She lived outside the city walls in a house that had decided a long time ago it was done being impressive.
The walls had gone the grey of old wood left in rain for decades. The garden was overgrown in a way that looked accidental until you looked closer and realized every plant in it was medicinal, arranged by drainage pattern and sunlight exposure with the precision of someone who had thought carefully about what they were doing and then let it look like they hadn't. A scholar's garden. The kind that took thirty years to build and looked like neglect.
He knocked.
Nothing. He knocked again.
"I heard you the first time," said a voice from inside. "I'm deciding if I want to answer."
He waited.
The door opened.
Luo Weishan was perhaps seventy, perhaps older, the kind of age that stopped being countable and became simply present. She was small, straight-backed, with silver hair pinned in a style that had been fashionable forty years ago and she had not updated since because she had clearly decided it was fine and had better things to think about. She looked at Yevhan with dark eyes that had the specific quality of eyes that had been reading things for a very long time and were now reading him.
"You're younger than I expected," she said.
"You were expecting me," he said.
"Shou Pei said he'd found someone eventually. He was optimistic that way." She stepped back from the door. "Come in. You'll want tea."
It wasn't a question.
The inside of the house was the garden continued, dense and organized by a logic that revealed itself slowly. Shelves of scrolls. A worktable covered in formation diagrams. The smell of dried herbs and old ink and the particular dusty warmth of a space that had been lived in seriously for a long time.
She made tea without asking what he wanted and put a cup in front of him and sat across the table and looked at him.
"Tell me what you found," she said.
He told her. All of it. The slip, the archive, the western wall, what the archive said about the Assembly's founding and the system they'd built and what it had replaced. He spoke for a long time and she listened without interrupting, her tea going cold in her hands, her expression not changing except around the eyes where something moved that he recognized as the particular emotion of hearing confirmed what you have spent your life believing.
When he finished she was quiet for a while.
"Forty-two years," she said finally. "Shou Pei and I started this together. He was the formation scholar. I was the historian. We found the same evidence from different directions and arrived at the same conclusion and spent the next four decades trying to prove it." She set down her cup. "He always believed the archive existed. I believed him. I wasn't certain until right now."
"I need your historical research," Yevhan said. "Everything you and Shou Pei built. The archive has the technical knowledge but the historical record of what the Assembly did and when is what makes it legible to people who aren't formation scholars."
"I know what you need it for." She stood and went to the shelves, ran a finger along the scroll spines with the ease of someone who knew exactly where everything was. "I've been organizing it for fifteen years in case someone came."
She pulled three scrolls and set them on the table.
"There's a condition," she said.
"I know," he said. "Your granddaughter."
She looked at him. "Shou Pei told you."
"The slip. The last fragment." He met her eyes. "I'll do what I can. I can't promise she stays out of it entirely because I don't know what she'll choose. But I won't bring her in deliberately."
Luo Weishan looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, the nod of someone accepting terms they know are the best available.
"Her name is Luo Qingse," she said. "She comes home in ten days." A pause. "She's going to figure out what you are on her own. She's very sharp."
"I've been told I hide it well," Yevhan said.
"You do," said Luo Weishan. "She'll see through it anyway. She gets that from me."
She pushed the scrolls across the table.
He picked them up and felt their weight and thought about forty-two years of two people working toward a truth from different directions and only one of them making it to this conversation.
"He walked past my stall every week for a month," Yevhan said. "Before he spoke to me."
"That sounds like him." Her voice was even. "He was careful about important things." A pause that had grief in it, not performed, just present. "He would be glad it was you."
Yevhan tucked the scrolls inside his coat and stood.
"I'll come back," he said. "When there's more to report."
"I know you will," she said, and went back to her tea like the conversation was finished, which it was.
He walked back to the city with three scrolls and the specific weight of having inherited something from two people, one dead and one still working, who had spent longer on this than he'd been alive.
He was going to make it mean something.
End of Chapter 16