Chapter 302: Two Philosophies

The dispensary sat at the bottom of the second terrace and it was the plainest room in the house. Low ceiling, four lamps, crates stacked to the roof beams with village names chalked on the ends. Qingluo was in there alone after dark, packing.

"You’re supposed to have an escort," she said, without turning round.

"I do. He’s outside with a cup of tea, pretending he hasn’t lost me."

"That’s Ah-Song. He does that." She shoved a crate along the bench with her hip. "Make yourself useful. Straw on the bottom, jars standing, straw between. Break one and I’ll take it out of you slowly."

Xuan stood his sword against the wall and started packing crates in a poison sect’s storeroom. It had not been on his list of things this week would contain.

The jars were small and identical and the labels came from four different hands. Shuiwei was chalked on the crate he was filling, and he’d drunk in that village eight days ago, in an inn where nobody would say this house’s name aloud.

"Can I ask you something straight?" he said.

"You can ask."

"You make the worst things on this coast, and then you spend the money on this." He set a jar in the straw. "Why?"

"Because it’s the same knowledge." Qingluo pressed a lid down and reached for the mallet. "A thing that kills a man at four grains fixes him at a quarter of one. There’s one art, and which one you’re doing depends on the dose and who’s holding the spoon."

"That’s the answer you give visitors."

"It’s also true, which is what makes it a good one." She knocked the lid home in three hits. "The rest of it is my great-grandmother. She worked out that a house like ours only exists if the people around it would riot to keep it. So we cure the coast at cost, nobody has ever burned us out, and that’s the arrangement. It isn’t holiness. It’s rent."

"Your grandmother says the same thing?"

"My grandmother says it better and charges more for saying it."

He laughed, which he had not expected to do tonight, and went back to filling the crate. They worked in quiet for a while after that. She was quick at it, and she checked his work twice without pretending she wasn’t.

"I’m going to tell you something," Qingluo said. "And before you get comfortable, it’s a trade. You’ve got an answer you won’t give me, so I’m putting something of mine on the table and leaving it there, and one day you’ll want to even it up."

"That’s not how a trade works."

"It’s how this one works." She wiped her hands. "Nobody in this house knows it. Not my grandmother, not Kang, not Ah-Ping, and she knows everything."

Xuan set the jar down. "Go on."

"Coming home from that wasted contract I was still in your empire, three weeks from any coast." Her voice had gone flat and level, the working voice. "Our own cart, our own man on the board. Old Ruan, third bench, been carting for my grandmother since before I was born."

"Go on."

"They came out of the scrub on both sides of the road in the afternoon. Twenty-odd of them, shouting, waving hooks about, and one had his hand up for the bridle." She set the mallet down. "Ruan didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow. That’s the first thing a house carter learns. If somebody’s in the back, you keep driving and you keep your mouth shut."

"And you?"

"I cracked two tubes together and put my arm out under the canvas."

Xuan put the jar back on the bench. He had stopped packing somewhere in the middle of that sentence and hadn’t noticed doing it.

"It came off the wheels low and went out both sides, and the cart rolled straight down the middle of it." She said it without any weight at all. "I didn’t get out. I never got out of the cart, and the cart never stopped, and it was over before the ones at the back understood that anything had happened to the ones at the front."

"How many?"

"Twenty-two. I counted them out of the back flap while we were still moving, and then I counted them again, because I wanted the number to be wrong." She rubbed her thumb along the edge of the bench. "They died on that road. All of them. We didn’t stop and we didn’t go back."

"And the old man?"

"Drove another two hours, and then asked me if I wanted to eat." Her mouth moved slightly. "That’s every word Ruan has ever said about it."

"What did you use?"

"Two things out of my own cases, mixed on my knees under a blanket, and the wind and the wheels did the spreading for me." She tipped her chin at the wall behind him. "One of them is in a crate back there. At a quarter grain it brings a fever down in children."

Xuan looked at the crates, and then went back to her. "There’s no story about this."

"There’s a story. There’s a road in your empire where somebody found twenty-two dead men and a great many confused officials, and about nine explanations for it, and not one of them has a girl in a cart." She pulled her sleeve straight. "That’s the only reason I can say it aloud. Nobody would believe me."

’Mira.’

[ She’s not performing. That’s the same voice she used on your meridians.]

"You could have thrown a name at them," Xuan said. "Half of this coast would have run."

"I was on your continent. My name is worth nothing there, which you know better than anybody this week." A shrug. "And saying it would have meant stopping the cart."

"Do you regret it?"

"Four years and I still can’t get the answer to stay in one place." She picked the mallet up and turned it over. "I don’t lose sleep over the men. They chose a road and a trade and it caught up with them. What sits badly is that I never looked at one of them. I sat under a blanket, it happened, and we kept going."

"That’s the part that would worry me too."

"Good." She put the mallet down. "So that’s mine. Your turn. How many?"

"Of people I’ve killed?"

"Yes."

"There’s no number for the war. Nobody who was there has one, and anybody who gives you one is lying or counting wrong." He fitted a lid and pressed it down with the heel of his hand. "Outside the war, where it was me deciding, one at a time, looking at them? Thirty-one."

[ Thirty-one is correct.] Mira said it quietly, and he understood that she had been carrying the figure the whole time and had never once offered it. [ I’ve never raised it because you never asked.]

’I know what it is.’

"Say the rest," Qingluo said. "There’s a rest."

"I’d stand behind twenty-two of them. The other nine I’ve gone over more times than I’d admit, and I’d do them the same way again, which is the part to keep in mind about me."

"I will." She hopped up onto the bench. "Here’s what I think of you, then, since we’re doing this."

"Go on."

"You solve people by taking them off the board. It works every time, and that’s the trouble, because a thing that works every time stops you learning anything else." She swung a heel against the cupboard. "Twenty years old, a whole art in your hands, one answer in your head."

"And here’s mine," Xuan said. "Twenty-two men died on a road and you never saw a face, and you’ve just told me that’s the only part that bothers you. It should be the only part. You’ve found a way to do the worst thing a person can do without having to be in the room for it."

"That’s fair."

"It wasn’t meant to be comfortable."

"It isn’t. It’s still fair." Qingluo looked at the crates for a moment. "Mine is a door closing somewhere the man can’t see. Yours is a thing everyone can watch coming, and you call that honest, and I’m not sure you’ve earned the word. You just like being looked at while you do it."

"Possibly."

"You’ve killed more people than me and you’ve been in the room for every one, and I’ve never been in the room at all." She knocked her heel again. "I don’t know which of those is worse. Neither do you."

They stood there across a half-packed crate, and neither of them moved, and neither of them was smiling. Xuan found he was enjoying himself in a way he would struggle to explain to his wife.

"We’re not going to sort this out," Qingluo said.

"No."

"Good. I’d have been disappointed." She picked up the chalk and wrote Shuiwei on the crate he’d closed, and she checked it first, even though she’d watched him pack the whole thing.

"Your man in the north," she said. "What is he to you?"

"He put himself in front of something meant for me. Then he got up and did it again."

"Then I hope you get him back. Go and see your alchemist in the morning." She started stacking the crates against the wall. "She’s going to tell you the antidote can’t be finished, and she’ll be right about the reason and wrong about the word."

"Which word?"

"Impossible," Qingluo said. "It isn’t impossible. It’s expensive in a currency you haven’t got yet."