The young man had come up the gorge in the middle of the afternoon, alone, with a sword on his back and his breath steady. Ling Xiao had smelled him from a mile away.

Iron. Pine resin on the sword’s grip. Sweat, a little, and under the sweat a thin, sour thread of hunger that had nothing to do with food. He had climbed straight to the crack in the north wall where the Fire-Vein lingzhi grew, red as a coal, out of the rock that Ling Xiao had been sleeping against for longer than the young man’s sect had owned the mountain. He’d looked at it as men looked at anything they meant to take. Then he’d looked down, and seen what was lying in the shadow below it, and drawn his sword.

Ling Xiao had almost admired that. Most of them ran.

It hadn’t taken long. When it was over, he’d done what he always did with something worth keeping. He’d taken what the man had been, and worn it.

The memories had come with the rest. He put them away tidily, as he always did, somewhere apart from his own, where they couldn’t leak. A name: Lin Xiao. A sect. A master. A mountain full of people who would come looking. He’d walked down out of the gorge in the dead man’s black robe with the lingzhi in his sleeve, washed the blood off in the river, and left the sword-sheath in the water because it was easier than carrying it. Then he’d gone to the town and taken a room. He wanted a bath and a bed, and Lin Xiao’s memories told him the Najia had the best of both.

That had been yesterday. Today the Grand Master of the Tian Xin Sect wanted to see him.

The Assembly Hall stood at the heart of the main peak, broad and plain and imposing in the way old buildings were when the men who built them wanted to look humble. A board over the door carried two characters in the Grand Master’s own hand. The strokes looked mild, almost gentle. Ling Xiao paused under them long enough to see the edge hidden in each one, then went in.

“Xiao-Er.” Tang Fan rose from his carved chair with both hands held out. He looked forty, with kind brows and pleasant eyes. He smelled of sandalwood, old ink, and something faint and metallic underneath that Ling Xiao set beside the hidden edges on the board outside. “Come, sit with your shifu. It’s been too long since we talked.”

“Shifu.” Ling Xiao bowed exactly as low as Lin Xiao’s memory told him to, and took the first chair below the dais.

It was a game. He’d known it would be before he walked in. The daughter had flown home in tears in the front seat of a bird. The father had sent for the son he’d chosen for her before her eyes were dry. But Tang Fan didn’t mention his daughter at first. He talked about the past. The night he’d first summoned the boy Lin Xiao to his rooms, at midnight, with no warning. The sword he’d given him on his sixteenth birthday. A winter when the river at the foot of the mountain froze solid, and half of Heaven Peak went sliding on it.

Ling Xiao answered each one easily. The memories were all there, arranged in the quiet place he’d put them. He only had to reach in and take one out. Midnight, the lamp, the smell of the old man’s tea. The sword’s weight. The ice. He gave them back in Lin Xiao’s flat, sparing voice, a few words at a time, and watched Tang Fan’s pleasant eyes take each answer and weigh it.

It went on for nearly two hours. The light through the high windows moved across the floor. Then, in the same warm, idle voice, Tang Fan said, “Do you remember the Lantern Festival when you were fifteen? When you fell into the lotus pond in front of the whole of Heaven Peak, and YunQi laughed until she cried?”

Ling Xiao reached for it.

There was nothing there.

He went through the boy’s fifteenth year carefully, as one goes through a drawer. There had been a Lantern Festival. There had been a pond, and lotuses, and a small girl with a painted fan. Lin Xiao had stood well back from the water all evening with his hands behind him, despising everyone.

“I’ve never fallen into a pond in my life, Shifu,” he said, in exactly the cold, faintly offended tone the boy would have used.

Tang Fan laughed and slapped the arm of his chair. “No, no, of course not. That was Mo Gu’s nephew. I’m getting old, Xiao-Er. Forgive me.” His eyes were creased with warmth. There was nothing at all behind the warmth that Ling Xiao could read. Which was, he thought, the most interesting thing he’d learned all day.

Only after that did Tang Fan come to his daughter. He didn’t ask Lin Xiao to love her. He only asked, as a father and a shifu, that his eldest disciple be a little gentler with her in public. She was young. She was proud. She’d been made to look foolish.

“Of course, Shifu,” said Ling Xiao.

He walked out of the Assembly Hall into the late afternoon smiling, and let the smile widen when he was far enough down the passage that nobody would see it. A wily old fox. Nine questions in ten about things only Lin Xiao could know, and the tenth about something that had never happened at all. If he hadn’t taken the memories along with the face, the old man would have had him.

He considered, as he walked, the old man’s claim to be his shifu. It was very nearly funny. There was nothing Tang Fan could teach him that he’d want to learn. By any measure that mattered, Tang Fan wasn’t fit to fetch his water. But the name was useful, and the robe was comfortable, and he’d played worse parts.

The boy’s memories were more interesting than the man’s company. He’d only taken them because it was convenient; he hadn’t expected to find anything in them worth reading. But Lin Xiao had been a careful young man under the coldness. The favours he’d let fall around Heaven Peak like coins dropped from a sleeve, the loan here, the word in the right ear there, had looked like kindness to the people who caught them. They hadn’t been. Every one was entered in a ledger the boy kept in his head. Every one bought him a little more of the mountain.

And under the ledger, folded small and pushed down deep, where even Lin Xiao had rarely let himself look at it, was what he’d been buying the mountain for.

He’d wanted the carved chair in the Assembly Hall. He’d wanted Tang Fan out of it.

Ling Xiao stopped in the middle of the covered walkway, with the evening coming on over the peaks, and laughed out loud.

Well. He was wearing the boy’s face. He’d eaten the boy’s lingzhi. It seemed only courteous to finish what the boy had started. He’d see that little wish fulfilled himself.

Somewhere among the memories, as he turned them over, something else surfaced: a day not long ago, behind the warrior quarter, on the path under the plum trees. The boy had been talking about the gorge with a friend. For a moment he’d felt someone on the other side of the wall. A light presence, quickly gone. He’d thought nothing of it. Ling Xiao looked at it for a moment, then set it back where it had been.

Zhou Peng was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps, shifting from foot to foot, with his face still raw from the morning.

“Da Shixiong.” He fell in beside him and dropped his voice. “Did you find it? The thing in the gorge?”

“Since I went myself,” said Ling Xiao, “it was hardly difficult.” He touched his sleeve, where the lingzhi lay wrapped in a cloth, and Zhou Peng’s whole body loosened with relief, like a dog’s when its master comes home.

He sent Zhou Peng away and walked on alone, down from the main peak, along the ridge path towards Capital Peak, with the sky going orange and the first lamps coming on in the windows below.

He was hungry.

It was a small thing, as hunger went. He’d eaten well at the Najia, better than most of these people ate in a month. But he’d also eaten, last night, four little pills out of a cloth twist that a green-aura nobody had carried down the mountain in her bag. He’d eaten pills before. Pills, in his experience, tasted of the cauldron and the hand that had made them: burnt, muddy, clumsy, crowded with the leavings of the herb. These hadn’t. They’d tasted almost clean, like water from high up.

Then she’d looked at his hands. She’d seen what nobody else on this mountain had seen in a day of looking straight at him. She’d tried to walk away. When that hadn’t worked, she’d stood with her back against his door and his fingermarks on her throat, worked out in front of him that he couldn’t take what he’d asked for, and told him so. You can have it, if you want worse pills.

Very few things had surprised him in a long time.

He smelled her room before he saw it: Life Root, Rock Jasmine, Rabdosia, the sharp scorched note of a cauldron that had been worked hard all afternoon. And under them, faint and cool and maddening, the green thing he still couldn’t put a name to.

A puzzle, then. He had all the time in the world. He’d decided to keep it.

He didn’t bother with the door.