Chapter 311 After

They made camp on the dead ground a good way back from the rim, because neither of them had the legs to go further and neither of them said so.

The tube sat between them wrapped in a spare shirt inside her flat case, and the case sat on a stone where they could both see it. Xuan noticed that they had both chosen where to sit by where the case was.

"You’ll have to do my arm," Qingluo said. "The old stitches have torn out and I can’t sew across my own body with this shoulder."

"Tell me how and I’ll do it."

"Small bites, close to the edge, and don’t be gentle, gentle is how people make a mess." She laid the arm out on her knee and turned her face away from it, which was the only thing she did all night that looked like fear. "Pull each one until the skin sits together and then stop pulling. You’ll know."

He sewed her arm by lamplight with fingers that were still half his own, and she talked him through it in the same voice she used for everything, and at the end she looked at the line of it and said he had a passable hand and should never do it again.

Then she listened to his chest, twice, once from the front and once with her palm flat against his back.

"Something small tore. Not a lung, or you’d be a much quieter man by now." She sat back. "You’ll cough blood for a few days and it’ll taper. No cultivating while it does. Push qi through that and you’ll turn a small tear into a thing I can’t fix out here."

They ate what was left of Ah-Ping’s bundle. Most of it had turned in the heat and they ate it anyway, and neither of them mentioned that either.

The frogs started up below them. Somewhere down in the bowl the animal came out of the water and went back into it, and the sound of that carried a long way in the dark.

"I’m going to ask you once," Qingluo said. "If the answer is no I’ll take the no and I won’t come at it from the side later, because I’d rather have you honest than have you managed. What took it out of you?"

Xuan had known it was coming since the moment she sat down, and he had been turning it over the whole time he was putting stitches in her arm, and he found the deciding part had already happened somewhere on that shelf.

"Something that isn’t from this world," he said.

She did not move, and she did not reach for the cup, and the lamp went on doing what lamps do.

"That’s the true answer and it’s most of what I have to give you." He kept his voice level, because there was no other way to say it that wasn’t worse. "It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t a method, and it wasn’t a pill, and nobody on any mountain anywhere did it for me. It came from outside everything you and I were taught to count, and it took the rot out of a boy who was going to die of it."

"Then tell me where that stops."

"The rest of it I can’t give you. Not as a bargain, and not because I’m holding it back to trade." He met her eye. "If I put the rest into words in front of you, the damage doesn’t land on me. It lands on other people, and one of them is sitting right here."

Qingluo turned her cup slowly in her good hand and let that sit for a while.

"I want the last part said plainly."

"You wanted to know whether the thing exists. It exists." Xuan put his hands on his knees. "I’m not going to sit in front of you and call it a story, or a coincidence, or the will of heaven, or any of the other rubbish you’ve been handed. That’s the line I’m giving you. Everything up to it is true and there is nothing past it that I can put in your hands."

She nodded once, slowly, and went on turning the cup. "Do you know what everybody else did?" she said. "They told me they didn’t know, which was true, or they invented something to get me out of the room, which was worse. You’re the first person who’s drawn me a wall and then told me it was a wall." She set the cup down in the dirt. "I’ve been asking a long time. That’s the only useful answer I’ve had."

"You’re taking it better than I’d planned for."

"I’m taking it professionally, which isn’t the same thing, and you’ll find out the difference if you ever lie to me." She pulled her sleeve down over the new stitches. "And I’d already worked out most of the shape of it, sitting on that wall with my hands on you."

"Tell me what you had."

"A cure is a fight. Two things in a body, one of them winning, and the loser leaves wreckage behind it. I’ve never once put my hand on a man who recovered from anything serious and not been able to read the fight afterwards." She held up her good hand and turned it over. "Your channels have no fight in them. Not a won one, not a lost one. The rot lived in you for years and there’s nothing in there that remembers it."

"Then it wasn’t a cure at all."

"It was a removal, and removing is not something my art can do, and it isn’t something anybody’s art can do." She said it flatly. "Which left me holding a fact that doesn’t fit inside the rules. So I stopped trying to make it fit and went looking for what does."

The lamp guttered and she cupped a hand round it without looking at it. "Now mine," Qingluo said. "You asked me once why I want him, and I told you to wait, and you waited, so here it is."

"My mother had third-level rot."

She said that the way she would say a weight or a dose, and then she kept going before he could put anything in the gap.

"The house managed her, which is what the house does. My grandmother gave her the best of everything and bought her more time than anybody else on this coast could have bought, and it ended the way all of them end." Her thumb moved on the edge of the cup. "I took the readings. Every morning, her pulse and her colour and the count of her breath, into the book in my own hand, because my grandmother said a Shen learns on her own family or she learns on somebody else’s, and my mother agreed with her."

"How old were you?"

"Old enough to write neatly. That’s the part people find hard to hear, so I usually leave it out." She let a breath go. "Near the end she started telling me there was a man in the room. Everybody put it down to what we were giving her, and they were right to, because what we were giving her does that to people."

"You didn’t put it down to that."

"I wrote it down. I wrote everything down, it was the only job I had." Her eyes came up. "White robe. Red at the collar and the cuffs. White hair to the shoulder on a man who wasn’t old. Red eyes. She gave me the cuffs twice, and she was particular about the cuffs."

Xuan sat very still. He had said those same cuffs aloud in a market, in an inn, in a yard full of people in green, and watched every one of them find somewhere else to be.

"A woman dying in a valley she never left, describing a man’s sleeves." Qingluo shrugged, and it cost her the shoulder, and she ignored it. "And in her last three days the numbers in my book did something I have never been able to explain to myself, and I’ve gone back to those pages more times than is healthy."

"Then Yuncheng."

"And a man came up the aisle stair with the cuffs exactly as she gave them to me, and I bought that seat and sat two along from him and did nothing useful whatsoever." She picked up the cup again. "That’s the whole of it. There’s no justice in it and no vow and nothing that would sound well in a story. I’ve never even had a name for him. All I’ve ever had is a dying woman’s description and a face in a crowd."

The fire had gone down to almost nothing and neither of them fed it. "Nothing that exists took the rot out of you," she said. "And nothing that exists stood at the end of my mother’s bed. I’ve spent a long time making myself believe those are two different sentences."

"You don’t believe it anymore."

"I stopped, on that shelf, with my hands inside an animal and a man standing over me who had no business still being upright." Qingluo looked at the case on the stone, and then at him. "I’ve done all of this on my own and I’ve got nowhere, and I’d rather be wrong beside somebody than right by myself. So I’m coming with you when you leave, and I’m not asking."