Chapter 7: The Bleeding Day

The vessel who came for him was a woman of twenty, with a shaved head and silver on her hands.

She ran up the Hall's back stair at midnight and hammered on his cell door until it opened.

"It's Gao Tie," she said. "He fought his. He's turning silver."

Cen Yu was out of bed before he knew he had moved.

He ran down through the dark with his left lung catching every third breath, and she ran in front of him.

The Long Shed stood at the bottom of the Hall's land, where the ground never dried.

It was a single long room with twenty cots, and twelve of them were empty.

The other seven vessels had pulled their beds into a ring.

In the middle lay Gao Tie, on his back, with his huge arms flung wide.

His skin had gone the color of a coin.

Silver flakes came off it onto the straw each time he breathed.

"Silver Moth," a woman in the ring said. "He took it at dusk. He walked the courtyard until he dropped. They told him to."

"They always tell us to," said another. "Brothers say it's the only way."

A Medicine Brother stood at the door with a key on a cord.

He was the Shed's warden, a heavy young man who spent his nights doing nothing.

He put up an arm as Cen Yu came in.

"Kept Vessels don't come down here after dark," he said.

Cen Yu looked at the arm, and then at the white-grey sash round his own waist, which was the same as the warden's.

"I'm a brother," he said, and the warden's arm came down slowly.

He knelt in the straw and took Gao Tie's wrist.

It was hot and dry, and the pulse under his thumb was a thread.

Cen Yu knew this silver.

Two years ago it had taken his sense of smell.

It had lived in him for one night and a morning, and he had eaten it dead, and it had left him with this cure.

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