He knew they were following him before he even reached the end of the riverbed.
Two of them. He had seen them at the edge of the lantern light while the bidding went on, and again while he was packing up, the way you notice the men who stand at the back of a showroom without ever looking at the stock. Not buyers. Men who waited for sellers to finish, and then followed them home.
Nothing is asked, and nothing is fought inside the lanterns. Outside, anything goes.
He climbed the bank, turned into the dark lanes below the eastern gate, and reached for Concealment. It wrapped him, his breath, his heartbeat, the sound of his feet, and he heard the two men stop at the top of the bank behind him and mutter, and he walked away from them through the dark, invisible, his heart going much faster than it should have.
After a short while, it ran out. He was only able to use it for a few moments due to inexperience. This was the first time he used the active concealment skill; the consumption was too great to be maintained until he got home.
He felt it go the way you feel the last coin leave a purse. One moment he was nobody. The next moment, he was a boy in a cheap cloak and a smiling old man’s mask, walking alone down an empty lane with his well run dry, and somewhere behind him, a boot scraped on stone.
He felt in his guts that one of the men was going precisely in the direction he was going; how he tracked him even while in active concealment, Qian Fan didn’t have a single clue.
He walked faster. The lane bent left. He went left. His heart was racing, his vision tunneling.
It was a dead end.
He turned around. It was a narrow lane, barely two shoulders wide, walled in by plastered brick gone soft, and gray with damp. A rain barrel stood against one wall, full to the brim. A drain ran down the middle of the stones. Somebody had piled broken roof tiles at the blind end behind him, and above, between the eaves, a strip of sky was just beginning to go the color of dishwater.
The bigger of the two men was coming down the lane with that strip of dawn behind him: broad, patient, leather guards on both forearms, lacquered black, the kind a man wears when he expects to use his arms on people. The second, thinner one stopped at the mouth of the lane with a short club in his hand, keeping it shut.
“Old man,” said the big one, almost kindly. “Twelve silver. Hand it over, and you can go home.”
“I have nothing,” said Old Zhou.
It was perfectly true. Every copper was somewhere this man would never reach.
The man smiled. He didn’t believe it. People never did, at first.
“Well, it’s too bad, old man, you might not know this since you’re new around here. You’re a face I have never seen. But those people give us protection money, you know, for protection. And I’m here for your protection fees. It’s already overdue.”
“Protection from who precisely?” Old Zhou replied.
The man laughed, then said, “Protection from us!”
Then the big man rushed over and hit him.
There was no warning, no shout, no name of any technique. That was the first thing that Qian Fan learned about real fights, and he learned it with his face: they didn’t start. One moment the man was smiling, and the next moment, his fist was already coming, low and flat and fast, at the side of Qian Fan’s face.
He moved too late. He had never been in a fight before, not in either life. The fist missed his temple only because he flinched, and it caught him on the shoulder instead; the shoulder went numb from the collarbone to the fingertips, and the wall came up and hit him in the back.
His mask slid sideways.
For one terrible instant, he saw the lane through one eyehole and the inside of a lacquered cheek through the other, and he didn’t think about the man, or the club, or the fist coming back. He thought: my face. He grabbed the mask with his good hand and shoved it straight, and the second blow was aimed at his ear, hit his forearm instead, and nearly broke it.
Fine, said a cold, distant part of him. Priorities.
The knife that he bought. He needed the knife. He reached for it.
It was the stupidest feeling in the world. He knew exactly where it was. It was in his inventory, with everything else, and his mind went looking for it the way your hand goes looking for a coin in a full purse, past the bundle of insect talismans, past four brown pills, past a jade-green pill he could never sell, and while his mind was searching, the man took a handful of the front of his cloak and slammed him into the rain barrel.
Water went everywhere. Cold, shocking, down his collar, down his back. The barrel rocked and held.
“Gentlemen,” said Old Zhou, in a voice that was nearly as dry as it should have been, “there’s been a misunder—”
The man punched him in the stomach.
Qian Fan waited for his body to fold around the fist the way bodies did. It didn’t. This gave Qian Fan the confidence he needed.
The blow landed square below his navel, right over the place where every night for two months, the cold thread of his wealth had come in through the square and settled in the storehouse, right over the middle of him that money had built, and it was like punching a full sack of grain. It hurt. It knocked the breath out of him. But nothing gave out.
The big man felt it too. He looked down at his own knuckles with a small frown, the way a man frowns at a door that should have opened.
At the mouth of the lane, the thin man had decided not to wait. He came in fast with the club raised high.
He had the Iron Needle Talisman out and thrown before he’d even decided to. Not at the big man, who was too close, but past him, at the thin one, who was three steps away and coming. The paper cracked like a snapped stick. Three iron needles went out of it with a hiss, and the thin man yelled and grabbed his thigh and went down on one knee in the drain, the club clattering away across the stones.
Sting, Qian Fan thought. Makes a point indeed.
The big man didn’t even look round. He was too close to bother. He took Qian Fan’s cloak with both fists and lifted.
Qian Fan’s feet left the ground. The man was very strong and very patient, and he held him there against the wet brick with Qian Fan’s heels kicking at nothing, and said, quite reasonably, “Twelve silver, old man.”
Qian Fan’s body did the only thing it knew.
It sank.
Not his feet; they were off the ground. His weight. He did what he had done every night at the woodpile until his legs shook: he let everything in him settle, down through the spine, down through the hips, down into heels that weren’t touching anything, the way a scale’s pan settles when the load comes to rest. And the bones in him, the bones that had sunk into themselves two nights ago and came out heavier, went with it.
The big man’s arms dipped.
He frowned. He heaved. And Qian Fan went on sinking, heavier and heavier, a boy in a cloak who had somehow become a sack of copper cash, until the man’s grip gave and Qian Fan’s heels hit the stones of the lane and settled into them as if they had been nailed there.
The man was still holding the front of his cloak. His face was a hand’s breadth away. He was, for the first time, not smiling.
There was no time for the knife. There was no time for anything.
And because he was a merchant, he could not help it; Qian Fan counted. The ring’s twelve silver, honestly, and everything before it: the clerk’s coins, the boy’s payments, every time and talisman, known, named, squared. He felt the whole storehouse come up behind him, the way a merchant feels a full warehouse at his back when he names a price he will not move from.
Coin-Edge Palm.
The qi went down his arm on the road the buckets and the woodpile had cut through it, a road barely a week old. It went cold, then colder, and for one instant, the edge of his hand was not a hand anymore. It was the rim of a copper coin, standing on its end, and behind it stood everything he owned.
He struck the man’s forearm, where the guard was.
The lacquered leather cracked like a cheap bowl dropped on stone. Under it, something in the man’s arm made a sound Qian Fan would remember for a long time. The fist opened. The man’s breath went out of him in a short, surprised grunt, and he took one step backward; his legs folded, and he sat down in the wet lane and stayed there, holding his arm, staring up at the smiling old man with an expression of complete and honest bewilderment.
At the mouth of the lane, the thin man had got as far as one foot. He looked at his friend sitting in the drain, at the cracked guard, at the needles in his own leg, and at the old man standing with his heels settled into the stones of the lane as if he had grown there.
Then the thin man got up and limped away, very carefully, the way you back away from a dog you’ve just realized isn’t chained, and was gone.
Qian Fan walked out of the lane past the sitting man without looking at him, turned the corner, and kept walking until he was three streets away. Then he leaned against a wall and slid down it, and sat in the gray dawn with his mask pushed up and his wrist screaming in pain, and his well so empty he could almost hear it echo.
He was soaked to the skin. His left shoulder had no feeling in it at all. His right forearm, where the second blow had landed, was already going the color of a plum. And his hands, both of them, were shaking so hard that he had to put them between his knees to make them stop.
Two lives, he thought. Two whole lives, and that was the first time anyone had ever hit him.
[Host! Host! That was—]
The talisman was worth every copper, Qian Fan thought.
[The talisman stopped the small one, Host. You stopped the big one.]
The big one was drunk.
[He was not drunk. He was sober and very large.]
Shut up; he was drunk, Qian Fan thought firmly. That’s the only way I got out of that, and the guard was cheap. Lacquer over leather. It cracks even if you so much as look at it the wrong way.
The System said nothing, in a way that suggested it had a great deal to say.
He sat there until his hands stopped shaking. The Common Talisman was still in his inventory, unspent: a talisman that blocked a strike that would break a rib, sitting safely in storage while a stranger punched him in the stomach. Good stock, at least. Still worth exactly what he’d paid for it. The knife was still in there too, somewhere, where his hands hadn’t been able to find it.
That was the lesson he took home, out of all of it. Not the palm. Not the guard. The knife.
He had stood in a dead-end lane with a weapon he’d paid for, and he hadn’t been able to get it out of his own inventory on time.
I’m going to have to practice that, he thought. Taking things out swiftly and accurately.
Then he stuffed the mask and the cloak into his inventory, where they did not exist, and walked home through the waking streets as a vegetable seller’s son, with nothing in his hands.
* * *
The next night, he went back down to the riverbed with a sealed jar from the clearance bin whose contents not even the System knew, and half a map that was missing its other half.
No insect talismans. He had learned.
He heard it before he’d set out his lantern. Two fog sellers, murmuring to each other in the dark, in the low voices of people trading the only currency the Ghost Market valued more than silver.
“...the old man with the white beard. Smiling mask.”
“The one who sold the ring?”
“Broke Ma’s arm through his guard. One hand. Didn’t even take a step.” A pause. “Ma says the old man hits like a debt collector.”
Behind his smiling lacquer face, Qian Fan closed his eyes.
He was fairly sure Ma had been drunk.