Chapter 6 — The Talisman in His Stomach
They left Drifting Cloud at the hour of the tiger on the eleventh day, in the soft grey before the first cock-crow, by the south postern of the inn where Aunt Three Pots had left a clay pot of gānjiāng on the lintel like a child's offering at a roadside shrine.
Yan Jiu carried the pot under one arm and Lin Yao's bedroll under the other and his stolen sword across his back and his fox along the line of his shoulder, and he walked out into the dim street with the small steady gait of a man who had done exactly this exit at exactly this hour from exactly this kind of inn more times than was decent for someone his age.
Lin Yao walked behind him with the dull black sword at her hip and the pine stick in her right hand and a borrowed straw hat tipped low across her brow. She had cut three cùn off the inside hem of her stolen middle-robe to hide the bandage on her right ankle. The bone-setter had re-set the tibia at the hour of the rooster the night before, on the kitchen table, with a wooden mallet and Aunt Three Pots' second daughter holding her shoulders, and the leg was — by the wife's tart estimate — good for three days of walking if you do not, you ridiculous girl, walk on it like it is a leg.
She was not, strictly, walking on it like it was a leg.
She was walking on it like it was a loan.
Yan Jiu did not look back at her. He had not looked back at her at any point since the hour of the snake the previous evening, when he had returned from the biāoshī with two bone tokens stamped through with cinnabar and a smile that did not reach his eyes. The smile had not reached his eyes for nine hours. The smile had been a biāoshī's smile — flat, attentive, ready — and she had watched him put it on the way another man might put on a coat for weather he had been waiting for.
She was beginning to understand that Yan Jiu had two faces.
The second face was the one he had brought down off the roof at the hour of the snake the night before.
It was very quiet, and very fast, and very awake, and she did not, yet, know whether to be afraid of it or glad of it.
She added two faces to the long ledger she kept in her ribs, under Yan Jiu, and she walked.
The biāoshī's cart-line was waiting at the south gate. Six carts. Eight donkeys. Four men with the hard rope-corded hands of caravan guards and one man with the soft round shoulders of a head-clerk and two boys with the bright sleepless eyes of apprentices on their first long road. The cart they were assigned was the fourth in line — middle-grade, no cargo of value, a small awning of split bamboo over the bed and a low wooden bench along each side. A young couple on their honeymoon ride south to a wife's natal village, the biāoshī had told the head-clerk, and the head-clerk had not believed it, but the biāoshī had been paid in east-province cinnabar bone-tokens and the head-clerk had also been paid in something he did not list on the manifest, and the head-clerk had decided to believe that he believed it for the duration of the contract.
Yan Jiu set the gānjiāng pot in the cart-bed. He helped Lin Yao up onto the bench — the hour of the tiger, ya-tou, watch the second step — and his right hand was at her elbow and his left at the small of her back and she was on the bench before she had registered the weight transfer, and the hands were gone before she had registered the warmth.
The warmth was stayed.
The road from Drifting Cloud ran south-by-south-west through the low millet plain for half a day before it climbed into the foothill scrub. The cart bumped. The donkeys complained. The head-clerk, three carts ahead, sang an old caravan song about a girl who had married a salt-merchant and regretted it before the third town. The two apprentices joined the chorus on the bad notes. The four guards rode in silence.
Yan Jiu sat across from her on the opposite bench, fox in his lap, sword along his thigh, eyes on the road behind them.
He did not speak for the first two hours.
She did not speak either.
She watched his face.
The bruise along the jaw had yellowed further overnight; the split lip had scabbed clean. Three days' growth of beard along the line of the throat. The braid was over the shoulder again, dust-grey ribbon. The dust-grey of the outer robe was the same dust-grey, but she noticed now — for the first time, in the morning light at this angle — that the robe had been taken in at the shoulder seam, recently, by a hand that was not a tailor's hand: small even back-stitching with cotton thread two shades wrong. Aunt Three Pots, she understood. He has slept in this inn before. The robe was tailored by a woman who has known him for at least one previous visit.
The two faces of Yan Jiu were beginning to add up.
The biāoshī's second cart, three lengths behind, had a chained dog that was barking at nothing. The dog had been barking at nothing for the last cùn of the road.
Yan Jiu's eyes — the dark awake ones — flicked once to the dog. They flicked once to the sky above the dog. They flicked once to the line of trees on the eastern ridge. They flicked once to Lin Yao's face, and for a half-beat too long they stayed, and then they were on the road behind them again, and the half-beat was already stayed somewhere under her sternum that was not, any longer, a place for cataloguing.
He said, conversationally, to no one: "Ya-tou."
"Yes."
"There is a tracking-talisman in the upper layer of the southern wind. I can feel it on the back of my teeth. It is — by the taste of the cinnabar — a Frost Sect courier-grade. Not yours. Not the dye-shop man's. Frost Sect, level two. It has not yet found us. It is searching."
The cold settled in her sternum the way frost settled on a clay pot.
She said: "Range."
"Half a li. It will close to a hundred paces in three breaths once it scents you. It will then call its sibling. The sibling will be level three. The sibling will not search. The sibling will arrive."
"How long until the sibling."
"Five breaths after the first one tags. Ya-tou. Are you breathing."
"Yes."
"You are not. Ya-tou. Four count in. Six count out. With me."
"Yes."
She breathed. He breathed across the bench with her, in soft sympathy, the same four-six rhythm, and his right hand — without looking — went into the inside seam of his sleeve and came out with three small paper twists. Each twist was the size of a thumbnail. Each was tied with a single red thread. The thread on the third was knotted twice.
He said: "Decoys. The double-knotted one is me. The others are me, two younger brothers. I will throw them in three breaths. The talisman will follow the strongest pulse, which will be the double-knotted one. The pulse will travel east on the ridge. The talisman will follow it east. When the talisman scents that the pulse is not you, it will return — but by then the cart-line will be three li further south and the talisman will be searching a different province."
"What if the talisman scents me first."
A small silence.
He said, lightly: "Then we have a different problem."
"Throw them now."
"Three breaths, ya-tou. I want the cart-line two more cart-lengths past the bend. If I throw now, the talisman will pass over the cart-line on its way to the decoy. If I throw at the bend, the talisman will go directly east and not over us at all."
She knew, then, that he had done this before. Often. With practice. She did not press.
He threw at the bend.
The three small paper twists left his fingers in a single fluid arc — east, east, east-by-north — and the red threads opened in the air and the paper flared and three pulses of false him sang out into the upper wind like a man calling his own name into a canyon to confuse a hawk, and Lin Yao watched the wind itself turn very slightly, the way the air turned over the body of a deer when a kestrel passed.
She did not see the talisman.
She felt it.
It was a small bright cold pull at the inside of her right wrist — the wrist where Pei Shenzhi had once, very lightly, placed his thumb to check her pulse after she had run too far in the courtyard at fourteen and her breathing had not slowed for an hour. The pull was the same temperature as that thumb. She closed her eyes for one breath and her father's voice came up under her sternum, dry and unsurprised: Daughter. They have keyed it to the print of the man who exiled you. They expect you to bleed toward him.
She bowed, very small, inside her ribs, to the dull black sword across her knees, and she said no to the inside of her own wrist the way her mother had said no at the door, and the pull thinned.
It thinned the way a thread thinned when held very steady in a strong wind.
Yan Jiu — watching her, not the sky — said quietly, "Ya-tou. What are you doing."
"I am refusing to bleed toward him."
"...Toward who."
"Pei Shenzhi."
A pause.
He did not ask the second question. He kept it for himself, with the same hard quiet patience that had taken in her wrist and her sword and her two-character name without flinching.
The talisman, in the upper wind, turned east.
It followed the doubled-knot decoy.
It dwindled.
It was gone.
The dog two carts back stopped barking.
Yan Jiu exhaled. He looked at her, properly, for the first time that morning. The dark awake eyes. The small soft scab. The yellowing jaw. The grin was nowhere. The second face was on. The second face was — she noticed, with the small cold cataloguing attention of a woman who had spent ten years learning to read the man who would one day exile her — afraid.
"Ya-tou," he said.
"Yes."
"That trick — the wrist trick — do not tell anyone you can do that."
"No."
"Anyone, mei-mei. Not your fox. Not the biāoshī. Not me, when I am drunk. Not me, when I am dying. The men who hunt your kind will pay sect-prices for that single sentence."
"My kind."
A longer pause.
He said: "We will talk about your kind when we are off this cart-line."
"Yan Jiu."
"Mei-mei."
"You know what I am."
"I have a theory," he said. He smiled at her — the second-face smile, flat, attentive, almost gentle. "I have had the theory since the inn well. I have refined the theory since the alley. I have finalized the theory since you bled three breaths of something not-qi in your ribs at the hour of the dog three nights ago and a kettle of water in the kitchen below your room hissed when it should not have. The kettle was not on a stove. The kettle was cold. The kettle was on the floor. Aunt Three Pots noticed. She did not tell you. She told me. By way of putting a clay pot of gānjiāng on the lintel this morning instead of selling it to me."
She did not breathe.
"Ya-tou."
"Yes."
"I do not — let me be very clear — care what you are. I cared the second I saw the sword. I cared the second I saw the wrist. I have not stopped caring, but I have not been afraid of you for a single breath, and I am not going to start. I am — Aunt Three Pots taught me this also — for hire, and I have decided what I am for hire to. I have decided it nine days ago at the dye-shop. I am also decided about it this morning. I will tell you my theory when we are off this cart-line and you can tell me how many of my guesses are wrong."
"...How many do you think are wrong."
"None."
She did not catalogue none.
She stayed it, in the same place she had stayed the peach-peel spiral and the home-seal love-knot and the small star next to Aunt Three Pots, and the stayed register inside her sternum, she noticed with the same academic neutral attention, had a sixth entry on it now, and the sixth entry was very heavy.
She would, indeed, need to rebind the spine of that register soon.
She would not — she also decided, with the small dry sardonic precision that was becoming her standard expression for catastrophes — be rebinding it alone.
The talisman returned at the hour of the snake.
It did not come from the east this time. It came from the south, against the wind, against the road, against the cart-line, on a bearing she did not have the experience to predict and Yan Jiu did not have the warning-window to dodge.
It came down through the bamboo awning of the cart and struck the wooden floor between her feet with the small terrible sound of a wasp landing on iron.
It did not buzz.
It seared.
A second sigil — level three — Frost Sect, homing class, frost-poison payload, keyed to the print of Pei Shenzhi's right hand, the right hand that had driven Frost-Rime through her shoulder at the cleansing and had also, four years ago in a courtyard in summer, very lightly, very briefly, placed itself against the back of her neck to push her gently down into a bow when she had forgotten to bow to a visiting elder, and had then withdrawn so fast she had only known it had happened by the warm patch the size of a copper cash that the hand had left on the meat of her neck.
The talisman recognized that meat.
It struck.
It struck up.
Yan Jiu —
Yan Jiu moved.
She did not — she would later, on a different evening, six weeks later in a roadside shrine in the rain, try to remember and fail — see him move.
She saw, instead, the outcome.
The outcome was that the small searing talisman that had been about to strike up into the meat of her neck struck instead the small soft wet meat of Yan Jiu's mouth.
He had stepped across the cart bed in one fluid motion. He had caught the talisman in his teeth the way a dog caught a thrown bone. He had — with the small precise patience of a man who had calculated the cost in less than a breath and decided it was affordable — closed his teeth on it.
The talisman went down his throat.
He swallowed.
He sat back down on the bench opposite her.
He looked at her.
He grinned.
The grin was the first face. The grin was back. The grin was the grin of a man who had been on a roof eating a peach.
"Mei-mei."
"...Yan Jiu."
"That was — I am willing to admit this freely — poorly planned."
"Yan Jiu."
"Tell me a joke. Quickly. The frost will reach my dantian in — mh. — seven breaths. Possibly six. I have done the math twice."
She did not — could not — tell him a joke.
She did, instead, the only thing her body knew how to do when the man in front of her had just put himself between her and a sect-grade sigil and was now, with the small lopsided smile of a man choosing to drown in the bathtub rather than the river, dying.
She put her hands on his chest.
Both hands.
Right hand over the sternum where she had seen, the night before, the small precise dragon she had thought was a tattoo and had now reidentified as a deflection-scar — old, faded, the keloid of a sigil that had been carried inside the meat of a man's chest for some years. Left hand over the lower ribs where she had felt, three nights ago when she had nearly fallen on the inn stair and he had caught her, the warm steady drum of a biāoshī's lung-discipline.
Her palms were cold.
His chest was — already — colder.
The frost was racing.
She closed her eyes.
She breathed in four count. She breathed out six count. She lowered her chin half a degree. She did not push down and she did not push up — she had learned, expensively, the morning she had bleached the meat of her own palm — that she could open.
She opened.
She opened the way her mother had opened the door for creditors, with the small flat conversational no of a woman who had decided that what entered the house was her decision and not the door's.
The Tianmo Ti, inside her ribs, roused.
It did not lunge. It did not eat. It looked at her, the way a hungry child looked at the mother who had just opened the rice-bin, and it waited.
She said to the Tianmo Ti, inside the inside of her ribs, in the voice her mother had used to the night-creditors: Not him. Him is mine. Take the frost. Pull it. Pull it through me. Out the soles of my feet. Into the cart floor. Into the dirt. Out. Out.*
The Tianmo Ti listened.
It had — she understood with the cold round clarity of a woman discovering that the dog she had been told her whole life was rabid was, in fact, only thirsty — never been spoken to this way before. It had been spoken over. It had been spoken around. It had been sealed, and warned, and named, and feared. It had not — in nineteen years of constitution — been asked, politely, like a daughter asking a difficult older sibling, to help.
The Tianmo Ti reached.
It reached through her palms and into Yan Jiu's chest and it found the small bright cold thread of frost-poison that the talisman had laid along the lining of his stomach and the inside of his ribs, and it did not eat the thread. It pulled it. It pulled it the way her mother had pulled a fishbone out of her own four-year-old throat with a thumb and one quiet word. It pulled it through her left palm, through her wrist, through the long fragile column of her right arm, through her shoulder, through the cracked clavicle, down the 任脉, through the lower dantian that was not a cup, through the huìyīn gate, down through the right hip, through the broken tibia, through the broken ankle, through the bandaged sole of the right foot, out —
— into the cart floor.
The wooden plank between her feet frosted.
A perfect circle. Six cùn across. Hoarfrost, white and clean and so cold the grain of the plank stood up. The frost held for one breath. The frost crackled. The frost dropped — sublimated into the warm summer air above the millet plain — and was gone.
The plank was scorched. Burned. A perfect circle of charred wood where the frost had drawn the heat out so fast the wood had cracked.
Lin Yao opened her eyes.
Yan Jiu was looking at her face.
He was — entirely — alive.
His chest under her palms was warm again. The pulse under her right thumb was the slow steady drum it had been three nights ago at the stair. The grin was — somewhere — gone. The first face was gone. The second face was gone. There was a third face she had not yet seen, and the third face was the face of a man who had just been given his life back by a woman whose hands were still on his chest, and the third face was very quiet.
He said, very softly: "Mei-mei."
"Yes."
"Who are you."
"I do not know."
"...Mh."
"I have known I was something. I have not known what I was. I was told at four that I was not. I was told at nine that I was not. I was told at thirteen that I was not. I was told at nineteen that I was not, and they cleansed me for the not. You are the first person who has, today, asked."
A long count of breaths.
His right hand came up.
He did not touch her face.
He touched her wrist where her wrist held his sternum, and his thumb settled in the small soft hollow between the tendons on the back of her hand, and he did not press, and he did not move, and he said:
"Good. Neither do I. Let's find out together."
She did not — strictly — breathe for two counts.
She breathed in, eventually. Four count.
She breathed out. Six count.
The fox, on the bench beside Yan Jiu, lifted her head and looked at the scorched plank between Lin Yao's feet, and looked at Lin Yao's face, and looked at Yan Jiu's face, and lowered her head and closed her eyes and curled her tail across her snout, as if to indicate that there was no embassy business at this hour and she was not, on this occasion, the relevant clerk.
Lin Yao took her hands off Yan Jiu's chest.
She did it slowly. Right hand first. Left hand second.
The left hand left a faint warm imprint on the dust-grey of his outer robe over his ribs — the imprint of her palm, slightly damp.
The imprint stayed for a count of breaths.
The imprint faded.
The cart-line rolled on. The head-clerk three carts ahead was singing the third verse of the salt-merchant song, in which the girl had now run away from the salt-merchant and was three towns south and learning, with great difficulty, how to live as her own person.
Yan Jiu, after a long time, said: "Ya-tou."
"Yan Jiu."
"You are terrifying."
"Yes."
"You are also — I would like to register this for the record, on the off chance I do not survive this caravan ride — worth every single one of the four people in that town who noticed I was not your husband and decided it was none of their business."
"...Yan Jiu."
"Ya-tou."
"That is not a joke."
"No. No, it is not. I am working on the joke. The joke is in development. Please give me until the hour of the dog. By the hour of the dog I will have a joke."
He had a joke by the hour of the dog.
The joke was bad.
She laughed, once, around the corner of her mouth.
He saw it.
He did not, anywhere on his face, react.
He took it inside his own ribs without acknowledgment — and this she would learn, eventually, from the fox — under a heading that had only one entry on it, and the entry was very heavy, and the entry was Yao-yao laughs sometimes. Wait for it. Do not press it.
The cart-line crossed into the foothills at the hour of the rooster.
The talisman did not return.
The road climbed.
The Tianmo Ti, under Lin Yao's ribs, slept the way a small child slept after eating for the first time in a long winter — full, surprised, beginning to understand that food was a thing that could come more than once.
It did not, yet, dream of him.
It would, eventually.
For now, the body in the cart across from her was warm again, and the hand at her wrist had let go three breaths ago and had then, very politely, returned to its own knee, and she sat with her own palms upturned on her thighs and watched the print of him slowly cool out of the meat of her hands, and she did not catalogue it.
She stayed it.
The seventh entry.
She would, she suspected, need a bigger register.