Chapter 17: The Council

The Council sat at noon on the stone dais in the Hall courtyard, with six hundred people standing on the flagstones below.

Seven chairs stood in a curve.

Six held Seats in blue robes, the Abbot in the middle and the Gate Seat at his right hand.

The seventh chair, the Hall's, still wore a crust of snow from the Winter Ritual, and nobody had ever swept it.

Cen Yu stood at the foot of the dais with the nine vessels behind him, and he had not slept.

Two days, he thought. My mother has two days.

Dan Qiu spoke first, because the Council had put his motion on the board.

He stood in his white-grey robe and spoke for a short time, softly, and every person in the courtyard leaned in to hear him.

He said the Hall fed six hundred mouths.

He said that its vessels had signed with a thumb, freely, for pay, and that the nine in front of him had broken their word before the whole temple.

He asked the Seats to cut the Hall's share by half, and to declare the nine spent.

"Spent" was the word the Elder used for the fifty-one.

Cen Yu knew it now, and he watched the vessels hear it.

"Abbot," he said, loud enough to carry, "may I answer?"

Su Jingzhi looked at him for a long moment.

"The Council hears the Keeper of the Pill Room," he said.

Cen Yu had not planned what he would say, because he could not plan speeches.

He had one thing, and he held it up: the grey ledger, which the Abbot had put in his hands at the foot of the stair.

"I can't read this," he said. "I never could. A woman read it to me two nights ago, and she is gone, and I can't tell you where."

"Pei Ruo was taken from the Insect House yesterday by two of this man's brothers. He says she is resting."

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