Chapter 9: His Turn

Pingan said his name for an hour.

He tried it soft, and loud, and teasing, and he tried every bad joke he knew.

He wrote on the back of the ghost's hand and kissed it.

Zhuoran sat on the bed with the needle across his knees and did not answer.

Just before the first grey light, he stood up, stepped over the sill and went out of the loft window onto the roof.

Pingan said a word his master would not have liked.

Then he climbed out after him.

He was a priest who had walked three hundred miles on bad roads, but he was also a man who was afraid of heights.

He crawled up the slope of the tiles on his stomach, holding on with both hands, until he reached the ridge.

Zhuoran sat astride it, with the river lying silver below him and the whole sleeping ferry spread out in the dark.

The wind lifted his ash-grey hair.

"Go back inside," he said, without turning. "You'll fall."

"I'm not letting go of this roof for anything."

"Then that's a problem."

"Yes." Pingan edged nearer. "I'd like to be wherever you are, if that's all right."

Silence.

"I think it's coming from me," Zhuoran said at last.

"What is?"

"The dead. All of them."

"I have dragged you into every fight for four years, and every one of them found me. Wherever we go, they come. I thought it was bad luck."

He turned his head. "It isn't luck. I'm the lamp, and they're the moths."

"You think I didn't notice?"

Zhuoran blinked.

"Four years," said Pingan. "Every fight. I can count. I'm not stupid."

"Then why are you still here?"

"Because you're the best part of my day."

Zhuoran stared at him.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got. Everything else I've got is hunger and a bad knee and a lot of yellow paper."

"Pingan..."

"I don't care what's coming from you. I care what you do with it."

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