The Wind-Hearing Bureau

A net of watchers everywhere in the market town that nobody can account for. The idler sitting in the teahouse, the stallholder muttering behind the cold-tea stall, the small watcher who is always at the mouth of the lane — some of them are the Wind-Hearing Bureau’s ears.

It watches, it records. Stepping up to seize a man, or opening its mouth to question him, is no business of its own. What it records is petty: who stood talking with whom in front of a stall for half a quarter, who has not turned up for 3 days running, who has suddenly put on a whole set of new clothes, whose spirit stones came out heavier at the counter than they did last month.

There are a few rough ways of picking a watcher out. If the man behind the same stall has changed face 3 times in half a month, that is not a business being run. A man who sits a whole afternoon with his water topped up once and his eyes on the street corner instead of on his bowl did not come to drink tea either. Old rogue cultivators teach the new ones: watch the hands, not the face — a real stallholder’s hands have work in them, and a watcher’s hands are mostly idle.

Where the name came from, nobody can say. It sounds like a government office, and yet nobody in the market town has ever seen its door, its plaque, or what its people wear. Some say it is ears the sects keep in the market town. Some say it belongs to the authorities, set up in the early years and never disbanded. Some say there is no such bureau at all, that a few idlers who deal in rumour put the name up for themselves and held it up long enough that everyone came to take it for real. Every one of these accounts has a part that holds and a part that does not.

So rogue cultivators have learned to go round. There are two ways from East Street to West Street: the straight one is two tenths quicker but goes past the cold-tea stall, and the long way round costs more time and buys not being written down. Whether those extra steps are worth it, people in the market town work out very precisely.

Who it watches for, and where the things it records are sent — no rogue cultivator can answer that, and no rogue cultivator dares ask. The ones who have asked change their own account of it a few days later.