Chapter 211 (Patreon)

I feel a hand shaking my shoulder.

At first I don’t know whose it is, or what it is doing there, because the only thing that exists in front of me is a row of letters, and the row beneath it, and the one beneath that, all arranging themselves as I look at them.

But the hand shakes me again, harder this time.

“Xiaojie”, says someone who sounds far away, and I finally blink.

The letters go still on the paper while the study snaps back into place all at once, and for a moment I can’t make anything fit, just like in my other life when I fell asleep on the train and woke up at a station I didn’t recognize.

I turn my head and find her on my left, standing beside the chair, with her hand still on my shoulder.

“Lianhua”, I tell her.

And my voice comes out hoarse, as if I hadn’t used it in hours, which is probably true.

“The three periods are up, Xiaojie”, she tells me. “And Xia is finishing making lunch.”

She withdraws her hand as soon as she sees that I am awake and stays where she is, with her hands clasped in front of her, waiting for me to say something.

Because that is the rule: if I go into a trance with my blessing, I am to be pulled out once three periods have passed, unless, obviously, there is an emergency.

I take my eyes off Lianhua and lower them to the table.

The book is open, and beside it there is a pile of sheets covered in my handwriting, with columns of signs, arrows, crossings-out and loose words that I remember writing all too clearly, even though I shouldn’t have been capable of it.

And I have been like this for several days.

In the box I assumed it wouldn’t be normal Sanskrit, and I was right, although this time I would have liked to be wrong.

Because it resembles it enormously. The letters are very similar, almost identical to those of the script of my other life, and there are whole words I have been able to find without any effort in some of the dictionaries.

But there are others that aren’t in any of them, there are letters that didn’t exist and there are rules that break exactly where they shouldn’t, as if at some point it had begun to diverge from a common source, which is probably true.

So I am making progress on the translation slowly, very slowly.

The Blessing does its part, and my memory does its own, because in there are all the dictionaries, all the grammars and all the manuals that ever passed through my hands, without a single page missing.

The problem is that the reading table in my head only fits five books at a time, so I spend half my time deciding which book to set aside so I can open another.

And of everything I have deciphered so far, the word that repeats the most is anna.

Which in Sanskrit means food, and sometimes, simply, cooked rice.

Which, in a book with Annapurna on the cover, tells me absolutely nothing, because it is exactly the word I would expect to find both in a prayer to the goddess of food and in a recipe for cooking it.

I sigh and set the brush in its rest, because this isn’t going to be solved today, or tomorrow, or probably this month, and staring at the page isn’t going to make it go any faster.

So I look back at Lianhua.

“Then it’s time to go eat”, I tell her.

Lianhua nods just once and steps aside to make room for me, so I grip the rims of the chair and push my way out of the study, with Lianhua a step behind.

The sun has already passed over the magnolia, and its shadow falls right across the stone table, where Xia is setting out the bowls.

She does it the way she does everything related to food, with the utmost seriousness, turning each dish until it is exactly where she has decided it has to be, and when she hears us coming she doesn’t even raise her head.

“You’re just in time”, she tells me.

“We don’t feel like finding out what happens if we aren’t”, I reply with a smile.

I stop the chair at the head of the table, Lianhua sits on the bench to my left and Xia on the one to my right, and for a while no one says anything, because I haven’t had a bite since breakfast and my stomach, apparently, has finally noticed.

But in the center of the table there is a dish I don’t recognize.

It is a river fish, whole, opened along the back and steamed on a lotus leaf, with its skin crossed by very fine parallel cuts, so regular they look as if they were made with a ruler.

“And this?” I ask Xia.

And Xia’s face lights up, as it does every time someone asks her about something she has cooked.

“It’s from the fish book”, she tells me. “One of the ones Lianhua bought me.”

She points at the cuts with her chopsticks.

“It says that in spirit fish the Qi is almost all under the skin”, she continues. “And that if you cut them badly, it escapes through the cuts while they cook. But if you cut along the line of the scales, and never deeper than a grain of rice, it stays inside.”

“And is this a spirit fish?” I ask her.

“No”, she replies. “It’s a normal one, one of the ones Lianhua brought back from the city yesterday.”

“Then it doesn’t have any Qi that could escape”, I tell her.

“That’s why I tried it on this one”, she tells me. “If it goes wrong, it doesn’t matter. And when I have a real one, I’ll already have the practice.”

She says it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and the truth is that it is, so I pick up a piece with my chopsticks and taste it.

It is very good, although with Xia that is no longer news, and it has a juiciness I don’t remember in any other fish of hers, as if those cuts and that way of cooking it had also kept the juices from escaping.

“It’s very good”, I tell her.

“Isn’t it?” she tells me. “Did you know that the steam can’t touch the flesh directly and that’s why it goes on top of the leaf? And that there are fish that have to be cooked with their heads facing north, although the book doesn’t explain why?”

I didn’t know either of those things, although after everything I have had to read about which way each formation has to face, I no longer dare to laugh at the part about the head.

But I don’t have time to tell her so either, because from there she goes on to talk to me about scales, about knives and about how many breaths a fish has to be left over the steam depending on how much it weighs.

While she talks, I eat and nod, and on my left Lianhua eats in silence, although I notice that every time Xia begins a sentence with what the book says, she raises her eyes from her bowl for a moment.

We are just finishing, with the bowls almost empty and Xia about to get up to bring dessert, when there is a knock at the courtyard gate.

It isn’t two soft, spaced-apart knocks, like those of the Tower’s people, but three sharp blows struck with a fist, so hard that the wood shakes in its frame.

“Anyone in the house?” asks a man’s voice on the other side.

It is a gruff voice, the kind that doesn’t ask in order to know the answer, but to announce that it is at the door.

Xia stays with her bowl half lifted, while Lianhua frowns.

Then she sets her chopsticks on the table, gets up without making a sound and crosses the courtyard toward the gate, while I do the same thing I did the last time someone knocked at that gate when we weren’t expecting anyone, which is to put my hand into my sleeve, take out a Spiritual Shield Talisman and a Cutting Wind Talisman and tuck them between my thigh and the armrest, where I can grab them without looking.

Lianhua opens the gate, and on the other side, on the stone path that goes around the island, there are three men.

From the table I see them through the gap of the gate as if they were a painting, although it isn’t a painting I would hang on any wall. The one in front is broad, with a shaved head and a scar that splits his upper lip in two. On his left there is another who barely fits in the frame, with forearms like two hams hanging from a hook, and on his right, a younger, thinner one, with a machete at his belt and a smile missing two teeth.

And all three have a small iron oar hanging from their belts, no longer than a hand.

The one with the scar looks Lianhua up and down and then looks past her shoulder, toward the courtyard, until his eyes fix on me, on the chair and on the wheels, with the face of someone who has never seen anything like it and has no intention of asking what it is.

“Who’s in charge here?” he asks.

Lianhua doesn’t answer him.

She doesn’t step aside, doesn’t point at me, doesn’t do anything. She simply stays in the doorway, exactly as still as she was, so it falls to me.

“I am”, I tell him from the table.

The man stares at me for a moment, and then he laughs. The other two laugh as well, although a little later than him, like people waiting to see whether the boss found it funny before risking it.

“Even better”, he tells me. “That way you’ll catch on quickly.”

He taps the oar hanging from his belt with his thumb.

“We’re from the Iron Oar Gang”, he continues. “And this part of the Rong is ours.”

And I can’t help thinking that an iron oar is the very last thing anyone who has to cross a river would think of carrying.

Although I don’t say so, of course.

“We know you go to the Tower of the Five Dragons”, he goes on. “Every few days this one takes the boat, goes to the Tower and comes back. And anyone who goes to the Tower that often has money.”

He points at Lianhua with his chin as he says it, and Lianhua doesn’t even blink.

But I do, because there is only one way to know how often Lianhua takes the boat to go to the Tower, and that is to follow her.

Lianhua warned me that at least three different groups were following her, that those groups made their living selling what they found out and that how serious the matter would be depended on whom they sold it to.

And now I know whom one of them has sold it to.

“So we’ve come to offer you protection”, the one with the scar finishes. “We make sure nothing happens to you, not here and not on the river. And in exchange, you give us half of everything you earn.”

Half.

Not a tenth, not a fifth, but half, and he says it with the calm of someone offering a fair price.

It is clearly a protection racket in the style of Al Capone in 1920s New York, although I don’t think even he dared to ask for that much in his extortions, and I also can’t help wondering how they intend to check how much half of what I earn is.

But I don’t have time to keep thinking about it, because the big one takes a step toward the gate, just enough that Lianhua has to raise her chin a little to look at him.

“The islands are very lonely at night”, he says. “And wood burns just as well even when it’s surrounded by water.”

“Boats sink too”, adds the one with the machete, looking straight at me. “And it’s very dangerous for three women to live alone. Nobody knows what could happen to them.”

“Nobody, least of all us, wants any of that to happen”, says the one with the scar, in the bored voice of someone who has repeated that line many times. “That’s why we’re here, so that it doesn’t.”

On my right, Xia says nothing, although out of the corner of my eye I see that she still has her bowl in one hand, while she has slipped the other into the sleeve where she carries the sewn-in sheath of a dagger she doesn’t like.

But at that moment, Lianhua turns her head and looks at me.

She says nothing, nor does she need to, because it is a look I know only too well and that means only one thing, that she is waiting for me to give her permission.

And at that moment I realize that I am tired.

Not from the meal, nor from the three periods in front of the book, but from this, from three strangers planting themselves at my door to explain to me what is going to happen to me if I don’t give them what they ask for.

Chen Mo warned me about it before I reached this city: that I was going to come across people who would decide that my circumstances gave them free rein, and that against that only two things worked, having someone behind me who frightened people, or a level of cultivation of my own that made them think twice.

The second I don’t have yet, and the formation that should protect this island I don’t have either, because I am still stuck on the orientations and the book’s endless list.

But the first I do have, and I have it standing at the gate.

And these three, judging by how they look at her, don’t even know what they have in front of them, and they probably have no way of knowing her level of cultivation either, since if any of them had checked it, by now he wouldn’t be so calm.

If I pay them, they will come back next month for half, and the month after for something more, because that is how this works everywhere. And if Lianhua kills them, there will be someone who wants to avenge them and someone in this city who will come to ask what happened, and I don’t know which of the two I would like less.

But if they go home alive, wet and knowing they are no match for Lianhua, they may never come back.

And at that moment, I remember that I told Master Mu, sitting at this very table, that if someone showed up looking for trouble, I would have Lianhua throw them in the river.

What I didn’t know then is that in the end I would have to say it for real.

“Lianhua”, I say.

And my voice comes out as tired as I feel.

“Throw them in the river”, I tell her, issuing my decree.

The one with the scar opens his mouth, and I don’t know whether it is to laugh again or to say something, but I don’t let him finish.

“But don’t kill them”, I add.

The man takes an instant to understand it, and in that instant his smile vanishes. Not out of fear, though, but out of something considerably worse, which is pride.

“Her alone?” he says. “Against the three of us?”

Lianhua doesn’t answer him, since she simply closes her eyes, crosses the threshold and steps out onto the stone path, so close to him that the man has to step back half a pace to avoid bumping into her, and that half pace leaves him with his heels almost at the edge, with the river at his back.

He realizes it, because his face changes, and he reaches out to grab her by the collar, but he never manages to touch her.

Lianhua knocks his arm aside with the back of her wrist, rests her open palm on his chest and pushes, and it doesn’t look like a hard push, or a fast one, or anything special, but the man looks as if he trips over something as he is pushed, and an instant later there is a splash.

I pull back on the rims to move away from the table, turn the chair and push toward the gate.

Beside me I hear Xia’s bowl land on the table, and then I feel her hand on the armrest, as always when we leave the house, although this time I don’t quite know whether it is to steady me or to steady herself.

When I reach the threshold, the big one has already hurled himself at Lianhua.

He comes fists first, and he is using a technique, there is no doubt about that, because his knuckles begin to glow faintly.

But Lianhua, who is still facing the river with her back to the man, doesn’t move until the last moment.

And in that last moment she takes a step to the side, just one, and the man passes through where she no longer is, trips over something at ankle height and goes headfirst into the Rong, his fists still glowing, as Lianhua simply pushes him from where she stands.

I don’t see what he has tripped over, because it can’t be seen, but I know what it is. A thread of the Invisible Loom that the hands of the Myriad have carried through the air to the exact spot where his ankle was going to pass, just as the first man surely tripped over one of them as well.

The third man already has the machete in his hand, but he doesn’t raise it; instead, he stares at the water, where his two companions are spluttering and flailing, then looks at Lianhua, and then looks at the machete, as if he suddenly didn’t quite know why he has drawn it, and starts backing away along the stone path, sideways, toward the dock.

Lianhua doesn’t chase him; instead, from the path, right beneath the man’s heel, a gray spike shoots up, no taller than a handspan, which doesn’t pierce him because Lianhua doesn’t want it to, but simply lifts his heel at the worst possible moment, and the man staggers, arms windmilling in the air and the machete in one hand, before falling backward into the river because, like his companions, in his precarious position he ends up tripping over something.

A few heartbeats later, the spike crumbles on its own, like a dry clod of earth, and only a little dust remains on the stone path.

And at no point have Lianhua’s blades left her sleeves.

I stay in the doorway, with my hands on the rims and Xia holding on to the armrest, looking at the river.

The three heads bob up a few paces from the bank, and the Rong’s current, which isn’t especially strong along this stretch, has already begun to carry them a little downriver. But all three know how to swim, as was to be expected in a city with three rivers, so they swim, although not very well, toward the tip of the island where the dock is, where I now notice there is a boat that isn’t ours, tied to the same post.

Lianhua stays standing on the path, without moving, until the three of them reach the dock, climb into the boat dripping and row away without looking back, and she doesn’t turn around until the boat disappears behind the island opposite.

Then she comes back to the gate, stops in front of me and opens her eyes while I check that she doesn’t have a single hair out of place.

“Gate Opening, Xiaojie”, she tells me. “None of the three had more than two open.”

“And the technique the big one used on his fists?” I ask her.

“One of those techniques that can be bought in any market, I suppose”, she replies. “And poorly learned.”

And it is at that moment that Xia finally lets go of the armrest.

“Wen”, she says to me.

She says it quietly, and when I look at her, I find her with her eyes fixed on the river, on the exact spot where the boat disappeared.

“And what if they come back?” she asks me. “What if they come back with more people?”

I take a moment before answering her, because it is the question I am asking myself too, and I don’t want to give her an answer I don’t believe.

“I hope that, after seeing what Lianhua did to them, they’ve lost the urge”, I tell her. “That’s what usually happens when someone realizes that what they thought was easy prey isn’t.”

Xia says nothing, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the river either, and with her past, I can imagine what is going through her mind.

“But it’s better to be safe than sorry”, I add, and I raise my eyes to Lianhua.

“Go to the Tower right now”, I tell her. “Find Lin Quingyu and ask her what they know about the Iron Oar Gang. Who they are, how many of them there are and, above all, who is above them.”

Because a gang that extorts islands in the middle of the Rong can’t exist in a city like this without someone knowing about it, and if anyone at the Tower has the time to find out, it is Lin Quingyu.

But Lianhua doesn’t move.

“Xiaojie”, she tells me. “You should not stay alone.”

“I’m not staying alone”, I reply. “I’m staying with Xia.”

Lianhua looks at Xia, who is still looking at the river, and then looks back at me, and I know that look too.

“If the three of us go, with the chair, it will take three times as long”, I continue. “Alone you’ll go much faster, and the sooner we know who we’re dealing with, the sooner we can decide what to do.”

Lianhua doesn’t answer me, because she knows I am right, but she doesn’t move either, because she also knows that she doesn’t like my being right one bit, so I put my hand into my sleeve, take out a handful of talismans and fan them out in front of me.

“And if anyone comes before you get back”, I tell her. “Worst case, I’ll simply be burning money.”