Chapter 190 Interlude 28

Lianhua ties the boat to the stone post of the dock, and before climbing up to the street she stays a moment looking at the river she has just sailed.

From here the island cannot be seen, only islets, a rock shoal that surfaces level with the water like the back of a sleeping fish, and a good stretch of slow, greenish current flowing between other built-up islands, none of which is the one where they live. From this side of the Rong, the house might as well not exist.

Which is one of the things Xiaojie wanted when she chose it, so Lianhua adjusts the straps of the backpack, turns around and climbs.

The backpack is almost empty, but she carries it anyway, because when one buys in a shop one has to be seen leaving the shop loaded with something, and a woman with a backpack full of books is something no one looks at twice.

She carries in her head the route she went over last night in the guide the Tower of the Five Dragons sold them, street by street, and the route ends at the largest bookshop in Sanjiang, or at least at the one the guide calls that.

Although she, at first, did not want to go to a bookshop.

They argued about it two nights ago, at the stone table beneath the magnolia. Lianhua defended the Tower, because the Tower has lists of everything it sells, delivers it to the door and gives the House of the Long Journey a tenth off, and a tenth of a hundred spirit stones is ten stones that can be used on something else.

Xiaojie listened to her without interrupting, which is what she always does when she intends to contradict her.

“A catalogue tells you what a technique is called and what it costs”, she told her afterward. “But it doesn’t tell you what it does. And much less whether it suits you.”

“The lists include descriptions, Xiaojie”, Lianhua answered her.

“Three lines written by someone who wants to sell it to you”, Xiaojie told her. “And in a technique, the important thing is never in those three lines, which is why I want you to go somewhere they can explain it to you.”

And then she gave the armrest two little taps, which is what she does when she is about to say the last word.

“A tenth off the wrong technique is still the wrong technique”, she finished.

Lianhua searched for an answer to that for the rest of the night, but she did not find one, so in the morning she conceded the point, and now she is climbing a street in Sanjiang with an empty backpack and a hundred spirit stones written on a paper tucked away in her clothing.

The street climbs gently from the dock, and as soon as she leaves the first warehouses behind, Lianhua does what she has been doing every day since they arrived, which is to observe.

She does not look the way people out for a stroll look; she observes the way she was taught at the Yushitai, noting where the streets cross, which alleys have an exit and which do not, on which rooftops someone could be waited for and who is leaning against each doorway.

And from time to time, at the crossings, she releases her sight upward with the Vision of Horus for a couple of heartbeats, just long enough to see where all the streets lead, before deactivating it again.

Because a map tells her that this street leads to a plaza and that the plaza leads to a bridge, but it does not tell her which street smells of trouble, nor on which corner the same group of men always gathers, nor to whom one yields the way.

In the capital, she knew that without thinking.

She knew which neighborhoods were crossed quickly and which were never crossed, which alley in the lower district was whose territory and at what hour it stopped being so, and which intermediary sold to whom. And she knew it because she had been learning it for years, street by street.

But here she knows nothing; here she has to start from the beginning, like an apprentice on her first day, without a single name to turn to and without a single veteran to ask.

So she goes along noting down in her mind everything she notices.

Such as that in this city, for example, almost everyone walks quickly, but no one runs. That there are more armed people in the street than in the capital, and that every time someone passes with the emblem of one of the three sects, the people around them lower their voices a little without realizing they are lowering them, while they move out of their way.

That last thing she notes down as something to truly keep in mind.

By mid-morning, the street opens onto a small cobbled plaza, with a well in the center and all four sides taken up by stalls. And clearly they are not fixed stalls, but blankets spread out on the ground, trestles with a board on top and the odd cart with its back open.

And behind the blankets there are no merchants; there are what she supposes are wandering cultivators.

Lianhua recognizes them immediately, because everywhere they look the same. Good clothing that stopped being good a long time ago, a weapon always within reach and the gaze of someone calculating how long what they have just earned is going to last them.

She looks at what is on the stalls, and right away she notices that they sell exactly what one would expect them to sell.

Half-cured spirit beast hides, folded with the fur outward. Fangs, claws and scales arranged by size on top of a rag. Bundles of spirit herbs of a green so intense it looks painted, and secondhand weapons, some with dried blood in the notch of the hilt.

And on a blanket at the back, behind a row of unmarked clay jars full of pills of a color no pill should have, a man assures anyone willing to listen that they are the work of an alchemist of the Jade Dew who prefers to remain nameless.

Lianhua crosses the plaza along its edge, close against the houses on the north side, and she is just about to leave by the street on the other side when she hears the noise of a board falling against the ground.

She does not turn around, but she activates the Vision of Horus by reflex.

What she sees with it are four men, all gathered around one of the smallest stalls in the plaza, a blanket with half a dozen hides tended by a thin young man, with a saber leaning against his knee that he has not yet touched.

The largest of them has just kicked over the trestle where the young man had his hides, and now he is standing on top of one of them.

“Our boss told you that any merchandise you brought into the city had to go through his hands first”, he tells him. “And you haven’t received his permission to sell in the plaza.”

“This plaza belongs to the city and he’s nobody to give permission for anything”, the young man answers him without letting himself be intimidated.

“That’s what they all say at first”, the big one tells him. “But we make sure they learn their place.”

The other three laugh while one of them draws his sword a handspan out of its scabbard, slowly, so that it will be heard and seen.

Lianhua, at that moment, notices the weight of the two Shuang Bi Shou she carries inside her sleeves.

She does not touch them. She only notices them, the same way she notices that there are thirty paces to the group and ten to the exit street, and afterward she does the calculation she always does, which is not whether she could win, because that one she is clear about, but what she would gain.

And the answer is nothing, since she does not know that young man.

This plaza is not hers, this city is not hers, and a stranger who gets into someone else’s fight in a city she does not know is bringing trouble on herself. And Xiaojie did not leave the Empire so that her handmaiden could get mixed up in matters that are none of her business as soon as she arrived, so Lianhua takes the first step toward the exit street.

But she never takes the second, because at that instant the people on the east side of the plaza silently move aside, opening a corridor that runs straight to the overturned stall.

Along that corridor come three people in the clothing of the Sect of the Autumn Waters Sword, just as the guide describes it, each with a sword at the waist.

The four men at the stall take a moment to notice. The one with the half-drawn sword is the last, and when he finally turns around, the first of the disciples is already two paces from him.

There is no warning.

The disciple draws and sheathes again in a single movement, and Lianhua, who has spent half her life training her eyes for this kind of situation, sees it clearly for what it is: a clean movement, without a single superfluous gesture, by someone who has repeated it so many times that he no longer thinks about it.

The hand that was gripping the hilt falls to the ground with the sword still inside its fist, after which the man takes a heartbeat to scream.

By then, the other two disciples have already moved. The big one tries to raise the arm with which he has just pointed at the young man, and that is the arm he loses, at the elbow. The third, who had stepped forward to grab the young man by his clothes, is next, and the hand with which he grabs him ends up on the ground, on top of one of the hides.

The fourth, who has only laughed, is left untouched, and he is, of the four, the one who trembles the most as he falls to the ground, terrified.

All of that lasts less time than it takes Lianhua to breathe twice.

Afterward, the disciple who drew first turns toward the plaza. He does not raise his voice, and he has no need to, because in the plaza the only sound now is the groaning of the three wounded men.

“In this city it is forbidden to cause trouble”, he says. “You all know it. And whoever didn’t know it, knows it now.”

Then he looks at the four of them.

“Gather up what’s yours and go”, he tells them. “If we see you again, what you lose won’t be just a hand.”

After hearing those words, the four of them leave, holding one another up, and it is the one who trembles who picks up his companions’ severed limbs from the ground, although he does so basically because he is the only one with enough hands to do it.

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The disciples do not stay to watch them go; one of them sets the young stall-keeper’s trestle back up without saying a word to him, and afterward the three of them cross the plaza by the same corridor they came along while the people close in behind them.

And after a very short while, the market returns to normal, as if nothing that had happened had happened.

That is what strikes Lianhua most. Not the speed nor the cuts she has witnessed, but that no one in the plaza seems surprised. The pill man is already hawking the nameless alchemist’s pills again, and the woman at the neighboring stall is throwing sand over the bloodstains on the cobbles with the same face with which she would sweep the leaves from her courtyard.

And that means it is not the first time, nor the second.

Lin Quingyu told them that those of the Autumn Waters Sword were the calmest of the three sects, and now Lianhua understands that it was true. They have not raised their voices, they have not gone looking for trouble and they have not stayed a moment longer than necessary.

But Lin Quingyu did not say they were the softest, so Lianhua notes that detail down too and leaves the plaza.

The next street is narrower and quieter, lined with small workshops and shops with their merchandise hanging at the door, and halfway along it there is a low table against the wall, covered with hair ornaments. Pins of wood and bone, combs, cheap metal clasps imitating expensive ones and, wound around a stick, cloth ribbons of every color.

Lianhua stops on seeing that, and she stops because Xia, when she is in a hurry or busy, which is almost always, does not do her hair. She gathers it up any old way, with a knot tied without looking, and the knot holds out as long as it can, which is never very long.

A well-made knot needs a moment of attention, and Xia, when she is preparing a meal, has neither the time nor the patience for anything but what she is doing. A ribbon, on the other hand, is wound once, pulled tight, and that is that.

So she chooses ten, all of different colors. Ten, because ribbons get lost. And of different colors, because she does not know which one Xia will like best, and asking her beforehand would spoil the surprise.

The ten together cost her a few Fen, which she pays with the city coins she carries loose in a little pouch hanging from her belt, and afterward she tucks the ribbons into one of the small pockets of the backpack as she keeps walking.

The bookshop is at the end of that street, where it opens onto a plaza considerably larger than the market one, and Lianhua recognizes it before reading the sign because of all the people going in and out of the building.

It is a wide building, four stories tall with a facade of dark wood, its doors thrown wide open, and through those doors people never stop passing, disciples with the emblem of one of the three sects and wandering cultivators with their weapons on their backs.

And above the doors, on a sign of lacquered wood, the name.

House of Serene Ink.

Lianhua stays a while on the other side of the plaza, counting. In the time it takes her to reach a hundred, fourteen people go in and eleven come out, and none of them leaves empty-handed.

That means the guide was not lying, so she crosses the plaza and goes in.

Inside it smells of paper, of ink and of old wood, and the noise of the street stays at the door. There are shelves up to the ceiling on every wall, long tables with books stacked on them and several identically dressed employees attending to the customers without raising their voices.

One of them, a young man, approaches her before she has taken five steps.

“How may I help you?” he asks her.

“I am looking for elemental techniques”, Lianhua answers him. “And books on spiritual materials.”

Lianhua sees how his gaze changes on hearing the word techniques, which is the gaze of someone who has just moved her from one kind of customer to another.

“Please come with me”, he tells her.

He leads her down a side corridor to a small, quiet room, with a table, two chairs, a cabinet that seems to be locked and a window overlooking an interior courtyard, and tells her that someone will come to attend to her shortly.

Lianhua does not sit down. She stays standing by the window, which is the spot from which she can see the door and the courtyard at the same time, and waits.

The one who comes in after a while is a middle-aged woman, with her hair gathered in a simple bun and a tunic of good fabric without ornaments. She carries a notebook under her arm and a professional smile that does not quite reach her eyes.

“Please sit down”, she tells her. “I’m told you are looking for elemental techniques.”

Lianhua sits.

“Earth”, she tells her.

The woman opens the notebook and runs her finger down a page.

“We have some twenty Earth techniques right now”, she tells her. “If you tell me exactly what you are looking for, I can tell you which ones suit you.”

And she does not ask her what she wants it for, nor what other techniques she has, nor what her level of cultivation is, which is exactly what is to be expected of someone who sells techniques and wants to keep selling them.

“They must be able to be cast at any point within sight”, Lianhua tells her. “Not only where I am, but also anywhere I am looking.”

The woman lifts her gaze from the notebook after hearing Lianhua, then lowers it again and goes down the column with her finger, discarding almost every line, one after another.

“That leaves us three”, she tells her.

She raises a finger.

“The first is a technique for controlling whatever earth one has in sight”, she continues. “Nothing more. It is very basic, although I have to tell you that many of the houses in the city were built by people who have this technique at a very high level.”

She raises the second.

“The second creates a stone spike that shoots suddenly out of the ground”, she tells her. “Even underneath another person, so it is useful for combat. It performs best when used on stone, since on any other surface it is not as effective.”

And she raises the third.

“And the third opens holes in the ground”, she finishes. “A pit, so to speak. Wherever you look, that is where it opens.”

And right afterward, before Lianhua can say anything, she lowers her hand and rests it on the notebook.

“But I must warn you that this last one is forbidden to use inside the city”, she adds.

Lianhua stays looking at her.

“Why that one and not the spike?” she asks her.

“Because the spike is temporary”, the woman answers her. “It comes out, does whatever it has to do and crumbles after a few heartbeats. The pit, on the other hand, is permanent.”

She shrugs her shoulders a little.

“And the authorities of this city don’t like people going around opening holes in their streets”, she finishes.

Lianhua nods, because that fits with what Hou Deming told them, that the three sects have been paying for repairs for generations so that whoever arrives by the Rong does not see a single pile of rubble.

Clearly a city that pays for that is not going to let just anyone put holes in its paving, so she goes over the three.

The first is no use to her, because the woman has clearly implied it is a construction technique. Nor is the third, because they are going to live in this city for years, and a technique that cannot be used where one lives is a technique that will almost never be used.

But the second is exactly what Xiaojie described in the courtyard. A technique that does not come from where she is, but from beneath whatever she is looking at, and she can look over a very wide area.

But Xiaojie did not ask her for one; she asked her for two, and for them to complement each other.

And there Lianhua falls silent a moment, while the woman waits with her brush motionless above the notebook, because a spike is a technique that strikes.

It comes out, it pierces and it disappears. And what a technique that strikes lacks is something that forces someone to stay still in the right place for the exact heartbeat.

And that, in all her fights, she has always done with the threads.

Very fine threads that she carries in her sleeves and then places with the Myriad of Hands wherever she needs them, so that someone trips, gets tangled or deflects a blow toward where she wants it. Because Qi hands cannot hold a cultivator, but a well-placed thread does not need to hold him for very long.

So Lianhua lifts her gaze after reaching a decision.

“Do you have any technique that allows one to create threads?” she asks her. “Threads that are strong and durable.”

The woman raises an eyebrow, because that is not the question one expects at the end of a conversation about Earth techniques, but this time too she does not ask why, and she stays thinking a moment with her eyes on the ceiling.

“There are two”, she says at last.

She raises a finger.

“The first is quite popular and many tailors buy it”, she continues. “It creates threads of Qi, and at a high enough level those threads can become permanent, so they can be used to weave clothing.”

She raises the second, and this time with considerably less enthusiasm.

“And the second is much less popular”, she tells her. “Its threads are practically invisible, so much so that without a technique to see Qi they cannot be seen. They are strong, mind you, because they withstand the strength of someone who has finished the Body Tempering, as long as that person uses no technique to increase it. And with practice several can be woven at once.”

She makes a pause.

“But in exchange, the threads are always temporary”, she continues. “They last no more than half a period.”

And she makes a gesture with her hand, like someone shooing away a fly.

“And a tailor doesn’t want cloth that unravels before supper and doesn’t even cover whoever wears it”, she finishes. “So almost no one buys it.”

Lianhua says nothing, but the woman has just described to her, without knowing it, the technique that best fits her way of fighting of all the ones she has ever heard named in her life.

Threads no one sees and of which several can be woven at once, made of Qi just like the hands that are going to place them. And with a single flaw, which is that they come undone after a while, and which for her is no flaw at all, because a thread that disappears on its own leaves no trace for anyone to find afterward.

A spike that pierces whomever she wants, and a thread no one sees so that her target stays where it has to stay.

Two techniques that complement each other perfectly.

Even though the second is not an Earth technique, and she will have to explain that to Xiaojie. But Lianhua does not doubt that she will understand her reasoning perfectly.

“How much do they cost?” she asks her. “The spike one and the invisible threads one.”

The woman consults the notebook, although Lianhua suspects she has no need to.

“The spike one is called Earth Dragon Spike”, she tells her. “Fifty spirit stones.”

She turns a page.

“And the threads one is called Threads of the Invisible Loom”, she continues. “And as I told you, it is not popular, so it costs considerably less. Twenty spirit stones.”

Seventy.

Lianhua does the math, and seventy leaves her enough margin for her other errand.

“I am interested in both”, she tells her.

The woman notes it down without making any comment.

And that leaves thirty for the rest, because Xiaojie handed her the paper with a single order, which was to spend all of it at the bookshop.

“And I am also interested in books”, Lianhua continues. “All the ones that explain how to identify spiritual ingredients, how to process them and, if possible, how to cook them. It doesn’t matter what kind of ingredients.”

“Of those we have a great many”, the woman tells her. “There are books on herbs, on beasts, on fungi, on…”

“I want all the ones you can give me”, Lianhua cuts her off. “Up to a maximum of thirty spirit stones.”

And there, for the first time since she came in, the woman’s professional smile freezes, and she sets her brush down on the notebook, very slowly.

“Excuse me”, she tells her. “But the two techniques and thirty stones in books amount to a transaction of considerable value.”

“They do”, Lianhua confirms to her.

“And the rules of this house oblige me to make sure the customer has sufficient capital before we start gathering so many books”, the woman continues. “I don’t say it because of you. It is the rule, and we follow it with everyone.”

But Lianhua is counting on it, because a woman alone, in discreet clothing and with an empty backpack, who asks for seventy stones in techniques and thirty in books, is exactly the kind of customer a shop like this has to protect itself against.

So she reaches into her clothing, takes out the paper folded in four, unfolds it and lays it on the table, turned toward the woman to show her that it is a payment authorization for a hundred spirit stones, written in Xiaojie’s small and careful hand, with the name of the House of the Long Journey and the seal stamped at the bottom.

The woman looks at it, and Lianhua sees the exact moment at which she recognizes the format, which is that of the Tower of the Five Dragons’ authorizations, and then the moment at which she leans a little over the seal and recognizes it too, because a seal like that is carried only by a company associated with the Tower.

The woman, after that, straightens up, and when she looks at Lianhua again she no longer looks at her as a customer to be protected against, but as a customer to be kept.

“I apologize for the question”, she tells her, and her voice has risen half a tone in warmth. “I had to ask it.”

“I understand”, Lianhua tells her as she picks up the paper, folds it again and puts it away without hesitation.

“Gathering so many books is going to take us a while”, the woman continues, already getting up. “They have to be brought from the storeroom and checked one by one. While you wait, someone will bring you something to drink right away.”

“Thank you”, Lianhua tells her.

The woman makes a bow considerably deeper than the one she made on entering, leaves the room and closes the door behind her.

And Lianhua hears her moving away down the corridor faster than she came.

She does not need to see her face to imagine her expression. She saw it many times in the capital, on some of the intermediaries to whom she handed over Xiaojie’s talismans right after revealing to them everything she wanted them to sell for her, since relying only on her siblings would have drawn too much attention to them.

It is probably the expression of someone who is already calculating her commission.

Lianhua is left alone in the room, and she thinks about the conversation in the courtyard, and about the Tower’s lists she wanted to use, and about how, if she had read there the name of a technique called Threads of the Invisible Loom, one line among a hundred others with a pretty name, three lines of description written by someone who wanted to sell it and a price so low, she would probably have assumed there was something wrong with it and passed it over.

Xiaojie was right, and tonight, when she sets the two tablets down on the table in front of her, she is going to have to tell her once again that she was right.

Although that is not what is going to cost her; what is going to cost her is waiting for Xiaojie to say yes before learning that technique that seems to have been created exclusively for her.