Chương 3Chapter 3: The Man Who Fell With the Rain

Chapter 3: The Man Who Fell With the Rain

It rained the day Shen Mu fell out of heaven, which he would always maintain was not his fault.

Falling was fine. Falling he could do; every shepherd knew how to fall — you spread your robe, you ride the wind down like a leaf on a river, you step off the last cloudbank onto the mortal earth with the grace of three hundred years of practice.

What nobody had told him was that a shepherd without a writ fell wrong. The moment he crossed the boundary of the mortal sky, heaven took its hands off him. His wind-riding stuttered. His robe, robbed of celestial qi, became a wet blanket with ambitions. The last four hundred paces were not a descent but an argument with gravity, which he lost, comprehensively, into a rice paddy at the foot of Azure Peak.

He came up out of the paddy mud the way a particularly undignified god might — soaked, sputtering, with a frog on his head — and found a sword pointed at his throat.

“Name,” said the owner of the sword.

She was standing on the paddy’s edge in patrol-grey robes, hair tied back, boots muddy to the ankle, and even covered in the evidence of the sect’s least-loved duty she had the unmistakable straight-backed stillness of someone who had been the best at something, recently, in front of everyone.

Shen Mu knew her face the way you know a name you’ve written in a ledger. It is one thing to forge a girl’s tribulation from six thousand li up. It is another to kneel in her mud with her sword at your throat and discover that she is young, and that her eyes are red-rimmed in a way that has nothing to do with the rain.

“Ah,” he said. “You’re her.”

The sword did not move. “I am the outer patrol of Azure Peak Sect. You fell out of the sky into Sect Master Wei’s—” she stopped. Corrected herself, flatly. “Into the sect’s fields. State your name and your business, or be detained.”

“Shen Mu,” he said, deciding — with the instincts of a man who had survived three centuries of bureaucracy — that the truth, deployed selectively, was the only weapon he had left. “Traveler. Cloud-reader. I read the weather for farmers. And my business, Miss Wei, is you.”

“That,” she said, “is the worst opening line I have ever heard at swordpoint, and I patrol a border with a bandit road on it.”

“It isn’t a line. In six days, a storm is coming for you. Not for the sect. For you, by name. It’s black, it’s wrong, it’s roughly the size of a province, and when your elders see it they will do the sensible thing and point the sect’s lightning-formation at it, and the formation will do what lightning-formations do — it will call it. And it will come down on this mountain with your name in its mouth.”

The sword stayed exactly where it was. But something in her face — something professional, the part of her that had read every tribulation scroll ever copied — flickered.

“Who sent you?” she said. “Which elder is testing me?”

“Nobody sent me. I sent myself, which for the record was a terrible decision and I regret approximately half of it.” Rain ran off his nose. The frog departed, unimpressed. “Miss Wei. Your tribulation.”

Her face went very still.

“Your tribulation did not fail,” Shen Mu said. “Tribulations do not fail. Heaven does not look at a girl who trained six years and go, eh, drizzle. Something happened to your storm before it ever reached you. It was replaced. I don’t know by whom—” lie, lie, the frog knows it’s a lie— “but I know when, and I know the storm that was meant for you is still out there, and it has been drinking demon qi in the Wastes for four days, and it is coming home.”

“Prove it,” she said.

It was not I don’t believe you. It was prove it — a swordswoman’s demand, clean as a cut — and Shen Mu felt the whole rotten shape of his plan tilt on its axis. He had expected to beg. He had rehearsed begging. He had not expected to be auditioned.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Patrol weather. The rain will stop at the second quarter of the hour of the horse. Not gradually — all at once, like a tap closing. There will be wind from the west for the count of two hundred, then dead calm, then your mountain will have exactly nine minutes of sun at the hour of the goat, which will be enough to steam the mist off the eastern steps and no more, and then cloud again by dusk. The sect’s weather-reader will have told you drizzle until evening. He is a nice man. He is wrong.”

“Anyone can guess weather.”

“That wasn’t a guess,” Shen Mu said. “That was a schedule. I used to write them.” He held her gaze, rain and all. “Meet me here tomorrow at the hour of the goat, in the nine minutes of sun. If I’m wrong, cut off whatever you like. If I’m right — Miss Wei, you are out of people who know what’s happening to you, and I am, as of this moment, the entire list.”

She looked at him for a long time. Then the sword lowered — not sheathed; lowered, the way you lower a tool you haven’t finished deciding about.

“The hour of the goat,” she said. “If there is no sun, cloud-reader, I will be extremely annoyed, and I express annoyance professionally.”

She turned and walked back up the terraced path, straight-backed, patrol-grey, through the rain that was scheduled to stop at the second quarter of the hour of the horse.

It stopped at the second quarter of the hour of the horse.

The sun came at the hour of the goat and lasted nine minutes, and she was waiting in it, in the steaming mist on the eastern steps, with two cups and a pot of tea she had clearly brought as an act of war.

“You knew the hour my tribulation fizzled,” she said, pouring. It was not a question, and it was not small talk. Her hand was steady and her eyes were not. “Down to the verse of the sutra. You said the storm was replaced, and you know when it was replaced, and you know it was replaced with — what? What did heaven send me, Shen Mu? What fell on my face in front of seven hundred people?”

He took the cup. He thought about the whole truth, which was a cliff, and about the part of the truth she needed, which was a bridge.

“A drizzle,” he said. “A spare. Grade one, the kind we send to water a dry valley. Somebody tagged it with your name and wrote it into the Storm Ledger as your tribulation, and heaven accepted the filing. That’s why there’s no seal. A drizzle can’t stamp one. It’s not that heaven refused you, Miss Wei. Heaven never got the chance. You were answered by a clerk’s forgery.”

The tea steamed between them. Nine minutes of sun. She watched the mist come off the steps like something being unveiled.

“Who?” she said.

“That,” Shen Mu said, “is the half I don’t know.” Lie. Forgive me, it’s the only coin I have left, and I’m spending it on keeping you alive. “What I know is storms. And yours is six days out and getting stronger every day it drinks, and it cannot be fought — not by you, not by your Patriarch, not by a lightning-formation. Storms that size aren’t fought, Miss Wei.”

“What are they?”

“Herded,” he said. “And before you ask — yes. That’s a real profession. It’s my profession. And I have six days to teach it to the only person alive the storm will listen to.”

“And if I’d already decided not to listen to you?”

“Then I’d be telling the frog.” Shen Mu drank his tea. “He seemed judgmental, but fair.”

The sun went out like a lamp being pinched, nine minutes to the second, and the cloud closed over Azure Peak, and somewhere very far to the south — too far to hear, except that she heard it, except that they both heard it, a sound with no source and no distance to it, rolling once across the roof of the world —

thunder.

Qinglan set down her cup.

“Teach me,” she said.