Chapter 1001 — Numbered

CHAPTER 1001

Numbered

The keeper of the Red Post waystation had lit every lamp he owned.

There were nineteen of them, hung along the eaves, over the gate and on poles in the yard, and he kept them burning all night. Shi Feng woke twice to the sound of him going round with an oil jar, muttering. The second time it was close to dawn, and the man was nearly crying.

“Uncle,” Shi Feng said from the window. “The lamps won’t stop them.”

“I know that, Honoured Guest!” the keeper said, clutching his jar. “This old fellow knows that! But Bitter Willow was dark when they came. Everybody says so. If my lamps are lit, maybe they’ll think somebody’s awake and go somewhere else!”

The keeper went to the next lamp. Shi Feng didn’t argue. The man was terrified and had no other way to protect his waystation. Telling him again would only make the fear worse.

Nothing came in the night. Qin Wuyan sat by the door of their room with his eyes closed and didn’t sleep, and Shi Feng slept with his back to the wall, as he’d been told.

In the morning the keeper screamed.

Shi Feng was out of the window and in the yard before the scream ended. The keeper was on his knees in the snow by the gate, his oil jar broken beside him. Above him, from the crossbeam of the gate post, hung a man.

He hung by a grey rope round his chest, not his neck. His head lolled forward. He wore a grey robe with grey sleeves, and across his chest someone had tied a wide grey sash. Stitched on the sash in black thread, big enough to read from across the yard, was one word.

Nineteen.

“Who is it? Who is it?” the keeper babbled, scrambling backwards. “Is it the bandits? Did the bandits hang a bandit?”

“Go inside, Uncle,” Shi Feng said. “Boil some water.”

The keeper went, gratefully.

Shi Feng drew the grey Sword and cut the rope. He caught the body with his good arm and laid it on the snow. The dead man was perhaps forty, plain-faced, with ink on his fingers and no wound anywhere. His aura was gone, but the frame of it was still in his meridians, and Shi Feng could read the frame. Deity Transformation. A deacon.

He opened the dead man’s mouth. Grey ash lay under the tongue.

Qin Wuyan stood at his shoulder.

“Their own,” Qin Wuyan said.

“Their own,” Shi Feng agreed.

He searched the robe. In the sleeve was a deacon’s token, a flat disc of grey bone with a plain mark cut into it and no number. He turned it over and laid it beside the sash.

“This man was a deacon of the Heavenly Sect,” Shi Feng said. “A deacon carries a token with no number on it. Deacons run errands. They buy witnesses, they hire takers, they burn a waystation and lay ash on the doorsteps. Every man the Sect has sent at me since Tianjing was a deacon, or someone a deacon paid.” He touched the black stitching on the sash. “Deacons don’t wear numbers. Elders do.”

“Nineteen,” Qin Wuyan said.

“The Sect killed its own deacon and hung him where I’d see him,” Shi Feng said. “The deacons failed. So they’re done with deacons. The next one who comes will be the Nineteenth Elder, and he wants me to know his number before he arrives.”

Qin Wuyan said nothing for a while. Then he nodded once.

The keeper came out with a pot of hot water, saw the body on the snow, and nearly dropped it.

“Honoured Guest,” the keeper said, shaking. “That gate post. I can’t keep that gate post. Nobody will stop at a waystation where a man was hung on the gate. I’ll have to cut it down and put up a new one, and the wood has to come up from the south, and a new post costs…”

He stopped, because he’d just remembered who he was talking to.

“How much?” Shi Feng asked.

“Four silver,” the keeper said. “With the carpenter. Five, if it’s pine.”

Shi Feng put six silver in his hand.

“Make it pine,” Shi Feng said. “The extra is for burying him behind your stable. He worked for the people who killed him, but I’m not leaving his body on your gate.”

The keeper looked at the six silver, then at the body, then at the young man who had just paid for both, and bowed so low that his hat fell off.

Shi Feng untied the grey sash, folded it and put it inside his sleeve. He didn’t put it in his ring. He wanted to feel it there.

When the keeper had gone to find a spade, he sat on the waystation’s step with his small private book on his knee. He turned past the tally from Hanli ridge, and past Lotus Gate, and past the page from Shuoyang where he’d written the three things on his list. Two of them had been crossed out. The third, a dead man who reported to someone, he’d left alone.

He wet the brush and wrote two lines underneath.

Court: closed.

Knife: next.

He looked at them for a while. Then he blew on the ink, closed the book, and stood up. The road north was white and empty, and somewhere on it, a man with a number was walking toward him.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said. “Let’s go and deliver the Yelü their order.”

Qin Wuyan was already at the gate.

[Mark: 6 | Note: the deacons are done.]