Payable Upon Return

Zhongli had forgotten his coin purse again, which was not news. What was news, Childe realized as the waiter at Xinyue Kiosk set down the bill with the delicate reluctance of a man handling a live firecracker, was that this time Zhongli had done it on purpose. "You checked your sleeve," Childe said. Zhongli lifted his teacup. "I did." "You checked your sleeve before we sat down. I watched you. You looked in there like you were confirming the weather." Childe leaned back on the bench until it creaked. Below the kiosk's railing, Liyue Harbor did its evening work: lanterns coming on one by one along Feiyun Slope, a porter swearing at a cart wheel, the smell of frying oil and salt and the faint mineral sweetness of glaze lilies someone was selling cheap before closing. "Which means you knew it wasn't there." "An astute observation." "So you came out to dinner, with me, knowing you couldn't pay." "I came out to dinner with you," Zhongli agreed, "knowing that I would not pay. The distinction is worth preserving." Childe laughed, because the alternative was to say something he would regret, and paid. He always paid. It had started as part of the job, back when the Tsaritsa's orders and the Gnosis and the whole elaborate theatre of the Rite of Descension had sat between them like a third diner. Feed the consultant, flatter the consultant, keep the consultant talking. He had kept a ledger in his head of every mora he spent on Zhongli and had taken a certain pride in how fast the number climbed. It had felt like progress. Then the theatre had ended, and the god had come down from the stage and turned out to be the man sitting across from him, and the ledger had stopped meaning anything. Childe kept paying anyway. Nobody had told him to stop, and he hadn't wanted to find out what would happen if he did. They walked down toward the water afterward because that was what they did. Zhongli moved through the harbor like a man reading a book he had written a very long time ago, pausing at a stall to tell the owner her scales were miscalibrated by roughly the weight of one cor lapis, stopping again to look at a carving of the Adeptus Rex Lapis on a shop sign. The carving gave him a beard and a scowl. He regarded it with the polite interest of someone viewing a cousin's poor portrait. "Does that ever get strange?" Childe asked. "Which part?" "Walking past yourself." Zhongli considered it seriously, as he considered everything. "It was never myself," he said. "It was what they needed me to be. I find I am fond of it, the way one might be fond of an old coat that no longer fits." They reached the pier at the bottom of the stairs. The tide was going out. The Jade Chamber had been gone from the sky above the harbor for months now, but Childe still caught himself looking for it, the way his tongue still went hunting for a tooth he'd lost at fourteen. He had been putting this off all evening. All week, if he was honest. He sat down on the edge of the pier with his boots over the water and said it to the water instead. "I got a letter from Snezhnaya." Zhongli did not sit. He stood beside him, hands folded behind his back, the hem of his coat lifting a little in the wind off the sea. "New orders?" he asked. "Something like that. I'm to report back. Not forever, probably. The Harbingers aren't really built for forever." Childe smiled at the water. "But long enough that the Northland Bank will have to remember how to run without me, which they'll manage, frankly, a lot better than they'd admit." "When?" "Three days. There's a ship north on the morning tide." He waited for Zhongli to say something measured and wise. Something about the turning of seasons, the inevitable partings that a contract anticipates. He'd heard Zhongli talk about partings before, in that warm, unhurried voice that made grief sound like weather a sensible person dressed for. Childe had always found it soothing in the abstract and maddening in the specific. He did not want to be anticipated. He wanted, just once, to be a surprise. "Ah," Zhongli said. "Then I have miscalculated." Childe looked up. Zhongli was looking out at the harbor, not at him, and there was something in the line of his jaw that Childe had seen exactly once before: in the Golden House, the moment the Gnosis changed hands and the long pretense finally fell away. A careful, deliberate stillness, like a man stepping onto ice he isn't sure will hold. "I left my purse at Wangsheng tonight," Zhongli said, "because Hu Tao has lately been teaching me about the uses of debt." "Oh, Archons," Childe said. "That can't be good." "She is very persuasive. Her position is that a debt is the most reliable thread in the world. A friend may drift, a lover may tire, a family may scatter to the four nations. But a person who owes you will always, eventually, return to settle it, if only to be rid of you." Zhongli paused. "She meant it about funeral payments. I took a broader lesson." The wind shifted. Somewhere behind them a wok hissed, and a child laughed, and the tide pulled at the pilings with a long patient sound. "You've been doing it on purpose," Childe said slowly. "Not just tonight." "Not just tonight." "How long?" Zhongli finally looked at him. In the lantern light his eyes were the color of old amber. "Since the Rite," he said. "Before it, the forgetting was sincere. I am genuinely poor at remembering mora, having spent most of my existence as its source. But afterward, when I understood you would stay in Liyue only as long as your orders allowed, I began to think it would be wise to give you a reason to come back that did not depend on the Tsaritsa." Childe's mouth had gone dry. "You were running up a tab." "I was running up a tab," Zhongli agreed, with the faint, pleased air of a scholar who has finally been understood. "It is considerable. I have kept an exact account." "Of course you have." "Four hundred and twelve thousand, six hundred mora, as of this evening. Including the tea, which was overpriced. The leaves were Qingce, but they had been stored near the ginger." Childe started laughing again, and this time it wasn't to cover anything. It shook out of him, helpless and a little ragged, until he had to put his forehead against his knee. Four hundred thousand. The God of Contracts, the oldest of the Seven, the Prime of the Adepti, had sat across from him over a hundred dinners and done arithmetic. "You could have just asked," he said when he could breathe. "You know that, right? You could have said, Childe, I'd like you to come back. I'd have come back. I'd have swum back." "I know," Zhongli said quietly. "But I have made a great many promises, over six thousand years, and watched a great many of them outlive the people I made them to. I wanted something sturdier than asking. I wanted something with terms." He reached into his coat. Not the empty sleeve; the inner pocket, over his heart. He drew out a folded sheet of paper and a small square seal carved from something dark and glossy, and when he crouched down on the pier beside Childe, Childe saw that the seal was not jade but stone, plain brown Liyue stone, the kind you could pick up anywhere on Mt. Tianheng. "Hold out your hand." Childe did. Zhongli unfolded the paper across his palm. It was written in the old formal script, the strokes so precise they looked printed, and at the bottom, beneath the sum, there was a single clause that Childe had to read twice. The debt above shall be settled in person, and in no other way, by the debtor and the creditor together, at a table of the debtor's choosing in Liyue Harbor. It shall not be forgiven. It shall not expire. Debtor: Zhongli of Wangsheng Funeral Parlor. Creditor: Tartaglia, Eleventh of the Fatui Harbingers. "I'm the creditor," Childe said. His voice came out strange. "So I could just forgive it. Tear this up on the ship and call us even." "Read it again." He read it again. It shall not be forgiven. It shall not expire. Settled in person, at a table of the debtor's choosing. "So I have to come back," Childe said, "and you pay." "I will pay," Zhongli said. "With my own mora, which I will by then have learned to carry. And the next time I will pay again, and the time after that, until the sum is retired, which by my estimate will take some years, given my salary and your appetite." He pressed the stone seal into the bottom corner of the page. Childe felt the faint warmth of it through the paper, a hum like a struck bell heard from very far away. Where the seal lifted, the mark it left was gold. "That's binding," Childe said. "Isn't it. That's not a joke contract. That's a real one." "I do not make the other kind." Childe looked at the gold mark for a long time. Then he folded the paper along its creases, slowly, and tucked it inside his jacket, next to the letter from Snezhnaya. "The Tsaritsa might have something to say about this," he said. "She is welcome to raise it with me." Zhongli's tone did not change, but something moved behind it, the way a mountain shifts by a hair and the whole valley feels it. "She will find that I honor my contracts above all things. Even the inconvenient ones. Especially those." Childe stood. His legs were not quite steady. He offered Zhongli a hand up, and Zhongli took it, which he did not need to do, and did not let go when he was standing, which he also did not need to do. "Three days," Childe said. "Three days," Zhongli said. "And then however many it takes." They stood on the pier while the last of the light went out over the water. Up on the slope, Xinyue Kiosk was stacking its chairs. Childe thought about the ledger he used to keep, the one that measured progress in what he had spent, and how stupid it had been, how backwards, to think that anyone was counting but him. "You owe me dinner," he said. "I owe you a great many dinners," Zhongli said, "and I intend to be very slow about it."