We left the city on a grey morning in mid-winter, when the roads were cold and hard and the sky had the particular flat quality of a day that had no intention of becoming anything other than what it was. I had traveled in many lives, and departure always felt the same: the city releasing you reluctantly, the familiar landmarks growing smaller until they disappeared into the architecture of distance.
Kaien's contact in the southern provinces was a man named Fang Wen. He had worked with Kaien's father for nearly a decade before retiring to manage a small trading post near one of the larger river towns in Jiangnan. He was sixty-three, according to Kaien. He had a reputation for knowing everything about land transactions within a two-hundred-mile radius of that river town, and for being impossible to bribe.
