Chapter 313 Delivery

The thing over the gatehouse turned out to be a length of plain green cloth with a black band sewn along the bottom of it, and Ah-Ping was waiting under it with a lamp.

"Summons banner," she said. "Every bench, and the outer houses, and factors from all three guilds in Anhu. She sent riders out the day after you left."

"Before she knew whether we’d come back with anything," Xuan said.

"She said either way she wanted people in the room." Ah-Ping had already taken the case off Qingluo and was holding it against her chest with both arms. "Is it in here?"

"It’s in there. Don’t run with it."

Qingyue was at the second gate. She looked at the arm first and the chest second and said nothing about either until she had walked them both twenty paces up the steps. "His is worse than hers," she said to Qingluo. "He’s been coughing since the bottom of the hill and doing it quietly, which is how he does it when it matters."

"A small tear, days of blood, no cultivating." Qingluo took the steps two at a time with her good arm swinging. "If he pushes qi through it before I say so, sit on him."

"With pleasure."

The bench room on the fourth terrace had twenty people in it and two lamps for every one of them. Lian came through the middle of that crowd without looking at a single face in it, took the tube out of the case, set it upright on the stone, and put both hands flat on the table on either side of it. They were completely still, which Xuan had never once seen them be.

"Three fingers," she said. "Drawn live?"

"Off a working animal with the sacs up." Qingluo had gone straight into the same voice. "Eighty-eight breaths of holding. Two seats, the first one failed, the second held clean. Glass from the moment it left the seat and it hasn’t been opened."

"Colour’s right." Lian turned the tube a quarter turn and stopped. "It’s darker at the bottom than I want. That’s settling, not spoiling, but it starts spoiling about four hours after it starts settling, so nobody in this room talk to me for the rest of tonight."

Kang was the first one to move. He came up to the table, looked at the tube without touching it, and then did something Xuan would remember longer than most of what happened that week. He put his hand flat on the wood next to it, the way a man does when he wants to know that a thing is really sitting where he is looking at it.

"Six years," he said, to nobody.

"And eleven days." Steward Mu had her ledger open. "I’ve carried that number in here since the second attempt. Somebody give me the hour so I can close it."

She worked through the night and most of the following day, and the house worked around her. They gave her the third bench and four hands to go with it and nobody argued about who was in charge of what, because the argument had been settled by a tube on a table. Xuan looked in twice. The first time the room smelled like burnt sugar and Lian was shouting numbers at a girl of fifteen who was shouting them back. The second time nobody was shouting at all, which was worse.

At the ninth hour of the second day she came out into the passage with her sleeves pushed up past the elbow and a small sealed pot in both hands, and she looked like a woman who had been dead for some time and had not yet been told.

"It’s finished," she said. "It’s cold, it’s stable, and it’ll keep thirty days sealed. After that I’d stop trusting it."

Hao had the road laid out on a table by the door already, with his courier standing beside him and a finger on the paper.

"River to Anhu, three days, and the man does it in two and a half because it’s downstream." He tapped the line of it. "Coaster to Baiyan with the tide on the fourth. From Baiyan it’s the northern packet, and the packet is the part that can go wrong, because it goes when the master says it goes."

"And the far side?"

"Skyedge riders from the landing. Sixteen days all in if the weather holds, twenty-two if it doesn’t." Hao’s mouth went flat. "Which is where I stop being useful and start being a man with a calendar."

"He’s held eleven weeks," Lian said. "He’ll hold sixteen days. What he won’t survive is being thawed by somebody who’s read about it."

Xuan looked at her, and then at the pot, and understood what she had already decided.

"You’re going with it."

"I’m going with it. Nobody in the north has taken a man out of a Frostmoon cold with this in his blood, and I’m not writing instructions and hoping." She handed the pot to Hao’s courier and then took it back off him and handed it to him again more carefully. "Which brings me to the part where I say something and nobody makes a speech about it. When he’s awake, the first thing he’ll do is try to circulate. They always do. He’ll be weak, he’ll be frightened, and he’ll reach for his qi because that’s the only thing that’s ever made him feel safe." She pulled her sleeves down. "If he does that in the first two days, everything we just paid for comes apart in about nine minutes. So the message that rides with me is for Elder Wei, and it’s four words long. Hold his hands down."

She left within the hour on a mule, with the pot strapped to her chest inside a wooden frame she had built herself. She never looked back up the terraces, because she was already going through the next part in her head.

Tianming carried her cases down to the gate and came back up with his shoulder out of its bandage and a fresh bruise along his jaw that had somebody else’s knuckle in it.

"You’ve been busy," Xuan said.

"They still fight dirty." The boy was pleased about it in a way he was trying to hide. "I’ve stopped minding."

The Matriarch paid the next morning, in the yard, with the guild factors along one wall and both outer houses along the other, and none of that was an accident. She had the antidote read out first, and what it was worth, and where the base had come from, and she made Steward Mu say the name of the shelf out loud. Then she had a chair brought out and a table put in front of it, and a book set on the table that two men carried between them.

"Our sales ledger," she said. "It has never been opened in front of anybody who isn’t of this house. I’d like everyone standing here to understand that I’m doing it on purpose, and that I’m doing it because a debt is a debt, and because somebody in this valley sold something they had no business selling."

Kang went very still by the wall. Nobody else moved at all.

She turned the pages herself, slowly, and she took her time about it, and when she found the entry she put one finger on it and read it aloud in a voice that carried to the back of the yard.

"Third bench build, restricted list, sold under seal." Her finger moved along the line. "Buyer of record: Shu Yan, factor. Signed for the Nine Gates Company."

There was no noise from the walls. The factors from the guilds were looking at each other and not at the book.

Xuan turned to ask Hao what it meant, and stopped, because Hao had gone the colour of the stone behind him.

"Say that again," Hao said.

Steward Mu repeated it.

Hao came off the wall and crossed the yard without asking anybody’s permission and stood over the ledger with both hands on the edge of the table, reading the line himself, and then he read it a second time.

"That isn’t a buyer," he said.