They fed the survivors at dusk, if fed was the word — a wooden pail of something gray handed through the bars, one dented scoop passed hand to hand down eleven men.
Ten men. The count had changed and the cage knew it. They had made a space around Shen Huang the width of a body, an honor guard of absence, and no one looked at him, which was itself a kind of staring, and when the scoop reached the net-mender beside the gap the old man's hands shook so badly that the gray slop went over the rim and into the flood at their ankles, and he stood looking at his own spilled portion as though at a verdict.
A boy crossed the cage and gave the old man his.
Shen Huang, cataloguing everything from his patch of sanctioned emptiness, filed the transaction and then — a rare event, twice in one day now — reopened the file and read it again. The arithmetic was wrong. The boy was young, eighteen at a guess, marsh-thin like the rest, with perhaps two days of margin in his body; the scoop was calories; calories here were minutes of standing in the Pit tomorrow. He had just watched a starving man hand a stranger his own blood pressure. Not furtively, either — not buying favor from a witness, not shaming anyone. He did it the way other men scratched an itch, settled it into the old man's hands, said something small in the marsh-tongue that made the ruined shoulders come down from around the ears, and moved back to his place.
And then, from his place, the boy looked at Shen Huang.
Everyone had looked at Shen Huang tonight — sideways, at the water, at the shape their fear made of him. The boy did it frontally, calmly, for three whole seconds, and Shen Huang, meeting the look with his own bland glass, experienced the small novel friction of being read. Not admired; not feared. Read. The boy's eyes went over him the way Shen Huang's went over rooms — and whatever they found made the young face go not frightened but sad, briefly, precisely, as if he'd opened a door on something standing in an empty larder.
Then a guard ran his spear-butt along the bars and the moment fell apart with the light.
Interesting, Shen Huang thought, settling into stillness for the night against a wall that never warmed. The Pit had one other reader in it. He filed the boy under instrument, unknown make — and, hearing another prisoner murmur to the boy in the dark, a word with a shape like Nuunah, amended the file's name and slept, pulse at fifty-one, like a closed book.
Morning was the bell, the throat, the glare.
The Pit had dressed for a better show. The tiers were fuller and louder; the water stood ankle-deep and gold-skinned under the low sun, the grates drinking at their patient tempo, the weed-line's dark band waiting a hand's width up the wall. In the western shade the Pitmaster's box was crowded now — guests, robes with real color in them, the glitter of cups — and the cantilevered rail had acquired cushions. Word had gone somewhere overnight and come back with an audience.
The far gate opened before Shen Huang's had fully shut, which told him the program's author considered the next act self-introducing.
It was.
The man came out of the throat like a landlord entering a disappointing property — unhurried, chin high, robes the layered red-on-red of live coals, and he was dry. That was the announcement, more than the robes or the walk: he stood in the Pit's flood and the water declined to touch him, a hand's width of shimmer standing off his boots, the air above his shoulders wobbling like the air over noon stone. The crowd gave him a roar with a name in it — one word, chanted from the cheap heights: Iskar. Iskar. He raised a hand to them without looking at them.
He looked at Shen Huang, and made a show of the looking — up, down, the empty hands, the bruises, the slave-gray wool — and then he turned his head and looked at a spot of open water twenty meters to Shen Huang's left, and the spot of open water became fire.
No gesture. No word. The man looked, and a column of flame stood up out of the flood taller than a house, roaring on nothing, steam shrieking off its base — and the crowd bellowed, and Iskar swept his gaze slowly across the Pit, and the fire walked with his eyes, a strolling tower of it, crossing forty meters of water at exactly the pace of his turning head, herding its own hissing weather, until he blinked it out and the Pit stood ringing and the steam drifted like the ghost of the thing.
Spectacle, said the crowd's roar.
Demonstration, said the sealed room. Datum the first, time-stamped, filed: the fire had gone where the eyes went. Not where the hand went — the hands had hung idle in the red sleeves the whole promenade. It had risen at the terminus of a sightline and traveled at the speed of a turning skull.
Once was decor. He needed it twice more, at cost, before he'd stake his body on it. On the mountain they had a saying about students who trusted a technique after one viewing; the saying was not kind, and the students it described did not grow old.
The bell struck twice — a new grammar, a duel's grammar — and Iskar of Zhammar smiled across the gold water at the Nobody, said something in his ember language that made the near tiers laugh, and looked, with theatrical courtesy, directly at Shen Huang's chest.
Shen Huang was already moving. The water where he'd stood went white, then orange, then ceased briefly to be water.