Day 8 of 30.
Madam Luo came to the Hall at dawn with her towel over her shoulder and a face like a monsoon sky.
"Four streets," she said. "Four streets of my neighbours ran out of their houses in their underwear. The tea shop lost every cup it owns. Old Chen's cat is still on the temple roof and refuses to come down, and Old Chen is sitting under the temple refusing to go home without it, and his wife is sitting at home refusing to cook until he comes back."
Lin Yan stood up and bowed with his bandaged arm held against his chest. "It was my fault, Madam Luo. I asked the wrong question. I'll pay for the cups."
"And my furnace is still alive," she said, as if he had not spoken. "And my dragons are still breathing. And nobody died." She sniffed hard. "You'll do it properly today. You'll finish the job. I'll pay one hundred now and two hundred when the water is hot and my neighbours are dry and that cat is down."
She slapped a purse on the table and left without waiting for an answer.
"She likes you," said Bao. "I swear she does, I've seen her like four people and one of them was a kiln, I'd put six stones on it!"
"She threw a purse at me."
"She put a purse. Near you. Fast. That's liking, for Madam Luo."
---
This time they did it properly.
He sat on the boiler room floor with the old maps from Lin Xiao's archive spread out round him, Threefive on top of them like a paperweight and Old Qian and Mei on either side, and Bao behind, breathing on his neck until Mei moved him. He had spent half the night lying awake thinking about questions, and he had written them on the back of his good hand in Mei's ink so that he could not skip one even if he wanted to, and by morning the ink had smudged and he could still read most of it.
"Threefive. Here is everything. One: the feed pipe is copper, as thick as my wrist, forty years old. Two: the east relief line connects to the district channel under the red bridge, and it must stay open. Three: the furnace is a Yingweida diner model with pre-war runes. Four: the cracked valve is replaced. Five: we have one spare valve, two metres of new pipe, Mei's copper ink and Qian's nails. Six: Madam Luo needs hot water in all nine pools by evening. Seven: the relief line cannot be closed, for any reason." He took a breath and checked his hand. "Give me two options. For each, what could go wrong, and how do we see it early?"
Threefive glowed. "Certainly. Option one. Keep the relief line open and add a second feed from the old tea shop cistern, which is full after last night. Heat rises slowly. Risk: the cistern's pipe is older than the others. Watch for rust colour in the first water; if you see it, stop. Option two. Keep the relief line open and wrap the furnace's feed coil with Master Qian's heat rune, the one from the bowls. Risk: the old furnace runes may object to a new rune touching them. Watch for flicker; if they flicker, stop. Excuse me. Has anyone eaten?"
"Option two," said Qian. "Tea shop pipe's rotten."
"You're sure?"
"I laid it. Nineteen years ago. Drunk. It's rotten. I'm surprised it's lasted this long, it was rotten the day I laid it."
"Then we test option two on a piece of pipe that isn't connected to anything," said Lin Yan, and pointed at the spare two metres lying against the wall. "Bao wraps that. We hold it by the furnace and watch the old runes. If they flicker, we know, and we haven't broken anything."
Mei looked up from the maps, and Qian looked at him the way he had looked at the first bowl that worked, the same narrow, unwilling look.
"Hm," he said.
They tested it. Bao wrapped the spare pipe in copper stencil and Qian's rune, talking the whole time, and Mei checked every stroke and found two that were wrong and said so in the tone of a woman finding a hair in her soup, and Bao fixed them, still talking. They held the pipe up to the furnace's front plate, all four of them leaning in, and the old Forge runes stayed steady. Then they glowed a little brighter, as if the furnace had leaned in too.
"It likes it," Bao whispered.
"Furnaces don't like things. Shut up."
"It likes it."
They wrapped the real feed coil at noon. At the fourth bell hot water poured out of all nine dragons at once, hot enough to make the old men in the pools gasp and then laugh and then complain that it was too hot. Out in the lanes the neighbours were dry, the drain covers had been found and put back, one of them on the wrong drain, and Little Hu had got Old Chen's cat down off the temple roof by climbing up with a fish, and was now being worshipped by Old Chen as a living god. Madam Luo came down the stairs and laid her hand on the old furnace's warm iron side and patted it like a horse that had won.
Then she counted two hundred spirit stones into Lin Yan's palm, one at a time, slowly, so that he would remember every one.
"Next time, ask about the pipes first."
"Yes, Madam Luo."
---
That evening a cheap Sol crew figure that Bao had rented for three copper fixed the Hall's leaking gutter. It saw the drip, climbed up, sealed it, climbed down, and bowed to nobody in particular, and the whole thing took about as long as it takes to say so.
Old Qian had been meaning to fix that gutter for six months.
"Thirty years I've been fixing gutters in this quarter, and a rented wind-up does it before I've found my hammer."
"It copied your joint, Qian Ye," said Mei. "The one on the west gutter. I saw it look."
"Of course it did. It's a good joint."
"So it's your gutter," said Lin Yan.
Qian glared at him over his bowl until the soup stopped steaming. Then he grunted and ate his soup, and was only slightly unbearable for the rest of the night, which for Old Qian was close to sweetness.
After dinner a neighbour brought him a household spirit in a cracked clay jar, holding it in both hands like an egg. Qian sealed the crack with copper, set the jar on the table, and waited, and everyone waited with him, and after a while the spirit woke slowly and looked around and told Grandmother Hu that she had burned the rice again yesterday, and Grandmother Hu burst into tears and hugged the jar to her chest and said it was the first sensible thing anyone had said to her all week.
"What if the crack had been worse?" said Lin Yan, afterward, when she had gone.
"Jar breaks, you pour the same lineage into a new one. It cooks as well. It's as polite." Qian cleaned his needle on his sleeve. "It doesn't remember she burns the rice. You can tell it. It'll know the story. It won't be the one that was there." He looked over. "Why are you looking at your tablet like that?"
Lin Yan had not known he was. Threefive's light, on the table, had gone very still, and stayed that way until he put his hand over it.
---
The next seven days went by fast, in bowls and repairs and, at night, the Returning Nail.
The Nine Dragons Bathhouse sent three more customers, all of them old men with complaints. The tea shop sent its broken kettle, wrapped in a towel, with a note that said please don't boil the street. A carpenter sent a job on a heating rune in his workshop floor, and Lin Yan asked about the pipes first, and there were no pipes, and he asked about the floor, and the floor turned out to be the problem. Overhead the skyboard kept its countdown to Ma Yilong's promise, and every evening it shrank by a day, and every evening Auntie Wang raised her prices on the Wu book.
And every night he stood on the iron drain cover in the yard with both heels together and his left palm raised and waited for three pulses, again and again, until his heels were bruised purple and the burned arm itched under its bandage so badly that he had to sit on his hand. Lin Xiao came out to count on the fourth night, with a blanket round her, and stayed.
"Six weights, Ge. I said six, not seven. You've been out here four hours. Qian says your channels are dry riverbeds. Pull seven and you find the bottom."
"Dry riverbeds is correct," said Qian, from under the eaves, with his pipe. "Four years on your back. Nothing's moved in you since the coma. There's no meridian to open, idiot boy. There's a ditch where one used to be. You'd get a trickle if you were lucky. You're lucky, so you'll get a trickle."
"Thank you," said Lin Yan.
"It wasn't a compliment."
Mei spent three evenings at the table with a roll of pale paper and her finest brush. She had asked to see the burned arm, and Lin Yan sat still for her, which was harder than it sounded, while she traced every scar on it and copied them onto the paper in ink with her tongue between her teeth. It looked, as Bao said, leaning over, like a map of a river delta, or a tree, or a very bad accident. Then Mei took a brush with red ink and drew the road a qi channel would take if it went along the scar's own lines.
"There," she said. "If it goes anywhere, it goes there. It's a bad road. It's the only one you have."
He pinned it on the wall beside the drain cover, and looked at it every night, and once, half asleep, talked to it.
Threefive, on the windowsill, asked questions, and they were the stupidest questions he had ever heard, and he answered every one of them. When the third pulse arrives, is it warm like a cup or warm like a nose? Is it closer to your thumb or your elbow? Does it arrive, or does it leave? Excuse me, I have lost count of my own questions; may I begin again? He wrote the answers down, and four days of them made a column, and somewhere around the third day the column began to have a shape, the way the current affairs register always had, in the fourth month.
On the seventh night he stood on the drain cover with his heels together and his palm raised. The burned arm had got a little stronger. His timing had got a little better. The moon was over the canal, and somebody two houses down was frying something with too much garlic, and he was hungry, and he caught the third pulse anyway.
The soft pull went into his left arm as always. But this time, where it always stopped at the elbow, it kept going. It was warm like a cup, not like a nose. It slid past the elbow along the ink road Mei had drawn, up across his collarbone and down through his chest, like a thread drawn through cloth, and came to rest below his navel, and it sat there, small and bright, a single coal in a stove that had been cold for four years.
He was afraid that if he breathed, it would go out, so for a while he did not.
"Qian Ye," he said, quietly. "Something's moved."
"Where?"
Lin Yan put two fingers below his navel.
Qian took the pipe out of his mouth. He got up off his stool, which he did for nobody, crossed the yard, took Lin Yan's wrist in a hand like a root and pressed two fingers into it, and stood there with his eyes half shut, scowling at the canal as if the canal had personally lied to him.
"Hm," he said, and let go. "Qi Gathering. First layer. One meridian, and that one's a disgrace, it follows a scar like a goat on a hill path." He put the pipe back in his mouth. "It's the smallest realm there is. Don't get proud."
In Mukherjee Nagar, when a boy's name came on the merit list, the whole PG came out on the balcony and banged steel plates with spoons, and the noise went up and down the lane until the uncles came out to shout. He could almost hear it now. He had been a failure for twenty-six years in one life and asleep for four in another, and tonight, for the first time in either, he had a cultivation base, the smallest there was, following a scar like a goat.
Bao was hopping on the spot. Mei was looking at the scar map on the wall, not at him. Lin Xiao had put both hands over her mouth and the blanket had fallen off her shoulders and she had not noticed. He found he was grinning and could not stop.
"Stop grinning," said Qian.
"I can't."
"Then do it quietly. Some of us are trying to have a pipe."
He sat back down on his stool. After a little while, without looking at anyone, he said, to the canal, "Fifty years I've been saying it can't be done in a man with dry channels. Drunk or sober." He drew on the pipe, which had gone out. "Keep it to yourselves that I was wrong."