My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 97: The Information Seller's Empty Stall
The information seller's stall stood empty for four days before anyone in the market thought to remark on it, and even then the remarking came sideways, a fruit vendor complaining to no one in particular that she'd have to find some other source for gossip worth trading now that old Chen had apparently decided to stop showing up.
Li Fan had crossed paths with the man perhaps a dozen times over the years, never buying anything directly — he'd long since learned to treat paid information the same way he treated any other unverified rumor, worth noting, never worth trusting outright — but he'd watched Chen work his corner of the market often enough to recognize the shape of an absence that wasn't simply illness or a poor week's trade. The man's stall sat exactly as he'd left it, canvas still stretched taut over its frame, a single overturned stool the only sign anything had changed at all.
He mentioned it to Old Mu that evening, the same habit of shared market texture that had carried them through every other season's small disturbances.
"Chen." Old Mu turned the name over with a frown, setting his oil rag aside. "The corrupt one. The one you told me about years back, feeding false leads to whoever paid enough to hear them." He shook his head slowly. "A man like that collects enemies the way this shop collects sawdust. Could be anyone finally decided they'd had enough of his prices."
"Could be," Li Fan agreed, though something in the timing sat uneasily against everything else he'd been quietly cataloguing these past months. Chen had specialized, precisely, in the sort of information that never should have left a sect's own confidential records — the same category of leak Li Fan had spent an entire evening, years ago now, reasoning his way toward as the only explanation for how hired blades had ever connected his own name to a sealed pouch's contents. A man who traded in exactly that kind of information going suddenly, completely silent was not, on its own, proof of anything. But it was one more thread pulled loose at precisely the moment several others had already begun fraying.
He walked past the records office two days later, an errand that required no real detour from his usual route, and found the old sweeper dusting shelves with the particular slow care his unsteady hands now demanded of every task.
"You'll have heard about Chen," the sweeper said, before Li Fan had asked anything at all, his voice pitched low enough that the words carried no further than the space between them. "Whole market's heard by now. What the market hasn't heard is that his stall wasn't the only one." He set his dusting cloth down, and looked at Li Fan with an attention sharper than his failing hands suggested he still possessed. "Two others, out past the eastern gate. Smaller operations, less known, the kind of men who traded only with regular customers and never advertised what they were selling to anyone new. Both gone quiet the same week Chen did."
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"Gone how."
"One simply vanished, same as Chen. Shop shuttered, no note, no word to family." The old man's voice dropped further still. "The other was found. In the canal, past the tanning quarter, three days after anyone last saw him walking. The city watch called it a robbery gone wrong and closed the matter before the week was out." He shook his head slowly. "Convenient, that. A robber who leaves a man's coin purse untouched on his own belt while drowning him in four feet of water."
Li Fan sat with that a long moment, the sweeper's shelves forgotten between them, turning the detail over the same careful way he turned over anything that refused to fit an easy explanation.
Three information sellers, silenced within the same narrow window, one of them dead in a manner the city watch had been remarkably quick to dismiss. Men who traded specifically in the kind of knowledge that moved between sect records and outside ears — the exact category of leak that had, by his own reasoning years ago, put a dying stranger's information into hands that had gone on to kill for it.
He didn't say any of that aloud to the sweeper. There was no benefit in handing an old man a weight he had no way to set back down, and no proof yet solid enough to justify the alarm such a theory would create. He thanked him for the tonic's return favor of information, left a fresh paper of the warming brew on the shelf beside him, and walked back toward the carving quarter with his own thoughts considerably heavier than the errand had originally required.
He said nothing of it to Old Mu that evening, the first time in longer than he could easily remember that he'd deliberately withheld a piece of the market's texture rather than sharing it freely between them. Some threads, he'd learned, were better carried alone until they'd finished revealing their shape, and this one — dead informants, a false rumor about an unopened pouch, a dragon-marked sighting that matched a decade-old memory too precisely to dismiss — had not yet finished revealing anything he trusted himself to explain without sounding like a man inventing conspiracy from nothing but coincidence and old fear.
He sat beneath the plum tree that night and let the Primordial Breath settle slower than usual again, his attention only half given to the cultivation itself. Someone was cleaning a trail. Not loudly, not carelessly — three quiet disappearances and one drowning dressed up as robbery were not the work of anyone reckless. Whoever was doing it understood exactly how to make a silenced man look like nothing more than an ordinary casualty of an ordinary city, the same patient, careful work Li Fan himself had spent years learning to recognize precisely because he'd spent years practicing its opposite.
He didn't know yet whether any of it pointed toward him specifically. He suspected, sitting there with the koi moving slow beneath the dark water, that suspecting wasn't the same as knowing, and that the only honest thing left to do was keep watching more carefully than he had before, and trust that whatever was moving beneath the city's ordinary surface would eventually surface far enough for him to see its actual shape.
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