Chapter 303: Price

Lian came to find him before he’d finished breakfast, which was how he knew it was bad.

"It can’t be finished," she said. "I’ve been at it since the third hour with two of their people helping, and they got there before I did and had the decency not to say so."

"Sit down and give me it in order."

"The build has a base under it. Everything else in that poison is decoration on top of one compound, and you can’t counter the decoration without the base in your hands." She dropped onto the bench across from him. "The base comes out of one animal. There’s no plant version, no substitute, nothing on my continent that comes within a mile of it."

"Then we buy the animal."

"You can’t buy it, because it has to be alive." Lian took the cup out of his hand and drank from it, which she had never done in eight years. "It comes out of a gland, and the fraction that matters falls apart a minute after the heart stops. Kill it and you’ve got a jar of expensive mud."

The Matriarch’s people were waiting in the room above the second terrace, and the room had been chosen, because there were exactly six chairs in it and no windows.

Steward Mu stood by the door with her ledger. Elder Kang sat with his arms folded. The Matriarch came in last with her sleeves already tied off, which Xuan was learning meant she had work to get back to.

"Your alchemist has told you," she said.

"She has."

"Then here’s the shape of it, and I’ll give it to you straight, because I’ve watched you haggle and you’re terrible at it." She sat down. "We need a live draw from a pit adder. Not for you. We’ve needed one for six years."

"What’s it for?"

"Nine things, and one of them is the antidote your man needs." Kang said it before the Matriarch could, with no hostility in it for once. "Fever work, two of the blood arrests. That base is in half the serious medicine on this coast, and we’ve been cutting doses for three years."

"So go and get one."

"We’ve tried three times." The Matriarch laid both hands flat on the table. "The first cost me two disciples. The second cost me a man from the third bench who sat at that table thirty years and can’t hear a word today. The third I called off at the edge of the sink, and I’ve been called a coward for it inside my own house, and I’d do it again."

"What guards it?"

"It guards itself. A pit adder at full growth is a very large animal and everything it breathes out is a weapon." Kang unfolded his arms. "It doesn’t need to bite. Stand in the wrong place for two minutes and your lungs go to paste. Armour makes it worse, because you sweat."

Xuan counted the chairs again and looked at the walls with nothing in them. He understood now why this room had been chosen.

"You want me to go in with her."

"I want you to go in with her," the Matriarch agreed. "My granddaughter is the only person alive who can take that draw cleanly. I’ve watched her do it on a dead one at eleven years old and I’ve seen what her hands are worth. What she has never had is somebody standing over her who can still be standing at the end of it."

"And in exchange?"

"The antidote, made here, finished, in your alchemist’s hands." She counted it off without any ceremony. "The name of who bought that build from us, out of the sale ledger, because a sale like that has a name on it and I want it read aloud as much as you do. And everything we know about where it went afterwards."

"That’s three things."

"It’s one thing, and it’s worth more than all three, and you know it as well as I do, because without that draw you’re going home with a corpse and a grudge." The Matriarch stood up again. "Ask your questions now. I’ve a bench waiting."

Xuan asked two, both about the sink and the road to it. She answered them plainly and Kang filled in the parts she was too senior to know, and then the Matriarch was gone before anybody else had stood up.

Qingluo had said nothing for the whole of it. She was on the sill by the door with her arms crossed, and she had watched her grandmother the way a person watches a gate they’ve been through a hundred times.

"One more thing," Xuan said, to the room. "Nothing to do with any of this."

Kang paused with his hand on the door. Steward Mu closed the ledger on her finger.

"I’m looking for a man. White robe, red at the collar and the cuffs, white hair to the shoulders, and he isn’t old. Red eyes." He kept it flat. "He carries a straight sword and never puts a hand near it. Years ago he sat through a provincial tournament in the north, and when it finished he rode south on a grey horse he wasn’t steering."

Kang’s face did nothing at all. "I don’t know him."

"He’s the first person to say that," Xuan said.

"Then you’ve been talking to better-informed people than me." Kang went out. Steward Mu went after him with a nod for nobody, and the door swung twice and stopped, and Xuan was left in a room with six chairs and one woman on the sill.

Qingluo hadn’t moved. She had gone completely still, which from her was loud, and she was looking at a spot on the table a foot in front of him.

"Say the last part again," she said.

"He rode south on a grey horse."

"Before that."

"Red eyes."

Qingluo came off the sill, pulled out the chair opposite him, and sat down in it properly, with both hands on the table.

"Western tribune, second morning, six rows up from the aisle stair," she said. "Four cushions on that bench, and he had the end one. I sat two along."

Xuan had been holding a cup. He put it down.

"You sat next to him."

"Two cushions away, and I chose it, and I waited about an hour for the woman who had it to go and buy food." Her voice had dropped into the working register. "I’d been looking for him for two years by then. I saw him come up the aisle and I got that seat, and then I sat there for a whole morning and got nothing at all."

"You were there for the patient."

"I was there for both. That’s what made it such a good day out." She turned her hands over on the table. "I couldn’t smell him."

"What does that mean?"

"Everybody carries something. Medicine, oil, what they ate, what they’ve drunk, what’s wrong with them. Give me two feet and a bit of quiet and I can tell you what a man’s liver is doing." Her fingers spread. "I sat two cushions from that man for an hour and the air beside him was dead. Nothing came off him. I’ve never had that before or since, and when he stood up I nearly followed him down the stairs, and I didn’t, because I was seventeen and I’d worked out that he’d know."

’Mira.’

[ I’m here. I’m listening to every word and I’d like a moment afterwards.]

"Four years," Qingluo went on. "Money, letters, three people paid to ask in three ports. I’ve never got a name. Not a wrong one, not a rumour with a name in it, nothing. You describe him to somebody on this coast and they stop talking. I imagine you’ve noticed."

"Twice so far."

"Then we’ve both been counting." She sat back. "So. Why do you want him?"

"He knows something about a thing I’m carrying, and nobody else does."

"That’s not an answer, it’s the shape of one." A small nod. "Fine. I’ll take the shape, since it’s the same shape I’m giving you. Ask me why I want him and you’ll get the same nothing."

"Then I won’t ask today."

"Good. Ask me the day you tell me what took the rot out of you." Qingluo stood, and pushed the chair back in, which he had not expected. "We go to the sink. I need you there because I need both my hands and I can’t spare either of them for staying alive. You need me there because there’s a thumb of fluid at the bottom of all this and I’m the only one who can get it out of a live animal."

"And the rest of it?"

"The rest of it is that we’re both hunting the same man, and neither of us has anything, and I’ve been doing it on my own for four years." She got the door open. "I’m tired of that. Be ready at dawn."

She left. Xuan sat in the room with the six chairs for a while after the door stopped swinging.

[ Well,] Mira said at last. [ That’s the first person on this continent you’ve described him to who didn’t change the subject.]

’She was two cushions away.’

[ He knew she was there, and she’s alive, which is more than I’d have promised.] A pause. [ I’ve carried this on my own a long time. I don’t know yet whether I like having company.]