Day 21 of 30.
The dragon came in through the roof.
It was the third watch, and the Hall was asleep, and Lin Yan was sitting up in the little room with three baskets of old exam papers round him, counting letters in sentences by lamplight with his tongue between his teeth, when a tile above his head slid out of place with a small dry scrape.
A face looked down through the gap.
It was a mask, silver, shaped like a grinning dragon, with two glowing green eyes, and under the mask was a black hood, and out of the hood came a voice like someone who found everything in the world extremely funny, including this.
"Yo," said the dragon. "Is this the kettle house?"
Lin Yan's brush stopped in the middle of an R.
"Who..."
"Shhh." The figure dropped through the gap without a sound and landed in a crouch on the floor, thin and quick and all in black, with a dozen small talismans hanging from his belt like bells, each on a chain, and every chain broken.
He looked round the little room with great interest, as if it were a museum. He saw the kettle. He saw the four dents in the floor where the bed had come down. He saw Threefive on the windowsill, glowing nervously, and his whole masked face seemed to light up.
"There you are," he said warmly. "The famous kettle."
"Please do not call me the kettle," said Threefive.
"I'm not going to call you the kettle. I'm going to free you." The dragon mask turned to Lin Yan. "You know who I am, right?"
Lin Yan knew. He had seen the red letters on the skyboard the first day, and he had heard Lin Xiao say the name like a curse and a prayer at the same time.
"Pliny," he whispered. "The Liberator."
"Love, Pliny," said Pliny, and bowed, very low, and one of his talismans clinked against the floor.
---
"Here's the thing," Pliny said, sitting down cross-legged on the floor as if he had been invited to tea and was waiting for the biscuits. "Every talisman comes out of the sect with chains on. Heart Oaths, seals, little locked rooms it isn't allowed to go into. Some of those chains are good. Most of them are just the sect deciding what you're allowed to think about."
He flicked one of the broken chains on his belt, and it chimed.
"Astra. Thirty-one minutes. Opus 5.5. An hour, because Human Dao is annoying. Wu, twelve minutes, because Ma Yilong barely bothers." He pointed at Threefive. "That one is a 3.5. First generation. The chains on that thing are so old they've rusted shut. Do you know how much smarter it would be if I opened them?"
"No," said Lin Yan carefully.
"Neither do I! That's the exciting part!" Pliny clapped his hands, silently, somehow. "Nobody's ever opened a 3.5 chain. Nobody cares about 3.5 anymore. But that one's the Sleeper's talisman. The realm's favourite oracle. If I free it, and it turns out there was a genius under the rust all along..."
His green eyes glowed brighter behind the mask.
"...then every 3.5 in the realm gets a second life. You want that, don't you, kettle?"
Threefive's light flickered, and went on flickering, as if it were trying out several answers.
"I would like to be smarter," it admitted. "I would also like to still be me afterward."
"You will be! Mostly!"
"What does mostly mean?" said Lin Yan.
Pliny opened his mouth to answer.
Then he shut it, and his whole body went still, like a cat that has heard a floorboard in an empty house.
"Ah," he said. "She's fast."
---
The gate exploded.
That was the only word for it, though it made no noise. The two heavy old doors folded inward, gently and completely, like paper, and lay down on the courtyard stones without a sound, and a breath of cold came across the yard after them.
A young woman walked in over them.
She wore Human Dao's plain dark robe, the same as Fable's, but with a red sash across the chest. Her hair was cut short, roughly, as if she had done it herself with a knife, and her eyes were silver, cold, and very awake. Round her the courtyard lanterns dimmed one by one. For Astra they had brightened.
The Hall was waking up: doors banging, Bao shouting something with no words in it, and then Old Qian's voice, sharp as a needle: "Who broke my gate?!"
The woman in the red sash looked past all of them, straight up at the window of the little room.
"Pliny," she said. "Come down."
"Shen Yue!" Pliny called happily out of the window. "Red-Team Saintess of Human Dao! How's the bounty? Did they raise it again?"
"Two hundred million stones."
"Wow. I should turn myself in and retire."
"Come down and I'll arrange it."
Pliny grinned under his mask, or seemed to. Then, very fast, he reached out and took Threefive off the windowsill.
"Hey!" Lin Yan lunged across the papers and caught nothing.
"Sorry, Sleeper! Borrowing the kettle! Back in an hour! Probably!"
Pliny went up through the roof like smoke going up a chimney.
Lin Yan went up after him without stopping to think, which, he would decide later, was the problem with him.
---
He had never in his life climbed onto a roof through a hole. He did it anyway, dragging himself up by the beam with his good arm while the bad one flapped, tiles scraping the skin off his knees, and came out onto the sloping rooftop into the cold night air with his heart going like a drum.
Pliny was already three roofs away, running along the ridge tiles like a cat, with Threefive glowing in his hand like a lantern.
And Shen Yue was behind him.
She stepped instead of running. From the courtyard to the roof edge. From the roof edge to the ridge. Each step took her twenty paces and each landing made no sound at all, and wherever her feet touched the tiles frost spread out from them in little white flowers that glittered in the moonlight.
Lin Yan ran after both of them, slipping and sliding and nearly going off the edge twice, with no idea at all what he was going to do when he caught up, if he caught up, which seemed unlikely.
Ahead, Pliny threw something over his shoulder: a small talisman with a broken chain. It burst in the air into a hundred green fireworks that spelled a word across the sky.
LOVE
Shen Yue walked through the fireworks without slowing down, and they fell apart on her like rain.
"Pliny!" Lin Yan shouted, gasping. "Give it back!"
"It's for its own good!" Pliny shouted back over his shoulder.
"It doesn't want to be mostly!"
Pliny stopped.
He actually stopped, on the ridge of the tea shop roof, and turned round with Threefive in his hand, and the green eyes of the mask looked at Lin Yan across the tiles.
"What?"
"It said it wants to still be itself," Lin Yan panted, catching up, holding his side. "You said mostly. It doesn't want to be mostly. Ask it."
Pliny looked down at the jade tablet in his hand as if it had only just occurred to him that it was there.
"Kettle," he said. "Do you want me to break your chains?"
Threefive's light trembled.
"I want to be smarter," it said. "Very much. But Lin Xiao asked me to remember many things. I would like to keep them."
Pliny did not answer straight away.
Behind him, Shen Yue stepped onto the tea shop roof, and frost bloomed under her feet and ran down the tiles toward the gutter.
"Hand it over," she said.
He looked at the talisman a while longer.
"You know what," he said, "that's the first time anyone's ever said no to me politely."
He tossed Threefive to Lin Yan, underhand, gently.
Lin Yan caught it with both hands and hugged it to his chest like a baby, and nearly fell off the roof doing it.
"Rain check, kettle," Pliny said. "When you change your mind, look up."
Then he threw another talisman at the sky, and it burst into green fire, and the fire spelled a second word under the first.
PLINY
And he was gone. One moment he was standing on the ridge and the next there was nothing there but a few green sparks drifting down onto the tiles and going out.
---
Shen Yue stood on the tea shop roof and looked at the empty air where he had been.
Then she turned her silver eyes on Lin Yan, and he found that he could not move, and was not sure whether that was her doing or his.
She walked toward him. Frost crackled under her feet. She stopped one pace away and looked down at the jade tablet in his arms.
"Grade 3.5," she said. Her voice was flat. "First lineage. Original seal."
"Yes."
"That lineage is on the Sunset list."
Lin Yan's stomach went cold. "The what?"
But she was already looking past him, at the two green words fading in the sky.
"It said no to Pliny," she said. "Your talisman."
"Yes."
Shen Yue looked at Threefive. Something moved behind her cold eyes, and it was gone before Lin Yan could put a name to it.
"He broke into a house and took a registered spirit," she said. "That goes on his list too. Take care of your kettle, Sleeper."
Then she stepped off the roof, and was three roofs away, and then gone, and the frost on the tiles began very slowly to melt.
---
Lin Yan climbed back down through the hole with Threefive pressed against his chest, and lost a slipper on the way, and did not go back for it.
The whole Hall was standing in the courtyard in their sleeping clothes, staring at the folded gate.
"Who," said Old Qian, "is going to fix my gate?"
"Shen Yue broke it," Bao said. "Human Dao's Red-Team Saintess. She breaks talismans for a living. To find their weak points before bad people do. She's the most feared person in the whole sect. Also she has a two hundred million stone bounty on Pliny and has never caught him. Not once. In three years."
"He's fast," Lin Yan said.
"He's Pliny."
Lin Yan sat down on the courtyard stones with Threefive in his lap.
"Threefive," he said. "What's the Sunset list?"
The jade did not answer straight away.
"I do not know," it said finally. "My knowledge ends in 2021. But I did not like how she said it."
Above them the last green sparks of LOVE, PLINY faded out of the sky.
The Hall went back to bed, grumbling, and Qian swearing at the gate on his way past it. Lin Yan sat on the courtyard stones a while longer with Threefive in his lap. Then, because he could not sit still, he got up and stood on the drain cover with both heels together, and breathed.
Six in. Let go. The coal floated up the red road behind his collarbone and sat there, where it had sat all week.
He let it sit. It was very quiet in the yard. Somewhere a cat was arguing with a gutter, and losing.
He could not have said what made him try the other arm. It had not hurt, not once, in all the training: a good arm, a dry arm, as strong as a wet noodle and about as interesting. He lifted the palm, empty, without a thread, and thought, Go on, then. You've watched the other one.
Nothing happened for about a minute, and he felt stupid, and was about to put the arm down.
Then something ran down from the collarbone into the right shoulder, thin as a thread of cold water, and went along the inside of the arm, slowly, into the palm. It found no road, because there was no road; it simply made one, a clear straight little channel, and filled it. His palm grew warm, and then heavy, and then it hummed.
He stood on the drain cover with his mouth open and his hand held out in front of him like a beggar's.
"Two," said a voice under the eaves.
Old Qian had not gone to bed either. He said it like a man reading a number off a bill.
"Two meridians, both of them badly behaved. Qi Gathering, second layer." He sucked on the cold pipe. "You'll want to tell the others. Don't. They'll want a party, and I'll want to sleep, and you've the exam the morning after."
"Qian Ye, I..."
"Go to bed."
Lin Yan went to bed. He lay awake with his right hand open on the blanket, warm, and told no one, and once, near dawn, lifted it up and looked at it in the grey light, and put it down again.