My Sect Is Down to Seven People

Chapter 263: The Half-Demon Girl

On the twenty-fifth, at the Dragon hour, Shao Ming lifted the door panels off the Qingya Market storefront and leaned them against the wall. He hung up the scale, set the hand scale dead center on the counter, and let the draft from the open door sway the scale hook twice. Frost clung to the blue stone outside the threshold, and he scraped the patch in front of the door clear with the sole of his shoe.

The market street was busier than last time. The old man selling flatbread moved his carrying pole over to the wall by the door, nodded through the doorway at Shao Ming, and asked whether he was still weighing and buying wild mushrooms today. Shao Ming said he was, and the old man shifted his pole another half-foot closer to the door, saying he'd come back to the bread after he'd sold some.

The first one through the door after opening was Zhuo Ying, two bundles of spirit herbs in her hands, the binding cord brand-new. She didn't rush onto the scale. First she pulled open the shelf under the counter, bent down, and checked on her own batch of sun-dried spirit herbs—consigned back in the Ninth Month. Half had sold; the rest still sat in neat rows, the hemp paper laid over the top untouched.

"Sect Master Xu." She straightened and lifted the herbs. "Qingya took the order too?"

Xu Yan looked up from behind the counter. "We took it." He lowered his head again and wrote the date on her line.

Shao Ming set the hook and leveled the beam. Miao Zhong came through the door with a stack of talisman paper under his arm and laid it on the counter. "Ink Pool Gate took it too." He fished a small stone from his sleeve to weigh down the corner of the paper. Kuang Lun came in behind him, three bundles of spirit herbs on his back. He swung them onto the scale and nodded at the counter. After the nod he bent to untie the cords; the knots had frozen stiff, and he had to pick at them twice before they gave.

None of the three went on. The market fell quiet for a stretch; the only sound was the rope on the scale beam creaking once. The wind lifted a corner of the talisman paper, and Miao Zhong pressed it back down.

Shao Ming shook the dirt out of the herb roots. "Dirt doesn't count. Spirit herbs, twenty-four catties." He slid the weight until the beam balanced, the arm bobbing once, swaying twice more before it settled, and he leaned in to read the markings again.

Zhuo Ying took the brush and wrote the price in her line in the market book. The characters came fast, one stroke to the end, and she laid the brush back on the inkstone rim. "Put it under my name." She paused, then added, "These last few months, not one herb broker has come down from the north. These bundles of mine were all cut on the southern slopes. Took three rounds of sun to dry them properly."

"Recorded." Xu Yan wrote that sentence into the small line beneath the price, the characters tiny, squeezed between two rows.

Kuang Lun's herbs came to eighteen catties. He waited until Shao Ming called it before he wrote the price himself. When he'd finished, he didn't leave right away. He glanced at the spot on the counter where the pills usually sat. It was empty. "The furnace on the thirtieth—still on?"

"Still on." Xu Yan turned half a page of the market book. "Sell on the thirtieth, light the fire on the first."

"Then I'll bring three more bundles on the thirtieth." Kuang Lun carried his empty basket to the door, then looked back. "Cold weather makes the herbs brittle. Can't stack anything on top of them on the road."

Miao Zhong counted out the talisman papers one by one for Shao Ming, then wrote his own name. He lifted the small stone off the papers and held it in his fist as if he had more to say. Xu Yan finished the line in the market book, lifted the brush tip from the paper, and looked up. Miao Zhong tucked the stone into his sleeve and said, "I'll be back on the thirtieth." He turned and left, his steps quicker than when he'd come.

Around the Snake hour, someone asked twice about the consigned herbs under the counter. Each time Shao Ming pointed at the row of figures on the paper. "Consigned. Price is written there. I don't bargain." The rogue cultivator asking the price turned the herbs over, checked the roots, said they were dried well, and left. Half a quarter-hour later he came back, bought half a bundle at the marked price, and set the money on the counter. Shao Ming counted it coin by coin, wrote it into the market book, and recorded it under Zhuo Ying's name.

Near the end of the Snake hour, two people were still waiting in the shop to weigh their goods. A young man with a bamboo basket on his back, and an older one with frostbite sores cracked open on the back of his hand, wrapped in a strip of cloth. Their goods sat at their feet; neither pushed ahead of the other.

The young one glanced toward the counter and lowered his voice. "The Sect Alliance has a bounty out on a girl."

The older man didn't look up. "What girl?"

"Half-demon."

"...How much?"

"Don't know. Don't know who posted it either." The young man nudged his bamboo basket half a foot forward. "Everyone coming down from the north is talking about it."

The older man wound the cloth strip around his hand one more time, pulling it tight, before he spoke. "Don't say that here."

Behind the counter, Xu Yan kept writing in the market book, brush never pausing. He finished the line—"spirit herbs, nine catties, consigned"—blew on the ink, and pinned the corner of the page with the hand scale.

Shao Ming was weighing wild mushrooms for a rogue cultivator. He drew the weight back in, his hand pausing on the beam, and glanced toward the counter. Then he pushed the weight back out and announced, "Wild mushrooms, four catties two taels." His voice as flat as ever.

Qi Qi came out from the back room, a stack of empty baskets hugged to his chest. He set them in the corner, lined them up, looked at the two men by the door, said nothing, and went back.

The young man with the basket lifted it onto the scale. The older man raised the bundle at his feet—the cloth on his hand had already seeped a spot of red—set it on the scale, and watched Shao Ming finish weighing before he said quietly, "I shouldn't have said that in the market."

Xu Yan set his brush down. "The market weighs goods, not words." He copied the herb price into the seller's rows. "Consignment?"

"Consignment." The older man took the brush and wrote his own price, slow, his hand too cold to obey. It took two tries to form a legible number.

"Under whose name?"

"Write mine." He thought, then added, "Last time was also mine."

Xu Yan acknowledged and wrote the name out in full. The two men finished their weighing and left. The flatbread seller set a stiffened flatbread on the threshold, saying even cold it would still chew, and offered it to them for the road. The young man bent, picked it up, and broke off half for him.

Xu Yan turned through the market book from the beginning. Page after page, line after line: weights, prices, names. Not one sentence carried back by word of mouth. He closed the book and weighed it down with the inkstone.

By the Horse hour the stall had sold out. Qian Duoduo topped up two pots of spirit rice at the grain shop—ten spirit stones. The shop closed at the end of the Horse hour, they left town in the Sheep hour, and entered the Mountain Gate in the Monkey hour. Shi Po waited under the gate arch to take the baskets, a stack in each hand, carrying them around behind the kitchen. Qian Duoduo turned over the hundred spirit stones to the Accounts Room; Xu Yan counted them into the cash box, put the market box on the rack under the ledger shelf, separate from the cash, and entered one line in the running ledger: Tenth Month, twenty-fifth, one hundred stones in. A count through the market book: eleven weighings today, one fewer than last market.

Lamplight in the main hall. Qian Duoduo set out thirteen pairs of chopsticks. A Sui carried one bowl first to the low hut by the Mountain Gate, then came back and sat. The talk at the table went elsewhere: A Sui asked whether the pills were coming out on the twenty-eighth; Qian Duoduo said they'd still need two more pots of spirit rice for the thirtieth market; Shi Po went for a second bowl of rice; Bai Xiaoman held her hand up to the lamplight and said her fingers were so cold they wouldn't straighten, couldn't even grip a pebble. Jiang Wan asked Qi Qi if he was going up the North Slope on the twenty-eighth. Qi Qi said yes.

What those two rogue cultivators had said in the market—no one mentioned it at the table.

Qi Qi ate fast, collected his bowl, and stopped at the door to glance back at Xu Yan. He didn't ask anything.

On the twenty-seventh, the Dog hour, in the Accounts Room. Xu Yan spread out ten label papers and wrote "Qingya" on each, with "Tenth Month, twenty-eighth" beneath. He left them to dry on the cover of the account book, and once dry, folded them into an old paper packet and pressed it under the ten empty porcelain vials on the Medicine Hall's table.

On the twenty-eighth the sky was still dark when Huo Qing was already out on the veranda practicing that thrust, the wooden target beside the pillar, the hole at its center dug a little deeper. Qi Qi passed along the veranda; Huo Qing never stopped, drawing the sword back and sending it out again. There was sword-wind from the East Courtyard too—Jiang Wan was already up as well.

Qi Qi slipped out through the old herb garden. The stones at the bottom of the gully had a thin coat of frost, and the frost on the pine needles dropped at the first step, down the back of his neck, cold. He hunched his shoulders and walked slower than last time, testing every step before he set his foot down. He stopped at the foot of the North Slope and recognized the landmarks: the pine half-dead, the stones white as if dusted with salt, the line of water running crosswise at the gully's bottom. The little path up the slope vanished beneath the low shrubs. He climbed step by step on the roots, and on the Stone Ridge he found that pine branch—the one he'd broken off last time, jammed into a rock crevice. Dead now, still standing.

By the time he crossed the North Slope shoulder, the sky had just begun to lighten. He looked north: a layer of white lay over the yellow grass beyond the pass. The main road came through from the south and continued north. No fresh wheel ruts, no hoofprints, no one on the road. On the western spur, the thin footpath ran halfway and stopped. The East Ridge lay flat and featureless. The few stone huts at the crossroads faced the road, their door planks still rotted, no sign anyone had been inside.

It was cold on the slope shoulder. He squinted and scanned again, from the Gap all the way to the far end of the road. Nothing extra, nothing missing. He stood a while, hands tucked into his sleeves. Wind came from the north, not strong. Once the sun climbed past the eastern ridge, he turned and started back.

At the Dragon hour, the Medicine Hall's cover came off and white steam rushed up to the eaves. Du Xiaochuan lay sprawled at the furnace door yawning. Cheng Banshan nudged him aside with one hand, pinched the alchemy flame down over the furnace chamber, and the formation hands lifted the cover and the tray. Bamboo splints flicked the pills one by one onto the tray; Du Xiaochuan counted beside him—ten, and not a single crack. Cheng Banshan bottled them, and Du Xiaochuan pulled the labels from under the vials and pressed one onto each bottle mouth. The bamboo splint scraped once around the furnace floor; the pill powder was gathered into medicine paper, and Xu Yan wrapped it, wrote "Tenth Month, twenty-eighth" on the packet, and set it on the end of the shelf, the rightmost in the row. One line went into the furnace log.

"Don't scrape the bottom too hard." Cheng Banshan hung the furnace hook back. "Sell on the thirtieth, light the fire on the first."

At the Snake hour Qi Qi came into the Accounts Room and stood just inside the threshold. His first word was: "Nothing."

"And on the road?"

"Nothing there either." Qi Qi brushed the frost from his sleeves. "That rock on the slope shoulder was coated in frost. I stepped on it and slipped."

"What about the grass beyond the pass?"

"Yellow. No one's stepped on it." Qi Qi reached the door and came back. "Those huts at the crossroads—no one's been inside."

Xu Yan nodded and slipped the day's record between the back pages of the account book. As Qi Qi left, he scraped the soles of his shoes on the threshold twice, knocking off a few pine needles.

That afternoon, Du Xiaochuan raked out the furnace ash, packed it into two old baskets, and hauled load after load out to the old herb garden, spreading it over the stretch of path that had been trampled to mud. Cheng Banshan wiped the formation hands twice with a cloth, then closed the furnace door before he sat down. In the Accounts Room, Bai Xiaoman copied the day's prices out of the market book, and when she finished she cinched the hemp cord on the cash box tight. Passing the Medicine Hall, Xu Yan noticed the row of retained samples on the shelf, one packet per date; the newest one, at the right end, its ink still not dry.

On the twenty-eighth, at lamplight, by the kitchen door. Qian Duoduo lifted the lid of the ration jar and peered in. The grain had dropped a good long way; rings of white residue marked the inside of the jar where the level had once been. One hand still on the lid, he asked, "On the thirtieth, for the Eleventh Month—still two bags of spirit rice, one of coarse grain?"

"Same as always," Xu Yan said.

The lid thumped back on, a muffled sound. "Then same as always it is," Qian Duoduo said.