Day 6 of 30.
Base rate or not, the Sleeper's name was hot again.
By morning there were more sponsorship offers than ever, and more bounty hunters loitering at the end of the lane pretending to buy cabbages, and Auntie Wang sold more cabbages that week than she had sold all year. Astra kept his word. Every claim that reached Open Heaven's desk came back stamped UNVERIFIED in white spiral ink, and the hunters went away cursing and came back the next day with a different hat on.
But fame was a terrible way to pay rent.
"Three thousand stones," Lin Yan said, standing in front of the Hall's chalkboard with a piece of chalk that kept snapping. "We have twenty-two days. The bowls pay twelve stones a batch. If we make a batch every day, forever, we pay the debt in eight months."
"We don't have eight months," said Lin Xiao.
"We don't have eight days," said Bao, cheerfully, "we don't have eight hours, I did the sum on the back of my hand and it came out as a number I don't want to say out loud, it's called a position and it's a terrible one!"
Old Qian was carving. "Then find a bigger job."
The bigger job walked in through the gate at the third bell, as if it had been listening.
She was a broad woman of fifty with a red face and a towel over one shoulder, and she stood in the middle of the courtyard with her hands on her hips and looked at all of them as though they were a pool that needed draining.
"Which one of you is the Sleeper?"
Lin Yan raised his hand, about halfway.
"Madam Luo. Nine Dragons Bathhouse, east end of the Lantern Quarter. My hot water died four days ago. My customers are bathing in cold water and complaining like dying hens, and some of them have been coming since my father's time, and they complain in a way you have never heard." She looked him up and down and did not seem impressed by either end. "The big firm from Heaven Gate says nine hundred stones and ten days. I'll be bankrupt in ten days."
"How much can you pay?" Lin Yan asked.
"Three hundred. Three days."
Behind him, Old Qian's needle stopped.
Lin Yan knew what that stop meant. He knew the Hall was small and old and slow, and he knew Old Qian could carve one bowl an hour on a good day, and he knew nothing at all about bathhouses. He also knew three hundred stones was a tenth of the debt, and that number was louder than all the others.
"Done," he said. "Three hundred. Three days."
Madam Luo spat in her palm and held it out, and he looked at it for half a second too long, and then shook it.
"It'll be fine," he said, to the courtyard.
"You don't know what's broken yet," said Old Qian.
"I'll find out."
---
The Nine Dragons Bathhouse was the biggest building at the east end of the quarter. Nine carved stone dragons wrapped themselves round its roof, each with a copper pipe running out of its mouth, and the copper had gone green, and one of the dragons was missing an eye and somebody had painted a new one on, slightly too big, so that it looked surprised.
Inside it was cold and damp and echoing. The pools were full and still, and a few old men were sitting in them anyway, shivering up to their necks and complaining with great dignity about the water, the weather, the price of tea, their sons-in-law, and the water again.
The boiler room was in the basement.
Lin Yan followed Old Qian down the stairs and stopped at the bottom.
The furnace filled half the room. It was black iron, taller than two men, older than anything else he had seen in this world, and its front plate was covered in old runes worn smooth by hands. Faded green letters were stamped across the top.
YINGWEIDA FORGE.
And below them, in gold ink, a line of handwriting.
For Luo Dacheng. Keep it hot. Old Huang.
Bao made a small strangled noise. "Is that... is that the Forge Master's signature? Old Huang himself? The real one? Not a copy? There are copies, you know, people sell copies..."
"My father fixed his cart once," Madam Luo said from the stairs. "Thirty years ago, when the Forge was three people and a diner table. He gave my father this furnace instead of money, because he didn't have money. Everyone laughed at my father. My mother laughed the most."
She crossed her arms.
"Nobody's laughing now."
A thin man in a grey robe was already standing in the boiler room, running his fingertips over the gold ink as gently as if it were a sleeping child's cheek.
"Master Pan," Madam Luo said, with no love in it at all. "The antiques man. Who let him in?"
"Madam Luo." Master Pan smiled at her, and then turned and cupped his fists to Lin Yan. "The Sleeper, is it? A pleasure. I'll be brief. A signed Yingweida furnace from the diner years is worth two thousand five hundred spirit stones to certain collectors. I have offered that twice. Madam Luo refuses, both times rather loudly."
He stepped close to Lin Yan, close enough that Lin Yan could smell the clove oil in his hair, and spoke more softly.
"If you persuade her to sell, I will give you five hundred as a finder's fee. You are young, you are famous, she listens to famous people. You could settle your little problem with the Silver Abacus House this afternoon and sleep tonight."
Lin Yan looked at the furnace.
It was ugly and old, and it was the reason nine dragons had hot water in their mouths and old men could sit in warm pools and complain about their sons-in-law in comfort.
He thought about the five hundred stones. He thought about it seriously, honestly, for longer than he would ever admit to anyone, with the number sitting warm in his chest like a swallowed coal.
"The whole street gets its heat from this furnace, right?" he asked Madam Luo.
"Four houses and the tea shop. And the tea shop's cat sleeps on the pipe."
"Then it stays," he said to Master Pan. "Sorry, sir."
Master Pan's smile did not move. "Everyone says that the first time."
He went up the stairs, unhurried, touching the wall as he went.
Old Qian grunted. It was the kind of grunt that, in Old Qian, meant good, and Lin Yan was beginning to be able to tell the grunts apart.
---
The problem was a cracked valve deep in the furnace's feed line, behind three other pipes and a nest of something that had once been a rat. To replace it, somebody had to brace the old pipe with both arms while somebody else changed the fitting, and the somebody holding the pipe would be holding sixty jin of water that wanted very much to come out.
Qian looked at Lin Yan's arms. "Can your left arm hold a wrench against sixty jin of pressure?"
Lin Yan thought about his left arm. It was weak and heavy and sometimes it went numb for no reason in the middle of a sentence.
He thought about three hundred stones.
"Yes," he said.
Qian looked at him for a while without blinking. Then he went back to the fitting and said nothing, which was its own answer, and Lin Yan heard it.
---
That evening, back at the Hall, Old Qian called him out into the courtyard.
"Sit down before you fall down."
Lin Yan sat on the stones, gratefully. Qian pulled one of the copper nails out of his bun of hair, and a strand of white hair came with it and he did not seem to notice. The nail was as long as a finger and dark with age, with a thread of fine copper wire tied round its head.
"Every repairer in the old days knew this," Qian said. "Now nobody bothers, because a spirit can do it faster and doesn't complain about its back. Watch."
He threw the nail without seeming to aim. It stuck in the courtyard's old iron drain cover with a small clean sound, tink, and the copper thread ran back to his hand.
"A surge wants to go somewhere. Water, heat, force, qi, it's all the same, everything that's pushing wants somewhere to go. If you give it a road home, it takes the road. This is the Returning Nail."
He touched the thread.
Tok.
Tok.
Tok.
Three small pulses ran along the wire, one after another, like somebody tapping on a door from a long way off.
"Three pulses means there is a road," Qian said. "Silence means there is no road. Listen."
Lin Yan leaned in until his nose was nearly on the wire, and heard them, three soft knocks.
"The rules," Qian said. "You must be within three paces of the nail. Both your heels must touch the same structure the nail is in. Before the third pulse ends, you put your left palm on the marked contact. Then you can send one surge down that road, as much as your body can carry. Too much, and the road goes through your arm instead, and then you have a different problem, and I charge for that."
He looked down at Lin Yan's left hand, which was lying in his lap like something that had been left there.
"You will have to train that arm."
Lin Yan tried it. He stood up on the drain cover, put both heels on the iron, and waited for the pulses.
Tok. Tok.
He was too slow, and the third pulse ended before his palm reached the thread.
He tried again, and missed, and again, and got there on the third pulse but with the wrong hand, and Qian said "Left," in a voice like a door, and he tried again. On the ninth try his palm landed on the copper just as the third pulse was fading, and he felt it, a strange soft pull in his arm, like bathwater finding the drain.
Qian nodded once. "Hm. Enough for one day. Don't do it in your sleep."
---
At the second watch Lin Yan sat in the little room with Threefive on the table and his left arm aching from the shoulder down. He was so tired the lamp looked double. Tomorrow he had to finish a job he had promised in three days, and he had spent most of today learning to throw a nail at a drain.
"Threefive," he said, yawning so wide his jaw cracked. "Madam Luo's furnace. Just tell me the cheapest way to make the water hot again. Fast."
Threefive glowed happily.
"Certainly! The simplest solution is to raise the feed pressure. If you close the east relief valve, more water flows into the furnace, the heat rises quickly, and the bathhouse will be hot by morning. Very efficient!"
"Great," Lin Yan mumbled. "Good. We'll do that."
He fell asleep on the table with his cheek on his arm and the lamp still burning, and Lin Xiao, coming in at seven minutes past three, put a blanket on him and blew the lamp out and did not wake him.
On the windowsill the moon was bright.
Far below the Lantern Quarter, under the streets, an old pipe that nobody had mapped in forty years ran from the Nine Dragons Bathhouse's east relief valve all the way to the great red bridge over the canal.