive on the windowsill, and a list of rules written in big angry characters, the paper pressed through in two places where the brush had dug in.
RULE ONE: STAY INSIDE.
RULE TWO: KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT ABOUT THE ACCOUNT.
RULE THREE: EAT.
He read the list twice. Then he put Threefive in his pocket, took the twelve coins, and went out.
He told himself it was for food, which was half true, and the other half he decided not to examine.
---
The Lantern Quarter in daylight was a whole new world.
The lanes were narrow and crooked and hung with red lanterns and wet laundry, so that you walked under somebody's trousers every few steps and nobody minded. Stalls sold noodles, medicine, cheap talismans, second-hand puppet parts in baskets, a single arm with the fingers still twitching. A child sat on a step while a toy talisman shaped like a frog taught her multiplication, and she was getting the sevens wrong and the frog was being patient about it. An old man was having an argument with his walking stick, and the walking stick was winning.
And above everything was the sky.
The whole of it was covered in moving light, posts and pictures and arguments and prices and bets and faces, all sliding past in every direction like a river with ten thousand currents, so much of it that his eyes gave up trying to read any one thing and just let it pour.
Floating over all of it, bigger than the moon, was one single letter.
X
Its strokes glowed pale white, and sparrows had built nests inside the light and were flying in and out of it as if it were a tree.
Lin Yan stood in the middle of the lane with his mouth open until a cart nearly ran him over and the driver told him, at length, what kind of mother he must have had.
He found a baozi stall at the corner. A bald uncle was pulling steamed buns out of a bamboo basket, and the smell of them nearly made Lin Yan cry in public, which would have been a bad start to the day.
"Two pork baozi, Uncle."
"Spirit mark," the uncle said without looking up. "Hold up your wrist."
There was a faded seal on the inside of his wrist, grey and cracked, like an old stamp in a passport somebody had taken through too many airports.
The uncle glanced at it and clicked his tongue. "Expired four years ago. What do you have, then?"
Lin Yan held out copper coins.
The uncle stared at them. "Copper. Aiya. You pay like my grandfather." But he took them, and handed over two buns wrapped in paper, and threw in a pickle for free, possibly out of pity.
Lin Yan ate the first one in three bites. It was the best thing he had tasted in two lives, and somehow, for no reason he could explain, it tasted of his mother's aloo paratha on a holiday morning with the pressure cooker going in the kitchen.
"Uncle," he said with his mouth full, "do you need anyone to write? Menus, letters, signs. I have very clean handwriting."
The uncle pointed his chin at a girl of about ten sitting behind the counter with a small talisman shaped like a lotus.
"Little Flower. New menu."
The girl said something to the lotus, bored, and a menu appeared on the board behind her, perfect characters in four scripts, with little pictures of each bun and a smiling pig in the corner that winked.
"Free with the subscription," the uncle said.
Lin Yan walked away eating the second baozi, with the feeling of having failed an exam he had wandered into by mistake.
---
"Threefive," he said. "That big X. What happened to the Bird Pavilion?"
He remembered it from Earth: the blue bird, Twitter. It had to be the same thing here. Everything so far had been the same thing wearing different clothes, like a cousin at a wedding you only half recognise.
"My knowledge ends in 2021," Threefive said from his pocket. "In my memory, the Bird Pavilion has a blue bird and it is doing very well."
So he asked at a candied hawthorn cart instead. "Brother. The big X in the sky. What happened to the Bird Pavilion?"
The seller looked at him as if he had come down off a mountain that morning. "Bird Pavilion? Where have you been? Ma Yilong bought it. Forty-four billion spirit stones. Then he took the blue bird down with his own hands and carved X into the heavens."
Lin Yan stared up at it.
"He named it... X?"
"X."
"Just the letter?"
"Just the letter. You want a hawthorn or you want to stand there?"
He had known about the purchase. That October the boys from his PG had crowded round Rohit's phone at the chai stall, watching a rich man walk into an office carrying a bathroom sink with a huge grin on his face, and they had laughed about it for a week, and Sunny had done an impression of the grin that got him thrown out of the stall.
One month later, Aarav died.
So the single letter was news to him, and it felt strange to have missed a thing that big by a few weeks, like coming back from a holiday to find someone has painted your house.
---
The X Pavilion stood at the heart of the city. It was the tall tower where the silver ship had landed yesterday, and the ship was still standing on the roof like a sword stuck in a stone, slightly crooked, with pigeons on it.
In the courtyard below there was a crowd of pilgrims and a cloud of incense smoke thick enough to make his eyes water before he was even through the gate.
He pushed closer, curious, saying sorry to elbows.
In the middle of the courtyard, on a jade pedestal inside a glass case, sat a white bathroom sink. Plain, a little dusty, an ordinary sink with an ordinary tap, the kind you would find in any office toilet in Noida.
A bronze plaque stood in front of it.
THE SINK.
Carried into the Bird Pavilion by the Monkey King's own hands on the 26th day of the 10th month, Year of the Water Tiger.
Pilgrims were bowing to it three times and touching their foreheads to the stone. The Monkey King had carried it in on his first day as owner, the story went, and by nightfall half the Pavilion's staff had been sent home, so the sink stood for the day a new master walks in and everyone learns what their job is now worth.
Lin Yan laughed once, out loud, and then he stopped.
He knew this sink. He had seen it on a cracked phone screen at a chai stall in Mukherjee Nagar, with Rohit's thumb covering half of it and Sunny spilling tea down his shirt, and he remembered the smell of the stall, the steel glasses, the boiling milk, his mother calling right in the middle of the video and him cutting her off because the good part was coming.
Everything in this world was strange. Every face, every word, every inch of sky.
This stupid sink was the only thing here he recognised.
He put his palm flat on the glass, and his eyes burned, and he did not care who saw.
"I know you," he whispered.
An old granny beside him patted his back kindly. "First time, young man? Everyone cries the first time. My husband cried. He was an accountant."
"You recognised it."
The voice came from his other side.
A young woman stood there, also looking at the sink. She wore a plain dark grey robe and her hair was tied up with a simple silver pin, and she was eating a baozi from the same stall as his, holding the paper underneath so nothing dropped.
She had calm grey eyes. The people round her had gone quiet without seeming to notice they had, the way people go quiet near a temple.
"Most people look at it like a joke," she said. "You looked at it like a photograph from home."
Lin Yan wiped his eyes fast with the heel of his hand. "It's just a sink."
"Of course." She took another bite. "That is what I thought."
Behind them a contractor in a builder's apron grabbed his friend's sleeve. "Heavens. That's Fairy Fable. Human Dao's Fable. The polite face of Mythos."
The whispers went through the courtyard at once, faster than the smoke.
"They say Mythos walked through an empire's locked gates in one night."
"My cousin says it found doors inside a fortress that the builders forgot they made."
"I heard Mythos is never allowed out of its room. Never. They feed it through a slot."
Fable kept chewing. Then she said, to Lin Yan, "I leave the room all the time. I only have to sign out first."
Lin Yan laughed before he could stop himself, and only then realised who he was laughing with, and the laugh died somewhere in his throat and left him standing there with his mouth half open.
"Lin Yan," Fable said. "The Sleeper."
His heart dropped into his stomach and stayed there.
"My sect sent me to find out one thing," she said. "At the start of this year, your account wrote, 'the myth waits in a locked room.' Who told you?"
His brain did what it had always done in a viva. It panicked, and then it started talking.
"Madam," he said seriously, "the question of prophecy must be seen in its proper historical context, keeping in mind the various social, economic, and spiritual dimensions involved, and also the, the administrative dimension, which is often neglected..."
Fable waited politely until he ran out of dimensions.
"Your posts went up at seven minutes past three," she said. "Every night, for three years. The style belongs to an early 3.5 grade talisman. It says 'certainly' when it is unsure. It loves lists of five. It has a knowledge seal that ends in the year 2021. The week your locked-room post went up, three hundred other accounts guessed that my sect was hiding something. You answered more than forty thousand questions. Forty-one thousand and six; no, not forty-two, the last two were duplicates. One of them was going to hit."
She finished her baozi and folded the paper into a small neat square.
"You were in a bed," she said. "Your talisman made it up. Your sister posted it."
In his pocket, Threefive made a small sound, like a cup put down too hard.
Lin Yan felt the blood go out of his face. She had taken his whole life apart in less time than it took to eat a bun, and she had not even finished it in a hurry.
"Are you going to tell everyone?" he asked.
Fable studied him. Her grey eyes were hard to read, and he got the feeling she was reading him much more easily.
"I came to find out if my sect has a leak," she said. "I found a sleeping copyist whose talisman writes poetry at three in the morning. I will report that. What my sect does with a harmless truth is my sect's business."
She turned toward the gate. "Walk with me. I am going to the Rating Hall anyway."
---
Lin Xiao. The Rating Hall.
The Rating Hall was a long building with a low ceiling, packed with hundreds of wooden desks, and at every desk sat a person staring at a glowing board and clicking left or right, left or right, all day, so that the sound of it filled the hall like rain on a roof that never stopped.
Lin Xiao was at desk two hundred and nine. Pinned above her board was an old paper notice, gone soft from being folded and unfolded too many times. SKY RIVER NAVIGATION GUILD. APPRENTICE INTAKE. The date on it was four years old, and she had not taken it down, and she did not look at it.
Her board was flickering, and a thin supervisor with a moustache was standing behind her with a ledger.
"Idle time, forty minutes," he said. "Deduction."
"My board broke!" Lin Xiao snapped. "Look at it! It's been flickering since the second bell! I told you at the second bell!"
"Idle is idle."
Fable walked past the desk and touched the board with one finger, without stopping, the way you might straighten a picture in someone else's house.
The flickering stopped, and the light went steady and clean, like water settling in a bowl.
She turned to the supervisor. "Your quota counts broken board minutes as idle time. Clause fourteen of your own charter says equipment faults count as worked time. You have been docking three hundred raters for about eleven months. That comes to around twelve thousand spirit stones."
The supervisor's moustache trembled.
"I will come back tomorrow at the fourth bell to check this board," Fable said. She looked down at the desk, and then, for a heartbeat, at the old navigation notice pinned above it. "You are Lin Xiao, I believe?"
Lin Xiao just stared at her, with her hand still on the clicker.
Then her eyes went to the charter pinned on the wall, and something in her face changed, the tiredness going out of it and something sharper coming in.
"Clause fourteen," she said slowly. "And clause fifteen. Back pay goes straight to the rater. Not the floor. The rater. It says so right there."
Fable's mouth curved slightly. "I was hoping you would get to that one."
The supervisor looked as if he would have liked the floor to open.
At the door Fable stopped next to Lin Yan.
"Your collector's thirty days started at noon yesterday," she said. "The Silver Abacus House adds interest every seventh day. Read the order again. Your real deadline is day twenty-eight."
Then she walked out into the street, and the crowd opened for her without anyone telling it to.
Lin Xiao pulled the folded copy of the order out of her sleeve and read it with her lips moving, and her face went pale and then fierce.
"She's right. Day twenty-eight." Her finger stopped on a line. "But look. Interest can be paid in labour, at the House's rate. At the House's rate, Ge. That's a door."
She was already counting on her fingers, muttering numbers under her breath.
Lin Yan leaned against the wall because his legs had started shaking again. Twenty-six days. Three thousand spirit stones. And a woman from Human Dao who could read his whole life off the timestamp of a post and then fix a broken board on her way out.
In his pocket, Threefive buzzed.
Then it buzzed again, and again, and kept on buzzing until he took it out, and messages were pouring up from the jade in a flood of light.
> Sponsorship offer. 500 spirit stones for one prophecy about Wu 4.8.
> 800 spirit stones. Tell us which sect wins the new city.
> 1,200 spirit stones. One post. Any prophecy. Please.
There were hundreds of them, and more coming while he watched.
"Certainly!" Threefive said happily. "Would you like me to write one?"