I remembered him saying it. I’ll come and visit. He’d said it to the girl whose body this was, on my first morning, with one hand on the door frame. I had known then that he wouldn’t. Six weeks later, here he was on the gallery of the Central Lineage, smiling down at me with both dimples, in the evening, while Ling Xiao was out.

People don’t keep promises like that. They keep appointments.

“Jiang Liu,” I said. “You’ve grown.”

He hadn’t. He laughed anyway, as if I’d been charming. “Inner-courtyard food. Can I come in? Or no, it’s a fine evening. Walk with me. I’ve been sitting in the stands all day and my legs have gone to sleep.”

“How did you get in? There’s a barrier.”

“My shifu brought me up for the competition. To get to know people.” He looked past me into Lin Xiao’s rooms, at the screen, the good lamp, the one bed with the bolster down the middle, and back at me, and his smile didn’t move. “He says it’s important, knowing people.”

“It is,” I said.

There were two cups on the table and the end of a pot of tea. On the chest by the window my cauldron sat under a cloth, still warm. I’d been about to start the evening’s batch. The sensible thing was to say I was busy, shut the door and let him go back to whoever had sent him.

But somebody had sent him. Somebody had got a Heaven Peak boy through the Central Lineage barrier and up to this door at the one hour in the day when the Da Shixiong had been called away by the elders. I wanted to know who. If it was Tang YunQi, I wanted to see her face when I turned up. If it wasn’t, I wanted to know that more.

And I wasn’t, I told myself, in any danger. Whatever was waiting at the end of the walk, I could be gone from in front of it between one breath and the next, into a meadow nobody in this world could follow me into. I had a cup of lake water in my bag. I had Lin Xiao’s jade at my waist, which the Grand Master himself had looked at. Whoever lays a finger on you answers to me.

“Let me leave a note,” I said. “My shixiong worries.”

Jiang Liu’s eyes went to the jade, and away. “Of course.”

I wrote it standing at the table, on the back of a page from my practice sheets, in the characters I’d spent three weeks teaching to stand up. Walking with Jiang Liu (Heaven Peak). He came to visit. Back soon. X. I read it over. Every stroke was one he’d be able to read. Three weeks ago he’d have had to guess at half of them and teased me for every guess. I weighted it under his teacup and went out.

The Central Lineage at dusk was quieter than I’d ever seen it. The bouts started at dawn. Anyone fighting tomorrow had gone to bed early; anyone who wasn’t had gone to drink with someone who was. We passed two courtyards without seeing a soul. Lamps were lit in the windows along the galleries. The paving gave back the day’s heat through the soles of my shoes.

Jiang Liu talked. He talked about Heaven Peak and its springs, about his shifu, who was a high-level mage on an elder’s line, about the pill he was working on, a level two he’d already distilled twice. He asked about my health and the leg. He’d heard. He asked whether it was true I’d been taken in by Kong Wen, how I found it, whether it was hard, being on Capital Peak, where nobody had much. He was sympathetic. He was easy to listen to. Once he took my elbow to steer me round a puddle that wasn’t there.

He didn’t ask about the village. I’d been ready for that, with my aunt’s family and the peach trees and my mother dead at seven, all of it borrowed from what he’d spread on the road. I’d expected him to test me. He didn’t seem to need to.

The paths narrowed. The galleries gave way to stone steps and the steps to a track of beaten earth between old trees. The lamps stopped. On my left the mountain dropped away into dark blue air. On my right the forest came down to the path’s edge, black and thick and smelling of moss and cold stone. Somewhere in it a bird said one note over and over, like a dripping tap.

I stopped walking.

He went on four or five paces before he noticed. Then he turned, fast. For the space of a breath I saw his face before he’d put anything on it. He was frightened. Not of me. Of losing me. He let out a breath when he saw me standing there. The smile came back as if he’d fetched it from a pocket.

“XiaoMo? Come on. It’s not much further.”

“Where are we going?”

“I want to show you something.”

“At the back of the mountain.” I looked up the track, into the trees. “In the dark. Disciples aren’t allowed back there, Jiang Liu. Even I know that, and I’ve hardly been out of my room.”

He bit his lip. I watched him bite it. It was a good bite, thin lower lip caught white under the teeth, the eyes going wide and wet. Then his whole face crumpled and he was crying, standing on the path with his fists at his sides, crying like a child sent home from school.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s Tang-shijie. She told me to bring you. She found out we came up together, and ever since she’s been… she brings her friends to my room, she says if I tell my shifu she’ll… I didn’t want to, XiaoMo. You were kind to me. You’re the only one from the village who was ever kind to me.”

The original had been arrogant and frightened; as far as I knew, she’d never been kind to anybody. But I let that pass. I watched the tears. They were real tears; they ran. In the dispensary, every so often, a patient would come to the counter who needed something stronger and knew exactly how much they needed to hurt to get it. They always had real tears. What gave them away was never the crying, but how quickly it stopped when you said yes.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s what we’ll do. Go back to Tang-shijie and tell her I’ll meet her. Here, at this fork, as soon as she likes. I’ll explain myself to her, and whatever she does after that, she’ll have done it to me and not to you.”

His eyes came up, wet and shining. “You’d do that?”

“I’ll wait right here.”

He thanked me three times. He took my hand in both of his and pressed it. Then he went back down the track at a half run, towards the lamps. At the bend, where the trees closed over, he lifted his sleeve to his face and wiped it once, from brow to chin, the single firm stroke of an actor wiping off paint. He didn’t sniff. He didn’t look back. Then the trees had him.

I stood at the fork with my hand still warm from his.

Not Tang YunQi, then. Or not only her. A boy whom Tang YunQi really had been tormenting would have cried all the way home. And Tang YunQi didn’t need to send anyone to the back of the mountain to make my life unpleasant; she’d been doing it in public for a month. Somebody else wanted me alone, in the dark, a long way from the Da Shixiong’s rooms, and had wanted it badly enough to buy a Heaven Peak boy to fetch me.

The sensible thing was to go back. I knew that. I had the thought clearly, standing there in the bird’s dripping note: Go back, leave a second note, let him handle it. Then I had the other thought. Whoever came up that track to find me would have a face. I would see it, and after that I’d know. Knowing was worth a fright. The pocket was a breath away. I’d never yet needed more than a breath.

I put my hand on the jade and waited.

I didn’t hear anything. I thought about it afterwards, and I was sure of it. No step, no breath, no crack of a twig. There was only the bird, and then a pressure at the back of my neck like two cold fingers laid there, precisely. Then nothing at all.

I came to falling.

Not far. I hit hard, on my backside, on something flat and cold enough to burn, and the jolt went up my spine into my teeth. Light stabbed into my eyes. I shut them. The light went red through the lids, and I sat there on whatever it was with my hands spread flat on it, breathing, until I could open them again.

White. Everything was white. For a moment I thought I’d gone blind the other way. Then the white had edges. The edges were shapes, and the shapes were everywhere: a woman with her hair blowing back from her face, a crane on one leg, a tree with every leaf distinct, a horse rearing, a scholar with a scroll half unrolled, a little bridge over nothing. All ice. All carved, if they were carved, to the last fold of a sleeve. They stood in ranks and crowds and clusters as far as I could see, under a roof lost in its own white glow. The hall was so large that the Hall of Mages could have been set down in it three times over and left room to walk round. There was no lamp anywhere. No sky. The ice itself gave off a soft light, the colour of milk in a glass.

It was cold. Not the cold of a winter morning, which gets into the bones; a clean, dry, bearable cold that sat on the skin and stayed there.

A man stood over me.

He was in black from head to foot, wrapped close the way a thief would wrap, with a cloth over his hair and another over his face. All I could see of him was his eyes. They were dark and still, set in a fan of fine lines, and looking at me as I might have looked at a pill I’d already decided to throw away.

Then they went to my waist, to the jade, and stayed there a moment.

“Elder,” I said. My voice came out hoarse. I tried again. “Elder, I don’t know you. I don’t think I’ve done anything to you. Why have you brought me here?”

He didn’t answer the question. “Stay where you are,” he said. His voice was flat, without any accent I could catch. “If you run, I’ll take your legs off at the knee. You won’t need them.”

Then he turned and went away across the ice, between the sculptures, quick and soundless, and was gone.

I sat where he’d left me and counted my own pulse. I didn’t mean to; my fingers went to my wrist on their own and found it. I let them. A hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty-four. I’d had patients come in at that rate with a story about the stairs.

Who?

Not Tang YunQi. Tang YunQi would have wanted to watch. And he had called me nothing at all, not You XiaoMo, not Capital Peak trash, not little shimei; he hadn’t cared enough about me to insult me. He’d looked at the jade. Whatever I was to him, I was something to do with Lin Xiao.

Take your legs off at the knee. You won’t need them. You say that to someone who won’t be needing anything much.

The pocket was a breath away. I put my hand flat on my breastbone, over the place where the teardrop lay, and felt for it. It was there, the familiar give, the meadow and the lake waiting just behind a thought. I could go. Now. He’d come back to an empty floor.

And then what?

I’d vanish out of a sealed place in front of a man who could carry a girl through a forest without a sound. He’d know I had something. He’d know it as surely as I would have in his place: a girl doesn’t disappear out of an ice cave unless she has a door to disappear through. And people who can set traps like this one go looking for doors. Then there was the other thing: I couldn’t see out. Once I was in, I’d have no way of knowing whether he was standing over the spot I’d left, waiting, with his knife out. I could come out in an hour to find him gone, or I could come out into his hands.

I took my hand off my breastbone. Last resort. I got up.

My backside hurt. I rubbed it and went, as quietly as I could in cloth shoes on ice, back the way I thought he’d come. The sculptures watched me pass. Close to, they were more beautiful still, and stranger; there were no tool marks on any of them, no chisel bite, nothing. A peony the size of my two fists together had every vein in every petal. A child of perhaps six held up a bird to the light, and the bird’s open beak had a tongue in it.

There was an opening at the end, an arch in the rock. Beyond it a short passage going down into dark. I could feel the air moving there, warmer, smelling of earth and wet leaves. The way out. I walked up to it, put my foot out across the threshold and went rigid from toe to scalp. A hard, buzzing shock, like closing your hand on a wire fence, went up my leg into my teeth. I snatched the foot back and stood there with my eyes watering.

A barrier.

I’d met barriers. Ling Xiao put them up as easily as he poured tea. But I knew from the books, and from Zhao-shishu, what it cost an ordinary cultivator to make one that held: a man with a hundred years’ work behind him. Not a disciple. Not a hired thug. An elder.

I thought about the eyes in their fan of lines. I thought about a quiet man standing under our eaves for an hour, trying to hear through a barrier he couldn’t break. I thought about who had drawn the lots at dawn every day this week, and who had told Tang Fan, in front of the whole arena, that he’d seen nothing unusual.

Somewhere down the passage, footsteps.

They were coming fast. I didn’t wait. I ran, back up the ice, and put myself behind the first big sculpture I came to, a woman twice my height on a pedestal of ice waves with her arms raised over her head. Her robe swept down behind her almost to the floor. I flattened myself against the back of it, between the hem and the pedestal, and made myself small. The cold went straight through my robe into my spine.

It was him. He came through the arch at a run, checked, and stood looking at the place where he’d left me.

I couldn’t see his face, but I saw his hands open and close. He swore, a short ugly word in a dialect I didn’t know. He took one step towards the sculptures, and then his head went up, like a dog’s, towards the passage behind him.

I heard it a moment after he did. Wind. Far off, then not far off, a long rising sound like a gale coming down a valley, though nothing moved in the cave and nothing had moved in the forest. He heard it and ran, not towards me but back to the arch, and flattened himself against the rock beside it with a long sword in his hand that hadn’t been there a moment before.

The wind came down the passage and into the cave. He swung at it as it came, a stroke that would have cut a man in half, and his blade hit the ice floor with a crack like a bell and left not a scratch on it.

The wind stopped. Where it had been, in the middle of the floor, with his white sleeves still settling round him and not a hair out of place, stood Ling Xiao.

I put my hand over my mouth.

“You’re not Lin Xiao,” said the man in black.

He didn’t say it as an accusation. He said it as a fact he’d been carrying about for weeks and was glad to put down.

“No?” said Ling Xiao pleasantly. He looked about the cave as he’d looked about the Spring Pavilion, as if he might buy the place if the price was right. “And how would you know?”

“Lin Xiao has never in his life had to be clever. He’s never had to set a trap or smell one out. He’s never stood up a second time to watch a fight he didn’t want to be in. And he’s never in his life looked at a girl.” The flat voice had an edge in it now, an old one, kept down a long time. “You walk like him. You smile like him. You’re not him.”

“Very good,” said Ling Xiao. He clapped. He actually clapped, three times, softly, the sound going away among the sculptures. “Very good indeed. And you, Elder Jiang? Shall we talk about you?”

The man in black didn’t move. But his eyes did; they narrowed, the fan of lines at their corners closing up.

“How long have you been Elder Jiang?” Ling Xiao went on, in the same pleasant voice. “I ask because the real one must have been very young when you took his face. A hundred years? Longer? You’ve been very patient. Patient men usually know better than to come out in the open for a girl.”

“She’s bait,” said Elder Jiang. “You know what she is.” And he came at Ling Xiao.

I’d seen fights all week. I’d seen Lei Ju throw a man the length of the arena. I’d never seen anything like this. He didn’t run; the air ran for him. It came off his sword in sheets, in blades, pale edges flickering across the ice like the light off a fish’s flank. Where they struck the sculptures they slid off and left no mark. He was fast and he was old and every movement had a hundred years of practice behind it. And Ling Xiao stood there and let it come.

At a yard from his chest, it stopped.

All of it. The sword, the sheets of wind, the blades of air, every one of them, simply stopped in the air a yard short of his white robe and hung there, quivering, like fish in ice. Elder Jiang leaned on the hilt with his whole weight. The sword didn’t move a finger’s width.

“Wind,” said Ling Xiao, conversationally, “can also be used like this.”

He opened his hand.

Elder Jiang went backwards off his feet, as if a door had slammed into him. And Ling Xiao was in the air after him before he’d landed, turning, one long leg sweeping round in a kick that never touched him. It didn’t need to. The air itself struck Elder Jiang in the belly and folded him in half and carried him the width of the cave into the sculptures under the far wall. He hit them with a sound like a sack thrown against a cliff. They didn’t so much as rock. He slid down between them and lay still.

Ling Xiao landed and shook out his sleeve.

“The show’s over, little sister,” he said, without turning round. “You can come out.”

I came out. My legs did it. I wasn’t sure how. He turned as I reached him and looked me over, quickly and thoroughly, as I’d have looked over someone brought in off the street: face, hands, the way I was standing, the leg. He put two fingers under my jaw and turned my face to the light, one side and then the other. Then he bent his head to the side of my neck and breathed in, once, slowly, without touching me.

“Did he put his hands on you?”

“Two fingers,” I said. “The back of the neck. He carried me. That’s all.”

His fingers stayed under my jaw a moment longer. Then they went away. “Your note,” he said, “was very legible. Your characters are coming along.”

“How did you find me? Past the note.”

“I followed your smell, of course.” He sounded surprised I’d asked. “From the fork onwards it was his smell as well. Old man and old leaves. And something under it.” He glanced across the cave, at the sculptures under the far wall. “Something I’ve smelled before.”

I followed his look. Among the sculptures at the foot of the wall, something moved.

Elder Jiang came up off the ice on his hands and knees. The cloth had gone from his face; it was his face, square and grey-bearded and bleeding from the nose, the face from the judges’ table, the face that had told Tang Fan there was nothing unusual to see. He looked at us. Then he threw back his head and screamed.

I’d seen this once before, in the street in He Ping. I’d hoped never to see it again. His skin split. Not tore; split, along lines that seemed to have been waiting there, and the black came up through it like ink through wet paper. His shoulders heaved and broadened. His arms lengthened. Under the black skin the veins stood out red and fat and twitching, and his eyes, when he lowered his head to look at us again, were black from edge to edge with a red bead of light in the middle of each. It took him five breaths. I counted.

A half demon. Like Luo Shan. In the robes of an elder of the Tian Xin Sect, judging the bouts, drawing the lots.

He was across the cave before I’d finished thinking it. I saw him start and then he was simply there, at Ling Xiao’s right side, a fist three times the size of a man’s coming round at Ling Xiao’s head.

Ling Xiao caught the wrist.

He did it without looking, as you’d catch a cup knocked off a table. Then he turned his hand over, and the bones in the black wrist broke with a sound like green sticks. The demon howled and swung the other arm. Ling Xiao put the flat of his hand to the side of its head and pushed.

The head went round too far. It stayed there.

Ling Xiao opened his hand and the body dropped on the ice at his feet, all of it at once, like a sack.

I stood very still. My hand had gone to my wrist again. I let it.

“I’m going to take his memories,” said Ling Xiao. He said it as he’d say he was going to wash his hands. He looked at me over the body. “You can shut your eyes, if you’d rather.”

I thought of all the things I’d wanted to know about him. I thought of a man who could put on another man’s face like a robe and know his whole life by morning. I had wondered, more than once, lying on my side of the bolster, how that was done.

“No,” I said. “I’ll watch.”

His eyes rested on me a moment. “You did say,” he said softly, “that you liked it when I stopped pretending.”

Then he crouched by the body and laid his left hand flat on its forehead.

A mark came up in the middle of his palm, round, faintly lit, written in characters I couldn’t read. His lips moved. And the body began, very slowly, to get smaller.

I made myself watch it as I’d watch anything I needed to understand. It wasn’t burning. It wasn’t rotting. It was going in, as a grape goes in when it dries. The black skin drew tight over the bones and wrinkled; the hollows deepened at the cheeks and temples and the backs of the hands; the whole of it sank and folded and drew down into itself as though the ground were drinking it. Dehydration, I thought, with a clear and distant part of my mind. Severe. Rapid. Total. It took perhaps the time of a slow cup of tea. At the end of it there was a black cloth and a heap of black robes on the ice under his hand, with a shape in them like a dent in a pillow, and then not even that.

He took his hand away. The mark on his palm faded.

Ling Xiao stayed crouched there a moment longer with his eyes closed. When he opened them, they were dark and bright as wet stone, and he looked straight at me.

“Frightened?”

“No,” I said.

I had both hands in front of me, the right holding the left at the wrist. I hadn’t noticed I was doing it. He looked at my hands, then back at my face. He didn’t say anything.

“What was that?” I said. “What you did.”

“That?” He stood up and dusted his knees, though there was nothing on them. “Nothing much. One of the things my true form does.”

True form. I put the words away carefully, where I kept things I’d come back to.

“He was a spy,” I said. “Like Luo Shan.”

“Like Luo Shan. He’s been in the sect a hundred and four years. There was a real Jiang once, a boy of good family who came up to the mountain to learn the sword, and before he’d learned enough of it to matter, this one had his face and his name and his room.” He moved the empty robes with his foot. Something clinked. “He’s never put a foot wrong in all that time. Never so much as looked up from his bowl. He’d have gone on not looking up for another hundred years if his masters hadn’t told him to get rid of me.”

“Why?”

“Guess.”

I hated it when he did that. I guessed anyway. “Because you killed Luo Shan.”

“Close.”

“Because killing Luo Shan in the street brought every spy in every sect under suspicion. Because they’ve been pulling them out by the dozen.”

“Closer.” He was smiling now, the real smile, the one that liked being argued with.

“I don’t know.”

“Idiot. You give up too easily.” He bent and took something from the pile of black cloth: a jade tablet on a cord, the size of my palm, carved with a name. “Luo Shan didn’t want to show what he was. Not in the middle of a street, not in front of half of He Ping. Somebody made him. And nobody can make a half demon show his face unless he can see it. So now they think the Da Shixiong of the Tian Xin Sect can see a half demon through any skin.” He weighed the tablet in his hand. “Which, as it happens, he can.”

With that stink on you. I remembered him saying it, flicking his sleeve, throwing Luo Shan five yards. I didn’t need to see anything.

“And me?” I said. “What did he want with me?”

Ling Xiao looked away.

He did it quickly, only for a moment. He rubbed the side of his nose with one knuckle, looked at the sculptures, looked back. I’d seen him do it before: the night he’d looked at the teardrop and then at the skin beside it and reached for an empty cup. He reached for nothing now. He just looked away.

“Tang YunQi was going to lure you out tonight, one way or another,” he said. “He’d heard her plotting with her friends. So he let her do his work for him. Let her send the boy, waited behind her, took you once you were alone, and meant to lay it at her door. You were more or less dragged in.”

More or less. There was a whole room behind more or less, with the door shut.

I didn’t open it. I looked at him and he looked at me. For once I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I found I wanted badly to know what the Da Shixiong would look at a wall rather than say. Not now. I’d keep it. Anything that could make Ling Xiao rub his nose was worth more than I could spend in one evening.

“They’ll look for him,” I said instead. “Tomorrow. He draws the lots at dawn.”

“They will. And they’ll find a man who left the Central Lineage this afternoon on sect business, by the west gate, an hour before you and I were seen together on the gallery.” He put the tablet away inside his robe. “I’ll see to it. You needn’t think about it.”

I thought about it anyway. But my eyes had already gone past him to the sculpture behind him, the one I’d hidden behind. From back there, flattened against the cold, I’d been too close to see it properly. From here, with the light coming through it, I could.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait. Look.”

I went round him to the tall woman with her arms raised. Her robe swept down to the floor in folds as heavy and full as real silk, and in the middle of it, at the level of my eyes, deep inside the ice, there was a shadow. I put my face close. Not a shadow. A plant. A thick fleshy stem, three leaves in a whorl, and a closed bud at the tip, the whole thing no longer than my hand, held in the ice as perfectly as a fly in amber. A herb. I’d have known it blindfold; I could feel it, a thick sweet weight of spiritual energy coming off it like heat off a stove, through what must have been a foot of solid ice.

“What is it?” I said. “Do you know it?”

He came and stood at my shoulder and looked. “Level five,” he said after a moment. “Possibly six. Somebody wanted it kept.” He frowned at the ice. “There’s something in this place that blocks a cultivator’s senses. I couldn’t feel you from outside, even once I was at the mouth of it. I couldn’t have felt that from three feet away.”

“Can we get it out?”

“Can you,” he said, and smiled.

I put my hand flat on the ice. It was cold, but not the cold of water ice; under the cold ran a dense fizzing hum, like holding my palm to the side of the Hall’s great cauldron when the fires were lit. And I understood it before I’d finished feeling it, as you can know a smell before you can name what’s making it. This wasn’t frozen water. This was spiritual energy, the same stuff I pulled out of herbs every day and distilled and pressed and packed into pills, so much of it, packed so close for so long, that it had set solid. Somebody had carved a hall full of statues out of it. Or it had grown so, as frost grows on a window, into whatever shapes it pleased.

I did what I’d have done with a herb. I reached into it with my soul force, as I reached into a herb in the cauldron to find the impurities, and drew a little.

Under my palm the ice softened. It went from hard to wet. The wet ran down over my wrist in a thin cold stream, and a hollow the size of my hand opened in the woman’s robe. A sword hadn’t scratched this. A grown man thrown against it hadn’t rocked it.

I took my hand away and stared at it. I knew that cold. I knew the hum under it. I’d drunk it by the cupful for months.

“Your lake,” I said.

“Your lake, set hard.” Ling Xiao had come up behind me to look. “Spiritual water. People who find a cupful of it loose in a spring sell it by the drop, and the buyers count themselves lucky.”

“Don’t melt them,” he said. His voice had gone thoughtful. “You’ll lose most of what’s in them. Cut them.”

“Cut them?”

“The same way you cut the impurities out of a herb. Make the soul force thin. Draw it across the base.” He touched the pedestal of ice waves with his foot. “Here. And then put the whole thing away.”

I looked at him. He looked back at me with his eyebrows up, perfectly bland. He’d watched me take thirty bundles of herbs into a pocket behind my breastbone and never asked a single question about it. He wasn’t going to start now.

I knelt at the base of the pedestal. I gathered my soul force, all of it I could feel, and drew it down and down and thin, thinner than I had ever made it, into one line no wider than a hair. I laid the line against the ice where the pedestal met the floor, and drew it through.

It went through like a hot wire through butter. A faint hiss, a curl of cold steam, and the woman with her arms raised stood free of the floor, all three yards of her, on a clean flat base, without a drop lost.

In.

She was gone. Where she’d stood there was a smooth round patch on the floor of the cave, a little paler than the rest. On the shore of my lake, I knew without looking, a woman of ice with a herb in her skirts was standing on the grass with her arms up, as if she’d just arrived and was waving.

I sat back on my heels. I couldn’t help it; I laughed. It came out high and ridiculous and went away among the sculptures. I didn’t care.

“How many,” I said, “are there?”

Ling Xiao looked round at the cave, at the ranks and crowds of white figures going back and back into the milky glow, as far as we could see. “Some thousands,” he said. “And you have, I’d say, an hour.”

“An hour?”

“Elder Jiang has to have left by the west gate this afternoon,” he said, “and the Da Shixiong has to have come back from the elders by second bell, and found his shimei’s note, and gone out to look for her, and been seen. Then the patrols go round. An hour. Perhaps a little more, if you’re quick.” He walked off a little way into the crowd of figures, hands behind his back, looking about him like a man in a market. “Besides. You don’t have more than an hour in you.”

I didn’t answer that. I went to the next one.

We worked out a way of it quickly. Ling Xiao walked ahead between the sculptures and looked into them. His eyes were better than mine; even blocked as he was, he could see a shadow inside a foot of ice where I’d have seen nothing but white. When he found a herb he stopped and said, “This one,” and I came and cut it and put it away. When he didn’t, I cut anyway, the smaller ones, as many as I could reach, because every one of them was spiritual energy set solid. Every one of them could be sold. A peony. A sleeping fox. A pair of cranes with their necks crossed. The little bridge over nothing. The child with the bird.

I counted. Of course I counted. I counted the sculptures and I counted the stalks of the herbs inside them. Thirty or so pieces in, with nine herbs I didn’t recognise, my soul force was a puddle at the bottom of a bowl and my hands had begun to shake.

I stopped. I got the cup out of my bag.

Ling Xiao turned round at the sound of the stopper. He watched me drink it, the whole cup, in four long swallows, the cold green taste of my own lake going down. He’d seen the lake. He’d sat on my stool beside it. He’d never seen me drink from it like this, as if it were nothing, as if it were water.

“You carry it about with you,” he said.

“In case of emergencies.” I put the empty cup away and wiped my mouth on my wrist. The heat was already coming, the long slow surge up from my stomach, filling the bowl to the brim and over. “This is an emergency.”

He laughed, quietly. But he didn’t say anything else. He went back to looking into the ice.

The second half went faster than the first. I’d learned how thin to make the line and where to lay it so the base came off flat. I’d stopped laughing every time a piece vanished. A tiger with its jaws open and a herb in its throat. A scholar’s desk, complete with an inkstone. A woman playing a pipa, with a red, many-petalled flower inside the pipa’s belly that made Ling Xiao stop and look at it for a long moment and say nothing. The sleeves of my robe were wet to the elbow. My knees, through the cloth, had gone past cold into nothing.

I’d cleared a long, pale lane through the crowd, a lane you could have walked a cart down, when the shake came back into my hands.

I ignored it. There was a horse ahead of me, rearing. Ling Xiao had said This one about it, and I could see the herb myself now in the ice of its chest, a feathery dark thing with a white root. I knelt by its hooves. I pulled up the last of what I had, the dregs, the bitter scrapings at the bottom of the bowl, and began to thin them out.

A hand closed round my wrist.

“No,” said Ling Xiao.

“One more.”

“No. You’ve had one more. You’ve had six more.” He didn’t take his hand away. He hadn’t pulled; he was just holding my wrist, with my hand still flat on the ice of the horse’s hoof, and I couldn’t move it. “You promised me. No fifth pass until I say you can. This is a fifth pass.”

“It’s not a pill.”

“It’s your soul. It doesn’t know the difference.”

I looked up at him. He was crouched beside me on the ice with his white sleeve trailing in a puddle of my melt-water. He wasn’t smiling.

I looked back at the cave. At the long pale lane I’d cut, and beyond it, the rest: the ranks and crowds of white, going back and back into the glow, thousands of them, untouched. Two twentieths, I thought. Perhaps less. Two lanes’ worth out of a hall that would take twenty.

“Somebody will find it,” I said. “If we leave it. Somebody will come back here and find it and take it all.”

“Nobody’s found it in a hundred years.”

“He found it.”

That stopped him. I saw it stop him. He looked at the black heap of robes far behind us by the arch, and then at me.

“He found it,” I said. “So it can be found. And if he found it, he could have told someone, they could have told someone else, and the next time anyone comes in here, it won’t be us.” My voice wasn’t steady. I didn’t care. “I don’t leave stock in an unlocked room, Ling Xiao. Not overnight. Not ever.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he did something I didn’t expect. He took my other hand as well, the one that had been holding the cup, and held both my wrists together, loosely, in one of his.

“Then you’ll come back,” he said, “when you can do it without hurting yourself. And I’ll come with you. Until then, nobody is going to find this place who hasn’t got my nose. I’ll make sure of it.” He stood up and pulled me up with him, easily, by the wrists. “Now get on my back.”

“I can walk.”

“You can’t. Try it.”

I tried it. My knees folded under me the moment he let go. He caught me round the ribs before I hit the ice, stood me up again against him, turned round and crouched.

I got on his back.

He went back down the long lane I’d cut, past the place where the woman had stood with her arms raised. By the arch he stopped to scoop the black robes and the sword off the floor and make them, with a flick of the hand, not be there any more. Then he walked straight through the barrier as though it were a bead curtain. I felt it go over me, a faint warm prickle and nothing else. We were in the passage, then under the vines, then out under the trees in the dark.

It had gone full night while we were in there. There was no moon. The forest at the back of the mountain was a solid black I could have put my hand into. He walked through it as fast as I’d have walked down a lit corridor, never putting a foot wrong, never once brushing a branch. He held me under the knees. That was all. His hands stayed under my knees the whole way and didn’t move, not an inch, not up and not anywhere else, as if he’d been told I’d break. I lay on his back with my cheek against his shoulder and felt every step of that care go into me like cold.

I could smell him, under the white robe. Pine and smoke and clean skin, as he always smelled. Nothing else. Nothing at all of what I’d watched him do.

In my head, because I couldn’t help it, I counted the stock. Ninety-one sculptures. Twenty-three stalks of herbs I couldn’t name, from level four to who knew what. A herb in a pipa he’d looked at too long. A hill of white on the shore of my lake, with a woman on top of it, waving.

He didn’t say anything about what I’d seen, all the long way down through the trees.

Neither did I.