Chapter 289: South

The crossing sorted the five of them out fast, the way small spaces do.

Lian was sick. She was sick from the moment the land went out of sight, and she refused, with a determination that bordered on the religious, to be a person who was sick. She took her meals with everyone. She kept her ledgers. She worked her cases every morning on a crate lashed to the deck, grinding and weighing and testing with a bucket at her elbow that she would use, wipe her mouth, and return to work as though the whole transaction had happened to somebody else.

Xuan made the mistake of offering sympathy exactly once.

"Young Master," she said, without looking up from her scale, "say one more nice thing to me and I’m putting something in your rice."

Tianming discovered that he loved the sea and that the sea was entirely indifferent to him, and he spent the crossing in a condition Xuan could only describe as permanently astonished. He learned the names of the sails. He learned to tie four knots and demonstrated them to anyone who slowed down. He asked the bosun so many questions that the bosun began hiding.

He also trained, every day, on the foredeck, because Xuan had made him a promise on a terrace and had no intention of being the kind of man who forgets one on a boat.

The fourth form went first. Xuan took it apart in front of him, showed him where the elbow was going and why the whole movement fell over when it did, and rebuilt it from the footwork up. The fifth came after. After that the correction drills, which Tianming hated and did anyway, over and over, on a deck that refused to hold flat.

"This is way harder when the floor keeps moving," he complained once, flat on his back after the ship had taken a swell out from under him.

"That’s why we’re doing it here. Get this right and solid ground’s going to feel like cheating."

Hao made friends with the entire crew inside a week and had extracted, by the end of it, the price of salt in four southern ports, the name of the harbormaster at Anhu, which of the three shipping guilds actually controlled the wharf, and the fact that the southern coast paid in cut silver rather than coin, which he found so exciting that he explained it to Xuan twice.

"They weigh every payment. Every single one. Everyone carries a scale."

Xuan looked at him. "And you’re happy about this?"

"I’m thrilled." Hao was already writing. "Nobody trusts anybody. Do you know how useful that is?"

"Usually not the word I’d use."

"It is if you’re trying to make money. If nobody trusts anyone, the first person they do trust becomes valuable." His brush moved faster. "This isn’t a problem. It’s an opening."

Qingyue was unbothered by the sea in a way that Lian took as a personal insult.

She stood watch at the rail most evenings, in cold that had gone soft and wet the further south they came, and she said very little, and she watched everything. She was the first to notice the water changing color. She was the first to notice, several days before the lookout, that the birds were the wrong birds.

"Different birds," she said. "I’m guessing everything else will be different too."

"You’re really not nervous about this?"

Qingyue glanced at him. "Xuan, I’ve never left the continent. My husband is chasing a man he saw once in a crowd, and we’re sailing toward a sect famous for poison."

"So that’s a yes."

"I’m extremely nervous." She rested her forearms on the rail. "I’m just choosing to be interested instead. It’s easier."

They raised the southern coast in the morning haze, and Xuan stood at the bow and looked at another world.

The land came up green in a way the north never managed, dense and wet and stacked, mountains going straight into the sea with cloud caught halfway down them. The city built into the mouth of the river had been built upward instead of outward, terraces cut into the slope and houses on stilts over the water and a harbor so full that the Grey Heron had to wait for a berth.

Everything was subtly, constantly wrong.

The roofs turned up at the corners the wrong amount. Somebody was ringing a bell in a pattern that meant nothing to him. There were three cultivators flying escort over the harbor in formation, openly, in daylight, over a commercial port, which no sect in the empire would have bothered to do or been permitted to. The colors on their robes said something specific about rank and school and he could not read a single stroke of it.

And on the pier below, at least a dozen men and women wore blades curved the wrong way, too long in the tang.

Tianming saw it at the same moment he did, and went pale.

"Those swords. They’re the same as—"

"Yeah."

"So those are the people who attacked—"

"No." Xuan caught his shoulder before the boy could finish loudly enough for half the pier to hear. "Look again. How many do you see?"

Tianming did.

There were dock hands with them. A woman with a fruit basket had one across her back. A boy of about twelve was carrying one wrapped in oilcloth for someone.

His expression changed.

"Oh."

"Exactly."

"It’s just a normal sword here."

"It’s just a sword here." Xuan watched the pier slide closer. "Back home, that blade narrowed things down. Here it tells us absolutely nothing."

"So we’re back to nothing."

"Pretty much." Xuan took his hand off the boy’s shoulder. "Welcome to the problem."

They came ashore into a wall of noise and heat.

Nobody looked at them twice.

That was the thing that got him, walking up the pier with his people around him. In the empire he had spent the last stretch of his life unable to enter a room without it rearranging around him. Officials had walked backward in front of him. A gate captain in the capital had once nearly injured himself getting a barrier up fast enough.

Here a man shoved past him carrying a crate and told him to move.

The customs officer at the head of the pier looked at their papers, looked at their faces, asked Hao two bored questions about cargo, stamped everything, and waved them through without ever once looking at Xuan properly. Golden Core. Consort of an empire. Founder-seated lord of the Skyedge Sword Sect. The man could not have picked him out of the crowd again an hour later.

’Nobody knows who I am.’

[ Nope. Nobody knows, nobody cares, and for once nobody’s going to bow because you walked into the room. ] Mira sounded far too pleased about it. [ So? How’s that feel? ]

Xuan thought about it, standing in a foreign port with the sun on the back of his neck and his sword drawing no attention whatsoever.

’Pretty good, actually. Like taking off armor.’

[ Yeah. Enjoy that part. ] Her tone shifted. [ Because the other part is that everything you’ve built is across an ocean. Your name means nothing here. Your title means nothing. Nobody owes you a favor. Nobody’s scared of your father, your wife, your sect, or your friends. ]

’You’re really selling the trip.’

[ I’m saying you’re starting from zero. Down here you’re just some guy with a sword, money, and a bad habit of getting involved in things. ]

’I’ve done worse with less.’

[ Yep. That’s what worries me. ]

They took rooms above a chandler’s on the third terrace, because Hao had negotiated it before the rest of them had finished walking up the hill, and because it had a view of the harbor and two ways out of the building.

Xuan stood at the window that evening and watched the lamps come on all the way down the slope to the water.

’All right. First thing, the poison sect. Lian gets her answers, Yun Ji gets a cure, and we figure out who’s buying.’

[ Yeah. First thing. Not the reason we’re here. ]

’There’s a difference?’

[ A pretty big one, actually. You have this annoying habit of finishing one problem and deciding you’ve finished the whole job. ]

’Okay. What’s the job?’

[ The man in white. ]

Mira lost the teasing completely.

[ Everything else points back to him. The poison. The raiders. That mark on the disc. Whatever connection I have to this place. It all keeps circling back to one man I couldn’t read, on a continent I can’t see properly, who somehow knew enough to sit in a provincial tournament years ago and watch a crippled kid who wasn’t supposed to matter. ]

Xuan turned away from the window.

’Great. So how do we find one guy on an entire continent?’

[ We don’t. ]

He frowned.

’That’s your plan?’

[ That’s the first half. ]

’Wonderful.’

[ Xuan, listen. You can’t hunt someone like that. No sect we know. No family. No real name. I couldn’t even read him while he was standing forty paces away from us. If he doesn’t want to be found, we’re screwed. We could search for twenty years and never get close. ]

’You’re really on fire tonight.’

[ I’m getting there. ] Mira paused. [ You’ve been looking at it backwards ever since the mountain. ]

’Go on.’

[ He came to us. ]

Xuan said nothing.

[ Think about it. He crossed an ocean. Went to some provincial tournament nobody important had any reason to care about. Sat there watching people who meant nothing to him. And the second a half-dead kid planted a star in the arena that nobody else understood, he stood up. ]

’And smiled.’

[ Yeah. And smiled. Then he left. ]

Xuan leaned one shoulder against the window frame.

’You’ve been thinking about this for a while.’

[ Years, Xuan. ]

That shut him up.

Mira continued, quieter now.

[ So stop trying to find him. That’s not how this works. That man doesn’t get found. He comes to look when something catches his attention. ]

’So we stop hunting him.’

[ Exactly. ]

Xuan stared down at the harbor, at a thousand foreign lights and a city that had no idea who had just walked into it.

’And then what?’

Mira’s answer came without hesitation.

[ We make enough noise that he comes looking again. ]