The body was removed before sunrise.
Wei Longshan had given instructions that it be handled with care — a proper burial, not a ditch — and had set aside funds for a headstone even though he did not know the man's name and had no way of finding it out. Deng Qiufeng had looked at him with the particular expression he reserved for moments when his master did something that defied accounting. Wei Longshan had ignored the expression, as he always did, and gone to bed.
He slept four hours. He always slept four hours. It was sufficient.
By the time the city was beginning its morning noise — the canal boats, the grain merchants, the distant rhythm of the eastern market waking up — Wei Longshan was at his desk with the jade scroll unrolled before him and a cup of tea that was actually hot this time. He had placed three oil lamps in a triangle around the scroll for light and was working through the characters with the methodical patience of a man who understood that some problems did not yield to force, only to time.
The script was not entirely alien. That was the first useful discovery. Beneath its unfamiliar surface structure, certain radicals appeared that bore a family resemblance to archaic forms he had encountered in the oldest texts in his library — pre-unification writing, the kind that scholars argued over in pamphlets that no one outside of academic circles ever read. Wei Longshan had read them. He had read everything, eventually, during the long years when reading was one of the few activities that required enough attention to temporarily displace the emptiness.
That habit, he reflected, now appeared to have been preparation.
By midmorning he had isolated fourteen characters he could assign meaning to with reasonable confidence. By early afternoon he had a partial translation of the first section — rough, full of gaps, but coherent enough to understand that the dying man had been carrying something far more significant than a traveler's keepsake.
The scroll was a record. Specifically, it was a merchant's record — not of goods, but of observations. Someone had traveled to Zhanhai, or near enough to Zhanhai to report on it from a position of genuine knowledge, and had written down what they saw with the unsentimental precision of a person whose livelihood depended on accurate information. Not a poet. Not a spy. A merchant, like Wei Longshan had been at the beginning, before the word merchant became inadequate to describe what he was.
He read: The city called the Gate of Salt is larger than the imperial capital by a measure I cannot honestly calculate. The streets are ordered. I saw no beggars. I am not certain whether this means there is no poverty or whether poverty is simply not permitted to be visible. Both possibilities are interesting. The people are — and here the script became unclear, the character worn to ambiguity — they do not look at foreigners with contempt. They look at us with the particular attention of people who are deciding something. I found this more unsettling than contempt would have been.
Wei Longshan set down his brush and looked at the wall for a moment.
They are deciding something. He recognized that feeling from the other side. He had spent his entire life being the one who decided. The idea of entering a city where the dynamic was reversed — where he would be the one being assessed, sorted, categorized by eyes that knew their own world far better than he ever could — produced a sensation in his chest that it took him a moment to identify.
Anticipation. Genuine, uncalculated anticipation.
He rolled the scroll carefully and placed it in the interior pocket of his robe. Then he called for Deng Qiufeng.
The old steward arrived with the expression of a man who had been waiting to be called and was professionally annoyed that it had taken this long. He was sixty-one years old, former infantry, with a soldier's posture and a steward's vocabulary of controlled disapproval. He had served Wei Longshan for twenty-two years. In that time, Wei Longshan had never done anything that Deng Qiufeng considered fully reasonable, and Deng Qiufeng had never failed to execute Wei Longshan's instructions regardless.
It was the most functional relationship in Wei Longshan's life.
"Sit down," Wei Longshan said.
Deng Qiufeng sat, which meant what he was about to hear was unusual. Under normal circumstances he received instructions standing, on the principle that instructions given to a seated man invited negotiation.
"I am going to Zhanhai."
The silence that followed had a texture to it. Wei Longshan watched Deng Qiufeng process the information — first the shock, which lasted approximately two seconds and was visible only in the slight stillness of his eyes, and then the calculation, which was familiar and took considerably longer.
"Zhanhai," Deng Qiufeng said. Not a question. A word being held up to examine its weight.
"The empire to the far west. Beyond the Salt Desert. Yes."
"The one that may not exist."
"The one that exists. I have partial documentation."
"From the corpse."
"He was alive when he delivered it."
Deng Qiufeng looked at the ceiling, which was his version of a significant pause. "When you say you are going — you mean you are sending an expedition. You will identify a reliable representative, provide sufficient funding, establish a trade objective—"
"I mean I am going," Wei Longshan said. "Personally. With a small party. Under a name that is not my name, in the guise of a mid-level merchant from the southern provinces."
The silence this time had a different texture. Deng Qiufeng placed both hands flat on the table in front of him — a gesture Wei Longshan had seen perhaps four times in twenty-two years, always preceding a statement of formal objection.
"My lord," he said, "you are the Duke of the Eastern Passage. You control forty percent of the river trade. Three ministry officials owe you significant personal debts. The Emperor's third letter this year is on your desk, unopened. If you disappear—"
"People will manage."
"Which people, specifically, will manage what, specifically?"
Wei Longshan smiled. It was the same smile he had felt last night, standing over the dying man — not the performed warmth he used at court, not the cold precision he deployed across a negotiating table, but something older and less controlled than either. "That is an excellent question. I will need three months to arrange an answer. In that time, I need you to help me liquidate a third of the river assets quietly, establish a series of holding structures that will maintain the remainder without my active management, and identify a cover identity for a southern merchant of moderate success and no interesting history."
"Three months," Deng Qiufeng said.
"Perhaps four."
"And then."
"And then we leave."
Deng Qiufeng's expression shifted. Wei Longshan had said we, and they both noticed it, and neither commented on it directly, because twenty-two years of working together had produced certain efficiencies in communication.
"I will require a travel stipend," Deng Qiufeng said finally.
"You will have one."
"And I will require, in writing, an acknowledgment that I advised against this course of action."
"I will have it drafted this afternoon."
Deng Qiufeng stood, smoothing the front of his robe with the precision of a man restoring order to something that had briefly been disordered. "I will begin with the asset structures. The southern identity will take longer — there are two document houses I trust, but only one with experience in the western trade routes." He paused at the door. "The language. Zhanhai uses a different script entirely."
"I know."
"You have begun studying it."
"Since this morning."
"You have fourteen words."
"Fourteen confirmed. Perhaps twenty probable." Wei Longshan picked up his brush again. "In three months I will have enough to function. In six I will be fluent. By the time we arrive, it will not be a barrier."
Deng Qiufeng looked at him for a moment with an expression that was difficult to categorize — not quite admiration, not quite resignation, occupying some precise point between the two that had no common name. Then he left.
Wei Longshan turned back to the scroll.
Outside, the city continued its noise — the canal boats, the market, the distant bells of the mid-morning prayer at the temple on the eastern hill. All of it familiar. All of it, he realized, already beginning to recede. Not physically — he was still here, in this room, in this house, in this empire that bore the shape of everything he had ever built. But something in his attention had already moved, was already facing west, standing at the edge of the Salt Desert with the wind in his face and nothing in his pockets and the entire question of what he was capable of still, at last, unanswered.
He wrote down a new character. He was fairly certain it meant threshold.
He thought: yes. That seems right.