Chapter 12: The Lid

The seam in the floor was a trapdoor, and it opened on a breath of cold air.

Duan Linxiao leaned out of the bed in his shirt and lifted the wooden panel himself, with his teeth set.

He would not let Shi Wen help.

Beneath it a stair of black stone went down into a pale silver light.

Shi Wen sat on the edge of the bed in the Lord's spare robe and looked down.

The Lord had told him not to, and he had never been good at that kind of order.

The light was not a lamp.

It moved slowly, rising and falling on a long even beat.

The air smelled of rain on stone.

"Do you hear it?" said the Lord.

"It's breathing," said Shi Wen.

"Yes."

Below, far down in the dark, something let out a long slow breath, and Shi Wen's skin tightened all over his body.

"The valley has no moon," said the Lord. "You will have wondered why. The book will not have said."

"It said the clouds were a curse of the sect's founders. I thought it was scenery."

"It is a lid."

The Lord set the panel gently on the bed beside him.

"A thousand years ago a moon fell on this valley," said the Lord.

"Not a stone from the sky. The spirit of a moon, which lost its light as it fell and could not find it again."

"It was starving. It drank the light out of the sky above us, and the lamps, and the people who lived here."

The Lord looked down at the stair.

"The first Lord sealed it under the floor."

"With what?" said Shi Wen.

"With a knot. In the heart of the man who carried it."

He laid two fingers on the fur at his own collar.

"The cold in my body. The cough. The lines you see under my skin."

"It is not a curse, Shi Wen. It is the knot, and the weight of what it holds."

"You're the lid," said Shi Wen.

"Every Sect Lord has been. Most died by their hundredth year. I have lasted three hundred, by being stronger than the rest and colder."

"And crueler," said Shi Wen slowly.

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