Chapter 1
The Morning the Hill Moved
The rain stopped on the ninth night, and the hill let go of the stair the way an old hand lets go of a rail: quietly, having given fair warning for years to anyone who would listen.
Yap Siew Lan heard it happen in her sleep and did not know it. She dreamed of drums far off, and woke at twenty to six as she always did, boiled water for the first flask, tied her broom fresh at the neck with wire, and stepped into a morning that smelled wrong. Rain-washed mornings in Bukit Kabut smelled of moss and cold stone and frying shallots from the Teoh house. This one smelled of opened earth.
She was at the foot of the stair before the first light reached the balustrades, and there she stopped, because in sixty-three years she had never once seen the Stair of Clouds closed.
Someone had strung plastic tape between the newel posts. Beyond it, the first three flights climbed as they always climbed, worn silver in their middles, dark at their edges, each riser carrying its carved line of donor names gone soft as bread. But past the third landing, where her tea stall stood shuttered under its zinc awning, the hillside itself had moved. A wound of raw ochre earth came down through the trees and lay across the middle flights, and the steps between the seventh landing and step seventy-nine stood tilted out of line like books pushed sideways on a shelf.
