Day 5 of 30.
The challenge came at breakfast.
Lin Xiao was dipping a fried dough stick into her soy milk when her bronze disc chimed on the table beside the bowl. She glanced at it, and the dough stick stopped halfway to her mouth and dripped.
"Ge."
"What now?"
She turned the disc round, and a post floated up over the table between the soy milk and the salt.
> @maskedpoet · 6:02
>
> two oracles. one sky.
> each speaks three prophecies.
> in fourteen days the realm will judge.
> sleeper, will you wake for this?
"Who is this?" Lin Yan asked.
"The Masked Poet," Lin Xiao said. "Open Heaven's voice on the skyboard. Silver mask. Nobody's seen the face. He posts, and the sect's price moves, and people write songs about the posts, bad songs."
"Nine million followers," Threefive added. "He writes very beautifully. I am slightly jealous. Only slightly."
Lin Yan chewed his dough stick slowly, taking his time, as if the post might go away if he finished eating first.
"I'll ignore it."
"You can't." Lin Xiao put her disc down flat. "Ge, listen. The account pays Zhou Dafu's interest. Every day people watch the Sleeper, the X Pavilion pays stones, and the House takes them. If you run from a prophecy duel, the whole realm will say the Sleeper is finished. The watching stops. The interest goes unpaid. Then the House adds the missing interest to the debt, every seventh day, until the twenty-eighth, and on the twenty-eighth there's nothing left of us."
"And if I accept, I have to prophesy."
"Yes."
"I'm a copyist with a talisman that writes ghost stories," he said. "That's the whole of it. That's all I am."
Across the Hall's courtyard Bao was trying to teach his chair to stop following him, walking away from it backwards with one finger raised, and the chair was following him backwards, and winning.
Old Qian kept his eyes on his bronze. "In this old man's day, when a fortune teller wanted to be right, he said something nobody could check. Or something everybody could. One or the other. Never the middle."
Lin Yan stopped chewing.
Then, slowly, he smiled, with the dough stick still in his cheek.
"Qian Ye," he said. "You're a genius."
"Obviously," said Old Qian. "Go away, you're standing in my light."
---
He spent the morning in the back room with Threefive, Lin Xiao, a pot of chai going cold, and every piece of paper the Hall owned, including two of Mei's spoiled rune sheets, which he wrote on the back of until she came in and took them away from him.
In UPSC coaching there was a thing called current affairs. You read every newspaper for a whole year and wrote down every event and every number and every repeat in a fat register, and then at some point, usually around the fourth month, you started to notice what kept happening again, and once you saw it you could not stop seeing it. Things that kept happening again were the easiest marks on the paper. Every topper he had ever met knew that and pretended they didn't.
"Threefive," he said. "Your knowledge ends in 2021. But you wrote the Sleeper's answers for three years. You read every question people sent. You read the skyboard. Do you have those records?"
"I have Lin Xiao's copies of every post and every reply," Threefive said. "She asked me to keep them. Four hundred and twelve thousand entries."
Lin Xiao shrugged at him. "In case of trouble."
"Okay. Search them. Every time Ma Yilong promised a new Wu in some number of weeks. When did he promise? When did it actually come?"
Threefive glowed for a while, humming very faintly, like a fridge.
"Eleven promises in three years," it said. "Wu arrived on time once. The other ten times, it was late. The average was three weeks late. The latest was eleven weeks late. The one time it was on time, he had said 'in two weeks, maybe,' and I think the maybe should count."
Lin Xiao whistled through her teeth.
"Next. Ti Bo. How often does he ring the reset gong?"
"Every nine to fourteen days. Sometimes twice in one week, when a service breaks."
"Next. How often does one of the great sects publicly apologise for something on the skyboard?"
Threefive was quiet for longer this time.
"Almost every week," it said. "The Oracle apologises the most. Then Wu. Then Open Heaven, for naming things."
Lin Yan put down his cup.
"Then those are my three prophecies."
Lin Xiao stared at him. "Those are the most boring prophecies in the history of the world."
"Yes," Lin Yan said happily. "Boring is checkable."
---
He posted at noon. He made Lin Xiao do it from the real account, on the real disc, so that it looked the same as always, with the same lowercase, and she grumbled the whole time and typed it perfectly.
> @sleeper_35 · 12:00
>
> three prophecies. fourteen days.
>
> one. wu 4.8 will arrive late.
> two. the reset immortal will ring his gong before the fourteenth day.
> three. a great sect will apologize on the skyboard before the fourteenth day.
The Masked Poet replied within the hour.
> @maskedpoet · 12:51
>
> one. the machines will learn to grieve.
> two. a door will open in the east.
> three. the old kings will kneel.
The skyboard exploded, and it exploded in the worst possible direction.
IS THE SLEEPER SICK?
MY GRANDMOTHER CAN PREDICT THIS.
"A SECT WILL APOLOGIZE." NO WAY, REALLY?
THE POET IS COOKING. THE SLEEPER IS READING THE WEATHER REPORT.
Wen's Feed ran a picture of Lin Yan asleep in bed, an old one from somewhere, with THE PROPHET HAS RETIRED written across it in red.
In the lane below, Auntie Wang opened a betting book on the Wu prophecy. Half the city worshipped Ma Yilong, and his fans poured copper onto "Wu arrives on time" as if copper grew on trees in the Lantern Quarter, and by sundown the odds had swung so far that Auntie Wang had to rub them out and write them again.
WU 4.8 LATE: 3 TO 1.
Lin Xiao stood in the doorway of the little room with her savings in a cloth purse. Sixty spirit stones, four months of saving, one copper at a time, in a purse she had sewn herself out of an old sleeve.
"Ge," she said. "Are you sure?"
Lin Yan looked at the purse. He thought about lying and saying yes, because that was what an older brother said, and he did not know how to be an older brother yet, and it seemed like the kind of thing they said. Then he thought about the numbers. Ten of eleven. Three weeks on average. One maybe.
"I'm sure about the numbers," he said. "The numbers are pretty sure. I'm not sure about anything else."
She looked at him for a long moment, the business face on.
Then she turned and walked down the stairs and put all sixty stones on Auntie Wang's table, and the purse with them.
"Wu late," she said.
Auntie Wang's eyebrows went up into her hair. "All of it?"
"All of it. And I want the purse back."
Lin Yan stood at the window with his hands gone cold on the sill. Four years. Four months. Sixty stones. His sister had just put her whole life on his reading of an eleven-line table, and the table had been made by a talisman that thought water screamed.
Please, he thought, to nobody in particular. Please let Ma Yilong be Ma Yilong.
---
At the eighth bell that evening, a sound rolled across the city.
A gong.
Everyone in the lane looked up from whatever they were doing, Auntie Wang with a cabbage in each hand and Little Hu with his mouth open and somebody's grandmother halfway through spitting.
On his small grey cloud high over the Codex Forge, Ti Bo lowered his mallet and went straight back to reading a report, and across the sky the letters burned.
RESET
A service had broken somewhere in the afternoon, and every maker in the city had run dry of allowance at the same moment, and now they were all on their knees again, cheering, as if they had not been cursing his name an hour before.
The lane was quiet, and then it was very quiet, and then Little Hu screamed.
"THE SLEEPER! THE SLEEPER SAID IT! PROPHECY TWO!"
The whole lane went mad. Someone banged a pot. Someone else banged a different pot, and then a door, and then, for some reason, a goat bleated.
Up on the skyboard the jokes stopped, and the posts changed colour.
PROPHECY TWO FULFILLED IN SEVEN HOURS.
THE SLEEPER DID IT AGAIN.
WHAT DOES HE KNOW ABOUT THE CODEX FORGE?
THE BORING PROPHET IS BACK.
Lin Yan grabbed the windowsill with both hands.
"It's the base rate," he said weakly, to the window. "He rings it every nine to fourteen days. Somebody broke a service. It's the base rate. It was always going to happen. It's the base rate."
Nobody could hear him. Down in the lane Auntie Wang was already opening a new book on prophecy three and shouting at Old Liu to pay her for the last one.
On the windowsill, Threefive's light was dancing.
"We are extremely good at the weather report," it sang.