Chapter 208

Lianhua pushes the chair up the last stretch of the ramp onto the dock, and as soon as I feel the wheels on the planks, I lower my hands and close them around the push rims.

“You can let go now”, I tell her.

Lianhua lets go.

She says nothing, but she doesn’t step away either. Instead, she stays on my left and half a step behind, which is where she always places herself when she isn’t the one pushing, while Xia takes my right.

I push both rims at once, and the chair moves forward.

It is the first time I have gone out into the city with the new chair, and with it, as always, the looks begin. Although today they are different from those of other days.

Because until now, the people at the dock have seen a wheeled chair go by pushed by a woman, which is strange enough already. But today what they see is a wheelchair with a girl sitting in it who makes it move by turning the wheels with her own hands.

A stevedore freezes with a sack halfway between his shoulder and the ground, two men who were arguing beside a pile of crates stop arguing mid-sentence, and a woman leading a child by the hand stops so abruptly that the child bumps into her leg.

I don’t look at anyone, which is what I have been doing my whole life, and I go on my way.

At the end of the dock, the planks give way to the stones of the street, and there the wheels start to rattle.

It is nothing the chair can’t handle, since that is why the craftsman spent who knows how long testing materials he charged me their weight in gold for in his workshop. But every time a front wheel meets a stone higher than the rest, I loosen my hands without meaning to, just in case. And when a cart crosses the street in front of us, I brake. And when a group of apprentices comes toward us taking up the whole width of the street, I brake too, wait for them to move aside, and start off again.

But I am the one who starts off, and that is the only thing that matters to me.

We have been going like this for a good while when, on my left, Lianhua sighs.

It is a short, almost soundless sigh, but Lianhua sighs so rarely that Xia turns her head to look at her, and I, out of sheer habit, squeeze the brake lever.

“Stop, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

I have already stopped, so I just look at her.

Lianhua offers no further explanation. She positions herself behind the chair and takes hold of the two handles on the backrest while she waits for me to release the brake. And as soon as I release it, she pushes.

Suddenly, the street starts going past me at twice the speed it was a moment ago.

“Lianhua!” I tell her, twisting around as far as the backrest allows. “I was the one moving it.”

She keeps pushing as if she hadn’t heard me.

“May I ask why you’re doing this?” I ask her.

“Because you are too slow, Xiaojie”, she replies.

She says it in her usual voice, flat and polite, so I open my mouth to protest, but Xia beats me to it.

“It’s true, Wen”, she tells me. “A lady with two baskets of cabbages passed us. And she had a little boy strapped to her back.”

I look up the street, and there is the lady, with her two baskets and her little boy, who is looking at me over his mother’s shoulder with his mouth open.

Xia is coming with us today because, after what Lianhua told us, I have no intention of leaving her alone on an island with no way of defending herself. And right now I am wondering whether it wouldn’t have been more peaceful for me to leave her at home.

But I say nothing, because the worst of it is that they are right.

It isn’t a matter of strength, since the Muscle Tempering gives me more than I need to move this chair from one end of the city to the other, but it simply doesn’t have the stability needed to move quickly through a city whose paving is only designed for two things, walking and carts, while I push only with my arms.

So I sigh, the same as she did a moment ago, although with considerably more noise, rest my hands in my lap and let myself be pushed.

And while Lianhua takes us through streets I don’t know, I console myself with the thought that at least in the courtyard at home I can do whatever I want.

The formation makers’ guild isn’t in any of the quarters I have been to so far, but inland, far from the docks, and as we get closer, the city changes.

The streets widen and grow quieter. Here there are no workshops open to the street, no smell of medicine, no hammers, but tall walls of pale stone, one after another, with closed wooden gates and, every so often, the crown of a tree peeking over the top. The people we pass walk unhurriedly and carry no sacks or baskets, only the odd roll of paper under the arm, or nothing at all.

In my other life, I would have called this an expensive residential neighborhood, the kind with more gardens than houses.

What catches my attention most, though, isn’t the walls but the lintels of the gates, because many of them have runes carved into the stone, some more worn than others, all set inside a circle.

As I pass one, I activate Sensing the Qi for just an instant, and the runes light up inside my head with a faint, steady glow, the same one the Qi-gathering formation at my house has when it is running.

They are formations, and they are working.

At the next gate I do the same, and at the next one too. It doesn’t happen at all of them, but it does at almost half, and although I have no idea what each one does, I do know that no one spends spirit stones keeping something lit that protects nothing.

And in case I had forgotten, that reminds me why we have come, so in the middle of that quiet street, I give Lianhua a sign and then use the Golden Chains of Ogma.

A golden line comes out of me and stretches to Lianhua, behind me. I wait a moment, just in case, but no others appear.

“Lianhua”, I tell her without opening my mouth. “Are they watching us?”

She doesn’t answer right away, and I notice the chair moves a couple of heartbeats more slowly, which is how long it takes her to look from above with the Vision of Horus.

“Yes, Xiaojie”, she replies afterward. “Since we got off the boat.”

The first thing I think of is turning my head, and then I realize it is precisely the last thing I should do, because all I would achieve is that whoever is following us would know that I know too, or at least that is what happens in every spy movie I have seen, so I don’t.

On my right, Xia keeps looking at the gates, oblivious, because she can’t use the technique yet, and for once I prefer it that way. But as I let the golden line fade, I am gladder than ever that I didn’t leave her alone on the island.

The guild is at the end of that same street, in a small square, and the first thing I see of it isn’t the building but the ground.

Because in front of the entrance, taking up almost the entire square, there is an enormous circle carved into the flagstones, so big that Lianhua has to push me across it to reach the door, and filled with runes from the edge to the center, packed tightly together.

As I cross it I try to read it, but I only manage to understand a tiny fraction of what I see.

I recognize a few scattered runes, but I am unable to tell which ones do something and which are there only so that no one knows which ones do something, which is exactly what is supposed to happen. So either it is a real formation, very well hidden, or it is the guild’s biggest scam disguised as advertising.

The building is a single story, of the same pale stone as the walls along the street, but so wide that it takes up an entire side of the square. There are no steps at the entrance, and above the doors, which are wide open, there is a sign of dark wood with the name of the guild carved into it, along with the ever-present seven elemental runes.

Hall of a Hundred Circles.

The vestibule is spacious, low-ceilinged and floored with gray flagstones, and it isn’t empty. There are people waiting on the benches along the walls, apprentices crossing it with rolls of paper under their arms and a couple of men talking beside a column with burins hanging from their belts.

And as soon as my wheels sound on the flagstones, everyone turns to look at us.

It isn’t the look from the dock, that of someone who sees something they don’t understand and doesn’t know what to do with it. It is a look of curiosity, which goes from me to the chair, from the chair to Lianhua and from Lianhua to Xia, and then starts over, because they can’t decide which of the three of us is the one with business here.

At the back of the vestibule there is a counter, and behind it, as could not be otherwise, a receptionist, because there are things that never change, and one of them is that between the door of any business and whatever you want from it, there is always a counter with a good-looking woman behind it.

That woman, at any rate, isn’t young either, since she has that indeterminate look that can mean a very wide range of ages, with her hair gathered in a simple bun, a pleasant face and a smile that seems to be there out of habit.

Lianhua stops me in front of the counter, which comes up almost to my shoulders, so from where I sit, what I mostly see of the receptionist is her face and her hands, which are resting on a register.

“Welcome to the Hall of a Hundred Circles”, she tells us kindly. “How may I help you?”

She says it looking at Lianhua, which is what almost everyone does the first time, and I don’t hold it against her.

“I would like to know what the requirements are to request a teacher who can teach me formations”, I tell her.

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The receptionist lowers her gaze to me after hearing me, blinks once, and during that blink I see her trying to fit together the fact that the question came from the girl in the chair and not from the woman pushing it.

But whatever her age, she must have spent many years behind that counter, because her smile doesn’t move a millimeter while she seems to regain her composure.

“Every three days we hold classes for beginners”, she replies. “Anyone can sign up, as long as they pay the enrollment fee.”

I sigh after hearing her, since it is the right answer to the question anyone with my appearance would ask, but not to mine.

“I’m not looking for basic classes”, I tell her. “I’m already capable of creating six-vertex formations.”

Which is true, even though so far I have only created one. But the fact that I have only created one doesn’t change the fact that I am capable of creating them.

“What I want is a teacher who will give me private lessons on the higher-level types of formations”, I finish.

“In that case we have a requirement”, she tells me, unperturbed. “To prove that you are capable of creating that type of formation, you would need to present the certificate from the guild where you learned to create them.”

I bring my hand to my face, and this time the sigh comes out considerably longer.

In my bag I carry a certificate with the red seal of the Pavilion of a Thousand Strokes, my name and my Qi signature, which says that I know how to create talismans and absolutely nothing else, so here it is as useful to me as if I weren’t carrying it.

“Is it essential?” I ask her as I take my hand away from my face. “I learned through private lessons, so I’m not registered with any formation guild.”

And this time her smile does change.

Not much, but it changes, and the receptionist opens the register, turns a page, turns it back again and stays looking at it.

To me, it is clearly the face of someone looking on a form for the box that corresponds to what she has just been asked and not finding it, because it never occurred to anyone that someone would ask for it.

In my other life I saw that same face at more than one university registrar’s office, and it always made me feel a little sorry for them.

In the end she closes the register and folds her hands on top of it, and I realize that the receptionist, for the first time since we came in, doesn’t know what to do.

It shows in her hands, which part from the register and can’t find anywhere to go, and in the way she looks at Lianhua as if expecting the adult of the group to tell her that this is all a joke. But Lianhua returns her look without saying anything at all, which is what she always does when I am the one doing the talking.

“Wait a moment, please”, she tells me at last, and her voice comes out a little faster than it has so far. “I need to ask for instructions.”

She comes out from behind the counter and disappears down a corridor at the back of the vestibule, with a step so quick that, in someone less professional, it would already be called running.

I stay looking at the opening of the corridor she has gone down, and then I turn my head to see whether what I now consider inevitable is happening.

And they don’t disappoint me, because there they are.

Because, as seems to be the norm everywhere I go, the vestibule has reorganized itself while we were talking. The people waiting on the benches are no longer sitting on the benches but standing, and considerably closer to the counter. The two men with the burins have stopped talking by the column, and quite a few of the apprentices who were crossing the vestibule have stopped crossing it and are standing in the middle of the way, with their rolls of paper under their arms, watching us.

No one says anything, but no one pretends otherwise either.

In my other life, all that group would have been missing was a bucket of popcorn to make it clear why they have stayed.

Xia has seen them too, and she edges a little closer to the chair, her hand already on the armrest.

But fortunately, both for us and for our audience, which this way has no time to get bored, the receptionist soon comes back down the same corridor.

And she doesn’t come back alone, because behind her comes a man who looks considerably older than her, tall and thin, with a long white beard so well groomed that it seems he brushes it every morning, and a dark blue robe with the edges of the sleeves embroidered in silver.

The receptionist stops beside the counter and indicates me with her open hand.

“Master Qin”, she tells him. “This is the young lady I told you about.”

The man called Master Qin arrives with something on his face I didn’t expect to find, something very much like eagerness, so I imagine the receptionist told him that in the vestibule there is an applicant who claims to know how to create six-vertex formations without ever having set foot in a guild, and that he has come out from wherever he was to see with his own eyes whether it is true.

But once he arrives he looks at me, then looks at the chair while, slowly, he lowers his gaze to my legs and leaves it there a moment longer than a normal glance lasts.

After that look, the eagerness disappears, and in its place appears something I recognize instantly, because in this city I already saw it on the face of the examiner at the Pavilion of a Thousand Strokes before being let into the exam room, and in the Empire I saw it many more times than I would like to remember, except that this man doesn’t bother to hide it.

It is contempt.

“This one?” he asks the receptionist.

He doesn’t ask me; he asks her, ignoring me completely, in the tone of someone asking about a package that was delivered to the wrong address.

“Yes, Master Qin”, the receptionist replies, in a considerably lower voice than the one she used with me.

Master Qin looks at me again, and this time he does speak to me, although from so high up that I have to tip my head back to see his face.

“Girl”, he tells me. “Do you know what a formation is?”

“Yes, Master Qin”, I reply.

“You don’t”, he tells me. “If you did, you wouldn’t be here.”

He clasps his hands behind his back.

“A formation isn’t written on a piece of paper on top of a table”, he continues. “It is traced on the floor, on the walls, on the beams. You have to kneel over it, walk around it and go along every groove from one end to the other.”

He lowers his gaze to my legs again, just for an instant.

“Someone like you is incapable of drawing a formation”, he finishes. “Not even one of three vertices, and much less one of six.”

On my right, Xia’s hand closes around the armrest and she says nothing, while on my left Lianhua doesn’t move at all, although I notice she seems calmer than she has been in other situations where I have been belittled.

“With the right techniques, it isn’t necessary to be able to move in order to draw a formation”, I tell him.

I say it politely and without raising my voice, because it isn’t an opinion, it is a fact. The Qi-gathering formation in the floor of my house I carved sitting on a low chair in the middle of the room, with the Dragon’s Grip holding the burin, the Myriad of Hands holding everything else and Lianhua holding the board that served as my ruler.

And it works.

But when he hears me, Master Qin’s face, for some reason, tightens.

“Techniques?” he says to me.

The word comes out as if I had insulted him personally.

“Every formation maker worthy of the name traces formations with his own hands, because it is the only way to feel how the Qi runs through each line as he creates it”, he continues. “What comes out of something created with a technique is not a formation, it is a crude imitation by someone who doesn’t want to do a job properly.”

He pauses briefly, and in that pause he looks at my legs again.

“Or who can’t”, he adds.

Behind me, someone in the audience holds their breath.

I, on the other hand, take a deep breath, because the last thing I need right now is for what I am thinking to show in my voice.

“A formation created through techniques works exactly the same as one created by hand”, I tell him. “The logical thing is to use the most efficient and convenient method to create it.”

And that is when the vestibule, which until now had limited itself to watching, starts to murmur.

I can’t make out what they are saying, because they are all talking at once and in low voices, but I can tell it isn’t a murmur of a single color. There are those who click their tongues, there are those who snort a laugh and there are, a little further back, those who nod slowly, and from my height I can’t see how many are doing each thing.

Master Qin hears them too, and judging by how his ears redden above his beard, he doesn’t like what he hears one bit.

He opens his mouth to answer me, closes it, and opens it again, and along the way he seems to come to the conclusion that arguing with a girl in front of half the guild would cost him too much reputation.

“Enough”, he says, after which he turns to the receptionist.

“Throw her out of the guild”, he tells her.

The receptionist opens her mouth and closes it again. She looks at Master Qin, looks at me, and on her face I see with complete clarity that she doesn’t seem entirely to agree, although her position obliges her to obey.

But she doesn’t have time to carry out his orders or raise any objection.

“You can’t throw someone out of the guild just because they hold an opinion different from yours, Qin”, says a voice from the back of the vestibule. “If that could be done, we would have to throw out practically half the members.”

Every head in the vestibule turns at once, mine included, although it costs me a little more.

By the mouth of a corridor, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed, there is a man who appears to be middle-aged, with a short, carefully trimmed beard and a robe of the same cut and the same dark blue as Master Qin’s, with the same silver embroidery at the edges of the sleeves.

Which means, if they dress alike, that they most likely hold a similar rank.

And the receptionist confirms it right away, because she turns toward him and bows, with the face of someone who would rather be anywhere else in the world than in this vestibule.

“Master Shi”, she says.

Master Shi pushes away from the frame and approaches without any hurry, and the audience that had been gathering around the counter steps aside to let him through without his having to ask.

“This is none of your business, Shi”, Master Qin tells him.

“An applicant someone wants to throw out of the vestibule is the business of any master who passes through the vestibule”, Master Shi replies.

“She isn’t an applicant”, Master Qin tells him. “She is a girl who intends to trace formations without touching them, without feeling the Qi under her own hands.”

“Qi runs the same through a groove cut with a burin held in the hand as through one cut with a technique, whatever that technique may be”, Master Shi replies. “The formation doesn’t care who traced it, Qin. All it cares about is that it is traced well.”

“That is how a craft is lost”, Master Qin tells him.

“And that is how time is saved”, Master Shi replies. “If a technique saves you half the work and the result is the same, refusing to use it isn’t respect for the craft, it is stupidity.”

And as I listen to them go back and forth, I realize that this argument isn’t new.

They aren’t having it because of me. They have had it many other times before I came through that door, and it shows in how quick their answers are, while the audience, after the first murmur, no longer seems surprised, but watches like someone attending for the umpteenth time a play they know by heart.

So the only conclusion I can reach is that there are two factions in this guild.

One, Master Qin’s, which holds that formations must be created by hand in order to personally feel the flow of the Qi, and all that sort of theory. And another, to which Master Shi belongs, which holds that if a formation works exactly the same when created with the help of techniques, it is stupid not to use them to lighten the work.

On the excavations of my other life I had to listen to this same argument for years, between those who kept drawing site plans by hand on graph paper and those who were already taking measurements with devices that did it on their own. The first said that by hand you understood the site better, and the second, that by hand it took three times as long.

And no one ever convinced anyone, although the first group dwindled for the simple reason that they began to retire, but here people live for centuries.

Master Qin opens his mouth to reply, but at that moment he seems to realize how many people he has around him and that not all of them are looking at him kindly, so he closes it.

He snorts through his nose so hard that his beard moves, gathers his sleeves with a curt gesture and leaves down the corridor he came from, without looking at anyone, not at me, not at the receptionist, not at Master Shi.

The vestibule stays silent until his footsteps can no longer be heard, after which Master Shi turns toward me and approaches.

He doesn’t come too close. He simply stops at just the right distance for me to look him in the face without having to tip my head back, and I don’t know whether he does it on purpose, but I appreciate the gesture.

He looks at me with curiosity. Not at the chair or at my legs, but at me, the way one looks at a problem one didn’t expect to come across this morning and that seems considerably more interesting than the work one had planned.

“And what have you come to the guild for?” he asks me.

So I tell him in the same words I used with the receptionist. That I am not looking for the beginners’ classes, that I am already capable of creating six-vertex formations and that what I want is a teacher who will give me private lessons on the higher-level types of formations.

“And I have techniques that allow me to create formations despite my condition”, I add.

Master Shi strokes his beard with two fingers, just for a second.

“Advanced formation classes are reserved exclusively for members of the guild”, he tells me.

He pauses briefly.

“But if you are willing, I can give you an exam right now to make you a member”, he continues. “And afterward, depending on the result of that exam, we can discuss the rest of your requests.”

I don’t think about it for even a second after hearing his words.

“I accept”, I tell him.

I say it so quickly that, on my right, Xia lets go of the armrest in surprise, and on my left I notice, without needing to turn, that Lianhua finally stops being so still.

But while Master Shi gestures to the receptionist and she goes back behind her counter with a relief that shows in her whole body, I can’t help another vestibule coming to mind.

One of black stone and golden wood, in the capital of the Tianjing Empire, where a man with runes embroidered in silver thread explained to me, very politely, that at that moment there were no masters in the building. And where a voice I didn’t expect asked him whether she, then, was not a master, and ended up examining me right there.

That exam ended with Master Mu tapping her shoulder with her fan while she decided what to do with me.

Master Shi doesn’t carry a fan, but he still has two fingers on his beard, looking at me, and I have the clear feeling that he is thinking exactly the same thing Master Mu did back then.