Qin's Moon: Yang Shi's Long Song

Three days after the rain stopped, Yang Huisheng went on a long trip. It wasn't far; he walked from Zilanxuan to the south of the city and back, covering about half of Xinzheng City.

He changed into a dark gray short-sleeved shirt, not his usual faded blue robe. He wrapped the Heavenly Sword in three layers of cloth, slung it diagonally across his back, making it impossible to tell what it was from the outside. He walked through several alleys in the south of the city, his pace neither fast nor slow, indistinguishable from any other ordinary person going out on business. But he memorized every place he passed: the width of the alleys, the height of the walls, whether there were any protrusions at the base of the walls for leverage, where the forks in the road led, whether there was a back door at the end of a dead end—he was drawing a mental map "just in case."

The southern part of the city is the oldest area of ​​Xinzheng. The houses are low, the streets narrow, and the moss on the corners of the walls is thicker than elsewhere. There are few pedestrians, mostly vendors and elderly people. When Yang Huisheng turned into a side alley, he saw a blacksmith's shop. The shop was small, its door open, revealing a dark red glow from the furnace. The sound of the anvil was rhythmic—clang, clang, clang—evenly spaced, like the ticking of a pendulum. A shirtless man stood before the anvil, his left hand holding a pair of tongs gripping a dark red iron bar, his right hand swinging a hammer, striking it again and again. The shape of the iron bar was already emerging—a sword blank. A rough blank, unsharpened, the blade not yet polished with a ridge. But the man's hammering was steady, each strike landing in the same spot, as if he had been doing it for twenty years.

Yang Huisheng stopped at the doorway. He stood in the shadows outside the threshold, not going in, but watching the sword blank take shape. After the blacksmith swung it a dozen times, he stopped and put the sword blank back into the furnace to heat it. When he straightened up to wipe his sweat, he saw the person standing at the door, his gaze sweeping over the long strip of cloth wrapped around Yang Huisheng's back, and lingered for a moment.

"Want it?" the blacksmith asked.

Yang Huisheng said, "No. I'll watch you fight."

The blacksmith glanced at him for a couple of moments, then draped the towel back over his shoulder without chasing him away. He used his tongs to examine the unfinished sword in the furnace and said, "It's just an ordinary sword. No patterns, no decorations, just for cutting things."

"Chop what?"

"They chop everything. Some people use it for firewood, some for self-defense, and some to store away in their trunks." The blacksmith glanced back at him. "If you want one made, you can come to me."

Yang Huisheng didn't answer. He stood there for a while, watching the dark red glow of the furnace cast flickering light and shadow on the blacksmith's face. Then he said, "If someone wanted an inconspicuous sword—the kind that could be hidden under clothing, unnoticed—how would you forge it?"

The blacksmith paused, his tongs tightening. He took the sword blank from the furnace, placed it on the anvil, hammered it once, and said, "No need for a new one. Just find an old, dull one, heavily rusted, and re-sharpen the blade. An old sword is less conspicuous than a new one. Nobody'll give an old sword a second glance."

Yang Huisheng accepted those words. He stood at the doorway, watching the sword blank slowly darken from dark red to gray, and finally to the true color of iron. He glanced at the furnace fire, then nodded, turned, and left.

The blacksmith called out from behind him, "If you're looking for old swords, there are a few over at the scrap yard in the west of the city."

Yang Huisheng had already walked out of the alley. He didn't turn around, but he heard it.

He continued his journey around the south of the city, passing three alleys, an abandoned ancestral hall, and a sealed, dry well. He remembered the well's location—the opening was covered by a bluestone slab, but one corner of the slab was missing and could be lifted. If he needed to hide someone, he could do so there. After Gai Nie arrived, he might have a place to store some things. After finishing his journey through the south of the city, he returned to Zilan Pavilion by the same route. When he got back to the backyard, he took the cloth-wrapped sword off his back and hung it back on the wall of the side room. Two raised marks from the ash on the cloth resembled the shape of something. He didn't unwrap it to see if it had been touched.

Yan Lingji sat on a stone stool in the courtyard, holding a bowl of peeled walnuts. Seeing Yang Huisheng return, she said, "You went out." Yang Huisheng replied, "Just went for a walk." Yan Lingji didn't ask where he had gone. She pushed the bowl of walnuts towards him. Yang Huisheng walked over, took a walnut from the bowl, put it in his mouth, chewed it twice, and swallowed.

"Are the roads in the south of the city easy to travel?"

He paused for a moment. "Guess I went to the south of the city?"

"Your cuffs are stained with charcoal ash from the blacksmith's shop in the south of the city," Yan Lingji said, looking at his cuffs. "In Xinzheng, only the blacksmith's shop in the south of the city burns charcoal; the other shops burn firewood."

Yang Huisheng looked down at his cuff—there was indeed a very faint gray mark, almost invisible unless you looked closely. He glanced at Yan Lingji, chewed the walnut, and swallowed it.

"Easy to drive," he said. "The road isn't wide, but it's not congested."

Yan Lingji didn't ask any more questions. She lowered her head and continued peeling walnuts, piling the shelled kernels into a small mound on the rim of the bowl. Yang Huisheng stood beside the stone stool, the sunlight warming his back; the autumn wind hadn't yet arrived. He watched her peel walnuts. The unsharpened sword, the anonymous ironware in the old ironworks, and every exit he had memorized—they were slowly piecing together a deck of cards in his mind, a deck whose full picture he couldn't yet see. He wasn't in a hurry to collect them all.

Before the autumn harvest, the sickle must be sharpened first.