Xu Hao had learned how to enter the dark hall whenever he wished.
Unfortunately, the dark hall had not learned how to be useful.
He stood before the writing brush, or at least imagined he was standing. The place offered no sensation of feet against a floor. There were only the brush, its slender handle hanging upright, and the deck of blank cards suspended beside it.
"Come here," he told the brush.
Nothing moved.
"Please?"
Still nothing.
He tried reaching with his left hand. Then his right. He tried thinking about the brush without looking at it, as Er Bao had taught him to attend to Spirit without forcing it. When that failed, he pictured a table beneath the cards, complete with an inkstone and a lamp.
The hall declined to provide furniture.
Xu Hao opened his eyes beneath the rocky ledge. One leg had gone numb.
Below, Da Bao was arguing with a cooking pot.
"It sits crooked," the older brother complained.
"Then move the stones," Er Bao said.
"I moved them. Now it sits crooked the other way."
Xu Hao rubbed his knee until the feeling returned. He had spent a week trying to touch an object that remained an arm's length away. Once he had even tried a command from a childhood story.
The brush had been unmoved by his authority.
He wasn't sure he would have obeyed himself, either.
He rose and headed down to camp. Er Bao took one look at him and put aside the cord he was mending.
"Another headache?"
"Only a small one. I'm improving at those."
"Did the cards move?"
"Not even when I insulted them."
Er Bao's mouth twitched, but he didn't laugh.
They had agreed to keep the power secret and not exhaust him with experiments. Xu Hao had accepted, then found excuses to meditate whenever the brothers were busy.
Judging by Er Bao's expression, that last part had not gone unnoticed.
* * *
The camp's greatest difficulty that afternoon was not a beast or an enemy. It was salt.
Da Bao held up their clay jar and shook it. The few grains inside made a faint scratching sound.
"Enough for today," he declared.
"If you put it all on one piece of meat," Er Bao replied, "it will be enough for one mouthful."
Da Bao looked at his brother with genuine injury. "What's the point of salt if you can't taste it?"
Xu Hao examined the meat drying over the fire. Their supply had to last until the trip to Hibiscus Town, already postponed because of him. Hunting provided food, but not jars or cord.
A man without rope around his wrists became surprisingly demanding.
"Let me cook tonight," he said.
Da Bao gave him a suspicious look. "Can you?"
"I had forty-two years to learn. I managed several meals without poisoning anybody."
"Forty-two?"
Xu Hao remembered what he looked like, and who he was speaking to.
"An expression," he said. "It means a very long time."
Er Bao raised an eyebrow but passed him the knife.
Xu Hao cut the fresh meat into thin strips instead of the enormous portions Da Bao favoured. He crushed safe leaves Er Bao identified for him, mixed them with a little rendered fat, and rubbed the mixture into the meat with the smallest pinch of salt he could manage. Then he moved the cooking rack away from the hottest coals.
Da Bao watched every step.
"The fire's over there," he pointed out.
"I've noticed."
"You're taking the food away from it."
"I'm trying to cook it rather than introduce it to a violent death."
The older brother frowned. Er Bao hid a smile behind his cup.
The first piece took longer than Da Bao liked. When Xu Hao offered it to him, the meat was tender beneath its browned edge and fragrant with herbs.
Da Bao chewed. Then he took another piece.
"More salt would help," he announced.
Xu Hao held out the almost-empty jar.
Da Bao considered his handful of meat, looked into the jar and shook his head.
"It's good as it is."
For once, that was praise enough.
* * *
They were cleaning up when Da Bao made the suggestion that occupied Xu Hao for the rest of the day.
"If those cards can give people things," he said, licking a little fat from his thumb, "draw us some salt."
"You want me to draw salt?"
"A mountain of it."
"Wouldn't a mountain be difficult to carry?"
"Then a small mountain. And meat."
"Why not a palace, while we're at it? With servants to cook your dinner?"
Da Bao brightened. "Can you do that?"
"No, Brother Da Bao. I cannot even move the brush."
Er Bao laughed. Da Bao returned to the drying rack, apparently disappointed that nobody had found a sensible solution to their shortage.
Xu Hao carried the pot to the stream. He scrubbed it with sand, rinsed it, and sat for a while holding the damp rim between his fingers.
Draw salt.
The stories described recording abilities, not producing cooking supplies. It was a foolish suggestion.
Yet the brush bothered him for a different reason.
He'd spent days trying to grab it, command it, or sense an element that might wake it. He had never once considered doing what a brush was made to do.
As a professor, he had copied countless inscriptions and diagrams. When pottery was too fragile to move, he drew it. A good drawing was not decoration. It forced a person to look.
He put the pot down.
At the edge of the stream, he found a flat piece of bark and a twig blackened by the fire. He drew a flame, borrowing the shape from a picture he'd once seen in a textbook: a curling tongue of fire rising above a darker base.
The drawing resembled fire. That was all he could say for it. He knew what flames looked like and what they did to dry wood. He did not know what it meant to be born with a fire element, how Spirit moved through the body, or how to produce even the smallest spark without flint.
Still, it was something to try.
He sat beneath the ledge with the piece of bark on his knee and closed his eyes.
The hall arrived as it always did. Brush. Cards. Darkness.
Xu Hao pictured his drawing as clearly as he could, down to the little smudge he'd left near the bottom. He imagined the brush tracing the same line across a blank card.
Nothing happened.
He imagined a real fire instead: the orange light, the crack of resin in burning wood, the heat on his cheeks when he leaned too close to the campfire.
The brush remained still.
He opened his eyes with an ache behind them and a taste of bitterness in his mouth.
"So much for that," he muttered.
He turned the bark over and tried drawing a stone.
* * *
By the time Er Bao found him, the bark was covered with sketches: a stone, a leaf, the little clay salt jar, a stick figure carrying what might have been a sword. None had changed anything in the hall.
"You promised to rest," Er Bao said.
"I promised not to exhaust myself. There is a distinction."
"Your hands are shaking."
Xu Hao looked down. The charcoal twig trembled slightly between his fingers. He put it aside before the giant could ask him to.
"I thought if I drew something, the brush might understand."
Er Bao picked up the bark. He examined the little drawings without comment until he reached the figure with the sword.
"Is that me?"
"It was intended to be."
"I see. And why is my head square?"
"Artistic limitations."
Er Bao handed it back. "Come eat."
"I'm not hungry."
"Then come sit with us."
Xu Hao rubbed his face. The irritation had been rising all afternoon, and Er Bao had chosen the wrong moment to be gentle.
"I can enter the hall. I can see everything in it. I should be able to do more than stare at my own power."
"Perhaps."
"Perhaps?"
"I don't know what your power needs. Neither do you."
Xu Hao stood so abruptly that the bark slid from his knee. "Then how am I supposed to find out?"
The question came out louder than he intended.
Er Bao didn't answer immediately. He bent and picked up the bark before the damp earth could smear the drawings.
"Father once told Da Bao to watch a pot of water while he was away," he said at last.
Xu Hao stared at him. "This is not about a cooking pot."
"Da Bao thought he could make the water boil faster by raising an earth wall around the fire. He trapped the heat, cracked the pot and dropped half the wall into the stew."
From camp came Da Bao's voice. "The pot was badly made!"
"Father made him prepare another meal for everyone," Er Bao continued.
Xu Hao couldn't help it. He laughed, briefly.
"Is this supposed to teach me patience?"
"Mostly that knowing how to do something doesn't mean every problem needs more of it."
Er Bao handed him the bark. "You've tried all day. Put it away for tonight. Tomorrow you may notice something you couldn't see while you were angry."
Xu Hao looked at the sketches. There were dozens of places he could improve them. There were still no answers.
"I shouldn't have shouted," he said.
"No," Er Bao agreed. "You shouldn't."
After a moment, he added, "Come sit with us anyway."
* * *
Xu Hao kept his promise that evening.
He ate, washed his hands, and lay on his back outside the shelter while Da Bao settled in for the night. Above the pines, stars appeared in unfamiliar arrangements. He'd been searching them for something he recognised since the first evening in the forest. Nothing had changed. There was no Orion, no familiar scattering of lights he could point out to a student.
Er Bao sat near the fire, sharpening a knife with slow strokes.
Xu Hao thought of his apartment. There would be books piled beside the sofa, two mugs on the desk because he kept forgetting to take the first one to the kitchen, and a message from his mother asking whether he intended to come for dinner that weekend.
Perhaps his father would have called. Perhaps nobody had noticed yet that he was gone.
He tried not to follow that thought.
Instead, he remembered working late on a damaged manuscript, making careful sketches of the marks around its broken seal. He'd been good at that work because he knew the objects. A tiny change in the shape of a letter could alter the meaning of a sentence. He had spent enough years examining such details that he could picture a familiar inscription with his eyes shut.
The brush in the hall was not a sword. The cards were not stones waiting to be lifted. He'd asked them to give him fire and earth because those things were useful here, because he envied the strength of the brothers, because he was afraid.
There were things he knew better than fire.
A small sound came back to him, sudden and painfully clear: claws skittering around the corner of his kitchen, a thump against a cupboard, then the offended huff of a dog who believed the cupboard should have moved out of her way.
He smiled before he knew he was going to.
Sia.
His husky's mismatched eyes had always made strangers stop to look. One blue, one brown. She had a patch of white fur beneath her chin that looked as though someone had touched it with a paintbrush. She had never learned to enter a room quietly, and she had never once cared whether Xu Hao's research had gone well.
All she wanted was for him to come home.
He swallowed and turned onto his side. The memory hurt more than any blister Da Bao had given him. He'd avoided it since waking in the forest, afraid of imagining her waiting behind a door he might never open again.
But he could remember the shape of her ears. The weight of her head against his knee. The small scar hidden beneath the fur on one front paw.
He could draw her without a photograph. He'd done it before, years ago, absent-mindedly, on the back of a shopping list.
Xu Hao lay very still.
A brush. A blank card.
He had been trying to draw fire because fire was something he needed.
What if the brush was waiting for something he actually knew?