Ch. 040| The Listening-Rain Tower

The Listening-Rain Tower stood at the east end of the market town below the mountain, the only two-storey wine-tower in these parts. The tower was not large, its signboard gone old, the rain having washed the two characters "Listening-Rain" to grey. In the back alley was a cart-and-horse company, where freight carts coming north and south all stopped to rest, unload, and change draft-beasts.

Lin Que, herb-basket on his back, blended in among the unloading porters, unremarkable.

This trip he was down the mountain purchasing for the herb-lodge—a pretext he was wielding ever more smoothly. Buying medicine was real; but this trip, more than that, he meant to make out one thing clear: the Guangyuan Company's cart stopped in this back alley at every ten-day's end, and the "man who collects slips" that Senior Brother Xu had learned of before his death also came to this Listening-Rain Tower at every ten-day's end. One place, two lines.

Madam Chang's cart was parked at the very back of the cart-and-horse company. She crouched at the cart-shaft, working an abacus over a freight list; seeing Lin Que come over, the abacus beads jarred to a stop.

"I thought you'd not show your face this while." She lowered her voice and led him a little to a spot behind the cart where no one was. "The jade-token side has put word about, asking all over the market 'who's putting out the extra stock.' And you've the nerve to come down the mountain now."

"The stock I'm holding; I'm not putting any out." Lin Que said. "I've come to tell the proprietor, so your side isn't left waiting for nothing."

---

Hearing him say "holding, not putting out," Madam Chang's brow instead eased half a degree.

"Sensible." She took up the abacus again, but those brisk eyes did not look at him. "I'll not hide it from you—these days my Guangyuan Company has it hard too. On one hand the remnants of the Black Wind Hall, their flawed-batch pills cheap enough to smash the market, pressing the price of honest pill-materials to rags; on the other, this jade-token one—the rift-stock, I can't not sell to him, and selling to him there's only his one price. Of the stock that passes through my cart, eight in ten, in the end, go into his stores."

"What does he collect so much stock for?" Lin Que asked very light, as if in passing.

Madam Chang's hand on the abacus stopped.

She looked at Lin Que a breath, then swept her eyes swiftly all around, and only then pitched her voice to near past hearing: "This I'll say once; from now on don't ask again, and don't say it came from me."

Lin Que nodded.

"The one collecting the stock wears a fine cotton straight-robe, a mutton-fat jade token at his waist. He comes at every ten-day's end, and takes delivery inside that small door in the east wall-foot of the back alley." Madam Chang said. "Once he's collected the stock, he doesn't take it into the market's stores, nor haul it toward the market ward—weighs it and pays out spirit stones right before us, and the cart turns about and, along that road to the north, goes up the mountain."

Something stirred in Lin Que.

That road to the north. Out of the market below the mountain and north, the mountain road led to only one place.

"Up the mountain?" His voice did not change. "At the top of that road is the Xuanzhao Sect."

"I said nothing." Madam Chang gathered up the abacus and stood, her debts and dues reckoned dead clear. "You've held your stock and not put any out lately, not dragged these muddy waters onto the Guangyuan Company's head—that, I've noted. The rest, the Guangyuan Company doesn't touch."

Done speaking, she called a hand to yoke the cart, and did not spare him another glance.

---

Lin Que did not leave.

The small door in the east wall-foot of the back alley—he had marked its place from afar. Today was the very end of a ten-day span.

He found a wall-corner heaped with empty baskets and crouched down, half his face buried behind the herb-basket, and beneath his left eye that heat quietly rose—these few days' rest had dispersed most of the mist in his eyes, and he could see clear again.

Past noon, that small door did open.

A man in a fine cotton straight-robe strolled out unhurried and stood by the door. He was some thirty years of age, fair-faced and beardless, a mutton-fat jade token at his waist glowing gentle in the sun. Rogue cultivators come to sell stock came forward one after another; he checked the stock, quoted a price, paid out spirit stones, spoke very little, his manner cool, as if conducting the most ordinary of dealings.

Midway through the selling, a rogue cultivator with half a basket of stock on his back, seeming to resent the price pressed low, stiffened his neck and would not let go, arguing low a sentence or two. The man in the straight-robe did not anger; he only dropped a single cool remark. From that distance Lin Que could not catch it, but that rogue cultivator's face visibly whitened, and he dared argue no more, meekly weighed his stock, took that price pressed to the bottom, and squeezed out of the crowd as if fleeing.

"Can't not sell to him." Madam Chang's words, Lin Que now saw with his own eyes. Had that rogue cultivator truly hardened his heart not to sell, from then on the stock he gathered would find no one who dared take it, and the cart he ran would overturn halfway down the road—this stock-collecting stall, aboveboard an amiable dealing, was underneath a net drawn dead-tight.

Lin Que's left eye swept along that man.

The man's qi was nurtured even, his tread sank heavy: the cultivation of the later stage of Qi Condensation, a stretch above Lin Que. But in Lin Que's sight, within the qi all about that man, there hid too a very faint trace, cut across—of the same handiwork as that one on the Breathing Scroll, as that one in Senior Brother Chen's spine, from the same hand.

This man collecting the stock was himself cultivating an art that had been cut.

The string in Lin Que's heart drew taut. He held his breath, not daring so much as to shift the herb-basket. As the man checked stock, in one instant he raised his eyes and swept toward this wall-corner; Lin Que dropped his lids and pressed the heat in his eye's depths dead down—the Eye of Flaws stirring changed the breath, and this man, close by, might well not fail to sense it.

That glance rested on him half a breath, and moved away.

A thin sweat seeped from Lin Que's back.

---

The collecting ran on until the sun leaned west.

From that small door were pushed two flat carts draped in blue cloth, the stock all loaded on them. Lin Que counted: the rogue cultivators selling stock had come in a dozen-odd waves front to back, and these two carts held the rift-stock of the better part of a month, a hundred li round about.

The man in the fine cotton straight-robe locked the small door and swung himself up onto the first cart.

The cart did not head into the market, nor down that road to the market ward. The two blue-cloth flat carts, one before the other, rumbled out of the back alley and, along that mountain road to the north, went slowly up.

North. The Xuanzhao Sect.

Lin Que crouched at the wall-corner, watching the two carts of stock vanish at the bend of the mountain road, and did not move a long while.

Stock that came out of rifts, gathered up half a month by half a month by a hand wearing a jade token, a hand itself cultivating a cut art, neither sold nor dispersed, cart by cart, hauled toward the Xuanzhao Sect.

And that blue-robed man, whom those within the sect honored as "the Teacher," who could enter the Xuanzhao Sect—he was the very hand that had cut that stroke from the art.

These two matters, before this, had been two separate lines in his mind; now, along these two blue-cloth flat carts, they joined.

He did not hurry after them. That mountain road was all Xuanzhao Sect ground, and for him, a herb-lodge disciple, to trail empty-handed behind a stock-cart up the mountain—found out, he would be Senior Brother Xu the second.

Lin Que stood, brushed the dust from his knees, shouldered the herb-basket, and headed into the market.

---

Just as he turned out of the alley mouth, a figure came toward him, and Lin Que's step checked.

Blue vigorous garb, waist cinched trim, plain-sheathed long sword. Shen Ningshuang.

She started too, those spirited eyes pinning onto his face: "You again."

"Senior Sister." Lin Que dropped his hands. "Down the mountain purchasing for the herb-lodge."

"Purchasing." Shen Ningshuang bit down on the two words, a trace of cold crossing the corner of her mouth. "The strange-death case at Qingqi Market, you were at its edge; the outer-gate qi-deviation case, you were at its edge; and now this Listening-Rain Tower—you again. I could almost suspect you're deliberately hanging about behind me."

Lin Que did not take up the remark; he only asked back: "Senior Sister has traced her way to this market—for that Xu fellow?"

Shen Ningshuang's look sank.

That outer-gate case of serial qi-deviation, Lin Que had it reckoned in his mind—the three-day term up, the higher-ups had, sure enough, pressed it into "each man's failing of root and bone" and closed it. If she was still investigating, there was no order from above at her back; all that upheld her was the anger she herself could not swallow down.

"Closed." Shen Ningshuang said coldly, sure enough, as if struck where it stung, and so hiding nothing. "The three days the higher-ups set were up, and they had it written as 'roots and bones uneven, each to his fate,' and sealed the file. I've been reassigned to look into a trifling talisman-theft case in the city's west."

She gave a cold laugh.

"A case where three outer-gate men died and were ruined, the higher-ups want closed in three days; a trifle in the west, a few stolen talismans, is worth reassigning me, an enforcement disciple, to look into." She pitched her voice very low. "This weighting is turned on its head. The more someone's busy shunting me aside, the more I believe—beneath those three lives is pressed something that can't bear the light."

She paused.

"That Xu fellow you brought up last time—'lost his footing on a mountain path by night'—I checked the old files privately. In the half-year before his death, he ran to this Listening-Rain Tower at every ten-day's end. I followed that thread, and felt my way here."

Lin Que lowered his eyes. She had traced her way to the Listening-Rain Tower, but had only felt out the half-stub of "Senior Brother Xu came here"; the small stock-collecting door in the back alley, those two carts of stock gone up the mountain, she had not yet seen.

And the half he had seen was missing exactly her enforcement-blue robe—who was behind that small door, into which place the stock hauled up the mountain went, he, an odd-jobbing disciple, could not investigate; she could.

"Since Senior Sister has felt her way to the Listening-Rain Tower," Lin Que said, weighing it, handing the words over very light, "she might do well to note—at every ten-day's end, what the east wall-foot of this back alley collects, and once it's collected, in which direction it goes."

Shen Ningshuang's gaze abruptly sharpened: "You know."

"A purchasing servant crouching at a wall-corner waiting on unloading," Lin Que lowered his eyes, "what I chanced to catch sight of shouldn't be taken as sure. Senior Sister is one who enforces the law; whether it's investigated true, Senior Sister weighs herself."

Shen Ningshuang stared at him, and after a while, the corner of her mouth pulled into an arc it was hard to say was vexation or a smile: "It's this trick of yours again. Say only half, and leave the other half for me to dig out myself."

But in the end she did not press further. That time in the market ward, that time at the herb-lodge—she had already been caught twice by these half-sentences, and yet those half-sentences, every time, had proved true.

"Never mind." She turned, looking toward the direction of that stock-collecting door in the back alley, her voice very low. "This half-sentence, I'll take it up."

Two steps on, she checked again, without turning back: "Your herb-lodge—Supervisor Pei still remembers your name. Since you too are touching the matters of this mountain, keep your hands and feet clean—the one watching isn't only me."

These words were not a character off from the ones she had dropped at the herb-lodge. She remembered him, and he remembered her.

The shadow of the plain-sheathed long sword swept across the light at the alley mouth. From now on, the one watching that stock-collecting door in the Listening-Rain Tower's back alley would be more than Lin Que alone.

【Ch. 040 End · the market town below Xuanzhao Mountain · the back alley of the Listening-Rain Tower】