Chapter 256: The Market Again

The second rest day was week six, which meant Ryuken announced it at breakfast on a Tuesday in the same way he had announced the first one, between finishing his bowl and standing to leave.

“No training today.”

He walked out.

Kaito looked at his tea. “Same as before. Do not stand in the outer ring.”

Vane was already looking at Ashe. She was already looking at him. The logistics of the first rest day had established a pattern and the pattern was that they went to Korreth and she bought things from a sequence of vendors and he carried them and the day was better than any day that had spent itself in the sanctum.

“Twenty minutes,” she said.

He went to get his jacket.

He passed Lancelot in the corridor. Lancelot was coming from his room and going toward the eastern wall, which was where he went when there was no scheduled purpose, the specific trajectory of a person whose default state was the wall.

Vane said: “We are going to Korreth. The city.”

Lancelot looked at him. The flat red eyes, no expression.

“The market is worth seeing,” Vane said. He did not extend an invitation in the formal sense. He said it as information, the way you mentioned that dinner was at a certain hour, and then he walked on toward the front of the compound.

He did not look back.

He and Ashe were at the compound gate when Lancelot appeared behind them.

He had his jacket on. He said nothing. He stood three paces back with the hands-at-sides posture that was his default, looking at the city below the mountain with the mild tactical interest he applied to new spaces.

Ashe looked at Vane.

Vane looked at the steps.

They went down.

Korreth at week six was different from Korreth at week four in the specific way that places are different when you know them a little rather than not at all. Vane recognized the fish vendor’s stall from the distance and the spice arrangement at the corner of the second row and the alley that led to Old Shen’s wrapped parcels. The city had a legibility now that it had not had on the first visit.

Lancelot walked behind them and read it differently.

He was not looking at the food or the vendors or the specific social geography that Ashe navigated by instinct. He was reading the defensive geometry. Sight lines, exit routes, the structural quality of the buildings, the specific way the crowd density distributed itself across the market’s irregular grid. He walked through a city the way he walked through any space that might become a combat environment.

Ashe was buying fish.

“The deepwater carp again?” the vendor asked.

“And the smoked elk if you have it.”

“Last of the season on the elk.” He began wrapping. He glanced at Lancelot, who was standing three paces back reading the alley behind the stall with the flat attention he gave everything. The vendor looked at Ashe. “New student?”

“Yes.”

“Western?”

“Also yes.”

The vendor handed over the parcels. He looked at Lancelot again. “He looks like he is planning something.”

“He always looks like that,” Ashe said. She handed the fish to Vane and moved toward the spice stalls.

They walked. Lancelot walked behind them.

At the spice stalls Ashe had a ten-minute conversation with the merchant about something that was either a supply chain problem or a family dispute, Vane could not fully determine which, and somewhere in the middle of it Lancelot drifted left toward the adjacent stall, which was selling something that smelled of pine resin and old metal.

Vane followed at a distance.

The stall was an old weapons trader. Not the ceremonial kind — the practical kind, the eastern style where functional and traditional occupied the same objects. Long blades and short blades and pole weapons in racks behind a man who looked like he had been selling weapons for forty years and had opinions about all of them.

Lancelot was looking at the broadswords.

Not browsing. He was standing at the display with the specific attention he gave things that were worth attending to, his eyes moving across the blades in a way that was not aesthetic and not commercial. He was reading them. Each one in sequence, assessing the balance and the metallurgy and whatever else the Iron Heaven-less version of his perceptual framework produced when pointed at steel.

The vendor had noticed. He watched Lancelot the way the fish vendor had watched him, with the wariness of a man who had seen what unchecked cultivation talent did to display furniture.

Lancelot reached for a broadsword. He picked it up with one hand, which required the mana integration of someone who had spent years with a weapon of this specific mass, and held it with the grip that was his.

He turned the blade once. The balance of it was immediately apparent in how the weight distributed along the shaft.

He set it down.

He picked up the next one.

He worked his way down the display. Pick up, assess, set down. Each one placed back with the same care, no sound, no drama. The vendor was watching every movement with his hand near a communication crystal that would call the city watch if needed and his better judgment telling him it was not needed.

Vane counted.

Eleven broadswords.

On the twelfth Lancelot stopped for a fraction longer than the others. He turned it twice instead of once. He held it at extension and looked down the flat at something only he could see.

He set it back.

“The balance is three degrees off,” he said. To the vendor, not to Vane.

The vendor stared at him. “Nobody has caught that.”

“It was forged with an asymmetric alloy distribution in the upper third,” Lancelot said. He was not being unkind. He was being accurate, which in his register was indistinguishable from unkind. “The smith corrected for it in the grip weighting but the correction addresses the static balance and not the dynamic. Under sustained load the asymmetry returns.”

The vendor looked at the blade. He looked at Lancelot. He looked at the blade again with the expression of someone reconsidering something they had believed for several years.

“You could see that,” the vendor said.

“Yes.”

A pause. “What would correct it.”

“The alloy distribution cannot be corrected after forging. The grip weighting would need to be increased by approximately fourteen grams on the right side and the quillon adjusted by two degrees to compensate for the shifted rotational axis under load.” He looked at the blade. “Or a different sword.”

The vendor sat down on his stool. He looked at his entire display with the expression of a man who had just been told something significant about something he had been selling for years.

Ashe appeared at Vane’s elbow with her parcels. She looked at Lancelot. She looked at the vendor’s face. She looked at Vane.

“How many,” she said quietly.

“Twelve.”

“He found one he could criticize.”

“Three degrees off on the dynamic balance. The others were worse apparently.”

She watched Lancelot set the blade back in the rack with the same careful placement he had used for all eleven before it.

“He was looking for one that was right,” Vane said.

She was quiet for a moment. “There are a lot of swords in this city.”

“I know.”

They watched him. He had moved to the pole weapons now and was running the same sequence, pick up, assess, set down. The vendor had stopped watching him with wariness and was watching him with the focused attention of someone who has realized they are in the presence of expertise they have not previously encountered.

Ashe started walking toward the roof stall. “Come on,” she said, not loudly. “Let him finish.”

Vane caught up. “Are we leaving him?”

“He knows where we are.” She shifted her parcels. “He is doing something. We do not interrupt people when they are doing something.”

They left him with the pole weapons and the vendor who was learning things about his own inventory.

On the roof with the grilled meat and the mountain above them, Lancelot appeared twenty minutes later. He had not bought anything. He climbed the ladder to the roof access with the ease of someone for whom ladders presented no particular obstacle and sat against the far parapet without being invited, which was the closest he came to joining something.

He looked at the mountain.

Vane and Ashe ate. The city ran below them.

After a while Ashe said, without looking at him: “The pole weapons.”

Lancelot: “The first three were decorative.”

“The eastern style uses decorative pole weapons as display, not function. The functional ones are in the back.”

A pause. “He didn’t show me the ones in the back.”

“You have to ask.”

Another pause. The mountain. The city sounds. A long-suffering vendor somewhere below probably examining every weapon in his stock with fresh uncertainty.

“I will ask next time,” Lancelot said.

It was the first thing he had said that implied a next time. Vane looked at Ashe. She was eating with the focus she gave things she liked and not looking at either of them, but the corner of her mouth had done something small and real.

He looked back at the mountain.

The second rest day ran its course in the warm unremarkable way of days that did not ask anything of anyone, and the three of them sat on the roof while the city moved below them, and it was enough.

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