Chapter 290: Rules of the House

The first thing Xuan learned about Anhu was that nobody would take his money.

Not in the sense of refusing him. In the sense that the coin he put on the counter, good imperial silver with the old dynasty's stamp on it, got picked up, turned over, tapped twice against the wood, and handed straight back to the noodle seller's daughter, who then produced a small brass scale from under the counter, snipped a corner off the coin with a pair of shears, weighed the fragment, and handed back the rest.

The whole operation took about the time it takes to sneeze.

"Did she just cut my money in half?"

"She cut two-thirds of a tael off it and gave you the change," Hao said, delighted. "That's the price of the noodles. You're carrying metal, not currency. The stamp on it means nothing here."

"So everyone's just walking around with scales."

"Everyone. The children have scales." Hao gestured at the whole street with his chopsticks. "That woman weighed your silver in front of you, which is courtesy. If she'd weighed it under the counter you'd have been robbed and you'd never have known."

Tianming was two paces behind them, and had been for an hour, because he kept stopping.

He stopped for the fruit he didn't recognize. He stopped for a man carrying a live eel in a wet cloth bag. He stopped dead in the middle of a busy lane for a woman running a stall of dried lizards, and had to be physically retrieved.

"What are they for?"

"No idea."

"Someone's buying them," Tianming said, with the wonder of a boy from a mountain where every single thing had a purpose he could name. "There's a queue."

Above them, three cultivators went over the harbor in a loose triangle, low enough that their shadows crossed the street, and the street did not look up.

That was the part Xuan kept catching on. In the empire, a cultivator flying over a market would have stopped the market. Down here they went over every quarter hour or so, escort rotations for the shipping guilds, and the fishmongers kept gutting fish.

"Three guilds," Hao said, following his eyes. "They run the wharf between them, and none of the three can move a crate off a ship without the other two knowing. The sect people you're watching aren't a sect, they're hired. Guild colors, not school colors."

"Cultivators for hire."

"Cultivators on salary." Hao's brush was already out. "Do you know what that means about this place? Strength here is a service. Somebody buys it by the month."

They were most of the way up the second terrace when Xuan made his mistake.

It was reflex, and that was the humiliating part. He was looking for the office of a shipping agent Hao had named, the street signs meant nothing, and he did what he'd done a hundred times in the capital without thinking twice about it. He let his spiritual sense unfurl and swept it out across the terrace, feeling for the shape of the building, the people in it, whether anyone in the immediate area was worth noticing.

He had it out for about half a breath.

A woman selling salted plums four stalls down turned around and looked at him.

She wasn't a cultivator. He could see that at a glance, some faint trickle of Qi Refining at best, a woman in her fifties with plum juice on her hands. She looked directly at him across the crowd, and she went white, and then she went furious.

"Hey!"

The terrace stopped.

It stopped the way a room stops when a glass breaks, all at once, and thirty faces turned, and Xuan understood in one long cold moment that whatever he had done, everyone within earshot knew exactly what it was.

"He put his hand in me." The woman's voice cracked with it. "Right here in the street. This one. Him."

A man at the next stall over set down what he was holding.

'Mira. What did I just do?'

[ Something very stupid, and I should have warned you, and I didn't think of it because I've never seen anyone react to it before.] Fast, tight. [ Apologize. Right now, out loud, and mean it. Don't explain, don't say you're a foreigner, just apologize.]

Xuan bowed. Properly, from the waist, in the middle of a foreign street, to a woman selling plums.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know. Where I'm from it's a thing people do without thinking, and that's an explanation, not an excuse." He straightened, and kept his hands visible. "It won't happen again. Not to you, not to anyone here."

She stared at him. Whatever she'd been braced for, that wasn't it.

"You're northern," she said.

"Very."

"That's no excuse."

"I already said it wasn't."

The woman looked at him a moment longer, and then made a disgusted noise and turned back to her plums, and the terrace slowly went back to being a terrace. The man at the next stall picked up what he'd set down. Somewhere a scale clicked.

Tianming was rigid. "What just happened?"

"I'll tell you when I know."

The person who told him was standing at the top of the terrace steps with her arms folded, watching the whole thing with open enjoyment.

She was somewhere north of fifty, built like a door, with a set of brass scales chained to her belt and a stack of weighing trays under one arm, and she waited until Xuan reached her before she spoke.

"You're the one who bought Old Yun's building for double what it's worth," she said to Hao.

"I paid what it was worth to me."

"That's what all my worst customers say." She looked Xuan up and down without any evident respect. "And you're the one who just groped a plum seller with his mind in front of forty people. Congratulations. That'll be on every terrace by dark."

"I'd like to know what I did."

"You looked inside her." She said it flatly, as though explaining a stair to someone who'd fallen down it. "You want to know what's in a man up north, you look. Everybody does it, nobody minds, fine. Down here, nobody looks inside anybody. Ever. Not a stranger, not a friend, not your own wife."

"Why?"

"Because down here what's inside you can kill you." She shifted the trays to her other arm. "Half this coast lives with something in the blood. Herbs, treatments, family regimens, things they took as children, things somebody else put in them. A body's a private ledger. You go reading a woman's without asking and you may as well have opened her purse." A short shrug. "She'd have been in her rights to spit in your face. She's got kids, so she shouted instead."

Xuan let that settle all the way in.

'That's the whole continent,' he said. 'That's a rule that only makes sense on a continent full of poison.'

[ Yeah. And it took a plum seller to teach it to you, which I think is good for your character.]

'You said you didn't think of it.'

[ I didn't. I've been reading everything and everyone since we docked, the way I always do, and it never crossed my mind that anybody would consider it rude.] A pause, and something careful under it. [ I'll stop. Publicly, anyway. I don't like the idea that this place has a way of noticing.]

The woman had not stopped watching him.

"Ge Sanniang," she said. "I weigh silver on the second terrace. Your friend here has already bought me lunch twice, which tells me he's worked out what I actually sell."

"Which is?"

"Everything anybody buys in this city goes over somebody's scale, and a good deal of it goes over mine." She let that sit. "People argue in front of me. They pay for things they'd rather not be seen paying for. They complain about who they're paying. I don't ask. I weigh, and I remember, and every so often someone finds it worth their while to hear what I remember."

Hao looked insufferably pleased with himself.

"Sanniang has agreed to a standing arrangement," he said.

"Sanniang has agreed to consider a standing arrangement, on a trial, because your friend is polite and pays fast and I've had a bad year for both." She hooked the trays higher. "First one's cheap, since you've amused me. Ask."

Xuan thought about the eleven things he wanted and picked the one worth spending it on.

"There's a sect on this coast that deals in poisons."

Ge Sanniang's face did something interesting. It was not fear, exactly. It was the expression of a woman recalculating what kind of customer she'd just taken on.

"There is," she said.

"I need to get in."

"No, you don't." She unhooked her scales, checked the pan for grit, and hooked them back. "But since you're going to try anyway, come and see me tomorrow, and bring your accountant, and don't bring the boy. And northerner." She started down the steps and stopped. "Don't do that thing again. Not up here where I trade. And especially not there."