The thing about a city's underside was that it didn't hide. It just didn't advertise.
You had to know where to look, which meant you had to have spent enough time in the bottom of things that you learned the language. Not the language of crime exactly, more the language of need. People doing things outside official channels weren't doing them because they enjoyed the risk. They were doing them because the official channels had priced them out or locked them out or decided they didn't deserve access at all. The Sovereign Assembly ran the cultivation world the way any monopoly ran anything: well for the people inside it, badly for everyone else.
Ashfen's underside ran on that gap.
Yevhan had spent three years learning it the way he'd learned everything else, patiently, without letting his interest show. He knew which tea houses had back rooms where minor cultivation resources changed hands without paperwork. He knew the woman who ran the eastern quarter's informal apothecary, not a real apothecary, just a woman with extensive herbal knowledge and no sect license and a very loyal customer base who couldn't afford sect medicine prices. He knew three different people who could move information across district lines faster than the city guard's official messenger system.
Today he needed information about Shou Pei.
He started at the most obvious place, which was the dead man's neighborhood. The area around Shou Pei's registered residence was the kind of block that had once been middle district and was currently lower district and was very aware of the downgrade. The buildings were maintained with the specific care of people who were holding on. Window boxes. Swept steps. A neighborhood association board with meeting minutes pinned to it, the minutes six months old.
He didn't go to the residence. The inspector had been there yesterday and possibly left someone watching. He went to the tea house on the corner instead, ordered something cheap, and sat near the window where the light was good for reading and the sightlines were better.
He read the same page of a navigation almanac for forty minutes while actually watching who came and went from Shou Pei's building.
Nobody official today. One neighbor, an older man who paused at the door and then decided not to knock and walked away with the particular gait of someone who'd just remembered something they'd been trying to forget. A young woman who left a bundle of incense on the step, the kind of thing people did when someone had died and they weren't sure what else to do.
He paid for his tea and went to talk to the young woman.
Her name was Fen. She'd been Shou Pei's downstairs neighbor for two years. She'd known him the way you knew people in dense city living, by the sounds of his movements above her ceiling, by the smell of his cooking in the shared stairwell, by the occasional exchange of new year's food. She cried a little when she talked about him, quickly, like she was embarrassed by it.
"He was a quiet man," she said. "Kept to himself mostly. But kind. If you were carrying something heavy he'd help without being asked."
"Did he have visitors?" Yevhan asked.
She thought about it. "An older woman, sometimes. Silver hair, very straight. She came maybe once a month. They'd talk for hours." A pause. "And recently, maybe the last year or so, he started going out more. At odd hours. Late at night. I'd hear the door."
"Do you know where he went?"
She shook her head. "I asked once. He said he was going to check on something. He looked, I don't know. Not worried. More like a man who's been worried for a long time and has finally decided to do something about it."
Yevhan thanked her and moved on.
The second stop was less comfortable.
There was a gambling den in the lower district that operated out of the basement of a dried goods warehouse and had been operating there for, by his best estimate, about fifteen years, which meant it had an arrangement with someone in the district administration and probably also someone in the city guard and was therefore as stable as anything in Ashfen's underside got.
He went in the afternoon, when it was quiet. The man who ran it was named Ox on account of being very large and the kind of unhurried that large people sometimes achieved, the calm of someone who had never needed to be in a hurry because things generally moved out of their way.
Ox knew him. Not well, not as a regular, but as a useful occasional contact who sometimes had information that was worth trading for.
They sat at the far corner table with tea that was better than the corner table suggested.
"Formation scholar," Yevhan said. "Old man. Named Shou Pei. Used this district for the last three years or so."
Ox thought about it with the slow deliberate quality of someone who kept a great deal of information organized in their head and needed to find the right drawer.
"The map man," Ox said eventually.
Yevhan kept his face still. "The map man."
"That's what they called him. Bought old maps. City maps, underground maps, survey charts from before the Assembly reorganized the district boundaries. Spent a lot. Paid well, didn't ask questions about where the maps came from." Ox drank his tea. "Died last week."
"He did. Did anyone know what he wanted the maps for?"
"If they did they didn't say it where I'd hear it." A pause. "He was nervous toward the end. Last two months. Still buying but quick about it, didn't linger the way he used to."
"Nervous how?"
Ox considered. "Like a man being followed. Checking his back. Not sleeping. You know what that looks like."
Yevhan did. "Anyone following him that you saw?"
"Not that I saw. But I heard there was a sect inquiry opened about three months back. Formation irregularities, they said. Same thing they always say when they want to look at something without admitting what they're looking for."
Three months. The archive had been pulsing for at least that long then, or something had changed that drew sect attention. Shou Pei had known. He'd kept moving, kept buying maps, kept pushing toward whatever he'd been pushing toward for forty years, knowing someone was behind him.
And then he'd seen Yevhan's stall.
"Thank you," Yevhan said. He left a fair amount on the table. Not so much it looked like he was buying silence, just enough to make the next conversation equally smooth.
The third stop was the one he'd been putting off.
The woman who ran it was called Madam Shao and she operated a house in the entertainment district that offered, depending on your requirements, music, company, excellent wine, and various other arrangements that the Sovereign Assembly's official morality guidelines had opinions about and Madam Shao had been ignoring for twenty years.
Yevhan went there because Madam Shao was the single best source of information in Ashfen's lower and middle districts and he needed to know if anyone besides the inspector was currently looking for what Shou Pei had left behind.
He was also, he acknowledged to himself while walking there, slightly hoping Madam Shao had moved establishments. She had a way of looking at him that he found difficult to categorize.
She had not moved establishments.
She was in the front parlor when he arrived, reviewing accounts with the focused expression of a woman who had built something real and intended to keep it. She looked up when he came in and the expression shifted to something he could only describe as assessment. Not hostile. More like a merchant looking at an item they'd wondered about the price of for a while.
"The herb man," she said. "It's been a while."
"I haven't needed anything," he said.
"And now you do."
"Information."
She gestured to the chair across from her. He sat. She had the kind of stillness that powerful people sometimes achieved, not Ox's physical ease but something more deliberate, the stillness of a person who had learned to let other people fill the silence and found it useful.
"Shou Pei," he said.
"Dead," she said.
"Yes. Was anyone asking about him before the inspector arrived?"
She looked at him for a moment. "You know about the inspector."
"She came to my stall. The old man died outside it."
Madam Shao accepted this. "There was a man," she said. "Two months ago. Not local, not sect. Private hire, the kind that doesn't say who's paying. He asked about an old formation scholar who'd been buying maps. Very specific questions. He was quiet about it, which usually means someone upstream wants to stay invisible."
"And?"
"And I told him nothing because he was rude about it and I don't like rude." A small pause. "I did, however, note that he wore a ring with a particular insignia. Not the Sovereign Assembly's standard marks. Something older."
She described it. Yevhan listened carefully.
He recognized it. A minor house, three generations back, that had been absorbed into the Assembly's hierarchy not through conquest but through negotiation, which usually meant there was something they had that the Assembly wanted. They were known, in the circles that kept track of these things, for expertise in pre-Assembly historical artifacts.
Someone who knew what Shou Pei was looking for had been looking for it too.
"You're welcome," said Madam Shao, even though he hadn't thanked her yet.
"Thank you," he said.
"While you're here." She leaned back in her chair and looked at him with the direct uncomplicated interest of a woman who had decided to be direct and uncomplicated about her interests. "I have, over the past two years, concluded that you are not what you appear to be. I find that interesting. If you ever want to discuss what you actually are, my door is always open."
Yevhan stood. "I'm a herb vendor," he said pleasantly.
"Of course you are," said Madam Shao.
He left.
Outside the air smelled like river and evening cooking and he walked home through the slow amber light of early dusk and thought about the insignia and what it meant that someone had been asking quiet questions two months before Shou Pei died.
He thought about the word rude. About the kind of men who were hired to be quiet and were rude anyway because they had decided they didn't need to be polite to people in places like Madam Shao's.
He thought about Shou Pei dying outside his stall and the cracked jade slip pressed into his hand and forty years of a secret carried by an old man with map stains on his fingers.
He thought about someone else looking for it.
He needed to move faster than he'd planned. Not so fast he made mistakes. But faster.
He bought his evening noodles from a different stall than usual. Varied the route home again. Nothing specific to worry about, not yet, just the update of a threat model that had shifted from theoretical to actual.
When he got home he sat with the slip for two hours and pulled everything that remained out of it, even the fragments he'd dismissed as too damaged, because too damaged was a relative assessment and he no longer had the luxury of being patient about it.
He found nothing new. But he understood better now what was gone.
Shou Pei had spent forty years building toward this. Had died with the finish line close enough to see. Had handed it to the one person in Ashfen who could cross it for him.
The least Yevhan could do was not waste the start.
End of Chapter 6