Shi Yuan reached out to wipe the black ash from the wooden tag, but Chen Xiuyuan caught his wrist.
A thin corner had already curled up. One more wipe would take the carved marks off with it.
"Take it into the light tomorrow morning."
He found a flat board and laid the broken tag on it, along with the fragments that had fallen beneath it. The porter pointed to the end that had not burned through and said there had originally been a hole for a cord. It had hung beside the cart and was only taken down and thrown into the fire after the goods were unloaded.
"Did you see whose name was carved on it?"
"I can't read. I only remember a cross at one end, like the ones on the medicine baskets."
Chen Xiuyuan noted this down and had Shi Yuan lead him behind the shed to spend the night. When they reached the doorway, the porter turned back and cautioned them not to say he had picked up the wooden tag.
"At the market tomorrow, I'll only point out the way. If you want me to identify someone in front of the cart escort, I'm not going."
"Just the way," Chen Xiuyuan said.
The next day, the broken tag was placed beside the window. Slanting light fell across it, revealing two short incisions on the charred surface, with the lower half of the character "口" showing beneath them. Shi Yuan studied it for a long while and tried filling in several characters, but the burned-away side blocked every attempt.
Chen Xiuyuan traced what remained of it in his medicinal herb notebook, leaving the blank spaces as they were.
They could not recover the full name, but the cross-shaped mark remained. Two slanted cuts intersected, one end close beside the original cord hole. Auntie Sang brought over the outer wrapping of the returned medicine bundle and turned out a corner. It too bore a cross drawn in ink.
"At the market, they often use marks like these to distinguish baskets of loose herbs," she said. "I know several sellers who do."
Shi Yuan had already pushed the two together. Hearing this, he left a gap between them again.
"Are we still going, then?"
"Yes. Let them tell us how they mark their own goods first. Don't use this to feed them an answer."
Shi Qiren sent a patrolman along with them. The porter walked ahead, stopping outside the small market to point at an open patch beside a ditch. He said the cart had waited there for goods. He stood some distance from the stalls under the sheds, where he could see the way ahead and retreat to the patrolman's side at any time.
The open ground was already covered in wheel ruts. Overnight dew had softened the old tracks, making it impossible to tell which belonged to that medicine cart.
Chen Xiuyuan crouched to examine them for a while, then stood and asked which way the front of the cart had faced during unloading.
The porter pointed toward the mouth of the ditch.
"The cart pulled over there, with the ends of the shafts facing the shed. There's a gap over there. I passed baskets through it and nearly put my foot in."
Following his pointing hand, Shi Yuan found a collapsed stretch of earthen edge. Shallow wheel grooves lay beside the gap. They could not identify the cart, but they showed that a cart had stopped close behind the shed. From there, it was only a few steps to the back of the medicine stall.
"Someone said you're looking for a cart with a repaired shaft?"
A child poked his head out from behind a shed post, holding a loosely tied bundle of straw rope. He glanced at the blade on the patrolman's waist and hid half his face again.
The patrolman asked what he had seen. The child said a man in brown had come by and kept telling him to play out front. Shi Yuan immediately pressed him about the man's appearance, but a man watching from the roadside cut in first. "Did he have a scar by his mouth? That's what the Du Family's assistant looks like!"
The child hesitantly nodded.
Chen Xiuyuan stepped in front of the man and crouched facing the child.
"Before he said that, did you remember anything on the man's face?"
Clutching the straw rope, the child slowly shook his head.
"I was standing behind him. I only saw his clothes. When he turned around, I ran."
"Then just remember that."
The onlooker was displeased. "What's wrong with asking more clearly? How can a child remember everything all at once?"
"Put a few more words in his mouth, and he won't even be able to tell what he saw himself."
Chen Xiuyuan closed his notebook and asked the patrolman to move the gathering crowd back a little. The child's mother hurried over from the neighboring stall and first pulled him behind her. Only after hearing that he would not have to go along to identify anyone did she let him finish.
What the child remembered was that a passage behind the shed had been blocked while the cart was parked there. He normally took a shortcut through it, but that day he could not get through and had to go around the front. As for which day it had been, he could not tell.
Chen Xiuyuan thanked them and let mother and child return to their business. Shi Yuan followed him a few steps away, still somewhat unwilling to let it go.
"That's it?"
"He saw a cart beside the shed, and the porter said he received goods behind it. Keep what matches for now. As for what the man in brown looked like, ask someone else."
The porter led them around behind the shed and stopped beside a low door. Dragged baskets had left scrapes across the threshold. Empty crates were piled inside, with a blackened cloth hanging to one side.
"Here," he said. "That man carried the herbs out through this door."
Chen Xiuyuan saw a large basket outside the door. Only a broken cord remained where its wooden tag had hung from the handle. Auntie Sang had already returned from the medicine stall out front, holding two small bundles of roots.
"First, look at what they've put out for sale."
The sign on the stall read "Broken Stream Scarlet Whisker Root."
Auntie Sang placed the two bundles beneath the sign. One had long rootlets and dark root bark; the other looked thicker, but almost all its fine rootlets had been clipped off. The seller reached to take them back, but she pressed down on the basket rim.
"When I asked just now, you said these had all been freshly delivered from up there. When I asked which slope they were dug from, you said the north slope. Could roots this old be dug from the north slope at this time of year?"
The seller wiped his apron. "I don't dig them myself. They come to me under this name, so that's what I sell them as. Just because you say they aren't, does that mean they aren't?"
Auntie Sang untied the bundle of thick roots and pinched off a small piece of bark with her nail. The inside was white. She took the other bundle, the one with long rootlets, and pinched it open to reveal a faint red line.
"Call whoever you like, but first have someone who knows herbs examine them. The medicinal effect this can provide is a far cry from Scarlet Whisker Root."
The seller lowered his voice a little, but still said, "They're all medicinal roots. Sometimes different soil and water make them different colors."
Only then did Chen Xiuyuan speak. "Which cart delivered them?"
"So many carts come and go every day."
"I'm not asking about every day. Only this basket."
He had Shi Yuan stay behind the shed, then walked into the stall and showed the seller his drawing of the burned wooden tag. The patrolman still held the original; it was not placed on the counter covered in herb dust.
The seller glanced over the carved marks and immediately pointed to the bottom. "That's the 'kou' in South Entrance. That little bit at the top is missing. When carts come here, that's what's carved on their tags."
Chen Xiuyuan turned the notebook back and wrote down his words.
"You just said you didn't remember which cart."
"I remember the goods tag, not the cart. What's strange about that?"
As he spoke, the seller took an intact wooden tag from beside the basket. "South Entrance" was carved on it, with a cross on the back and a cord hole in a position similar to the broken tag's. The knife strokes varied in thickness; it was not something impossible to imitate. But by handing it over himself, he was at least willing to acknowledge that the goods had been loaded and unloaded through that location.
Chen Xiuyuan asked who had delivered the goods. At last, the seller gave a surname.
The Du Family.
Auntie Sang glanced at him without rushing to respond. She spread out the bundle of thick roots with clipped rootlets again and pointed out two genuine Scarlet Whisker Roots mixed among them. The outer layer had an attractive color, but the center of the bundle was filled with another, cheaper medicinal root.
"Was the batch sold to Blood Stone a few days ago like this too?"
"I didn't untie that batch. How would I know?"
"You handle these goods. There must be a tally of how much you take in and how much you sell," Chen Xiuyuan said. "Bring out the exchange accounts. We've brought the original bundle to check against the batch sent to Blood Stone."
The seller stepped back and said he did not have the accounts. Shi Yuan was just returning from the back door. Hearing this, he told the patrolman the unloading location he had noted. The porter stayed at a distance, and the patrolman went over to ask whether this was indeed the door, rather than publicly dragging him over to point anyone out.
Seeing them split up to verify the details, the seller finally lifted a corner of the counter covering and pulled a thin wooden board from beneath two layers of old cloth.
Most of the marks on the board were tallies, with a few heavily abbreviated names of goods. Auntie Sang followed the Scarlet Whisker Root column down and found that the previously returned bundle was included. The person who had exchanged it and the quantity exchanged matched the records brought from Blood Stone.
Chen Xiuyuan copied down the legible portions and asked the seller to read them aloud himself. When he reached the entry delivered by the Du Family, the seller paused, then finally stated the full quantity.
They kept a copy, while the patrolman watched over the original board. Chen Xiuyuan wrapped the two kinds of medicinal roots separately, without letting Auntie Sang first describe the differences identified here as proof that the entire cartload had been adulterated.
The sun had moved past the shed roof, and people at neighboring stalls began putting away leafy herbs that could not withstand the sun. The seller remained seated on an empty basket. Several times he wanted to speak, and at last he asked, "What is it you want-the medicine, or my stall?"
"Medicine that works," Auntie Sang said. "If you'd sold it honestly from the start, who would have touched your stall?"
Chen Xiuyuan looked at the drawing in his hand. The wooden tag connected to the unloading point, the porter's route led to this door, and the returned medicine bundle matched the stall's old accounts. They had yet to find the names of those people from Broken Stream, but the goods could no longer be easily shifted off this route.
He handed the medicine bundles to Auntie Sang and prepared to return to Blood Stone, first to have Elder Shi examine them, then to investigate the cart with the repaired shaft.
A pair of boots blocked the road ahead.
The newcomer wore a clean-washed gray-brown robe, with a flat medicine pouch hanging at his waist. Seeing him at the shed entrance, the seller immediately rose from the empty basket and called him Shopkeeper Du.
"Du Huai," the man gave his name to the patrolman. "I've done business here for some years. Anyone who doesn't know me can ask around."
He spoke amiably, but his eyes first fell on the two medicine bundles in Auntie Sang's hands.
"If the roots got mixed up, just come to me. I supply his goods. If something went wrong, naturally I should handle it. Why make such a fuss that he can't do business all day?"
"We're investigating the goods sent into Blood Stone, and Broken Stream," Chen Xiuyuan said.
Du Huai studied him for a while, then suddenly smiled. "You're the young man who came back with the herb-gatherers? I've heard about you. Escaping danger and bringing the wounded back with you-that takes ability."
He stepped half a pace aside, as though inviting them into the shed to sit, while his hand remained on the rim of a roadside basket.
"I know Blood Stone is short of medicine. Whether it's Scarlet Whisker Root or other wound medicines, I can lower the price on this batch. Auntie Sang, you know what the exchange rates used to be."
Auntie Sang did not go inside. "By how much?"
"Half."
A woman nearby who had come to exchange for medicine stopped in her tracks. Holding a cloth bundle, she had hesitated in front of the stall for a long time earlier. Now she could not help looking toward Auntie Sang.
Only then did Du Huai continue.
"You can choose the medicine, and we'll deliver the goods. But once we've settled this, stop going from place to place investigating that cart and those people. Business travels the old roads. If you investigate those roads until they turn cold, who will be willing to come afterward?"
Chen Xiuyuan tucked his medicinal herb notebook back inside his robe.
"If the medicine costs half as much, will those arrows at Broken Stream be halved too?"
The smile faded from Du Huai's face. He pressed a hand against his medicine pouch and said slowly, "Think about the people waiting for medicine before you answer me."