She came back on a Tuesday.
Yevhan knew it was her before he looked up because he recognized the footsteps, which was a habit he'd developed out of necessity and never managed to shake. Everyone walked differently. She walked like someone who had somewhere to be and had already decided the fastest route to get there, efficient, no wasted movement, the gait of a person who found meandering personally offensive.
He was tying bundles of dried silvergrass when she stopped in front of his stall.
"You," she said.
"Me," he agreed, not looking up.
"You're the one who found the body."
He did look up then, because pretending not to be interested in that sentence would itself be suspicious. He put on the expression he used for unexpected official attention, which was slightly worried in a way that suggested a man with nothing to hide who nonetheless understood that official attention was rarely comfortable.
"The old man," he said. "Yes. He collapsed outside my stall. I sat with him until the city guard came." A pause. "Is there a problem?"
She was looking at him the way she'd looked at the report she'd been reading when they'd collided that morning, systematically, taking inventory. She had the kind of face that was difficult to read not because it was blank but because it was controlled, every expression exactly as much as she intended and no more. Dark eyes. The inspector's insignia on her collar catching the morning light.
"Shou Pei," she said. "That was his name."
"He told me before he died." Yevhan set down the silvergrass. "I didn't know him. He collapsed and I gave him water and stayed with him. That's all."
"Did he say anything else?"
This was the moment. He felt it the way you feel a narrow path on a dark hillside, one foot wrong and you're sliding. He let two seconds pass, just long enough to look like a man searching his memory rather than a man deciding what to give away.
"He said he'd been looking for someone," Yevhan said. "Didn't say who. He was feverish, not entirely coherent. He said something about the First Mountain but I couldn't follow what he meant." He paused again, added the right amount of uncomfortable honesty. "He pressed something into my hand. A piece of jade. Cracked, looked worthless. I didn't know what to do with it so I kept it. Is that illegal?"
Something shifted in her expression. Barely. Less than a millimeter. He catalogued it and filed it away.
"Do you have it with you?" she asked.
"At my room." He reached under the counter, produced the slip. He'd prepared for this last night, specifically: he'd wrapped the slip in a cloth and left it in his coat pocket this morning on the premise that a man who had nothing to hide would have no reason to hide it. She reached out and he placed it in her palm.
She turned it over. Ran a finger along the crack. The slip was cold and dead to a standard read, he'd made sure of that last night, suppressing every trace of the data he'd coaxed out of it back into the base matrix and letting the crack look like nothing more than a crack.
She handed it back.
"Worthless," she agreed, which was an interesting word choice. Not nothing, not junk. Worthless. Like she'd been hoping for something and found its absence instead.
"Can I ask what this is about?" he said. "The old man, I mean. He seemed like a scholar. I hope he's not in trouble." He let a beat pass. "I suppose that question doesn't make sense now that he's dead."
"Formation disturbances," she said. "In this district. We're investigating the source." She said it like she was reading it off a notice board. Professional, uninflected, giving him exactly as much information as she'd decided he was entitled to.
"I wouldn't know anything about that," Yevhan said. "I sell herbs."
She looked at him for a moment. He held the look with the mild slightly-confused expression of a man who genuinely sold herbs and had no idea why an inspector would find him interesting.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Gu Yun," he said. Close enough to his real name that it sat naturally in his mouth. Far enough that it wasn't his name.
She wrote it down in a small notebook she produced from inside her robe. He watched the way she held the brush, left-handed, the strokes quick and practiced. "How long have you had this stall?"
"Two years. Almost three."
"Before that?"
"I traveled. Odd work." He gestured at the stall, at the organized rows of dried plants and bundled herbs, the small handwritten price tags. "This is more stable."
She looked at the stall. At him. At the stall again. He had the impression she was comparing what she saw against some internal model and finding the fit acceptable but not perfect, which was exactly right, he wanted her to find it acceptable but not perfect, too clean a story invited no questions and no questions meant no excuse to talk to him again.
He needed to know how close she was getting. Which meant he needed her to come back.
"If you think of anything else about the old man," she said, closing the notebook, "report it to the district office."
"Of course," Yevhan said. He picked up the silvergrass again and began tying. Then, like an afterthought, like a man who was slightly awkward around official people and was therefore overcompensating with small talk: "The formation disturbances. Should the district residents be worried? Some of my customers have mentioned cracks in their walls."
She stopped. Turned back. "What kind of cracks?"
"Foundation level, they said. Old buildings mostly." He shrugged. "I don't know anything about formations. I just thought if it was something serious I could, I don't know, let people know to be careful."
She studied him again. He kept his face helpful and slightly vacant.
"It's nothing to worry about," she said. "Old qi settling."
"That's a relief," he said. And smiled. Just enough. The kind of smile a person gives when they believe you.
She left.
He watched her go without watching her go, which was a skill unto itself, tracking someone in your peripheral vision while your hands did something else and your face did something else and the part of you that was actually paying attention stayed very still and very quiet.
She walked like she was already thinking about the next thing. Turned left at the intersection toward the older part of the district, which was where Shou Pei's registered residence would be.
Yevhan went back to his silvergrass.
She was good. The kind of good that came from genuine aptitude and years of practice rather than rank alone. The way she'd looked at the slip, the specific word worthless, she'd been hoping it would be intact. She knew what an intact pre-Sovereign slip would look like. Which meant she knew more about Shou Pei's work than a standard formation disturbance investigation would require.
Interesting.
He'd given her enough to seem cooperative. A name, the slip, a useful detail about foundation cracks that would redirect her attention to the geological symptoms rather than their source. Not enough to matter. Just enough to be a helpful, slightly forgettable resident.
He tied the last bundle of silvergrass.
She had a good face. Not the way the word was usually used, he meant it structurally. The kind of face built for honesty, open enough to invite trust, which in someone in her profession probably meant the honesty was calculated. She knew what she looked like and used it the same way he knew what he looked like and used it.
That was actually, he thought, quite interesting.
"You're going to be a problem," he said to the space she'd vacated, quietly and without heat.
A woman passing his stall with a basket of vegetables gave him a look.
"Talking to the herbs," he told her. "They grow better for it."
She walked faster.
He didn't see Mei Sulan again that day, which was expected. He spent the afternoon thinking about her the way he thought about formations, mapping what he knew against what he didn't, identifying where the structure was solid and where it was guesswork.
What he knew: she was an inspector, recently arrived, investigating formation disturbances linked to Shou Pei. She'd recognized the slip type, which meant training beyond standard investigator curriculum. She was left-handed. She walked like she was always in a slight hurry. She had given him back the slip without hesitation, which meant either she trusted her read of it as worthless or she'd wanted to see if he'd react to getting it back.
What he didn't know: how much she'd been told before arriving in Ashfen. Whether she was reporting to the standard formation authority or to someone further up. Whether she'd found anything at Shou Pei's residence that he needed to worry about.
He closed the stall at dusk and took a different route home than usual. Not because he was being followed, he didn't think he was being followed, but because varying your routes was the kind of habit that kept you alive longer than paranoia did, low effort, high return.
The evening market was setting up as he walked, the night vendors with their lanterns and their grilled meats and their cards and dice. He bought a meat skewer from a woman who always slightly overcharged him and let her slightly overcharge him because she was feeding four children and he was not, and ate it walking.
He thought about the third fragment on the slip. The hollow holds the key.
He thought about Mei Sulan's face when she handed the slip back.
He thought about how she'd said formation disturbances and old qi settling in exactly the same tone, the first one probably true, the second one definitely a lie.
She was protecting something, or protecting someone, or the case was more complicated than she was letting residents see, and all three of those things were interesting in different ways.
The meat skewer was, as always, slightly too salty and completely worth it.
He went home and sat on his floor and opened the slip and spent three hours on the fragment he hadn't finished translating yet.
Somewhere in Ashfen, he suspected, Mei Sulan was doing something similar. Sitting with a case that had more underneath it than the surface showed, pulling at threads, being very good at her job in the dark.
He found, to his own mild surprise, that he respected that.
It didn't make her less of a problem. But it made her a more interesting one.
End of Chapter 4