Shen Wuyan watched the last customer duck beneath the lintel and pull the door shut against the cold. He let his smile fade. Behind him, Han Yucheng was still clearing the tables.
The room smelled of steeped leaves and damp wood. Wuyan had chosen the plain cups and smoke-darkened screens as carefully as he had chosen the face he showed across the counter. After the better part of three thousand years, he knew how to be overlooked. Keeping up the pleasant manner from morning until closing still took an effort. He sat down and poured what remained in the pot.
The afternoon's players had neglected it while arguing over their stones. The tea was bitter. He drank half a cup before setting it down and reaching into his sleeve.
The jade slip lay across his palm, pale and no longer than his finger. His thumb found the worn edge, then followed the crack from one corner to the other. His qi held it closed. He had stopped the damage from spreading, but the worst had been done before the slip came into his hands.
He passed his spiritual sense through the intact half. The familiar work resolved readily. Beyond the crack, the marks would not yield any meaning.
He withdrew his sense. He had expected nothing else, though he still made the attempt whenever he took it out.
Everything he understood of formations had begun with this damaged inheritance. Its maker had been a forger too; enough survived to leave no doubt about either craft. There were hints of others, but he could not make a judgment from what remained. He had never found a name.
The formations followed the grain of the world. Even after centuries spent studying them, Wuyan could recognize a rightness in their placement that he could not reproduce in his own work. He had long believed the slip was only part of an inheritance left by someone far above him in cultivation.
Then, passing through the Blackwood on his way toward Redstone, he had found that same work.
He turned the slip over in his hand. He remembered how far the array had seemed to reach through the deep forest, and how little of it he had been able to examine. The beasts grew stronger as he pressed farther in. Eventually he had turned back without learning its full extent.
But he had seen enough to recognize the principles. In all his searching, it was the first formation he had found that matched the inheritance.
That was why he had stayed. A small shop in Redstone gave him somewhere to live while he studied what he could reach.
The trail had since led into the city itself. The Wang Clan, fading when Wuyan first investigated it, possessed formation lore with the same grain, though the family seemed unaware of its worth. Looking into where it had come from brought him to a forger from Ironforge whose daughter had married into the clan.
A forger unusually gifted at formations, who had entered the Blackwood some seven years before and never returned.
Wuyan had been slow to connect that disappearance with the array. He knew nothing of the man's fate. The forest had stopped his own investigation; it might have stopped the forger's as well. Yet the man's work remained with the Wangs, and the old array remained beyond the beasts. Either might lead him to more of the inheritance.
He rested the slip beside his cup without taking his fingers from it. For a long time, his search had given him little reason to expect an answer. Now there were places worth looking.
A shutter bar dropped into its brackets behind him.
Han Yucheng had finished the tables and hung his cloth over the counter. He was closing the shutters from the street end inward, checking each bar before moving to the next. Wuyan watched his hands.
When he had first seen Han on a southern road, those hands had been flat against his thighs as he knelt among six dead companions. The others in the demonic band had tried to fight or flee. Han had stayed where he was and submitted.
His corruption had barely reached his meridians. Wuyan had thought him salvageable, and there had been a use for him before any question of kindness arose. A few men from the Bastion needed killing. Han had done what he was told, then come to the Quiet Cup.
It had taken patience to make him useful here. Now Wuyan could leave the everyday work of the shop to him.
Han did not know he had also been an experiment. Wuyan had once told him he had acted out of kindness, and some of that had been true. Watching him reach for the next shutter, Wuyan could no longer have said how much.
"Leave the east window," he said. "I'll sit with the cold a while."
Han lowered his hand. He checked the remaining bar, then turned from the windows.
"Master."
Wuyan inclined his head. Han went through to the back, and his steps sounded up the back stairs. Wuyan waited until they had ceased before lifting the slip again.
Cold air passed over his fingers. He had spent so long with the damaged jade that he could turn it to the readable side without looking. For years he had told himself that what remained would have to be enough.
He slid it into his sleeve. His hand started toward the usual inner fold, close against his heart, then stopped. He left it in the outer fold instead.
The tea had gone cold. He finished it anyway, rose and rinsed the cup himself. There was no reason to waste what he had already poured. He set it upside down among the others and lowered the lamp.
His spiritual sense spread through the city and into the night. At the Wang compound, the formation he had asked the clan to build was nearly whole. They had worked carefully. It would not be long now.
He let his attention pass beyond the walls and the watch-fires, north toward the Blackwood. He kept to its nearer reaches. There were things deep in that forest older than any Beast Emperor, and he had no intention of drawing their notice.
Ruoxi was beyond the treeline, moving through a cluster of beasts.
He followed her for a moment. She was quick, turning from one opponent to another without hesitation. He knew this restlessness. Waiting for the breakthrough frightened her more than she would admit, and she went out to fight when she could no longer bear it. Once she was among the beasts, she enjoyed herself too much to be in a hurry to leave.
Wuyan rested a hand on the counter. Soon the array would be ready for her. For a moment, he was content simply to watch his sister.
Deeper in the forest, another presence stirred.
It moved toward the disturbance she was making. Wuyan followed its approach, and his hand left the counter.
A Beast Emperor. Ruoxi could not fight it, and it was closing fast.
He was gone before the lamp flame steadied.
The cup stood upside down among the others, still wet from the rinse.