The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 4 - Chapter 12

Chapter 12: Lantern Plant

When they came to the rear palace that day, the very air felt different.

Jinshi headed for the Jade Pavilion, Gaoshun and several other eunuchs with him. Consort Gyokuyou had looked out of sorts for the past several days, and this morning he’d received word that she seemed likely to give birth any time.

Maomao’s adoptive father, the man called Luomen, had been in constant attendance on the consort, but the baby wouldn’t come. There remained the question of whether it would be a breech birth—the whole reason Luomen had been summoned from the pleasure district in the first place.

No one had officially mentioned the fact that the consort would be giving birth, but the tension in the air at the Jade Pavilion suggested everyone knew. Other palace ladies tried to get a glimpse into the residence from outside. The moment they realized Jinshi was there, though, they turned red and scuttled back to work.

It was now ten days since Maomao had vanished.

Jinshi was greeted by Hongniang, who looked somewhat worn out as she ushered them into the pavilion. In the hallway was a large washbasin and a teapot heating over a brazier, ready for the moment the child was born. They’d obviously prepared in case the delivery went quickly.

“How is she?” Jinshi asked, forcing himself to sound calm and collected. The ladies-in-waiting looked at him uneasily, but it was the elderly man emerging from the room who gave him the details.

“The contractions have stopped for the moment. I can’t tell yet when the child might be born.” It could, in principle, happen any time, although it would still be somewhat early at this point.

“And how is the mother?”

“The consort is still alert and calm. At the moment, I don’t think there’s any danger of a breech birth.”

So Maomao’s treatments had helped. That was a relief, but they weren’t out of the woods yet. There were still too many variables.

There was another man in the hallway with them; he was dressed in a doctor’s outfit and had a thin mustache. He was the rear palace’s official physician, but at that moment he was little more than an obstacle, and the ladies-in-waiting seemed to resent having him there. At his feet was a cat—too old to be called a kitten anymore, Maomao was now a proper young feline. Jinshi couldn’t help wondering whether that was sanitary, but the cat helped distract Princess Lingli, who was otherwise desperate to go to her mother, so perhaps it was a net good.

Normally the rear palace, quite frankly, could have gotten along without its doctor, but at this moment Jinshi was glad to have him there. The man’s expression was easy to read, and at the moment he was clearly suffering from a felt need to be of service, and distress that Maomao was still missing. The combination seemed so likely to produce simple mistakes that the ladies-in-waiting of the Jade Pavilion had evidently ordered him to stand in one place and not move. Seeing someone so obviously even more distraught than he was actually helped calm Jinshi down, allowing him to set aside his mounting panic.

“Very well,” Jinshi said. “I’ll take my leave for the moment, then. If anything happens, send a messenger.”

“Yes, sir,” the grandmotherly eunuch said with a bow.

Gaoshun appeared at almost the same moment Luomen withdrew. “Master Jinshi,” he said. Jinshi had sent him to see the Matron of the Serving Women about a separate matter.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Ahem...” Gaoshun glanced around, effectively communicating that this discussion should be held privately. The delivery might resume at any moment, but Jinshi could hardly stand there indefinitely, so he left two eunuchs and then saw himself out of the Jade Pavilion.

“All right. What is it?”

“It’s about the vanished eunuch. I asked the other eunuchs if they knew something, anything, about the matter.”

The missing eunuch had gone by the name Tian, meaning Heaven. A common name; one might hear it anywhere. Reports were that Tian hadn’t been very close to the other eunuchs. He was gorgeous to look at and was frequently mobbed by palace women, but it seemed there had been another side to him. Of all the eunuchs freed from slavery to the barbarians, he alone had no other personal acquaintances in the group. In other words, it was possible he’d insinuated himself among them before they arrived at the rear palace.

The safest bet was that this had been his plan all along. It explained why Tian had gone out of his way not to get close to anyone—and it meant they were wasting time, without even any information to show for it.

“One eunuch did say he’d seen someone he thought was Tian praying in front of a shrine.”

“I daresay that’s hardly uncommon.” The rear palace had no shortage of shrines big and small. A prayer now and then was the least one would expect from a devout believer.

“Yes, but...” From the folds of his robe Gaoshun produced a diagram of the rear palace; he pointed to a shrine in the northern quarter.

“That’s...” Jinshi began. It was a shrine dedicated to the veneration of those who had died in the rear palace, the same place they’d performed Consort Jin’s funeral. Typically, those who died here were returned to their families—but there were those who had nowhere to go even after death.

Jinshi immediately turned toward the northern quarter.

“The man I spoke to said Tian was visiting a grave.”

“Whose?”

“I’m afraid he wasn’t sure.”

Jinshi grunted and crossed his arms. He decided to go and inspect the place himself. He had other things to do, but he just couldn’t let this go.

There was an abiding horror of death in the rear palace. This was where the future sons of heaven were to be born and raised—of course the inhabitants would wish to distance themselves from anything as inauspicious as death.

At the same time, though, those who served the privileged had a custom: those who had lain with the Emperor once could never leave the rear palace as long as they lived. There were exceptions, of course. Consorts given to underlings for political reasons, or as a reward for loyal service. Mostly, though, such women were the daughters of powerful people. A mere maid whose blossom withered on the branch, who never produced any offspring, could expect to simply fade away here in this garden, her name recorded and remembered nowhere.

The place Jinshi was now going was where those flowers slept.

There weren’t even ten grave markers there—though he didn’t know whether that was many or few—and all of them belonged to women who had served in the palace during the time of the previous emperor. The overseers of the rear palace had decided (call it capricious if you must) that too many interments would soon become a problem.

When they arrived, they discovered someone was already there. Most unusual for anyone to visit the graves of nameless palace women. Even from a distance, they could see that the visitor was an older woman; she was sitting in front of the nearest, comparatively newer grave marker.

This woman, perhaps more than forty years old, had a face that conveyed strength. Before the grave were flowers she must have picked somewhere, and a branch of a lantern plant—Jinshi would have said it was slightly out of season. Maybe someone else had left it there earlier.

The woman stood up—and that was when she noticed Jinshi and Gaoshun. Her eyes went wide for just a second, but then they returned to normal and she bowed politely before moving to make her exit. There was nothing inherently wrong with visiting the graves; they had no reason to suspect her of anything.

Except for one thing.

As the woman walked by, Jinshi caught a strong whiff of alcohol. Very strong—as if he might get drunk just smelling it. Like those foreign distilled spirits. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he had grabbed her wrist.

She couldn’t conceal her shock. Nonetheless, she managed to act calm as she said, “Can I help you, sir?”

Normally, Jinshi would never have done something so impulsive. He would have considered his actions more carefully, rather than suddenly grab a palace woman’s arm. But even though he’d convinced himself that he was perfectly calm, he now saw that he had been far more out of sorts than he had realized.

“Where is Maomao?” he asked. He felt the woman tense. Gaoshun and the other eunuchs watched them silently. Calm down, Jinshi told himself. He had to calm down. When he spoke again, it was with his customary honeyed tone. “I’m curious to find out about a certain befreckled palace woman. Would you happen to know anything about her?”

He used the smile that so often got him what he wanted from the palace women—but this woman didn’t smile back; instead, the blood drained from her face. She looked like she’d seen a goblin. The woman, Shenlü’s, pupils dilated; Jinshi could feel her pulse racing where he held her wrist. She knew something. He was sure of it. He gripped her arm tighter so she couldn’t get away.

The woman looked at him, eyes wide. Perhaps she had foreign blood in her veins, for her eyes were green. Suddenly, though she gazed at him, her look turned distant. “An old memory’s come back to me,” she said. “Someone calls to me with a kind voice, gives me sweet candies from a foreign land.”

Huge tears began to roll down her cheeks, but Jinshi couldn’t follow what she was saying.

“No one seems to remember what he looked like when he was young. All I’ve heard is that by the time he was old, he was but a shadow of his former self. He ceased to come to me after I was fourteen, so I know nothing of what he looked like after that time.”

Who was the woman talking about? What was she saying, and why? Jinshi could see, though, that even deeper than the green hue in the woman’s eyes was the anger.

“But he, too, had a voice like honey and a face like a celestial nymph’s.” There was conviction in her voice. “Why would one such as yourself stoop to pretending to be a eunuch?”

Jinshi’s grip slackened, just for an instant, but it was all Shenlü needed; she shook him off and began to run. She’d never had any hope of escape, though; with the eunuchs all around, she was soon apprehended.

“What shall we do with her, Master Jinshi?” asked the man who had captured her. Even as he spoke, the woman produced a small bottle from the folds of her robe, uncorked the stopper, and drank the contents. Gaoshun was yelling even before Jinshi: “Make her vomit that out!” He ordered one of the eunuchs to bring water, holding on to the collapsed woman himself and jamming his fingers into her mouth, trying to make her throw up. Jinshi could only watch.

“—shi! Master Jinshi!” He was momentarily startled by Gaoshun’s shouting. He must have been completely out of it. The eunuch was already back with the water and was pouring it down the woman’s throat. The bottle she’d drunk from was rolling on the ground. Jinshi recognized it as one of the vessels into which Maomao had put her distilled alcohol. Extremely strong alcohol was a poison in its own right, and this woman had just drunk an entire bottle of it.

The wind gusted, blowing away the flowers in front of the grave and shaking the lantern plant berries.

“Master Jinshi, what do you want us to do?” Gaoshun asked forcefully. Jinshi suddenly realized the other man’s creased brow was practically in front of his eyes. “Master Jinshi, you need to get a hold of yourself; surely you know that. You need not be troubled by a palace woman’s little joke.”

“Joke?” Jinshi asked. Who would drink a vial of poison as a joke? Hadn’t this all started because Jinshi had impulsively grabbed her arm? And had the person the woman had spoken of truly been...

“Gaoshun... Do I indeed resemble him?”

The thought had always bothered Jinshi, ever since he’d been young. He didn’t resemble that person. Nor his older brother, nor his mother. So who, then, did he resemble? It was a question that fed baseless rumors among the ladies-in-waiting. Stories that he was illegitimate.

It was practically laughable: what was he doing here, in this garden of women? He’d asked his elder brother to let him take on this eunuch identity in order to cast aside his status as heir apparent... It was ridiculous, plain and simple.

Still frustrated with himself, he went and stood by the grave marker Shenlü had been visiting. He wanted to laugh himself to pieces, but he still had work to do. Slowly, he knelt by the marker and picked up the red pod of the lantern plant where it had fallen. Dried out now that its season was over, it had begun to tear, revealing the red fruit inside. He remembered hearing that lantern plant could help induce an abortion. And when he saw the name carved into the gravestone—a name that would one day be effaced by the passage of time—he thought he understood why someone would have offered the plant here.

Taihou.

A perfectly ordinary name for a serving woman. Not so much in the capital, not these days; but in the countryside, women were calling their daughters Taihou in droves. Here, though, on this grave marker, the name was unforgettable.

It was the name of a serving woman who had died last year. A woman whose only joy in the cloistered world of the rear palace had been getting groups of women together to tell scary stories. She’d had no family at all. With one exception. If the daughter who’d been born from her assignation with the palace doctor had lived...

Taihou. The missing eunuch and serving woman. And...

No. He still didn’t have all the pieces of this puzzle. But his intuition enabled him to fill in the gaps, and slowly intuition became certainty. Jinshi knew where he had to go next.

If a child born at that time had survived, they would now be two years older than the Emperor. Suppose the banished doctor had taken the child with him. They were said to have disappeared after that, but that was questionable. Something about it didn’t fit.

The woman named Taihou had been a servant to one of the consorts—none other than Loulan’s mother, Shishou’s wife. Taihou was said to have been some relation of the Shi clan’s, a distant relative of Loulan’s mother. Perhaps she would know something about the child born to this serving woman and the vanished doctor, then, Jinshi thought, and turned toward the Garnet Pavilion.

There was no hint there of the austerity that had pervaded the pavilion until the previous year. Instead the place overflowed with ostentatious exoticism. Jinshi sighed privately, then made himself put on his usual smile. A lady-in-waiting bowed to him, almost shyly, and led him inside.

They passed through a hallway lined with garish mother-of-pearl baubles, then came to the receiving room in which he was normally seen. The mistress of the pavilion was lounging on her couch, also as usual, polishing her nails.

Jinshi allowed his eyes to crinkle in a smile. Consort Loulan was attended by six ladies-in-waiting, all assiduously seeking to her every need. Each was dressed in a flamboyant outfit; today’s theme seemed to be traditional clothing of the island nation to the east. Each of the women wore a panoply of layered robes, a garish sight if ever there was one. The women were so thoroughly covered that one couldn’t even see the shapes of their bodies, and at the same time they’d applied makeup around their eyes that made them appear wide-eyed and angry, giving their faces an angular look. The overall effect was odd at best. Jinshi thought it made them look like smirking foxes.

He found himself wondering what compelled Loulan and her ladies to dress in such outrageous ways. Was she aware that the Emperor found it off-putting? Loulan, Jinshi knew, understood her place as a high consort very well—and her place as Shishou’s daughter even better.

Loulan whispered something to one of her ladies-in-waiting, holding up a folding fan made of feathers to hide her mouth. A most refined way of speaking to each other, Jinshi mused—but that couldn’t be all it was. He had come here grasping at the faintest of hopes, and it gave him an appreciation for fine details that might otherwise have escaped his notice. The mole on Loulan’s temple, for example. She’d tried to hide it with makeup, but it was still faintly visible. Maybe sweat had diluted the white powder somewhat.

If Jinshi remembered correctly, however, Loulan didn’t have a mole on her temple.

He didn’t bother to sit in the chair the lady-in-waiting offered him. Instead, he strode straight toward Consort Loulan.

“Whatever is the matter?” one of the ladies asked, looking incensed. “Surely even you, Master Jinshi, must observe some decorum.” What was the woman’s name again? Jinshi prided himself on knowing how many women worked in each of the pavilions, their names and where they came from. The ladies of the Garnet Pavilion, though, were constantly changing their clothes and makeup, and all had similar builds. Thus he knew their names but could never seem to put them to their faces. Instead, he distinguished them by subtle details—who had a mole, or whose eyes were a certain shape.

Jinshi reached out, grasped Loulan’s fan between his fingers, and flung it away.

“W—Well, I never!” one of the ladies-in-waiting cried. Consort Loulan turned away from Jinshi as if afraid of him, and her ladies moved to put themselves between him and her. A consummate show of loyalty to their mistress—or so it seemed.

Jinshi had only to glance at the eunuchs who had accompanied him and they pulled the women aside, clearing his path to Loulan. He took her shoulder, none too gently, and forced her to face him. Even under her copious makeup, he could see her flushing red.

“I seem to recall Consort Loulan having seven ladies-in-waiting,” he said. As Shishou’s coddled daughter, she’d had no fewer than fifty servants with her when she entered the rear palace. Jinshi held Loulan in place and wiped away the makeup around her eyes with his fingers, revealing large, double-fold eyes. Now, what had been the name of the woman with the mole on her temple?

“I believe your name was...Sourin. Or—no, Renpu, was that it?” Jinshi smiled, very deliberately not allowing any anger into his face. The lady-in-waiting who had transformed herself into Consort Loulan, however, went from flushed to deathly pale, and began to tremble.

“Mas—” One of the other ladies-in-waiting moved once more to get between them, but Jinshi simply looked at her, and she winced visibly and stepped back again.

“Where is the real Consort Loulan?”

Had she planned all this from the beginning? The army of servants, the ladies-in-waiting who physically resembled her, and the ever-changing, dazzling costumes—all so no one would notice if the consort changed places with one of her women. Had that been her goal all along? And where was the real Loulan now?

“Where did she go?” Jinshi asked. The woman posing as Loulan shivered violently but didn’t say a word. Jinshi tightened his grip. “Where did she go?”

When he asked the question this third time, the woman who had tried to interpose herself leaned in, hugging the fake consort protectively. She gave Jinshi a look. “I’m very sorry, sir. But I swear, she truly doesn’t know.” He hadn’t noticed before because of the matching outfits, but this woman was several years older than the fake consort. “Please, have mercy.” The woman, deeply distressed, looked at the fake consort’s feet. The long hem of the skirt was damp, and droplets could be seen running down the silent woman’s legs and dripping off her toes. So the fake Loulan was terrified enough to lose control of her bladder.

Jinshi released the fake Loulan’s chin. Her eyes widened; the pupils were dilated, her breathing was harsh, and she was still shaking. The pale skin of her chin and neck showed clear signs of where Jinshi had grabbed her.

It was a display of violence all but unthinkable for the eunuch Jinshi. Far too unrefined, too uncivilized for him.

Admitting the daughters of powerful officials to the rear palace had its advantages for the Emperor. Yes, the officials could look forward to potentially having a grandchild sit on the throne should their daughter bear the sovereign’s offspring—but it could tie their hands as well. For many parents—not all, but many—their daughter is the apple of their eye. The birdcage that was the rear palace effectively held those precious girls hostage.

Considering how Shishou had pushed to get Loulan into the rear palace, he clearly doted on her. His daughter became a high consort, but while the Emperor was obliged to treat her with a certain level of respect, she was likewise expected to conduct herself to certain standards.

Already, Jinshi had stopped thinking of her as “Consort” Loulan. For she had violated those standards.

“She said she wasn’t coming back,” the lady-in-waiting from earlier said solemnly. The woman, who said she was Loulan’s chief lady-in-waiting, submitted herself to Jinshi’s questioning in place of the false consort, who could barely breathe properly, let alone hold a conversation. From what Jinshi gathered, she had been pushed into acting as Loulan’s body double because she bore the closest physical resemblance to her; the woman didn’t really understand the situation or the implications of what she was doing. She thought the demand to impersonate her mistress was just another of Loulan’s whims.

Jinshi clenched one hand into a fist. He’d been wrong. He knew now that it had been the wrong way to approach the situation, not what the eunuch Jinshi with his delicate smile would do. But he hadn’t been calm enough to think of any other way to approach the situation.

So she wasn’t coming back. That presumably meant she’d fled the rear palace. That was a serious offense, punishable in some cases by death. And how much worse it was when the crime was committed by a high consort. It was like a courtesan cutting her ties with her house, the apothecary’s daughter had said once. Jinshi smiled to himself; it was just like her to compare the place where the Emperor’s children were born to a common pleasure district.

The girl. Someone else they still hadn’t found. Knowing Maomao, it was always possible she’d gone along voluntarily. But more likely, she’d been given no other option.

But why? He still had so many questions. He interrogated the chief lady-in-waiting thoroughly but was left shaking his head. He could always have her put to torture, but he didn’t think it would get him anywhere. Her eyes had said she was telling the truth.

He had the ladies-in-waiting of the Garnet Pavilion, the maids, the eunuchs—anyone associated with Loulan—confined to a single location. The “classroom” was just about the right size. Meanwhile, eunuchs were doing the tedious work of checking every woman in the rear palace, just for good measure, but so far they hadn’t found anyone who resembled Loulan.

Jinshi knew he was in no shape to deal with Consort Gyokuyou’s delivery; much against his wishes, he charged Gaoshun with the job.

Jinshi was in his office, holding his head in his hands. Basen was with him, perhaps because it was a state of emergency—for at that moment he was reporting, “Not long ago, Master Lakan charged the rear palace, attempting to force his way in.”

Jinshi’s face was tight; he didn’t think he could have smiled if he’d wanted to. It was an unbelievable thing to do, yet the man with the monocle had done it.

“Word must have gotten out somehow,” Basen said, making a face like he was chewing on something bitter. “And Shishou’s current whereabouts are still unknown.” It was clear enough why Basen no longer referred to the man with any title of honor: his daughter Loulan had fled the rear palace, and as her father, he too would be treated as a traitor to the Emperor.

Meanwhile, they’d also received a report on Shenlü’s status after drinking the alcohol. She’d survived, somehow, but hadn’t yet regained consciousness. They were told she’d been a personal acquaintance of Taihou’s, and that was no doubt how she’d been brought into this conspiracy against the throne. With the former emperor gone, her rage, Jinshi suspected, had turned against the rear palace generally. They didn’t even know who else at the clinic might have been involved. Perhaps they’d simply gone along quietly because they, like Shenlü, had been the former ruler’s victims.

Jinshi didn’t have time to twiddle his thumbs. He wanted to go flying from the rear palace and hunt down Loulan. But he simply didn’t have enough information. To go running off now would be like going in search of a needle in a haystack. First, he thought, he should find out what Shishou was up to. Yes, well, he already had someone working on that. And that left Jinshi with nothing to do but pace back and forth in his office.

“Master Jinshi,” Basen said with a glance in his direction. A visitor had arrived outside the office, and Basen seemed to be trying to remind him that it wouldn’t do for him to be seen in such a pathetic state. Jinshi, bowing to necessity, sat and pretended he was calm. Basen glanced at a mirror that was positioned so as to conceal what was inside the room; then he awaited their visitor with a look of some perplexity.

In came a simple official, a person of a height that might have been called petite had he been a woman. He wore a pair of round spectacles, but other than somewhat unkempt hair and narrow, fox-like eyes, there was little obviously remarkable about the young man, although he looked oddly familiar.

The young man put his hands in his sleeves and bowed. Jinshi thought he spotted something tucked in the young man’s sash; when he looked a little closer, he realized it was an abacus.

“A pleasure to meet you. My name is Kan Lahan.” With that supremely simple self-introduction, the young man grinned.

That name: ah, so that was who he resembled.

No one would have known who he was had he identified himself as a member of the House of Kan, for in the whole country of Li, there were only about twenty family names. Thus, when indicating their families, people often used courtesy names, which were frequently passed down from generation to generation. Separate from such family courtesy names, there were also courtesy names given to various houses since ancient times by the Imperial family.

In the case of the man standing before them, La was his courtesy name. There were only two within the outer court who claimed that name: Lakan and the nephew he’d adopted. The only other person who might even be considered to count was a man who had come to the rear palace recently as a physician —Luomen, “Luo” being the same character as “La.”

All of which raised the question, what was Lakan’s adopted son doing here?

“Did you need something with me?” Jinshi outranked Lahan in the official hierarchy, such that the young man’s sudden appearance might in itself be considered rude. However, Jinshi knew that pulling rank and making scary faces wouldn’t get him anywhere in this case. And regardless of his station, there were some officials who simply treated him with less respect because he was a eunuch.

“I thought you might wish to see this, sir.” Lahan produced a scroll from his sleeve and passed it to Basen. Basen inspected it, then handed it to Jinshi. Jinshi, for his part, decided to go ahead and take a look at it, trusting that a delivery from Lakan’s son might well be significant. He undid the string tying the scroll shut and unrolled it—then looked at it in amazement.

“What do you think, sir, if I may ask?” Lahan was still grinning, a deeply self-satisfied and rather unpleasant expression, but the contents of the scroll fully justified his smugness. It was a list of words and numbers—but depending on how one looked at it, it was also something else.

“It’s something my adoptive father recently instructed me to look into. I don’t think he was at all happy not knowing where the feifa were coming from. Anyhow, I did some sniffing around in connection with the officials who were recently punished and discovered a most intriguing pattern.”

The scroll was a record of receipts. The sort of thing someone associated with the board that oversaw the national treasury could easily get a look at. Even officials of other affiliations could see such things if they followed the proper procedures.

“I thought it would be simplest to show you a primary source. Granted, this is only a selection I made; there’s a bit much of it to parse otherwise.”

Excerpt or not, he’d arranged the numbers such that even a nonspecialist like Jinshi could understand them. And they revealed that over the past several years, the expenditures of one government organ in particular had grown larger and larger.

“Interesting, isn’t it? These past several years, there’s been neither drought nor any plague of insects, and yet the price of grain has risen steadily. Why do you suppose that is? I thought it most strange, so I examined the market price over the same period—and it seems the price of grain was the steadiest of just about any commodity.”

He was clearly building to something. There was something else the price of which had risen month by month, along with the cost of grain.

“And there was something else: for some reason the price of iron has been creeping up as well. Here you can see the price of metals all over the country rising—they wouldn’t happen to be building a colossal statue somewhere, would they?”

Jinshi understood what Lahan was driving at. He set down the scroll and looked at the young man, who certainly shared his shrewdness with his adoptive father at least. The price of grain might not sound so important as such, but there was a great deal of it. A modest increase in price would mean a substantial rise in value. And what if, Lahan was suggesting, someone was keeping the difference for themselves?

As for the increase in the price of metal, that implied an increase in demand. That could be caused when, say, someone building a monument to display their power, or some other highly visible project, started gathering material from all over. Even stew pots and farm equipment might be requisitioned and melted down. But there were other reasons the price might go up...

“I’m capable of examining the circulation of currency over these past years more closely. Including where it seems to concentrate,” Lahan said. Exactly what Jinshi had been hoping to hear. It was almost as if this was precisely what he’d come here to say.

It seemed to Jinshi that there was a request in Lahan’s gaze. That, no doubt, was why he had brought this scroll to Jinshi: men like him never did anything unless it somehow served them.

“And what do you want in exchange?” Jinshi asked bluntly.

Lahan’s expression softened as if he’d simply been waiting for Jinshi to ask. He took a piece of paper from his sleeve, although he looked somewhat reluctant about it. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to consider this amount.”

The paper was a bill for the repair of a wall of the rear palace. Jinshi could only assume it was one Lakan had burst through.