Chapter 296: Gate

Wen Bao stopped at a leaning stone half a mile short of the terraces and took the mules’ leads out of Tianming’s hand without being asked.

"This is me," he said. "I’ve never been past this stone and I’m not starting at my age. I’ll be here two days. After that I’ll be somewhere with a roof."

Xuan paid him for the two days anyway, and the man tucked it away and looked genuinely sorry for them, which was worse than anything he could have said.

They went up the last stretch on foot, and the mountain opened out.

Nine terraces climbed the slope in steps, each one wide enough to hold a village, and every terrace was roofed. Long houses ran end to end under oiled silk stretched on bamboo, and above the silk, catching the flat morning light, ran panel after panel after panel of glass.

Hao stopped walking.

"That’s glass," he said. "That is a mountain of glass, up a road I have personally walked, on the back of animals I have personally priced."

"You’re doing sums."

"I’m doing sums and they’re obscene." He started moving again with his neck craned. "Every pane of that came up the way we came up, and not one of them broke, and they roofed nine terraces with it. Whatever that house sells, it doesn’t sell it cheap to the people who can pay."

Mist poured out from under the eaves of the long houses and rolled down the terrace walls in slow ropes. Workers in green moved along the rows with cloth tied over their mouths, and channels of water ran through the whole thing, chuckling away downhill, and not one drop of that water was going anywhere near Xuan’s mouth if he could help it.

The smell arrived before the gate did.

It came down the road to meet them, green and sweet and slightly wrong, like fruit that had turned an hour ago in a warm room. Underneath it sat something thin and metallic that he had no name for at all.

Tianming’s chest started working harder, and the boy did what any disciple on any mountain in the empire would have done. He steadied himself, opened his channels, and put the Nine Dragons Breathing Art into it.

He got three breaths in before his knees went.

Lian had him by the collar before Xuan finished turning around. "Stop. Off it, right now, close everything down. Shallow breaths, high in your chest, and don’t take a deep one until I tell you."

"What’s wrong with me?"

"Nothing. You were pulling it in on purpose." She had her thumb under his jaw, counting. "There’s runoff in this air and it’s mild and it would have done nothing to you at all if you hadn’t decided to inhale it with your whole body."

Xuan let the air sit on his tongue and read it the way the Venom Serpent had taught him, which was the first time since the boat that a thing he’d paid for was worth what he paid.

Three separate somethings, maybe four, all of them thin as smoke. None of them would kill a healthy man standing still. One of them turned nasty the instant qi ran through it, and it turned nasty in a way that suggested it wasn’t designed to do that, the way lamp oil isn’t designed to burn a house down.

’It’s runoff,’ he said. ’They’re not defending the road. That’s just what a place smells like when nine terraces of that work downhill of you.’

[ Which is worse, isn’t it.] Mira sounded almost impressed. [ Nobody built a trap. They live here, and the by-product of living here would put a Foundation cultivator on his back inside a minute. Half these people have grown up breathing it and their bodies have quietly rearranged themselves around it.]

’And the ones who visit?’

[ Learn fast, or get carried out. Look at the four in green by the wall. Watch their shoulders.]

He watched. Every worker in sight breathed the same way, quick and shallow and high, all day, without ever thinking about it.

Tianming got his colour back and looked mortified, so Xuan clapped him once on the good shoulder and left it there.

"You’ve got company," Qingyue said.

She had drifted out to their right without anybody noticing her go, the way she’d been doing since the ridge. "Two on the wall above the gate, one in the doorway of the second long house, and a fourth on the third terrace who isn’t a guard. Small, sitting up on the wall, eating something."

"A child?"

"Not the way she’s sitting."

The gate itself was a disappointment, and Xuan understood on sight that it was meant to be.

Two stone posts, a bar, and a woman in her sixties with forearms like a farmer’s and a ledger open on a stand beside her. No formation, no banners, and nothing about it said keep out except for the plain fact that everybody in the valley had spent a week telling him what it was.

"Steward Mu," she said, before any of them opened their mouths. "You’re the northerners from Anhu. You made good time." She flipped the ledger closed on her finger. "Water?"

A boy stepped up on her left with a tray and cups.

"We’re fine," Xuan said.

"Suit yourself. It’s water." Steward Mu handed the tray back anyway. "Say what you came to say. I’ll be honest with you about how far it gets you, which is more than you’ll get anywhere else on this mountain."

Cao Zhen stepped up on cue with the case in both hands and the seal turned outward, and read the sentence Xuan had given him in a warehouse two hundred miles away, in the flattest voice a career of paperwork can produce.

Steward Mu let him finish. That was the part Xuan would remember later. She let the man have the whole sentence.

"That’s very good," she said. "There’s a box in the north store room with eleven of those in it. Letters, seals, one of them with ribbon on it that must have cost somebody a fortune." She tapped the ledger against her thigh. "Nobody’s opened it in my time. Your empire is a season of sailing away, envoy, and it’s never once had anything we need."

Pei Song’s ears went scarlet. Cao Zhen closed the case with enormous dignity and stepped back, which was, Xuan thought, about the most any man could do.

Hao had his opening and took it, and he was good, and Xuan enjoyed watching him work right up until it stopped being enjoyable.

He didn’t lead with silver, because silver was the amateur’s move. He led with a wharf. He offered the House priority berthing in Anhu through a guild he had spent three weeks befriending, cargo moved ahead of the queue, and a factor in the city who answered to them and cost them nothing. Then he named a figure on top of it.

Steward Mu heard him all the way out.

"That’s the best offer anybody’s made me at this gate in four years," she said. "You’ve clearly worked, and I’d hire you tomorrow." She opened the ledger again. "The three guilds carry our crates ahead of their own already, and they don’t charge us, and I have never once asked them to."

Hao’s mouth stayed shut for a moment.

"Because they’d rather be owed than owe."

"Because their children get sick." Steward Mu shrugged. "You can’t buy what nobody’s selling. That’s the whole of it, and it isn’t personal, and you’re not the first man to be good at his job in front of me."

’Mira,’ Xuan said.

[ Don’t.]

’I could be through that gate in ninety seconds.’

[ You could be through it in forty, and standing in a courtyard full of people who cure this coast for a living, having proved to every single one of them that a northerner with a sword is exactly what they always assumed.] A pause. [ And somewhere up that hill there’s a woman at Nascent Soul who has spent sixty years being politely certain nobody would ever try it. Don’t hand her the pleasure.]

’I wasn’t going to.’

[ I know. I wanted it said before your hands did something charming.]

"So that’s it," Xuan said to the steward. "The empire’s nothing, the money’s nothing, and there’s nothing I can say."

"That’s the size of it." She said it without any pleasure at all, which was somehow the part that landed. "The only people through this gate are people we sent for. There’s a rest house four miles down at the ford, they’ll feed you, and the road back to the coast is dry this week."

She lifted the ledger and turned toward the long houses, and that was the audience over.

He’d been turned away from doors before. It had been a while. What he noticed, standing in a strange country in the smell of somebody else’s work, was how completely quiet his own name had become.

Then Lian stepped past him.

She went up to the gate with her sleeves already pushed back and her cases at her feet, and she didn’t look at Xuan first, which meant she’d made the decision somewhere back down the road.

"Steward," she said. "Before you go. I’d like to describe a poison to you."