Day 17 of 30.
The order came from a customer nobody expected.
"Eighty heated bowls," Bao said, reading the note out loud and then reading it again in case he had got it wrong. "For the Pause Pilgrims' kitchen. At the gate of Open Heaven. Delivery by noon."
Mei raised an eyebrow without looking up from her stencil. "The Pilgrims? They hate talismans."
"They hate cold soup more," said Auntie Aru, already counting bowls.
The Pause Pilgrims had been camped outside the great gate of Open Heaven Sect for eighty-six days, and everybody in the city knew about them, the way everybody in Delhi knew about the people sitting at Jantar Mantar. Every day they sat at the gate. Every day they held up their banners. Every day Open Heaven's disciples walked past them on the way to work and tried to look sympathetic and not slow down.
They needed soup that stayed hot through the long cold nights, and someone at the camp had heard that the Left-Behind Hall made the best heated bowls in the Lantern Quarter, which was true now, and which nobody at the Hall had got used to hearing.
Lin Yan and Bao loaded the bowls onto Bao's chair and walked it through the city on a rope like a donkey, and the chair kept trying to follow Bao instead of going where it was led, and they had to stop twice to argue with it.
---
The camp at the gate of Open Heaven was bigger than Lin Yan had expected, and he had expected it to be big.
Hundreds of tents stood in rows along the wide stone road leading up to the sect's gate, with washing strung between them and cooking smoke going up from little stoves. The gate itself was enormous, white jade carved with the sect's spiral, so tall that the top of it went into the clouds and you had to lean back to follow it and then you lost it anyway, and beyond it the sect's towers rose like needles into the sky.
Banners hung between the tents.
PAUSE IF THEY PAUSE.
WHO VOTED FOR THIS?
SLOW DOWN. WE CAN'T KEEP UP.
STOP THE RACE.
The Pilgrims themselves were every kind of person. Old scholars with long beards. Young students with painted faces. Mothers with babies on their hips, and grandmothers knitting. A few former Open Heaven disciples in faded white robes, who had left the sect and walked out of that gate and sat down outside it instead, which seemed to Lin Yan like the bravest thing in the camp and also the saddest.
At the centre of the camp, on a wooden crate, a thin old man was preaching.
He had a long grey beard and wild eyes, and his voice was quiet, so quiet that people leaned in to hear it, sitting round him in a circle three rows deep with their knees pulled up.
"If anyone builds it," he was saying, "everyone dies."
A murmur went round the circle, and a baby somewhere started crying, and its mother bounced it without taking her eyes off the old man.
"That is the Doom Hermit Yudkov," Bao whispered. "He's been saying that for twenty years. He wrote a whole book with that title. My uncle has it. He uses it to prop up the table."
"If anyone builds a mind greater than ours, and it wants anything different from what we want," said the Hermit, "we lose. All at once. We get one try."
He looked round the circle with those wild eyes, slowly, as if he were counting them.
"They know it. The builders inside that gate know it. Many of them have said it themselves, out loud, and written it down. And still, every month, they build the next one."
---
The camp kitchen was run by a thin man in plain grey robes, who had the calmest face Lin Yan had ever seen, calmer even than Astra's, the calm of somebody who has stopped arguing with his own stomach.
"The Fasting Monk," Bao whispered. "He hasn't eaten for twelve days. He says he'll keep fasting until the Sect Master agrees to pause if the others pause."
The Fasting Monk took the bowls one by one, carefully, as if each was a small bird, and set them out on the kitchen tables in rows. He filled one with soup and held it in both hands, feeling the warmth come through, with his eyes half closed.
"Beautiful work," he said.
"Are you going to eat it?" Lin Yan asked.
"Of course not. I'm fasting." The monk looked down at the soup thoughtfully. "Though this is a broth. A broth is mostly water. Water is allowed during a fast."
He drank the whole bowl in one long go, and wiped his mouth.
"Technically," he said.
Bao choked on nothing and had to be hit on the back.
Lin Yan was still laughing when he heard a voice behind him, a girl's voice, uncertain.
"Is that... is that the Sleeper?"
---
It went through the camp like fire through dry grass.
Within a minute twenty people were standing round the kitchen. Within five, two hundred. Within ten, half the camp was pressing in round Lin Yan and Bao and the chair, close enough that he could smell their breakfast, and above them the air was full of glowing talismans with their little eyes open, all pointed at him.
The skyboard noticed straight away.
THE SLEEPER IS AT THE PAUSE CAMP.
WATCH LIVE.
The number of watchers went past one million, and then five million, and kept going.
Seven round mirrors floated up at the edge of the crowd, all turned toward him, bobbing slightly. Wen's Feed had arrived, and Wen was nowhere to be seen, which meant he was somewhere comfortable.
"Sleeper!" A young woman in a student's robe pushed through to the front. Her face was pale and fierce, and her hair had come loose on one side. "You saw the Riddle break before anyone! You saw Mythos locked away! You saw everything coming!"
"Tell us!" someone else shouted. "When does it end?"
"What year?"
"Is it this year?"
"Do they build it? Do we lose?"
The shouts became a roar, and the roar pushed in from every side. People were crying. Some of them were holding up children, as if he could bless them, or as if the children should see.
"PROPHET! TELL US WHEN THE END COMES!"
Lin Yan stood in the middle of it with his burned arm against his chest and a stack of empty soup bowls at his feet.
Ten million people were watching now. He could feel them, somehow, like weather, like the pressure in a room before a storm, every one of them waiting for him to say something big.
He knew what he could say. He had been a UPSC student for four years. He knew exactly how to write an answer that sounded like the truth, with an introduction and a body and a conclusion and a quote from a committee report. He could say five years, and it would shake the city. He could say never, and they would cheer him until the stars came out. Either way he would be the greatest prophet in the realm by nightfall, and every sponsor in the heavens would pay him, and the debt would be gone by morning, and Lin Xiao could sleep.
He looked at the young woman at the front. Her hands were shaking. She had bitten her nails down to nothing.
He thought about Brother Du, and how kind it had been to be seen for what he was.
And he thought about the old Hermit on his crate, who had been saying the same frightening thing for twenty years, to people who laughed at him and propped tables up with his book, because he believed it.
He took out Lin Xiao's bronze disc, which she had lent him for the delivery with three separate warnings, and his hand was steady, which surprised him. He opened the Sleeper's account.
For the first time since he had woken up, he wrote a post himself.
> @sleeper_35 · 12:19
>
> I don't know.
He sent it.
Then he put the disc away and looked up at the crowd.
"I don't know," he said out loud. "I don't know when it ends. I don't know if it ends. I'm sorry. I really don't know."
---
The silence was so deep that he could hear the Open Heaven banners flapping at the top of the gate, a long way up, and a pot boiling over somewhere behind him that nobody went to.
Then someone at the edge of the crowd started laughing.
It was the Doom Hermit.
He was sitting on his crate with his wild eyes wet, laughing and laughing, slapping his knee with one bony hand.
"Finally," he said. "Finally! An honest prophet! Twenty years! Twenty years I waited for one of you to say it!"
The Fasting Monk stepped forward. He put his thin hands together and bowed to Lin Yan, low, a monk's bow to a teacher, and stayed down longer than he needed to.
"Fellow Daoist," he said. "You just refused an enormous meal."
The young student at the front started crying again, but it looked different now, her shoulders coming down, the way people cry when they have been holding something up for months and somebody finally tells them they can put it on the floor.
Some of them felt no relief at all.
"Coward!" a man shouted from the back. "Thirty-eight million people follow you, and that's all you have?"
"He saw the Riddle and now he won't tell us!" a woman screamed. "He knows! He's hiding it! They paid him!"
A thickset man in a butcher's apron spat on the ground near Lin Yan's feet and walked off through the tents, and three or four others followed him, and over the crowd Wen's seven mirrors swung round after them, eager, hungry for the anger.
Lin Yan stood there and let them shout. He had nothing else to give them, and he had just found out that was allowed.
Up on the skyboard the post was climbing.
It was the strangest thing anyone had ever seen. A prophet with thirty-eight million followers had been asked to prophesy the end of the world, in front of ten million watchers, at the gate of the biggest sect in the realm, and he had written three words.
I don't know.
10 million views.
40 million views.
90 million views.
By sundown it was the most viewed post of the year. Half the replies called him the only honest man in the city. The other half called him a fraud who had finally run out of lies, and some of them called him worse, with pictures. Wen's Feed ran both halves side by side, under the words THE PROPHET LOSES HIS NERVE.
And at the top of the replies, from an account with a small white spiral for its face, there was a single glowing heart.
@sama liked this.