Shen Ningshuang

The post of an enforcement disciple sounds impressive; in practice it is the least rewarding job the sect has. First on the scene when something happens. If the case is solved, the credit goes elsewhere. If it isn't, the responsibility stays with her. She has held the post for years without requesting a transfer.

She has a fixed method for questioning. She lets the other person finish without interrupting, then asks the whole thing again from the top. Where the two accounts fail to match, she writes it down and does not call it out on the spot.

People in the bazaar are in the habit of calling strange events coincidences. Her habit runs the other way: a coincidence is a strange event she has not finished investigating.

A sword at her waist, seldom drawn. What she uses far more often is a thin notebook and a pen worn blunt—toward the back pages, the handwriting gets smaller and smaller.

Most of her cases end without a conclusion. Eight in ten strange happenings in the bazaar run their thread out halfway, and sect rules say an unresolved case gets filed. Her files are thicker than anyone else's, because she writes down the places where the thread broke as well.

Her colleagues consider this a waste of ink. Her position is that where a line breaks is itself a clue—it simply cannot be joined up yet.

The sword she wears has a plain scabbard. Most outer-gate disciples have something cut into theirs—a master's mark, the year of entry, or for the particular, a line of commissioned calligraphy. Hers carries not one groove from throat to tip. The only place worn bright is the side that rides against her belt, polished by years of hanging there.

She stands at the ninth layer of the Qi-Condensation Realm. Few in the outer gate are above her. She does not mention it, and few in the bazaar know—she rarely draws in the course of a case.

The enforcement office keeps its own method of breathing, not the one outer-gate disciples practise. She walks that road, and so the several ailments common among outer-gate disciples have never once touched her.

Someone asked her how often the sword leaves the scabbard. She said she did not remember. He took it for modesty. She genuinely was not keeping count—when a situation calls for it she acts, and when it is done the blade goes back, not worth a separate entry.

The bazaar has its customs. People who come to report trouble arrive with something in hand: a packet of tea, a string of cash, offered as travel money for the enforcement disciple. Accept, and the case is worked a little more gently. Decline, and the visitor understands the trip was wasted.

She does not take it. The fact took 2 years to travel through the bazaar, and once it had, more people came to her—mostly the ones with nothing to offer.

She has not lacked for warnings inside the sect. Enforcement work is lean, and a colleague who refuses what the others accept becomes, in time, a splinter under someone's skin. She heard them out, nodded, and carried on.

Her own account of it is short: take a man's gift and you must steer around certain places when you question him. Then what did she come for?

Strange business mostly gets reported at night. Only after the bazaar puts out its lamps will people say what they would not say by day, so her work often starts at the hour of Zi.

She goes alone. The enforcement office has always been short-handed, and she does not care to bring anyone—with two of them there, a witness picks whichever one looks easier to talk to, and what comes out is no longer clean.

Walking night roads long enough teaches its own rules: not down the middle of the alley, but along the wall; a half-step's pause at every mouth of a lane; at the sound of footsteps behind, stop under the next light and let the man pass. Nobody taught her these. They were bought with a few near things in her first year.

She carries little. A ledger, a brush, a small packet of blood-staunching powder, and a half-burnt candle. The candle is for the people she questions—households in the back lanes begrudge the oil, and the rooms are too dark to read a face. She needs to read the face.