## CHAPTER SIX
### Dusthaven
The town appeared through the trees at midday — not dramatically, not the way towns appeared in the old sect stories where travelers crested a hill and saw something sprawling and golden below them. Dusthaven appeared the way most real things appeared: gradually, through gaps in the tree line, first as a smell of cook smoke and animal feed, then as the sound of voices and cart wheels on packed earth, then as buildings that were functional rather than beautiful, built by people who needed walls and roofs and had not had spare time for anything beyond that.
It was exactly the kind of town that did not appear in sect histories. No cultivator had ever done anything significant here. No legendary blade had been found in its market stalls. It existed because people needed somewhere to sell grain and buy tools and argue about prices, and those needs were older and more persistent than any sect's ambitions.
Jian Yu counted the buildings he could see from the road. Thirty-one. Counted the people visible in the market street. Fourteen, with more behind stalls he couldn't see yet. Counted his remaining problems in order of urgency: no money, cracked cultivation, wanted by Eagle Sect, wanted by an unknown organization whose symbol matched the color spreading across his blade, two cracked ribs, and a traveling companion who was carrying information she had not finished sharing.
Six problems. He had started the week with zero. That was a significant change in inventory.
"The healer's name is Shen Bo," Lin Mei said beside him. "He works out of the eastern end of the market. He charges in goods or services, not coin, which is useful given our current situation."
Our current situation. He noted that she had said it that way. Not your situation. Ours.
He filed it and kept walking.
---
The market street was narrow and loud in the way of all market streets — vendors calling across each other, the specific percussion of haggling that had its own rhythm separate from actual conversation, animals expressing opinions about their circumstances from various tied positions along the eastern fence. Jian Yu kept his hood up. It was a warm day for a hood but it was a warmer problem to be recognized from a wanted poster, and he had learned a long time ago that minor discomforts were worth paying when the alternative cost significantly more.
He saw the poster before Lin Mei pointed it out.
It was on the notice board at the market entrance, between a livestock sale announcement and a weather warning for the northern road. His face, rendered in the rough woodblock style that notice-makers used when they needed to produce many copies quickly. The likeness was adequate — enough to be recognizable to someone who knew him, not detailed enough to identify him to a stranger unless that stranger was looking carefully.
Below the Eagle Sect notice, in different ink, four words.
*Find him. Bring him.*
And the symbol. A circle with a crack running through the center. The crack filled in black.
He stopped walking.
Lin Mei stopped beside him. He felt rather than saw her look at the symbol — the slight change in her breathing, the half-second where her body made a decision she didn't voice.
"You recognize it," he said.
A pause. Shorter than her pauses usually were, which meant she had been expecting this moment and had already prepared her answer.
"Yes," she said.
"Tonight," he said. "All of it. Not part of it."
She did not argue. "Tonight."
He pulled his hood further forward and walked past the notice board without looking at it again. He had already memorized everything on it that mattered. More looking would not add information. More looking would only add the risk of someone watching him look.
---
Shen Bo was not what Jian Yu had expected.
He had expected a healer's workshop — the particular organized clutter of someone who worked with plants and instruments, shelves of labeled containers, the smell of drying herbs and something chemical underneath. What he found, at the eastern end of the market in a building that had been two buildings once and was now unconvincingly one, was closer to a storage room that had decided to practice medicine as a secondary occupation.
The man himself was sixty at least, compact and unhurried, with the hands of someone who had been doing precise work for a very long time. He looked at Jian Yu for exactly two seconds when they entered, then looked at Lin Mei, then back at Jian Yu, and said nothing at all for a moment that stretched past comfortable.
"Ribs," he said finally. Not a question.
"Two. Maybe three."
"Left side."
"Yes."
Shen Bo made a sound that communicated neither sympathy nor surprise and gestured toward a low wooden bench along the wall. "Sit. Let me see what she did with them first." He looked at Lin Mei's wrap work with the specific expression of a craftsman evaluating another craftsman's output — critical but honest. "Adequate," he said, which from his tone was genuine praise.
"Thank you," Lin Mei said.
"Not a compliment. An assessment." He began unwrapping with the same efficient authority Lin Mei used when she worked. "You study under the Flowing Hand school."
Lin Mei was quiet for half a second. "I did."
"Past tense." Shen Bo did not look up from his work. "The Flowing Hand school has three masters currently practicing. None of them are running around the Hollow Forest with a wanted man." He pressed two fingers to Jian Yu's ribs with a precision that produced a very specific pain and extracted useful information from Jian Yu's involuntary response. "Two cracked. Third is bruised, not broken. You'll live."
"I was planning to," Jian Yu said.
Shen Bo looked at him then — the first real look, the kind that took more than two seconds and was interested in something beyond the medical. "You're the Eagle Sect boy."
"I was."
"Notice says you killed six people."
"The notice is wrong."
Shen Bo considered this. He resumed his work — rewrapping with a technique that was noticeably more effective than Lin Mei's had been, not because hers was poor but because his was exceptional in the way that sixty years of practice made things exceptional. "Notices are often wrong," he said finally. "In my experience the people most motivated to post notices are the people with the most to gain from what the notice says. Which means they are also the people with the most to lose from accuracy."
He tied off the wrap. Stood back. Looked at Jian Yu with the same assessing quality he had given the rib work.
"There is also," he said, "a second notice. The one below the Eagle Sect posting. I expect you saw it."
"I saw it."
"That symbol has appeared in three towns between here and the northern sect road in the last two weeks. Always below another notice. Always the same four words." He paused. "Always for someone who has recently come into contact with one of the old blades."
The room was very quiet.
Jian Yu looked at Shen Bo. "How do you know about the old blades."
"I know about many things," Shen Bo said, in the tone of someone who had been saying that sentence for sixty years and had found it consistently useful. "I know, for example, that the Flowing Hand school's lineage can be traced directly to the research archive of a man named Lin Dao, who spent twenty years studying the five swords before he apparently developed other interests." He looked at Lin Mei. "I also know that Lin Dao had one apprentice and that his archive did not die with him."
Lin Mei said nothing.
"I am not your enemy," Shen Bo said. To both of them, evenly. "I am an old man who has watched the symbol on that notice board appear and disappear for thirty years and has spent a significant portion of those years hoping that someone carrying one of the old blades would eventually walk through that door." He looked at the sword at Jian Yu's hip — the cloth-wrapped blade, the faint pulse of the unnamed color visible even through the wrapping in the dimness of the room. "I had expected to be younger when it happened. One adjusts."
Jian Yu counted his breaths. One. Two. Three.
"Sit down," he said to Shen Bo. "Both of you."
They sat.
"Start from the beginning," Jian Yu said. "Whatever the beginning actually is. Not the part you think I can handle. The actual beginning."
Shen Bo looked at him for a moment. Then at Lin Mei.
Lin Mei looked at the floor, then at Jian Yu, and something in her expression shifted — not relief exactly, but the specific quality of someone who has been carrying a weight alone for long enough that the prospect of setting it down, even partially, even with uncertain consequences, was something they could not entirely conceal.
"The beginning," Shen Bo said, "is about one hundred and forty years ago. Which is, not coincidentally, the last time that sword was held by a living person."
Outside, in the market street, the afternoon continued its ordinary business. Vendors called. Carts moved. Animals complained.
Inside, the three of them sat in the cluttered half-light of Shen Bo's workshop, and the beginning of something that had been waiting a very long time began.