Chapter 208 (Patreon)

I close the book, one of the ones on Master Shi’s list, and set it down on the table harder than necessary, even though the poor book isn’t to blame for anything.

Then I raise my eyes to the map of the island, which I have spread out on the other side of the table, its corners held down by a few stones from the courtyard.

It is a schematic map, nothing more. The outline of the island, the house, the courtyard with the magnolia, the dock and the stone path that goes around it all, because when I made it, all I wanted was to know how much ground I was going to have to protect.

And now, every time I look at it, I feel like throwing it into the river, because if I had known that the Range branch was so complicated in ways that have nothing to do with runes, I wouldn’t have chosen it in a million years.

Runes I understand. Runes are a language, and I have never had problems with languages in either of my two lives, but half of what I now have to learn isn’t runes, it’s which way each secondary formation has to face, which side of the land is higher than the other, what lies to the north and what lies to the south, and a whole series of similar things that the book enumerates in an absolutely endless list.

And all those things, in my other life, were only ever mentioned when people talked about feng shui.

Which came up in conversation every time some colleague from the faculty bought an apartment and spent weeks worrying about which way to point the headboard of their bed, while I listened with all the politeness in the world without believing a single word.

But here, to my misfortune, that nonsense isn’t superstition at all, since it truly affects how the formation works, and the book says so with the same seriousness with which it explains which runes to use in each case, so I have no choice but to take it into account when I set about creating it.

So I look at the map again while the island looks back at me, with its irregular outline in a river that surrounds it on every side and that, according to the book, also has something to say about this whole business.

I am thinking about that when the door of the study opens and Lianhua comes in.

“Xiaojie”, she tells me. “If you want to reach the auction with enough time to spare, we have to leave right now.”

She says it from the doorway, and from the way she says it, I understand that she has spent a good while calculating how long it will take us to arrive at the exact moment imperial protocol would demand.

I look at her, then at the book, and finally at the map.

“Then we had better go now”, I tell her.

Lianhua nods just once and goes out into the courtyard without waiting for me to say anything else.

I turn the chair on the spot until I am facing the door and go out after her, pushing the rims, with the wheels rattling as soon as they touch the courtyard stones, where Xia is already waiting beside the magnolia, with a small backpack on her back and the straps pulled so tight that it looks as if it has been sewn onto her shoulders.

“Are we leaving now?” she asks me as soon as she sees me. “Are we late? Are there going to be a lot of people? Will they let us in with the backpack?”

“Yes, no, yes and I don’t know”, I reply as I pass her.

Xia frowns, and then takes her place on my right without protesting.

At the courtyard gate, before the front wheels reach the stone path, I feel Lianhua’s hands on the handles of the backrest, so I let go of the rims and rest my hands in my lap without saying anything.

Outside the house, she is the one who pushes the chair, since when a woman with two baskets of cabbages and a child strapped to her back is capable of overtaking me on the street, I have no argument left to dispute it with her.

The island’s dock is small, barely a few planks reaching out into the water, and the boat is waiting for us, tied to its post.

Lianhua sets the ramp between the dock and the gunwale, takes the chair down it slowly, fits it into the anchoring on the bottom of the boat and checks the fastenings with a tug. Xia sits down beside me and, as always, holds on to my armrest just in case.

Lianhua casts off the line, pushes the boat away from the dock with one foot and begins to row.

“Lianhua”, I tell her once the island has been left behind. “Have you confirmed where the auction is being held?”

“Yes, Xiaojie”, she replies without stopping rowing. “The Tower of the Five Dragons has a building specifically for holding its auctions, since it doesn’t hold them at its headquarters.”

Which, come to think of it, makes all the sense in the world, since from the little I saw of that building, I doubt it has a space large enough for an event like this.

At the city dock they take me up the ramp, but this time, as soon as we leave the port warehouses behind, Lianhua doesn’t take any of the streets I already know.

She leads us inland along a route I have never traveled, and the city changes so gradually that I don’t realize it until I notice that the chair no longer rattles, because the ground is no longer uneven stones, but large, flat flagstones, so well fitted that the wheels don’t feel the joints.

The streets widen, the walls grow taller and the gates, lacquered in dark red, have stone lions on either side and, now and then, a man whose only job consists of standing in front of them scowling at anyone who tries to go in.

Besides, the people who pass us aren’t carrying anything and are almost never alone, but have someone behind them who carries the sacks and baskets for them.

Several streets later, the city changes again, and the walls give way to shops.

Here the facades are of carved wood, the signboards are lacquered and the characters of the names are gilded.

Through the open doors you can see folded silks in piles of every color, jade figures on shelves, porcelain so fine that the light passes through it, perfumes in tiny bottles and jewels laid out on dark cloths so that they shine more.

It reminds me of the main street outside the Imperial Palace, and judging by the way the shop assistants look at us from their doorways, first at the chair, then at our clothes, before forgetting about us to look at the next person passing by, here it works exactly the same way.

At the end of that street, the shops open onto a square with an enormous building on its far side, and if the Tower’s headquarters looked like a bank, this looks like exactly the opposite.

It has five stories, and each one has its own eave, curved upward at the tips and covered in glazed tiles that shine as if they had just been wetted. At each corner of each eave there is a coiled bronze dragon, with its mouth open toward the square, and red silk lanterns hang from the eaves, so many that I don’t even bother counting them.

The columns of the facade are lacquered and the balustrades of the galleries on each floor are carved down to the last handspan. Above the doors, which are enormous and wide open, there is a plaque of dark wood with the name of the Tower of the Five Dragons in gold characters.

And coiled around the columns of the entrance there are more dragons, carved into the wood and painted gold.

Seeing such a display of wealth, I don’t think it is any coincidence, because everything in this building seems designed so that whoever enters it feels they are someone important simply for having crossed the threshold, and whoever feels important is tempted to prove it by spending more money to impress even more.

But before reaching that door, you have to cross the square, and the square is already full of people. There are those who have come to the auction, who can be told apart because they walk toward the building with their backs straight and without looking at anyone, and there are those who have only come to see who goes in, who can be told apart because they look at everyone.

And the latter far outnumber the former, just as at the movie premieres of my other life there were far more people behind the barriers watching the red carpet than people walking on it.

Lianhua doesn’t stop to admire the building, but plunges into the crowd and begins to clear a path for us.

She doesn’t push anyone, nor does she need to. She simply advances, slowly, and people move aside, some because they see the chair and others because they see Lianhua, while from my height all I see going past are backs, embroidered sleeves and jade pendants swinging at eye level.

And, as always, the murmurs.

Xia walks close on my right, with her hand on the armrest, and says nothing.

Little by little, the entrance draws nearer, until we reach the doors, where there are several guards, all in the same clothes and all with the faces of men who have never smiled in their lives.

One of them steps forward and blocks our way.

“Your invitation, please”, he tells us.

He says it looking at Lianhua, but before Lianhua has time to do anything, Xia, who is acting as my assistant today, steps forward, takes the invitation out from inside her clothes and holds it out to him with both hands.

The guard takes it, looks at it and looks at me for an instant, and then he hands it back to Xia and steps aside.

“Go ahead”, he tells us.

And Xia puts it away again as carefully as if it were made of glass.

The first thing I think, as soon as we go through the doors, is that I have come to the wrong building.

Because the only auction I have ever been to, Master Mu’s, in the Empire, began with an endless corridor of carved panels, inlays of jade and gold and columns wrapped in embroidered silk, and ended in a reception hall as large as the Throne Hall of the Imperial Palace, where they kept you entertained while everyone arrived.

And here there is none of that.

Here, right past the doors, there is a small vestibule, considerably smaller than the building promises from outside, with a floor of polished wood. And in the center, a group of young men and women, all very good-looking and all dressed exactly alike, who approach each group that comes in to guide it inside.

Lianhua stops me beside the wall, so as not to get in the way of those coming in behind us, and almost at the same moment one of the men separates from the others and comes toward us.

And that makes me take notice of everyone else.

A group of three men with the air of merchants comes in, and a woman approaches them. Two ladies come in with a maid behind them, and a young man approaches them. A group of five comes in, three men and two women, and another woman approaches them.

That makes it clear to me that groups with more men than women are guided by a woman, and groups with more women than men, by a man.

The man who reaches us is young and tall, with a smile measured to the millimeter and a gray silk robe so well pressed that it doesn’t have a single wrinkle. He looks at the chair only once, very quickly, and his smile doesn’t move.

Then he bows, and to my surprise, he doesn’t bow toward Lianhua, but toward me.

“Welcome”, he tells me. “Would you be so kind as to allow me to see your invitation? That way I will know how far I should accompany you.”

Xia steps forward again, takes out the invitation and holds it out to him.

The man takes it with two fingers and reads it, and for a very brief instant he looks at me again, though this time differently. Then he hands it back to Xia with a small bow.

“Follow me, please”, he tells us, after which he turns toward one of the corridors.

In here, with the floor smooth and level, I close my hands around the rims again, and Lianhua lets go of the handles without saying anything and takes her place on my left, half a step behind, because she knows that inside buildings I like to push it myself.

We follow the man down one corridor, then down another, and then along a gallery open on one side, and there are people in all of them.

People I have never seen in my life.

A woman with the emblem of the Jade Dew embroidered on her chest, the same one I saw in that workshop in the Hundred Furnaces Quarter. Two men with that of the Autumn Waters and swords at their waists, and a little farther on, a group with that of the Nine Currents, emblems that by now I also recognize.

An old man with the seal of the Pavilion of a Thousand Strokes on his sleeve, the same one my certificate bears. And two men in dark blue robes with the edges of their sleeves embroidered in silver, who make me turn my head just in case, although neither of them is Master Shi.

Nor, fortunately, Master Qin.

But there are also people with emblems I don’t recognize, from sects or organizations I have never heard of. And people who wear no emblem at all and who, judging by how the others greet them, don’t seem to need one either.

Although, if I look closely, what they all have in common is their clothing.

Silk, and more silk. Gold thread embroidery, sleeves so wide they almost sweep the floor, jade on belts, on pendants and in hair, and a woman wearing so many hairpins in her bun that I don’t understand how she manages to keep her head straight.

We are well dressed. Our clothes are good, of good fabric and well cut, and on any other street in Sanjiang no one would look at us twice because of them, but it is clear that here being well dressed isn’t enough.

So, for the first time since I arrived in this city, the chair isn’t the only thing drawing all the looks, because the eyes that turn as we pass go from the chair to our clothes, and on more than one face I see, with complete clarity, the question of what three people dressed like that are doing here.

It is the same look we archaeologists used to get at exhibition openings in my other life, when the patrons arrived dressed for a gala and we arrived dressed for a lecture.

Although the curious thing is that the chair, with its wheels, its axle and its spirit wood rims, costs considerably more than some of the outfits looking down their noses at us, and there are those who notice.

A man in a green robe, who had begun to look at us with his nose rather high in the air, lowers his eyes to the wheels, stares at the rims for a moment, and when he raises his eyes again, his nose is no longer quite so high.

I say nothing and keep pushing the rims with the same face as always, but I won’t deny that I enjoy it a little.

The man stops at the foot of a staircase, and before he turns to look at us, Lianhua already has a Minor Levitation Talisman between her fingers. She leans down and sticks it on the side of the chair at the height of the armrest, the talisman glows for an instant and the chair rises a few fingers’ breadth off the floor.

The man’s eyebrows go up, only slightly, but it doesn’t take them long to return to their place, after which he turns around and begins to climb.

Lianhua climbs behind him, pushing me up that first flight, a landing, another flight, and on every landing there are people leaning out of the galleries who turn to watch us go by, until on the fourth floor the man finally stops.

Lianhua pushes the chair down until the wheels touch the floor, the talisman goes out and crumbles into ash, and I close my hands around the rims again.

The man leads us along the gallery to a carved wooden door, opens it and steps aside to let us through.

“This is your box”, he tells us. “Would you like anything brought to you while you wait?”

“Thank you very much, but we don’t need anything”, I reply.

The man bows again.

“In that case, I wish you a pleasant evening”, he tells us.

And he withdraws along the gallery with the same unhurried pace with which he has brought us here.

We go in, and right away it is clear that the box isn’t very large.

It has a few chairs of dark wood with silk cushions, a couple of low tables, a curtain gathered back on each side of the entrance and, at the far end, a carved balustrade overlooking the hall.

Lianhua doesn’t wait to be asked, since she immediately moves a couple of chairs aside, pushes them against the wall and clears the space in front of the balustrade, so I push the chair into that space, with the balustrade at just the right height to rest my forearms on.

Then Lianhua takes another chair and places it on my left and a little behind, as always, although she doesn’t sit in it.

Xia, on the other hand, takes off the backpack, sets it on one of the tables and begins taking things out.

First a small container for liquids, tightly closed. Then three cups and three plates, and finally several wooden boxes of refreshments, which she opens and sets out one beside the other with the seriousness of someone laying out a banquet.

Then she opens the container, pours tea into the cups and leaves the first one for me on the edge of the table nearest to me.

“See?” she tells me. “They did let us in with the backpack.”

“So I see”, I reply.

While Xia finishes serving, I notice that there is a small book on the other table, so a hand of the Myriad picks it up and floats it over to my lap.

It is thin, stitched along the spine and with covers of thick paper. And as soon as I open it, a smile escapes me, because the characters are all identical.

Not similar, but identical, stroke by stroke and character by character, in a way no human brush can write them. And the ink has that dull sheen that only oil-based ink has, the same ink I formulated years ago because the ordinary kind wouldn’t stick to bronze.

This book was made on a printing press, and it is a list, the list describing everything that is going to be auctioned tonight, lot by lot, with a drawing of the item next to many of the descriptions.

But the drawings weren’t made by hand; rather, clearly, at least to me, they come from carved wooden plates, which means that the two options I recommended to the artisans back then are together in the same book.

And my smile grows wider, because this, besides being a list, is the most shameless piece of advertising I have seen in this city.

Lin Quingyu told me that the problem with the printing press was that no one understood why they would want a thousand identical books until they saw them. Well, here there is one in every box, in the hands of the people with the most money in all of Sanjiang, and at some point tonight someone is going to wonder how it is possible for all of them to be identical.

And whoever wonders will end up asking the Tower, which is the one that sells the licenses, and every license the Tower sells is money coming into the House of the Long Journey.

Although for a moment I wonder why the auction list was never made public in the Empire, while here they leave it on the table for you, for now I set the book aside on the table and lean over the balustrade to see what the building is like inside.

And I discover that it isn’t very different from a theater in my old world.

Down below, on the lowest level, there are rows and rows of seats, still empty, facing a raised stage at the far end of the hall with a lacquered table in the center. And on the walls, surrounding the hall on all four sides and rising floor after floor almost to the ceiling, there are boxes, dozens of them, which are filling up at this very moment.

From here I see curtains being drawn back, silhouettes sitting down and servants serving, and the murmur of hundreds of conversations rising from every direction and hanging beneath the ceiling.

And as in any theater, half the audience looks toward the stage, and the other half looks toward the other boxes, to see who has sat where and with whom.

Now and then, some of them stare at our box for a second, I imagine out of curiosity about the new face, but being stared at is nothing new for me either, so I lose interest right away.

I lean back in the chair, pick up the cup and take a sip of tea, which is good, like everything Xia makes. Then I take one of the buns from the box she has left closest to me, take a bite and open the book again, this time to read it properly.

The first thing I notice is that the list is long, very long, but almost everything in it falls into a few categories.

First come the Spiritual Treasures, pages and pages of them, with names that sound like poems and descriptions that sound like recipes, and which I have no need for yet, because almost all of them are meant for stages of cultivation that I am still years away from reaching.

Then come the weapons, heaps of them. Swords, above all, which in a city governed in part by a sect of swordsmen makes all the sense in the world, but also spears, sabers and every kind of instrument man has devised for combat.

There are also sections for Pills, Talismans and even portable formations, but I only skim them, although as I go through the Pills section, I remember the Tàiyīyuàn of the Imperial Palace, where they had pills that healed wounds, and then our current situation and the possibility of running into trouble, so I make a note to buy pills that could be of use to us, although obviously not here, since the ones on display are all stupidly expensive.

And after that come the Spiritual Artifacts, which have the most carefully made drawings in the whole book, and which I am completely sure I can’t buy in a bidding war against all the people sitting down in these boxes right now, who are certainly going to go after them.

So I go through those pages fairly quickly too.

The techniques, on the other hand, I read with somewhat more attention, even if only in passing, and I consult Lianhua about some of them.

“And this one?” I ask her, and I bring the book closer to her with the Myriad so that she can read the description.

Lianhua reads it without taking the book.

“It covers my body in stone, Xiaojie”, she replies. “That would make me too slow.”

I move on to the next one.

“And this one?” I ask her.

“It is a sword technique”, she replies.

She pauses briefly.

“And even though they have an edge, I can’t use sword techniques with my weapons”, she adds.

And so it goes with all the others that seem interesting, one after another, until I reach the end of the techniques with the same interest with which I began other sections, which is none.

But right after that, at the end of the book, there is a small section, barely a few pages long, and its title makes me sit up straight in the chair.

Rarities Obtained from Celestial Fragments.

And for a moment, the archaeologist I carry inside rubs her hands together, but it doesn’t last long.

Because almost everything on those pages is broken pieces. Fragments of carved stone of which the drawing only lets you guess that at some point they were part of something, half a bronze bracelet, the handle of something that no longer has a blade, and other similar things that it would make no sense to buy.

And what isn’t broken is pottery.

Bowls, oil lamps, the odd jug, and a two-handled vase that the description presents as a piece of celestial origin decorated with figures. And although the drawing from the plate is quite crude, it doesn’t need to be good, because the meander band encircling its neck and the two warriors in profile, with their spears and their round shields, are things I have seen hundreds of times.

It is a Greek vase, unmistakably Greek.

And I have seen it, or seen its cousins, in display cases, in catalogs and on the slides for my classes. Whole rooms full of vases like this one, which people walked past without stopping, on their way to the mummy room.

Years ago I imagined that one day I would come across Greek pottery in this world; what I never imagined is that, when that day came, I would feel complete indifference on seeing it.

But however bored I may be, I can’t stop thinking about what it means.

Because first it was Egypt, then Rome, then Ogma and his golden chains, and now Greece, and every piece that turns up looks less like a coincidence, so I am more and more certain that the famous Celestial Realm, whatever it may be, has to be related in some way to the cultures of my old world.

I keep turning pages, faster now and with disappointment starting to settle in, because there are fewer and fewer left and none of them has anything that makes me stop.

Until, on one of the last ones, something does.

The description is the shortest in the whole section. It says only that it is a book from a Celestial Fragment, written in an unknown language, but what has made me stop isn’t the description, but the drawing that accompanies it.

It is of very poor quality, even worse than the vase’s, as if it had been carved half-heartedly. It shows the cover of a book on which is drawn the figure of a woman with three eyes and a crown on her head, who also holds a ladle in her right hand and a bowl in her left, and who is seated on something that vaguely resembles a lotus.

And whoever carved that plate didn’t have the slightest idea what they were copying, that shows in every line, but I do.

Because I know her. I have seen her in books, in museums and in temples, and however crude the drawing may be, for me there is no possible doubt.

It is a depiction of Annapurna, the Hindu goddess of food, nourishment and cooking.