Chapter 183

Lianhua brings me down from the ship in her arms and sits me in the chair at the foot of the gangway with the same care as always, and I notice the wicker of the backrest through my clothing as a sensation I had been missing.

But I notice something else too, which is that there are a great many people looking at me.

And I don’t mean Shen Fei’s men, who have spent two months seeing me every day and who by this point look at me exactly the same way they look at the capstan, but rather I mean everyone else.

Because this dock is full of people who have never seen me. There are stevedores stopped halfway through unloading with a bundle on their shoulder, there are two men with a list and a brush who have stopped writing mid-line, there is a woman with a basket who has turned around entirely, and there is, a bit farther off, a group of four who have come three steps closer without realizing they were coming closer.

And they are all looking at the same thing.

They are not looking at me exactly, since if they were looking at me they would look away after a moment, as people do. What they are looking at is that in front of them there is a girl seated on a bamboo frame with two large wheels behind and two small ones in front, and none of them has seen a thing like that in their lives.

So I do what I have been doing for thirteen years, which is absolutely nothing.

I don’t return their gazes, I don’t shrink, I don’t search for Lianhua with my eyes and I don’t do any of the things people do when they want to stop being looked at and achieve exactly the opposite, I simply settle myself in the seat, smooth my skirt over my knees and turn my head toward my right.

Chen Mo is there, two paces away, with his seven men distributed behind him and a bag on his shoulder that he was not carrying a while ago.

“Chen Mo”, I tell him. “I am ready now.”

Chen Mo lowers his gaze toward me.

“So I see”, he answers me.

“Then you can guide us to the headquarters of the Tower of the Five Dragons whenever you wish”, I tell him finally.

And Chen Mo, after hearing me, stays looking at me a second before answering.

It is not a look of annoyance nor of doubt, but rather it is the look of someone who is calculating for the last time the exact size of the problem they have taken on without intending to, and I get the impression that in that second there pass through this man’s head the streets there are between here and the headquarters, along with the quantity of people there are on each one of them.

Afterward he lets the air out through his nose.

“Follow me”, he tells me.

And he sets off walking without waiting for an answer, in a direction that to me, who cannot see over anyone’s heads, seems to lead out of the port.

Lianhua positions herself behind the chair and pushes.

And Xia, who has come down last with the backpack on and the face of one who has spent half an hour holding herself back, positions herself at my left in two strides and grabs on to the armrest with her hand.

And thus, in formation, we venture into Sanjiang.

Chen Mo’s men do not position themselves in a line behind us, but rather they spread out.

Two go in front, one on each side of their boss, two at each of my flanks some three paces from the chair, and one behind, closing. And they do it without anyone telling them to, with that naturalness of people who have done the same task so many times that they no longer consider it a maneuver.

And the moment they position themselves, the sensation changes completely.

Because the looks are still there, that is not fixed with anything, but the looks are no longer accompanied by people coming closer, and that is a difference I appreciate far more than I am willing to say aloud.

So I devote myself to looking at the port, which is what I have been wanting to do since we docked, and the first thing that draws my attention is the size of everything.

Because these are not the docks of a river, or at least they are not the docks of any river I have ever studied. The quays are of stone, not of wood, and they are wide, so wide that along one of them two carts pass in opposite directions without either of the two having to pull over, while the bollards are solid blocks clearly prepared for vessels of great size.

And all of that, in my other life, was called maritime port infrastructure.

River docks are not built like that, because there is no need. A normal river gives you a current, a scant draft and some barges that are loaded with a plank and four people, and that is why the river ports of my world were, almost always, a bank reinforced with stakes and little more.

But a river of twenty kilometers is not a river, it is a narrow sea with a current, and to a narrow sea with a current you build exactly what you would build for a sea. The strange thing would have been the opposite.

And with that idea I stay fairly satisfied with myself for some thirty seconds, until I realize that I have spent a while hearing the word chair.

I don’t hear it whole and I don’t hear it twice in a row, but rather I hear it the way one hears those things, which is in pieces and above the general noise of a port that is working.

And yes, most of what is being whispered is about my chair, but there is a part that is not.

Because every time we pass near a group, there is a moment in which the voices drop half a tone, and that half tone is not dedicated to the chair, but to the girl who is sitting in it.

And I understand it perfectly, because from outside what is seen here is a thirteen-year-old girl, badly dressed, seated in an artifact no one knows. And behind the girl is seen an adult woman, tall, with equally discreet clothing and with the way of walking of someone who knows what she is doing, pushing the artifact like someone pushing a wheelbarrow.

And here people have no category in which to put that, so what they are doing right now, between one bundle and another, is inventing a category for us.

And I hope they come up with a good one, because to me, after thirteen years, none has occurred to me yet.

But of the whole journey through the port, what I truly like is the noise.

It is an enormous noise, with layers, and I set about separating them out of pure professional inclination. There is the background layer, which is the water and the wood and the ropes, and above it is the layer of people shouting figures, and above that the layer of people arguing, and then, very occasionally, someone bursts out laughing about something and that laugh crosses above everything else.

And there is not a single voice that speaks about me in any of those layers, because no one here knows who I am, and that idea, which I have spent two months turning over, here suddenly becomes real.

Because in the Imperial Palace, every person I crossed paths with in a hallway had a complete file on me. They knew my rank, they knew who my mother was, they knew about my legs and they knew what the correct way of greeting me was.

And here, on the other hand, I am a strange kid in a strange chair, nothing more.

But while I revel in that sensation, we come out of the port.

There is no gate, nor a wall, nor anything that separates one zone from the other, but rather the quays simply end, the port becomes a street and suddenly there are no longer docks on the sides, but buildings.

And those buildings, all of them, without exception, are warehouses.

I recognize them in a second because they are the same everywhere: blind facades, wide double doors, no window at street level and a great many people going in and out with their hands full.

But what interests me is not that they are warehouses, but where they are, because they are pressed against the water without any kind of transition.

And that produces in me a small absurd pleasure, of those only understood by someone who has spent years receiving classes on a subject and now sees that subject come to life in front of her.

In Europe, the port and the city tended to turn their backs on each other. The port was a work zone, dirty and set apart, and a decent city grew inward, leaving the water to the stevedores and the customs offices.

But at the other end of the world that did not happen.

In the Chinese coastal cities, commerce did not move away from the port, but rather coiled around it. Warehouses, shops, workshops, markets and merchants’ houses, all in the same neighborhood and at the same distance from the water, because those who lived off the merchandise wanted to have it where they could watch over it.

And here exactly that is happening, because as we advance, the warehouses begin to mutate.

First it is a wide door that has, beside it, a window with a counter. Then it is a wide door with two windows. Then there is already more window than door, and then there are outright shops, with awnings, with baskets outside, with a kid seated on a stool whose only function in life is to shout at the people passing by.

And there is no point at which one can say that the warehouses end and the shops begin.

But besides that I see how the type of people changes.

In the port everyone had their hands full, but here there are a great many people who carry nothing in their hands and who are looking, touching, asking and, above all, waiting. There are men leaning against the walls who have been there a good while, and there are little circles that break up when someone comes out of a doorway and re-form the moment that someone leaves.

And that smells to me of middlemen, which is, by the way, one of the professions in the world that has not needed anyone to invent it.

At a given moment, the street opens and we emerge into a plaza that is a market.

And it is not a market with fixed stalls, but of the kind that are set up in the morning and taken down at night, with tarpaulins tied to poles, with the merchandise on the ground on top of mats and with the aisles exactly as wide as the need of two people to pass at once without touching.

Crossing it with the chair is an interesting exercise.

Lianhua does not take me through the center, but rather takes me along the edge, following the facade, and even so I notice every joint of the ground in the base of my back, because these wheels are still bamboo hoops without anything soft on the outside, and there is not a day of my life in which I don’t miss rubber.

Upon leaving the market the city changes again.

The streets widen, the awnings disappear, the ground goes from stone to flagstone, and the facades begin to have things that serve no purpose, which is the exact definition of a wealthy neighborhood.

There are worked eaves alongside lanterns hung at a height at which no one is going to steal them. There are two stone lions flanking a door and there is, in front of that door, a man whose job evidently consists of being in front of that door.

But there is a difference that is even clearer, which is that here no one shouts anymore.

And then the street opens for the second time, and what there is on the other side makes me raise an eyebrow, because it is a large square plaza, and it has nothing save a building in the center.

A single building, of five floors and without any construction attached to any of its four sides, surrounded completely by empty space, and that detail, in a city in which I have spent half an hour seeing houses leaning on one another like books on a shelf, is the first thing that tells me how much money there is inside.

And its facade is sober, but in a manner that strikes me as fairly intelligent, because there are no golden dragons, nor glazed tiles, nor painted friezes, nor any of the things I would expect from a place called the Tower of the Five Dragons.

What there is is good stone, very well cut, with the joints so fine that from here they can hardly be seen, a roof of clean lines per floor and some tall and narrow windows placed at exact intervals.

This text was taken from NovelPhoenix without permission; the author's own chapter there gives readers a way to support their writing.

And seeing it without context, everything in that structure, in my old world, would shout the word Bank.

There is no other way of putting it. Any headquarters of any financial institution of my other world had a very similar facade, and it had it for the same reason, which is to give the message not of how rich they are, but of how well they manage money.

And above the doors there is a sign of dark wood with carved characters that confirm my supposition about whom the building belongs to.

Tower of the Five Dragons.

And I, from my chair, looking at that sign, feel an absurd relief because I have spent two long months traveling, and all of that I have done to reach a counter that is behind those doors.

Chen Mo crosses the plaza diagonally without slackening his pace while we follow him to the doors, which are double and thrown wide open, with people entering and leaving through them, although not as many as I would expect for the size of the building, which is another fact I note down.

But Chen Mo does not stop at the threshold, nor identify himself, nor say anything to anyone, he simply enters, so we enter behind him.

And the first thing I think upon entering is that in here there was an architect who knew exactly what he was doing, because this ground floor has no rooms.

It doesn’t have them and clearly has never had them, since there are no partitions, nor folding screens, nor hallways, nor anything that interrupts the view from one end to the other. It is a single enormous space, with a double-height ceiling, with the light entering through those tall narrow windows I had seen from outside and with a floor of gray flagstone polished by the passage of many people over a long time.

And in all that space there are only three elements.

At the back, two large staircases, one on each side, that rise in opposite directions toward the upper floor, and at the foot of each of them there are two men standing who are clearly guards.

Then, distributed around the hall, there is a row of long and solid counters arranged with efficiency so that the lines they have don’t obstruct the traffic of the hall.

And then there is the third element, the intelligent part, which is the lack of any more furniture that would get in the way.

Because in a place like this, that emptiness is not a waste, but rather it is a tool. You enter and you see all at once where everything is, you see who is inside, you see whether someone is approaching you from behind, and above all you see that there is not a single corner in which anything can be done without the whole hall seeing it.

In my other life that was called branch design, and it worked exactly the same.

But the moment I finish making that very dignified analysis, I look at the counters and a laugh comes out of me on the inside, because, how could it be otherwise, they are attended by women.

And not by just any women, but by women of very good appearance, all more or less the same age, all with the same type of hairstyle and all with clothing that is clearly a uniform.

That is to say, exactly the same thing any institution of my world did on the floor facing the public, with the only difference that there we called it corporate image and here probably no one calls it anything at all because it has not occurred to anyone that a name was needed.

But then I look a bit more and I have to correct myself.

Because at the counter I have nearest there is a woman attending to a man who brings a sheaf of papers and a face of few friends, and that woman is not smiling at him nor making conversation with him. What she is doing is passing him the papers one by one with two fingers, very quickly, stopping at three of them and marking them with a fingernail, and when she finishes she lifts her gaze and tells him something short that wipes the face of few friends off the man all at once.

And at the next one there is another who is noting down figures on a sheet while she listens, without looking at whoever is speaking to her and without making a mistake.

So I correct what I was thinking ten seconds ago.

They have chosen them pretty, that is crystal clear and I don’t intend to pretend otherwise. But they have not chosen them only for that, because these women know perfectly what they are doing, and in a place where a counter’s error costs real money, that is the only thing that actually matters.

Chen Mo, meanwhile, has not stopped at any of those counters, what’s more, he doesn’t even look at them, but rather he crosses the hall in a straight line toward the staircase on the left and halfway there he turns his head backward.

“Xiaojie”, he tells me. “Follow me.”

And there, for half a second, I curse myself because I have not taken out the Minor Levitation Talismans, but I don’t have time to think about the consequences because Lianhua is already pushing toward the staircase, and when we reach the foot, Chen Mo is greeting the two men.

“They’re with me”, he tells them, and he says it without any ceremony. “All three.”

One of the two guards looks at the chair, and it is a look I know well, because it is not hostility, but rather a man asking himself, in silence, the same question I am asking myself, which is how the devil I am going to go up there.

But before I have time to open my mouth, and while Chen Mo is still talking with them, I notice a movement to my left, since Lianhua has taken something out from among her clothes.

And in a single gesture, she leans over, sticks a paper on the side of the chair at the height of the armrest and returns to her spot.

The talisman shines an instant and the chair rises.

Not much, barely a few fingers, just enough for the four wheels to stop touching the ground, and one of the guards opens his mouth a bit, but he closes it right away.

And Chen Mo, who is two paces away and who has turned his head just in time to see it, does something I did not expect, which is to nod with satisfaction, after which he turns around and begins to climb.

Lianhua pushes behind him, and since the chair is now floating, climbing the staircase consists simply of her climbing while she carries me, without effort, like someone pushing a balloon.

And I, taking advantage of the fact that Chen Mo goes three steps ahead and with his back turned, tilt my head.

“Lianhua”, I tell her in a low voice. “When did you take the Minor Levitation Talismans?”

“When I gathered the luggage on the ship, Xiaojie”, she answers me, and she says it with exactly the same volume as always.

“And why?” I ask her.

“Because we were going to a city”, she tells me. “And in a city there are staircases. It seemed to me that, sooner or later, they would be needed.”

I stay looking at the step I have in front of me, because once again, Lianhua has thought about the situation far more than I had.

“Well thought out”, I tell her.

“Thank you, Xiaojie”, she answers me.

And with those words we reach the top, but right away I realize that Chen Mo’s men have stayed below.

“Chen Mo”, I tell him. “Your men have stayed downstairs.”

Chen Mo, who was already entering the vestibule, stops and turns around.

“Naturally”, he answers me.

“Naturally?” I ask him.

“Xiaojie, my men were not coming because they were needed in here”, he tells me. “My men were coming because they were escorting you through the street, which is a completely different thing.”

He shrugs his shoulders.

“And you have already reached your destination”, he finishes. “So they have returned to the tasks it corresponds to them to do after having finished the voyage.”

After those words, he turns around and enters while Lianhua takes me behind him.

The second floor is a vestibule, and it is a fairly large vestibule, with the two staircases from below emptying into it, one on each side, and with a floor of polished wood.

And opposite, on the far wall, there is another staircase.

It is narrower than the two we have just climbed, it rises toward the third floor and it has two men at its foot, the same as the ones below, except that these two are not the same as the ones below.

I couldn’t say exactly how it shows, because they are dressed similarly and are armed in the same manner, but it shows, and it shows a great deal.

Chen Mo passes in front of that staircase without looking at it, then heads toward the interior of the floor, and Lianhua, the moment she sees that we don’t have to keep climbing staircases, pushes the chair downward until the wheels touch the floor, the talisman goes out and we go back to following him.

Xia, as she has been since we entered the building, goes behind us without saying absolutely anything, and that, in her case, must be noted, because I have seen her face upon turning around, and clearly she is looking at everything with a great deal of attention and saving up her questions for later.

And I also note that I am going to have to answer all of them tonight.

The route is not long, since we come out of the vestibule by one side, cross a hallway, turn, cross another, and in all that journey we come across four or five people who, invariably, greet Chen Mo.

And he returns all the greetings, with each one’s name and with a short sentence, without stopping, and he does it with an ease that confirms for me something I already suspected, which is that this man is not an employee who passes through here from time to time, but rather he treats this place as if it were his own house.

But the interesting thing is not the greetings, the interesting thing is that all five people, without exception, look at the three of us as we pass, and all five have exactly the same face, the face of someone who is swallowing a question.

And that, in an organization that dedicates itself professionally to information, strikes me as a fairly eloquent piece of data about the importance of being guided by Chen Mo, and about that man’s status.

Finally we reach a door, Chen Mo stops in front of it and knocks with two raps.

From inside there arrives a woman’s voice giving permission to enter, so Chen Mo pushes the door, enters, and while he enters he raises his hand backward without turning around.

“Come in”, he tells us, so we come in.

The office is a medium-sized room, with a tall window on the left, a large two-section cabinet against the far wall, a row of straight-backed chairs pushed against the walls and a solid table in the center, placed in such a way that whoever is seated behind it sees the door.

And behind the table there is a woman.

She is a woman of middle age, or at least she appears so, which in a place like this means nothing. She has her hair gathered without a single lock out of place, wears clothing of good fabric but of a muted color, and has in front of her three piles of papers perfectly ordered and a fourth pile that is evidently the one she is working on.

And she also has, on top of the table and to her right, a kind of cube of pale stone some thirty centimeters on each side that looks like a very expensive paperweight.

“Good morning”, says Chen Mo.

The woman lifts her gaze.

“Chen Mo”, she answers him. “They hadn’t told me you were back.”

Next her gaze goes, over Chen Mo’s shoulder, directly toward us.

But it does not stay on the chair, and that I notice because I have spent the whole morning seeing people stay looking at the chair, and this woman does not do it. She gives the chair the exact amount of time she would give a strange hat, and afterward she looks at me, and afterward she looks at Lianhua, and afterward she looks at Xia, and in none of the three cases does a single muscle of her face move.

“And who are your companions?” she asks him.

Chen Mo, instead of answering her as any normal person would answer, steps aside a pace, points at me with his open hand and lets loose the following.

“This little one is the owner of a commercial enterprise associated with the Tower of the Five Dragons”, he tells her, after which he makes a very brief pause.

“So I have brought her to you”, he continues. “Now you can stop being bored and do your job for once in your life.”

And what occurs next occurs very fast, because the woman takes a small ornament she had on top of the table, a piece of green stone the size of an egg, and throws it at his head.

“Stop needling me”, she tells him, without raising her voice a bit. “I do everything I can in my situation.”

Chen Mo tilts his head and the ornament passes a handspan from his ear while he laughs.

And it is not the short laugh of his, but rather it is a real laugh, while he stretches his arm backward and catches the piece of stone in the air before it reaches the wall, something he does without looking.

Afterward he leaves it on the table again, turns toward me and changes his tone.

“Xiaojie”, he tells me. “This woman is Lin Quingyu, and she occupies herself with all the matters related to the enterprises associated with the Tower of the Five Dragons. Absolutely all of them.”

He points at the table with his chin.

“So she is the one who can help you with everything you may need”, he finishes. “And with what you don’t need as well, if you let her talk.”

And I, after hearing that, settle myself in the chair, join my hands on my legs and make an inclination of the head as deep as being seated permits me.

“Chen Mo”, I tell him. “Before anything else, I want to thank you for everything you have done for me during this voyage.”

Chen Mo raises a hand.

“No, let me finish”, I continue. “Because I am not thanking you for bringing me, since that I had contracted. I am thanking you for everything else you have done for me and that you had no obligation to do.”

I lower my chin a bit.

“So thank you”, I finish.

And Chen Mo, faced with all that, does exactly what I expected him to do, which is to shrug his shoulders.

“That is what they paid me for”, he answers me.

“Right”, I tell him.

“And besides, I still have a great many things to do today”, he continues, and there he is already turning around. “Including one that has spent two months waiting, so if you will excuse me.”

And he sets off walking toward the door, so I let him reach it, open it and put one foot outside, because there are things that have to be said at the exact last moment or they have no charm at all.

“Chen Mo”, I tell him, smiling.

He stops upon hearing me.

“Don’t forget to send me my share of what is made from the contents of the ship”, I tell him.

And Chen Mo, without turning around entirely, with his hand already on the door, answers.

“Don’t you worry”, he tells me.

And he closes, so I stay looking at that closed door a second longer than I should, because I have spent two long months with that man at my side, and the last weeks of them stopped in the middle of a river splitting salmon, and it turns out that the farewell has lasted eight seconds and has consisted of him telling me not to worry.

Which is, being fair, the farewell that corresponds to a merchant.

Afterward I turn my head toward the table, and Lin Quingyu is looking at me.

And now there is indeed curiosity in that look, a fair amount, but it is a brief curiosity, because the moment she realizes that I have caught her looking she does not look away nor pretend anything, but rather she joins her hands on top of the table and turns completely professional.

“Very well”, she tells me. “Let us begin with the simplest thing. What is your name?”

“Sun Wen”, I answer her.

“Sun Wen”, she repeats, and she notes it down. “And what is that commercial company of which you are supposedly the owner?”

“The House of the Long Journey”, I tell her.

After hearing the name, the brush stops.

She doesn’t drop it, she doesn’t let go of it, it simply stops in mid-character, and Lin Quingyu lifts her gaze very slowly.

“The House of the Long Journey?” she asks me.

“That very one”, I confirm to her.

Lin Quingyu leaves the brush.

“You will understand that that surprises me”, she tells me.

“I think I understand”, I answer her. “But I would appreciate it if you told me why exactly it surprises you, because about that company I know considerably less than you probably know.”

And that sentence, by her face, throws her off a bit more still.

“Because some years ago there came to this headquarters some delegates of a consort of the Emperor of the Tianjing Empire”, she tells me. “They sat where you are now, negotiated for a month and set up that company. And in that month they did not say a single time that the company was actually for a girl.”

She leans back a bit in her chair.

“They gave to understand, without saying it, that it was for the consort”, she continues. “Something that, be it said in passing, struck us as perfectly reasonable, because a lady of an imperial court who wants income outside her Empire and doesn’t want it known, is the kind of client the Tower has more often than it seems.”

And I, faced with that, smile.

“That delegation was sent by my mother”, I tell her.

Lin Quingyu stays looking at me.

“Your mother”, she repeats.

“My mother”, I confirm to her.

And I add absolutely nothing more, because there is no need at all, and because there is a very small part of me that is enjoying itself.

Lin Quingyu stays silent two seconds, and in those two seconds I see perfectly how she rearranges some of her ideas inside her head.

“I understand”, she tells me at last, and with that it strikes me that the introductions part is over, so I turn serious.

“Lin Quingyu”, I tell her. “Before anything else, I want to tell you one thing, and it is that until two months ago I did not know that that company existed.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“They told me of its existence the night before I left, with a seal and a four-sentence explanation”, I continue. “So now that I am finally here, the first thing I want is to know exactly what the terms of the contract between the House of the Long Journey and the Tower of the Five Dragons are.”

And I don’t say word for word, although it is what I want to say, because I have spent two weeks repeating to myself that in this meeting I am not going to seem distrustful before my time.

Lin Quingyu nods.

“There is no problem with that”, she tells me. “What’s more, you are within your rights and I am glad that it is the first thing you ask.”

And next she raises a finger.

“But first there is a requirement”, she continues. “You have to demonstrate to me that you are effectively in charge of the House of the Long Journey.”