A wind-eroded garrison soldier crawled out of a brick seam in the western section of Platform Fourteen at Beacon Camp. Wang Si turned ashen from the feet up on the spot. An official from the Cloudwatch Bureau arrived four months ahead of schedule and announced that the wind erosion was one chi and seven cun deep, and that it would reach flood stage in twenty-seven days. The bricks were to be sealed, and everyone whose ancestors had been convicted of brick-related offenses was to be conscripted to the Cloud Platform three days later to patch seams and test bricks. Last year, 137 men went up to the South Platform, and only 51 came back down.
Lu Chen, a fourth-rank archer, had been able to see the hidden patterns in cloud bricks since he was ten. Before cracks even formed, he would mark the brick cores. He had not slept properly in three months. His ears rang, his hands trembled, and an old injury in his right knee made three out of every ten shots from a heavy bow go wide. He had counted every brick in the seventh stack's northwest corner three times, and had long known that the official Wu had lied four months earlier when he certified the platform as safe for three years. The visible seam was only a surface split that curled inward. The real crack ran through the third row from the top in the stack's northwest corner, starting at the eighth brick and moving east. It would collapse within three days. What's more, the cores of bricks numbered 387, 388, and 390 had been replaced. Their surfaces were smooth, they had been fired properly, and they rang like sound bricks when struck. Replacing brick cores was a way to shift blame from one person to another, and was the gravest crime under the brick inspection laws. Shao Tieyi stuck his lantern into the ground and asked who was guarding the platform. The official started reading names from the roster, then suddenly stopped and looked up at the crowd.
