Chương 35: Chapter 34 — Travel Like a Mortal

He found Mei Lian in the herb garden at dusk, kneeling between the rows of fenghuang grass with her hands in the dirt and a pile of pulled weeds growing at her side. She did not look up when he sat down on the stone border of the nearest bed.

"I'm on the roster," he said.

"I know. Everyone knows. People have been talking about it since the board went up." She pulled a weed with a motion that suggested the weed had wronged her personally.

"The roster was edited the day before it posted. The fifth name was a disciple called Wei Chao. He got moved to kitchen duty and a transfer took his place. Su Jieran. Came in four months ago from the eastern branch, no reason anyone can name. Two missions since, both well paid. On the second, someone got hurt and left the compound a week later." Mei Lian's hands stopped. She did not look up, but the weeding stopped, which from Mei Lian was the same as another person standing and knocking over a chair.

"What do you want me to do?"

"If I'm not back by the evening of the third day, go to Bao. Have him request the original roster from the duty hall, the version from before the edit. In writing. Through the proper channel. And he should do it before the files get shelved, because once they're shelved nobody pulls them again."

"You think someone swapped the roster to put this man on your team."

"I think the roster was changed." He watched her green-stained fingers rest flat against the soil.

"And I'd like there to be a record that someone noticed. That's all. A record." She was quiet for a while. The evening insects started up in the beds around them, and the light went from gold to gray while she knelt there with her hands still.

"Third day," she said at last.

"Evening. If you're late, I move."

"Thank you."

"Don't die over herbs." She went back to weeding.

"Or anything else." He sat with her a moment longer than the conversation needed. It was the closest he had come, in this whole borrowed life, to telling someone he had something to lose. He had not said it. All Ted had done was handed her a date and a procedure instead, which was the only language he had for it, and she had taken both without asking him to translate. * The next day he spent getting ready the only way he knew how, which was to prepare like a man with nothing to fall back on.

A cultivator packed for a cultivator's trip. He could break a fall, or go a day without water, or take a blow that would put a mortal in the dirt. Ted could count on none of that. At layer two his cultivation was a thin reserve he was still learning how to spend, and his lung meridian still caught when he climbed. So he prepared the way the accountant would have, the way a mortal would, by assuming nothing would arrive that he had not arranged for in advance.

He could not add to the standard kit; it was issued at the gate and inspected. What he could do was decide, ahead of time, exactly how he would use it. Water on a schedule, not on thirst. The map from the collection list set in his head, the three elevation bands and the rough bearing fixed so he could find south by the sun and not by a guide. The exits, on a road he had not yet walked. Knowing where his exits were, he did not need to win a fight. He only needed to still be standing there when the moment came.

He read the list twice more, the way he read everything. The most valuable of the three plants grew highest, in the damp shade near the treeline. Whoever assigned the collection zones would be deciding, in the same breath, who got near the valuable ground and who stayed away from it. Sleep came badly again. He had not expected otherwise. * He woke an hour before dawn and went to the archive. The door was unlocked.

Elder Shu sat at his desk with his tea and his book, in the same position Ted had found him in every morning for weeks.

"This junior has a question before the departure," Ted said from the doorway.

"Ask."

"If a mission team files an incident report, where does it get archived? By date, by team, or by category?" The question was legitimate. Ted was a junior archivist leaving the compound on his first assignment, and it was the sort of thing a thorough one would want to know. Elder Shu looked up. He studied Ted for three seconds, which was about two seconds longer than the question called for.

"By date," he said.

"With cross-references to team designation and location. The original goes to the Merit Pavilion. A copy comes here." He paused.

"Why."

"This junior wants to be thorough." Elder Shu held his gaze another moment. Then he picked up his tea, drank, and turned back to his book.

"Be thorough, then. And come back." The last three words were quiet. They were not part of any filing protocol. Ted bowed and left, and behind him the old man's page did not turn for a long time. * An hour after dawn the team gathered at the main gate. Mission Deacon Lu was not there.

A duty hall clerk Ted did not recognize handed out the standard wilderness kits, one canvas pack each: a bedroll, a fire striker, a water skin, a coil of rope, three days of dried rations, and a collection pouch lined with oilcloth for the specimens. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. Ted checked his against the list in his head. Everything was present, with nothing extra.

The kit was provisioned for a three-day trip out and back, down to the ration count, which was the institution's way of stating, in canvas and dried meat, that you were expected to return on time. Huang Zhisong inspected his own kit, nodded once, and shouldered the pack. He did not check whether anyone else was ready. He walked through the gate and the rest of them followed, because that was the arrangement and he knew it. The road ran east a quarter mile before it split.

The left fork carried on toward the market town. The right turned south and climbed into low hills covered in scrub pine and wild grass. A wooden signpost stood at the fork with characters carved into it, most of them weathered past reading. Whatever the south road had once been called, the sect had not thought it worth recutting. Morning came cool and clear. The path was wide enough for two abreast, packed dirt with stones along the edges, kept up well enough that someone used it often.

Ted walked at the back, because he was the slowest and because the back was the one place a man could watch everyone without being watched in return. Ren Deyi was talking. He had started before they cleared the gate and had not stopped He spoke about the collection list, the weather, the last time he had been outside the walls, which turned out to be never, as this was his first mission. His voice carried the way Bao had promised it would.

Ted could have tracked him by sound alone from fifty paces, and reflected that anything in the foothills with ears could do the same. Qin Miaoxiu walked ahead of Ted and behind Ren Deyi, holding a steady pace that matched Huang's without seeming to work at it. She had not spoken since the gate. Her pack sat square on her shoulders, straps set, weight centered. She had done this before, or she had prepared as though she had, which came to the same thing on the road.

Su Jieran walked third, between Qin and the talker, and Ted spent part of the first hour learning how he moved. He never took the front and never took the very back. He kept the middle, where he could see the whole team without being the man everyone else watched. He matched whatever pace was set and added nothing to it. He was, in every visible way, the easiest member of the team to forget about, which was either the most innocent thing about him or the least. * An hour in, Ted called a water stop.

Nobody had asked for one. The pace was easy, the morning was cool, and a Qi Condensation cultivator could walk half a day without the ache that stopped a mortal. But Ted was not thinking about aching legs.

"We should drink now," he said, "and mark our levels." Huang stopped and turned. His face was not hostile. It carried the patience of a man being told something obvious by the weakest person present.

"We're cultivators. We can manage our water."

"We can manage water inside the compound, with a well and a kitchen. Out here what's in the skins is all there is until the site. Drink when we're thirsty instead of on a schedule, and we reach the collection ground with the skins half empty and nothing to fill them from."

"There are streams in the foothills," Su Jieran said, mild as ever.

"I've been through the Greenveil before. Water's not a problem." Of course he had.

"I'd rather not stake the trip on finding one," Ted said. Ren Deyi, quiet for the first time since the gate, looked from Ted to Huang with his skin halfway to his mouth and his eyebrows climbing. Qin Miaoxiu had already uncapped hers and was drinking. She had not waited for the team lead to rule on it. Huang looked at her drinking. He looked at Ted and shrugged.

"Fine. Two minutes." He drank. It was a small thing, granted in the tone of a man humoring a nervous junior. Ted did not care about the tone. He cared that the water went in, and that Qin had moved first. She had heard the part underneath the words, which was not drink but plan ahead, and she had agreed with it before it could turn into an argument. Su Jieran drank too, smiling, as though the whole exchange had been the most reasonable thing in the world. He had not fought it.

He had offered his counter, the streams, and then let it go, the way a patient man lets a small point go when the road is long and there will be other chances to be right. Ted drank, marked the level on his skin with his thumbnail, and checked the sun against the line of the path. South-southeast, near enough to the bearing he had fixed the day before. He shouldered the pack. The team moved on. What he was building, in two-minute increments, was a record of being right about small things.

A man listened to about water might be listened to about something larger, later, when there would be no time to argue it from the beginning. It was the same trick he had run in twenty conference rooms. You did not win the room on the big number. You won it on the small ones, early, so that when the big one came it arrived already trusted. * The second request came two hours in, where the path narrowed and the scrub thickened toward real forest.

The straps had found the old bruise on his left collarbone, a souvenir of a wood-carrying shift, and the uphill stretches tugged at his lung meridian and reminded him it had not finished healing.

"We should set a watch tonight," Ted said at the next stop.

"Two-hour shifts, overlapping." This time Huang did not shrug. He turned all the way around, arms crossed, mouth set flat.

"The assessment said nothing above layer five in this district. Between the five of us that's nothing. No one attacks a sect team on a marked path."

"The assessment was three months old."

"And this path's been walked for herb runs for years." Level, firm, the team lead's voice, the one built to end a conversation.

"We'll set a watch if something changes. Until then we walk, we collect, and we don't burn energy on problems that aren't there." Ren Deyi bobbed his head, because Ren Deyi agreed with whoever was speaking. Su Jieran said nothing at all. Qin Miaoxiu looked at Ted once, the same short measuring glance she had given him in the briefing room, then settled her pack and kept walking. Whatever was in it, it was not agreement, and it was not dismissal either.

It was a tally being kept, quietly, the same as the one Ted kept. Ted let it go, because he had raised it, it had been heard, and the lead had ruled. Pushing now would spend credibility he could not spare this early. The watch would come up again at dusk, and by then the team would have a full day outside the walls behind it, and the difference between a marked path at noon and an open camp at night would be harder to wave off. The path climbed and the trees closed in.

The compound dropped out of sight behind the hills, and the sky opened overhead in the wide, indifferent way it did once a man was far enough from walls to feel how little of him there was. The air changed. Pine resin, wet earth, and under them something faint and metallic he could not place and did not like. He listened for birds and found fewer than the green of the place promised. Not none. Fewer. A mortal walking this road alone would have felt it as a mood and walked on.

Ted felt it as a number that did not match its column, and set it beside the other things he could not yet explain. They had been walking better than two hours when the Greenveil Range showed itself on the horizon, a low wall of mountains under growth so thick and so green it looked laid on with a brush. The collection site sat somewhere in that green, in the western foothills, waiting. Ted walked at the back and counted the things he could hold onto. His water, marked and rationed. His pack, balanced and quiet.

His teammates, all four of them, in view. The list was short. He had learned a long time ago that the short list was the only one worth keeping. The path bent south and started down into a shallow valley. The foothills rose ahead, green and dense and very quiet. Ted settled the pack on his shoulders, drank his water at the mark, and kept walking behind a group of strangers he was supposed to trust.