Chapter 15: The Trader's Son

The trader Ruan's house stood on the east canal, a tall narrow merchant's house of two floors with a shop front below and living rooms above, and somebody had walled up its windows from the inside. Ming stopped on the canal path and looked up at it. The low winter sun lay full on the house front. The shop shutters were closed. On the upper floor, where there should have been two lattice windows with paper panes, there were two squares of stacked stones, fitted together as carefully as a garden wall and plastered over with gray mud. The mud had been smoothed flat. In the sunlight she could see the long sweeping marks where somebody had smoothed it, again and again, with the flat of a blade. "She did that herself," said Nine, beside her. He had said almost nothing since the temple. "With a kitchen cleaver, I should…