Bai Heng

When the elders of the sect speak of her, the phrase they use is "clean foundations"—spiritual root, meridians, temperament: nothing that ought to be there is missing, and nothing that ought not to be there has grown in. In the Xuanzhao Sect that is the highest grade of praise available, and the heaviest weight to carry.

Her days follow the true-lineage rule: the peak at dawn, sparring before noon, the Archive Hall in the afternoon, evening practice to settle her breath. The schedule hangs on a wooden board outside her room and has not changed by a single character in ten years.

She says little, and when she does speak she takes the sentence all the way to its end—no circling, no room left over, no particular concern for whether it is comfortable to hear. Outer-sect disciples give way when they see her, not out of fear; they simply know she will not stop to exchange pleasantries.

She comes down the mountain rarely. Each time she does, her route runs a few streets further around than anyone else's.

The steward of the Archive Hall says there is a pattern to what she borrows: any given volume, she takes out three times. The first time she reads quickly. The second time she copies. The third time she only sits with it, and can stay on one page for a long while.

Fellow disciples have asked about the obstruction in her chest. Her answer is "still looking"—two years of that answer, and not a word of it has changed.

True-lineage disciples are housed at the summit, one courtyard each. The courtyard is a good deal larger than the outer-gate quarters, and the quiet is thorough—apart from the servants who bring meals and clothing, no one comes up from dawn to dusk.

Disciples who meet her must stop and bow. Most bow and move on; nobody stays for idle talk. This is not deliberate distance. The rules sit between them, and not much can be said across rules.

She is used to it. The first year up the peak she felt the emptiness; afterwards she packed the empty hours into her lessons, and stopped noticing.

Only one thing on the peak is ever loud: around the hour of Mao, the mountain wind comes through the row of bamboo along the courtyard wall and sounds like the bazaar below opening at first light. She sometimes stands a moment for it, then goes back inside.

The hour before noon is for sword practice. Her sparring partner changes every ten days; by the third year the outer gate had cycled through everyone able to face her.

Her thrust is not fast. The withdrawal is. Watching her exchange, what people remember is seldom the stroke going out—it is that as the blade comes back, the other man's wooden sword is still halfway through its own.

Most partners say nothing when they step off. One told the truth: sparring with her is less like a match than like being held still while every fault is pointed out one by one, and when it is done she does not scold, she simply waits for you to correct it yourself.

She sees nothing worth pointing out. The sword is practised from the manual; the manual says a thing and she does it, and where it does not go smoothly she stops and walks it again.