Chapter 8: The Second Lock

On the fifteenth, Shen Ao came to collect the bowl.

Collecting it was the clerk's duty, and he did it with a tray and a cloth and his eyes down.

Cen Yu sat on the edge of his cot in the Hall's wing and held out his left arm.

Shen Ao cut the vein, caught a full bowl, and bound the cut with a clean strip.

"The cup," he said, without looking up. "I need you to know the Elder told me it was Pale Fever. I swear it on my mother."

Cen Yu looked at the top of his head.

He had known that head since they were seven, when Shen Ao taught him to count to a hundred on a tea-field fence.

"I believe you," he said.

It was a lie, and he found he could say it as easily as the Hall said everything.

Shen Ao's shoulders eased, and he picked up the tray.

The bowl on it was dark and quiet, with a small red dot of paint on its rim.

Cen Yu watched him go, and then he went looking for Pei Ruo.

She was in the Insect House with a wooden pestle and a bowl of dried husks, grinding powder for the Pill Room.

"Tonight," she said, without a greeting. "After the second bell. The first lock is mine. I grind in the outer chamber every day."

"And the second?"

"The second belongs to the Elder."

They went down after the bell with one candle between them.

The Pill Room lay at the end of the lowest corridor, behind a plain door with an iron lock.

She opened it with a key from her sleeve.

Inside was a long cold chamber with a stone floor and shelves that rose to the ceiling.

Along one wall ran a rack of narrow ledges, and on the ledges sat bowls with tags.

Cen Yu counted six with a red dot on the rim.

"Those are yours," Pei Ruo said. "Every bowl the clerk has drawn from you this season. The clerk has been setting them aside."

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