Day 15 of 30.
The whole Lantern Quarter woke up early to watch the sky, the way people in Delhi used to get up early for a cricket final and then pretend they had not.
Auntie Wang had set up her betting table in the middle of the lane before sunrise. The book on Wu 4.8 had grown so big she needed two assistants, one to write and one to argue, and half the lane had money on "on time" and the other half had money on "late," and Old Liu had put money on both and could no longer remember which side he was supposed to be cheering for, so he cheered whenever anybody else did.
Lin Xiao sat on the step outside their door with her knees pulled up and her chin on her knees. She had been awake all night, and she had the look of it, and she had refused to eat breakfast on the grounds that she might be sick.
"It will be late," Lin Yan said, sitting down next to her.
"You said the numbers were pretty sure."
"They're very pretty sure."
"Ge. That's sixty stones."
"I know, Xiao, I know, I can count to sixty."
"If it's on time, I'll kill you."
"That's fair."
The morning went by, slowly, and then noon went by, even more slowly. Every eye in the city kept drifting up to the tower where Ma Yilong's silver ship still stood on the roof of the X Pavilion with the pigeons on it, as if the ship might do something. Somebody started a rumour that it had moved. It had not moved.
At the fourth bell, Ma Yilong posted.
The message spread across half the sky in white letters, casual, as if he had written it with his feet up.
Wu 4.8 needs a few more days to cook.
The Lantern Quarter went completely silent, all of it, the whole lane holding the same breath.
Then Lin Xiao screamed.
She screamed so loudly that both of Auntie Wang's assistants dropped the betting book. She jumped up and grabbed Lin Yan by both shoulders and shook him until his teeth knocked together, and then she was laughing, and then she was hugging him, hard, with her face in his collar, and then she let go and ran off down the lane shouting "SIXTY STONES! THREE TO ONE! SIXTY STONES!" at people who already knew.
Auntie Wang gave back her sixty, and then counted out one hundred and eighty more on top, one stone at a time, with a face like a woman at her own husband's funeral who had not liked the husband but had liked the money.
Up on the skyboard the posts had changed colour again.
Prophecy three had already come true on the ninth day, when Valley Song's Oracle apologised for telling a noodle seller to thicken his broth with river clay, and nobody had paid much attention to that, because the Oracle apologised for something most weeks and the clay story was not even the strangest that month. Everybody was paying attention now.
PROPHECY ONE FULFILLED.
THE SLEEPER DID IT AGAIN.
THREE OUT OF THREE.
HOW DOES HE KNOW?
The duel had been meant to run for fourteen days. The Masked Poet ended it on the eleventh, an hour after Ma Yilong's post.
> @maskedpoet · 17:03
>
> the machines have not grieved. no door opened in the east.
> the old kings are still standing.
> the sleeper sees clocks.
> i see weather.
> the duel is his. well played.
The whole realm went wild over the reply. Wen's Feed ran a picture of the two of them side by side, the Masked Poet in silver and Lin Yan in the same old bed picture, with THE CLOCK AND THE WEATHER in red across the middle.
Lin Yan read the Masked Poet's post twice, and found, to his own surprise, that he liked the man, or whoever was under the mask, for losing like that, in public, in five lines.
"It was the base rate," he said to Threefive.
"Naturally," said Threefive. "Nobody else believes that. I do. Excuse me, have you had anything to drink since noon?"
That evening Old Qian found Lin Xiao counting her stones on the Hall steps, for the third time, in piles of ten.
"You bet everything you had," he said, "on an eleven-line table."
"It won."
"It won this time." Qian lit his pipe, and it took him three tries. "Next time, bet half. The table was good. This old man has seen good tables lie."
Lin Xiao turned the purse over and over in her hands. Then she nodded, once, and did not look at him, and put half the stones back in the purse and the other half in her sleeve.
---
With his share of nothing and Lin Xiao's fierce insistence, Lin Yan walked back to Free Scripture Alley that afternoon with sixty copper in his pocket and the tungsten cube, which he had started carrying everywhere for reasons he could not explain to anyone, least of all himself.
The clearance stall was still there, and so was the little iron cage, pushed further back now behind a basket of broken lamps.
Inside it the two small stars were circling each other slowly.
"I am a disgrace," the spirit was whispering. "I am a disgrace to my sect. I am a..."
It stopped. It had seen him.
"You came back," said Twin Star Seven.
"I said I would." Lin Yan put fifty copper on the stall owner's table.
The stall owner looked at the money, then at Lin Yan, then at the cage, then at the money again, as if one of them might change. "You're really buying the crying one?"
"I'm buying the one that fixed three bugs out of four."
The stall owner shrugged and opened the cage. The two little stars floated out and hovered in front of Lin Yan's face, spinning uncertainly, bumping into each other once.
"What do I do now?" Twin Star Seven asked.
"You come to the Hall," Lin Yan said. "There's a boy there called Bao. He writes the worst code in the Lantern Quarter. He needs someone to check it. Badly. Every day. Possibly every hour."
The stars stopped spinning. Then they started again, faster, and brighter.
"I can check code," Twin Star Seven said, and its voice was a little louder than it had been in the cage. "I can check code very well."
"Distinction level?"
"Distinction level."
---
When Lin Yan got back to the Hall there was a clean young man in a blue blazer and a red tie standing in the courtyard with a small scroll held out in both hands, and he had clearly been standing there since the noon bell, because the cat had fallen asleep on his foot.
"Good afternoon!" said Claudius. "I am delivering your invoice personally, as promised, wearing this blazer."
Bao was lying on the ground laughing so hard he had stopped making any sound.
Lin Yan took the scroll. It said: ONE TUNGSTEN CUBE. 4 COPPER. DISCOUNT APPLIED: 100%.
"Brother Claudius," he said. "This says I owe you nothing."
"You asked very nicely," Claudius explained.
Lin Yan paid him four copper anyway. Claudius looked at the coins in his palm with enormous surprise, as if they had fallen from the sky, bowed deeply, gently moved the cat off his foot, and walked out of the gate saying, "Nobody has ever paid me before. This is a very special day. I will tell everyone."
---
At dinner there was a guest.
He was a man of about forty in a patched brown robe, with a kind round face and ink stains on his fingers, and he had a basket of sesame cakes on his arm that smelled so good Bao stood up without meaning to.
"Brother Du," Auntie Aru said warmly, taking the basket from him before Bao could. "Everyone, this is Brother Du. He teaches the lane children their numbers for free. He brings cakes every few weeks."
"Every few weeks when my students' mothers pay me in cakes," Brother Du said, smiling. "In bad months I bring nothing and eat yours."
He sat down next to Lin Yan and ate soup, slowly, blowing on every spoonful. He asked Bao about his chair and listened to the whole answer, which took most of a bowl and involved the toilet twice. He asked Mei about her stencils and knew the right words for things, and she answered him properly, which Lin Yan had not seen her do for anyone. He asked Old Qian about his nails, and made Qian talk for half an incense stick without stopping, which Lin Yan had never seen anyone manage, and Qian looked faintly annoyed with himself afterward.
He asked Lin Yan about everything except prophecies.
Lin Yan found himself relaxing, his shoulders coming down from round his ears for the first time in days, and he did not notice it happening until it had.
After dinner, while the others were washing bowls and arguing about who had washed them last time, Brother Du leaned back against the wall beside him with his hands folded on his stomach.
"You've had a strange month," he said.
"Very strange."
Brother Du smiled at the courtyard. Then he said, quietly, so that only Lin Yan could hear it:
"Your posts are hallucinations, aren't they?"
Lin Yan's whole body went stiff, from his neck down to his bruised heels.
"I tutored exam students for fifteen years," Brother Du went on, gently, still looking at the courtyard. "I know the face of a man who guessed an answer and got it right. It's the same face as a man who got it wrong. Very scared, very lucky."
Lin Yan opened his mouth to deny it. He had the denial ready; he had been carrying it round for days.
Instead something in his chest simply let go, like a knot that had been pulled on for too long.
"Yes," he said, and his voice cracked in the middle. "Yes. It's all fake. The Wu one was the base rate. The reset was the base rate. The Riddle was a ghost story. I don't know anything. I'm just reading the question."
"Well, of course it is," said Brother Du. "Nine in ten of my students say that, the first night, and eight of them pass. It's all right."
Lin Yan put his face in his good hand and kept it there.
For fifteen days he had been a prophet. Everyone in the realm looked at him and saw someone who knew the future, and even Lin Xiao, sometimes, when she thought he was not watching, looked at him that way, and it frightened him more than the bounty did.
This man looked at him and saw an exam student who had guessed.
It was the kindest thing anyone had done for him in this world, and he could not have explained to anyone why.
"Thank you," he whispered, into his hand.
"Keep reading the question," Brother Du said. "It's a better skill than prophecy. It lasts longer."
He stood up and brushed the crumbs off his robe, and took one more sesame cake from the basket, and wrapped it in his sleeve for later.
At the gate he turned back, as if remembering something small that he had nearly forgotten to mention.
"Oh. By the way. Tomorrow, the Oracle's new Flash branch will be delayed by one day. When it comes out the day after, the cheapest version will sell out by noon." He smiled. "Just a guess."