Chapter 203

“We’re going out today too”, I say halfway through breakfast, from the head of the stone table in the courtyard and with my chopsticks still in my hand.

Xia freezes with her bowl halfway to her mouth, and Lianhua, on the bench to my left, sets her chopsticks down on the table.

“Again?” Xia asks me. “What for?”

“To start spending money”, I reply.

And from the way the two of them look at me, anyone would think I hit my head last night and am starting to go delirious.

“We’ve been selling talismans to the Tower for months”, I continue. “And Lu Zhiyu does nothing but press me to bring her more, because supposedly they’re in high demand, so those payments have done nothing but pile up.”

Besides, right now all that money is sitting in the House of the Long Journey’s funds, unused. And in my other life, any halfway decent financial advisor would have told me that money that isn’t used is good for nothing.

Xia sets down her bowl, props her chin on her hand and looks at me sideways, with a smile I know far too well.

“And yesterday’s books weren’t enough of a birthday present for you?” she asks me.

This from the same girl who, yesterday, refused to look at the pile of books again once I added the romance novel to it.

“We’re going to buy things for all of us”, I reply.

Then I raise my chopsticks and point them at Lianhua.

“Although mostly for her”, I add.

Lianhua sighs when she hears me.

It is an almost soundless sigh, but Lianhua sighs so rarely that Xia stops smiling to look at her.

“Did you take what Master Mu told me about my weapons seriously, Xiaojie?” she asks me.

“Completely seriously”, I reply without hesitating.

“You are our first line of defense, and the main one”, I continue. “So the better prepared you are, the safer all of us will be.”

Lianhua doesn’t reply, because it is exactly the argument she uses with me every time my safety is concerned, and she knows it.

Ever since Master Mu left, I have had a list, and on that list there are two entries, one below the other.

Lianhua’s daggers, together with a chair I still haven’t dared to ask about, and today I intend to cross off the first before, at the very least, asking about the second.

“And I’m sure the Tower sells them in one of its catalogs”, I add. “But a weapon is better seen in person than contemplated on a list, so I’ve decided we’re going to the quarter of the craftsmen who work with spiritual materials.”

Lianhua opens her mouth and closes it again, because she already lost that argument once over the techniques, and she doesn’t seem to have the slightest desire to lose it twice.

“And while we’re there”, I finish, giving the armrest two little taps. “I’m going to see whether anyone can do something to improve my chair.”

Before we leave, I ask Lianhua to go to the study and put the roll of papers tied with string that is on my desk into the backpack.

Lianhua doesn’t ask what it is. Xia asks three times, but I don’t tell her.

The trip into the city is the same as yesterday’s. The chair anchored in its spot in the boat, Xia’s hand on the armrest just in case, the ramp at the dock, the first looks as soon as my wheels touch the planks and, after that, the streets Lianhua already knows by heart thanks to the Tower’s guide.

If you reach the Hundred Furnaces Quarter by smell, you reach the Ten Thousand Trades Quarter by noise.

I hear it two streets before we arrive. Hammer blows that follow no common rhythm, the screech of saws and, underneath it all, the hiss of red-hot metal every time someone plunges it into water.

Many of the workshops, as in the Hundred Furnaces Quarter, are open to the street, while others are closed in. Carpenters, tanners with beast hides stretched on frames, and blacksmiths.

The ground is covered in wood shavings that crunch under my wheels, while the air smells of resin, leather and charcoal.

Here, though, the looks are different, because a carpenter stops planing a board when I pass in front of him, but he doesn’t look at me. He looks at the wheels, and then at the axle, with the face of someone taking the chair apart in his head to see how it is made.

In the rest of the city they look at me because I am sitting in something strange they have never seen before, but on this street they look at me because they want to know how it is made, and I have to admit I prefer it.

From the second street on, the weapon shops begin, and by the third there is nothing else.

Although, more than weapon shops, they are sword shops. Swords on the walls, on the counters, half-forged on the anvils and in the hands of some boys who come out of a shop testing them against the air.

Near my old university, half the storefronts were copy shops, because that was what the students needed. Here, one of the three sects that govern the city is a sect of swordsmen, and everyone who wants to resemble them wears a sword at their belt, so the result is obvious.

Xia counts them under her breath, and gives up when she reaches twenty.

Lianhua passes all of them without turning her head, until, almost at the end of the street, wedged between two sword shops with doors twice as wide, a small shop appears without a single sword in sight. It has daggers, knives, awls, some narrow, curved blades whose use I can’t guess and an entire board of long needles arranged by size.

And it is Lianhua who stops, without anyone asking her to.

“This one, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

“If you say so, then we don’t need to look any further”, I say, confirming her choice.

The door is narrow, and the chair goes through with a finger’s breadth to spare on each side. Inside there is a long counter of dark wood, and on the walls, on felt cloths, short blades of every shape I can imagine and of a few I can’t.

Behind the counter is a man of about fifty, with forearms covered in small white scars and a searching gaze.

He looks at me, looks at the chair, looks at Xia, and finally settles his eyes on Lianhua, who is the only one of the three of us who looks as if she has come to buy something that cuts.

I don’t hold it against him, because I would have done the same if I had seen our group walk into my shop.

“I am looking for a pair of short blades”, Lianhua tells him.

“What style?” he asks her.

Lianhua raises her hands above the counter, and when she lowers them, the two Shuang Bi Shou are lying on the wood, side by side.

The man blinks, although he doesn’t seem surprised, since he simply picks one up, weighs it, runs his thumbnail along the edge and examines it closely with a loupe.

“Good steel”, he says. “Well cared for and well used.”

He sets it down beside the other.

“But ordinary steel”, he adds. “And someone at your level shouldn’t be carrying ordinary steel.”

It is almost exactly what Master Mu told her, although hearing it from a professional only reaffirms her words.

The man disappears through a curtain at the back and returns with a felt cloth holding three pairs of blades, which he spreads out on the counter.

“These are like yours”, he says, pointing to the first pair from the other side of the counter. “Same shape, but made of a common spirit metal. It holds up somewhat better than ordinary steel, and it’s the cheapest option of the three.”

He points to the second pair, longer and heavier than the other two.

“These are a better material”, he continues. “Made to cross edges with a sword and not come off worse, which is what ends up happening in this city sooner or later, but that makes them much heavier. They’re the most expensive.”

The author publishes this chapter on NovelPhoenix, but the version presented here was copied without approval; reading there supports the writer.

And he points to the third pair.

“And these have the same length and the same weight as yours”, he finishes. “But they’re made of a considerably better material than the first pair.”

Then he states the three prices, all of them expensive but within what I had supposed, and within our budget.

Lianhua tries them in order.

She picks up each pair, weighs them, slides them into her sleeves and draws them out again.

The first ones disappear without a sound. The second ones do too, but at the height of her left wrist a glint of steel peeks out from the cuff of her sleeve, and Lianhua draws them out without a word and returns them to the counter.

The third ones she puts away and draws out three times, and by the third time there is absolutely nothing to be heard.

“These”, she says.

“The long ones are better”, I tell her.

“The long ones are more expensive, Xiaojie”, she corrects me, making one of the weapons appear. “Not the best for me.”

She turns her wrist and the blade disappears again.

“These have the same length and the same weight as mine”, she continues. “I don’t need to adapt my current sheaths and, above all, I don’t have to relearn the combat distances of new ones. They are the ones that suit me best.”

I don’t argue with her, since she knows more than anyone about her weapons, so I do the math and discover that, of the money I was planning to spend on Lianhua’s weapons, there is considerably more left over than I expected.

“Do you have anything smaller?” I ask the owner. “Daggers that can be carried hidden in one’s clothes.”

“For whom?” he asks me.

“For me”, I reply. “And for her.”

Then I point at Xia with my chin.

The man stares at the chair for a moment, and I know perfectly well what he is thinking: what does someone who can’t even stand up to use a weapon want with one.

I hold his gaze until he decides it is none of his business, after which he disappears through the curtain again, and when he comes back he is carrying two small daggers, the length of a hand, each with a thin leather sheath designed to be sewn inside a sleeve or a belt.

At the Palace I was taught to use a knife and to throw it, but since I crossed the border I haven’t carried anything that cuts.

“One for me?” Xia asks me. “I don’t need a dagger, Wen. I’m going to be a cook.”

“And in the meantime, you train with Lianhua”, I remind her. “And what you learn just in case is only useful if you have it on you the day you need it. We’ve already discussed that.”

Xia crosses her arms and stares at the dagger the same way she stares at a fish at the market that she doesn’t trust.

“Fine”, she tells me. “But let the record show that I don’t like it.”

“So noted”, I tell her, as I always do.

And before the owner finishes wrapping everything up, I ask him another question.

“Do you know whether anyone in this quarter makes custom cookware?” I ask him. “For a spirit chef.”

To my right, Xia uncrosses her arms all at once.

The owner scratches the back of his neck, and then nods.

“I know one”, he tells me.

He explains where with two turns of his hand and the name of a street, and I notice that Lianhua, on my left, seems to be committing the directions to memory.

“And I am also looking for a woodworker”, I add. “One who works with spiritual materials and who doesn’t scare easily at an odd commission.”

This time he doesn’t ask what for, because he looks straight at my chair.

“There’s one at the end of the quarter”, he replies. “He’s slow and he’s expensive, but what comes out of his workshop always satisfies his customers.”

I listen to him, and it seems to me an acceptable enough recommendation to at least go and see him.

After that, the owner adds it all up and tells us the total.

I take out of my bag the paper, the brush and the inkwell I have carried with me ever since Shen Fei advised me to, and since the counter is a little high for me, I use the Myriad of Hands to fill it out against the counter.

Then I take out the seal and sign the paper in front of him, after which the owner picks up the paper, sees the three characters, and a trace of satisfaction crosses his face.

“A Tower authorization is always welcome”, he tells us, and after that he wishes us a good day as we leave the shop.

Xia hasn’t opened her mouth since I asked the owner about the cookware, and in Xia, a silence that long means she has spent all that time turning something over.

We haven’t gone ten paces out of the shop when she turns toward me, with her hand on the armrest and the package with her dagger clutched to her chest.

“Why did you ask him about cookware?” she asks me.

“Because the day you can try to get taken on as an apprentice by a spirit chef, if you bring your own cookware, you’ll have an advantage over everyone who doesn’t”, I reply.

“But that’s for later on”, I continue. “You still have a long way to go before you open your first Gate.”

Xia says nothing, but she doesn’t let go of the armrest either, and for the rest of the street, every time I glance at her out of the corner of my eye, I catch her smiling at the ground.

The woodworker’s workshop is where the owner said, at the end of the quarter, and it is the exact opposite of the weapon shop. A wide building, with a double door thrown wide open, so wide that the chair goes in without any trouble at all.

Inside it smells of resin and sawdust. There are planks stacked by size against the walls, and some of them, when I activate Sensing the Qi, light up before my eyes like embers banked under ash.

In the center, a lean old man, with wood shavings even in his eyebrows, is adjusting the spokes of a cart wheel.

He looks up when we come in, and the first thing he looks at isn’t me but my chair.

And at that moment I decide I like him.

“The short-blade armorer sent us”, Lianhua tells him.

“And what’s that?” he asks, ignoring her and pointing at the chair with his mallet.

“A chair with wheels”, I reply. “For someone who can’t walk.”

“And how long is it meant to be used for?” he asks me.

He asks it without any ill intent, just as he would ask how much load a cart has to bear.

“The palanquins I usually get asked for, to carry someone sitting down, are usually for a few months”, he adds. “Until the pill or the healer does its work.”

“Forever”, I reply bluntly.

The man goes quiet for a moment, looking at me for the first time and not at the chair.

“Then it has to be done right”, he tells me.

He sets the mallet down on the workbench.

“May I?” he asks me.

“Go ahead”, I tell him.

He crouches beside my right wheel, so close that I can see the sawdust stuck to his eyelashes, and spins it with his palm. The chair moves with me in it, and Lianhua, without a word, holds it by the backrest.

He raps the bamboo rim with a knuckle, listens, and raps again a handspan further along. He looks closely at the axle, runs his thumb along the joints and asks Lianhua to tilt the chair backward, and when she does, my stomach turns over a little.

Then he takes out a knotted cord and measures. The seat, the backrest, the distance to the footrest. The cord brushes my ankle, and I feel his fingers moving it aside carefully.

“And what do you want me to do for you?” he asks me when he finishes.

“I want to be able to move it by myself”, I reply.

Lianhua takes the roll of papers out of the backpack, and the man, seeing that his bench is too high for me, drags a trestle over to me, lays a board across it and spreads the drawings out at the height of my hands.

When I finish spreading out the drawings, they show a wheel seen from the side and, fixed to its side, a second rim, smaller, a few fingers’ width away from it.

“I grab this rim”, I explain, and run my finger over the drawing. “Holding it, I push, and the wheel turns with that push. To go forward, I push both. To turn, just one. And to brake, I squeeze this lever, which grips the wheels so they stop turning.”

The man looks at the drawing, looks at my chair and looks at the drawing again.

“With the material those wheels are made of, that wouldn’t last you a week”, he tells me.

“Less”, I reply. “Every time I start, brake or turn, all the force is going to hit the wheel. And bamboo isn’t made for that.”

“It splits at the joints”, he tells me.

“It splits at the joints”, I confirm.

And I don’t tell him that, on top of that, I finished the Body Tempering a long time ago, but he glances at me sideways, and I think he can guess, especially in the city we are in.

“And I want it a little bigger than this one”, I add. “I still have a bit of growing left to do.”

The man scratches his eyebrow, and a wood shaving falls out.

“Making it entirely out of spiritual material can be done”, he tells me. “But it’s going to cost you a fortune. And bigger, even more, because here the expensive part isn’t my fee, it’s the material.”

He must see something in my face, because he raises a hand before I can answer.

“Although there’s something else that can be done”, he continues. “If you don’t plan on doing anything strange with it.”

“Strange?” I ask him.

“Getting into fights”, he replies. “Situations where it’s likely to get hit, knocked over, that sort of thing.”

“I have no intention of getting into fights with the chair”, I tell him firmly. “Or without it, while we’re at it.”

And I mean it completely seriously.

“Then I’ll make you the chair out of good wood, but ordinary wood”, he tells me. “And I’ll put the spiritual material only where it’s needed, meaning the wheels, the axle and those rims of yours.”

It is a third option, the one I would have looked for if it had occurred to me before it occurred to him. It annoys me a little that I didn’t think of it, but it annoys me considerably less than it pleases me.

“That sounds perfect to me”, I tell him. “How much?”

He stays thoughtful for a moment, looking at my chair, and seems to do the calculations based on what he is seeing in front of him until he finally tells me a figure.

I do the math on what we have left after the weapon shop, and it is a little over half of our remaining funds.

To my right, Xia lets her breath out all at once when she hears it, although on my left, Lianhua doesn’t move.

“I know it’s expensive”, the man tells me. “And I’m going to tell you why, so you don’t think I’m charging you this because you’re a foreigner.”

I lean back against the backrest after hearing his words.

“I still don’t know which material is best for what you want it to do”, he continues. “And the only way to find out is to test it, and testing it means making several trial ones. So a good part of what you pay me is going to stay in this workshop, with no use I can imagine for them.”

He points at my wheels with his chin.

“But when I’m done, I assure you that you’ll be satisfied”, he finishes.

It is an explanation I consider reasonable, and one that also seems perfect to me, since I would rather spend a little more money on him testing materials than find out later that my new chair has problems.

“Half now”, I tell him. “And the other half when you deliver it.”

“That works for me”, he tells me. “When it’s ready, I’ll send word and you come pick it up.”

“I would rather you bring it to my house”, I reply.

The man frowns.

“I don’t do deliveries”, he tells me.

“If I come to pick it up, I’m going to leave here sitting in the new one”, I tell him. “And then someone is going to have to carry the old one for me. If you bring it to me, we save two trips and that problem.”

The man looks at Lianhua, as if asking her whether I always argue like this, and Lianhua gives him back a look that answers yes.

“Tell me where”, he says at last, and sighs.

Lianhua tells him, and all he does is make a brief grimace at the word island.

To pay, I don’t need the Myriad of Hands, because the board on the trestle is still at just the right height for my hands, so I write out the second authorization of the day and seal it in front of him, just like the first.

He looks at the seal the same way the owner of the weapon shop looked at it, and then he tucks it away carefully inside his jacket.

When we leave the workshop, the sun is right above the rooftops, and the quarter’s hammers have begun to fall silent one after another.

“It’s lunchtime already”, I tell them. “Let’s find somewhere to eat around here.”

“And after that?” Xia asks me.

“After that, the same as yesterday”, I reply. “Enjoy a walk through the city for the rest of the day, without going anywhere in particular.”

Xia smiles after hearing me, and Lianhua takes her place behind my chair.

In a single morning, more than half of everything I had is gone, and I am going to need a lot of afternoons with the brush for the House of the Long Journey’s funds to look like yesterday’s again.

But I don’t regret spending a single one of those stones.

Lianhua starts pushing down the street, and I lower my hands and rest them gently on the bamboo rims, letting them turn under my palms without gripping, because this chair wouldn’t take it.

I still don’t know when I will be able to push it myself, but the countdown has already begun.