Chapter 1004 — Alive, Hands Unharmed

CHAPTER 1004

Alive, Hands Unharmed

The eighth link flew and nailed the air at his feet.

Shi Feng knelt on the ice with his left arm wrapped in the chain and his shoulder hanging wrong. Seven anchors hummed around him. The space inside the ring was so stiff he could barely draw a breath through it. One more, and the ring would close.

He didn’t look at the ninth link. He looked at the seventh, the one wrapped round his arm.

It was black void-iron, forged by someone who knew what he was doing. But it was still iron. And iron could be heated.

He put his right palm flat on the links round his forearm and struck the Second Anvil Fire.

Clang!

The first beat went into the chain. The links went red. Yao Chenggu, ten paces away on the ice, frowned and pulled harder, and Shi Feng’s shoulder screamed.

Clang! Clang!

He kept striking. The Second Anvil Fire ran in its count, nine beats and a rest, and every beat poured more heat into the chain. Red became orange. Orange became white. The ice under his knees melted, and steam boiled up round him.

On the ninth beat the links stopped being solid. They sagged and ran, glowing, and the chain round his arm turned into a long bright stream of molten iron, still hanging in the air, still joined to the anchor and to Yao Chenggu’s wrist.

Yao Chenggu’s face changed.

“You’re melting my—” Yao Chenggu began.

Molten iron flowed. And Riverless Step at Perfection walked on anything that flowed.

Shi Feng shook his arm free of the stream, stood up on it, and ran.

He didn’t run toward Yao Chenggu. He ran up the bright stream into the air, toward the seventh anchor where it hung in its small black rift above the ice. Below him the ferrymen were screaming.

“He’s running on it! He’s running on the chain!”

“It’s on fire! The chain’s on fire and he’s on it!”

He’d felt it the moment the first anchor struck. Every anchor sat in a rift, and every rift hummed in the same note. They weren’t nine separate holes. They were nine mouths of one tunnel, all opening back to the place where the chain began, inside Yao Chenggu’s sleeve. That was how Yao Chenggu felt each anchor and moved it. It was also the one way in.

At the top of the stream, Shi Feng turned the grey Sword point-down and let it fall into the seventh anchor’s rift.

Falling Star Sword didn’t need a sky to fall from. Any opening would do.

The sword dropped into the rift with him behind it, and came out of the place where the chain began.

Yao Chenggu looked down. The grey Sword stood out of his chest, a hand’s breadth below his collarbone, and Shi Feng’s right hand was on the hilt.

“That’s…” Yao Chenggu said. “That’s my…”

“It’s your door,” Shi Feng said. “You left it open.”

He pulled the sword out. Yao Chenggu sat down on the ice. The anchors fell out of the air one after another and rang on the ice, and the space round the landing loosened all at once.

The Nineteenth Elder of the Heavenly Sect toppled sideways and didn’t move again.

For a long moment, nobody on either bank said anything.

Then the ferrymen started shouting all at once.

“He’s dead! The bandit chief’s dead!”

“A Shattering Void bandit chief, and he killed him on one arm!”

“Did you see how old he was? He’s a boy!”

“He’s the Pavilion’s guest. The 6 Mark. My cousin said he was in Shuoyang…”

“…”

Shi Feng sat down on the snow beside the body, took hold of his own left wrist, braced his foot against his ribs and pulled. The shoulder went back in with a crack. He sat very still for a while afterwards, sweating in the cold.

Qin Wuyan came down the landing and stood over him.

“That chain was harder to deal with than its owner,” Shi Feng said, breathing carefully. “The moment it melted, he couldn’t stop me.”

An hour later, fifty horsemen in grey northern armour rode in from the west. Their commander was a lean, weathered man with a frost-burned face, and he swung down from his horse and bowed to the Pavilion grey before he even looked at the body.

“Wei Changhe, commander of the Ninth Beacon Fort,” Wei Changhe said. “The county sent for us yesterday. We came as fast as horses can come. Guest Elder, are you hurt?”

“I was,” Shi Feng said. “I’m less hurt now.”

Wei Changhe looked at the body, at the melted iron cooling on the ice, and at the nine anchors lying in a ring. Then he took a board from his saddle and wrote on it in a few strokes, without asking a single question.

Shi Feng read it upside down. Bandit chief, slain by the Pavilion’s guest.

“That’s what you’re writing?” Shi Feng asked.

“That’s what the north writes, Guest Elder,” Wei Changhe said, and put the board away. “The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away. Anything else causes trouble further south. A man in my post learns not to cause trouble further south.”

Qin Wuyan searched the body. He came back with two things in his palm. The first was a flat token of grey bone, the same as the deacon’s at Red Post, except this one had a number cut into it. Nineteen.

The second was a slip of paper, folded small. Shi Feng opened it.

It was an order, written in a clean hand, and it had only four words on it.

Alive. Hands unharmed.

Shi Feng stared at the order, angry and disgusted. He flexed both hands; the left still hurt. Yao Chenggu had burned a village and abducted its people to draw an alchemist into chains.

“They want your hands,” Qin Wuyan said.

“They want me refining for them,” Shi Feng said coldly. “He could dislocate my shoulder as long as he didn’t ruin my hands. That was his order.”

Across the landing, among the ferrymen, a young man in a plain blue scholar’s robe was writing very fast in a small book. He had a Tianji Mansion seal on his belt.

Shi Feng folded the order and put it in his sleeve beside the grey sash.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said. “I’d like to go back to Beiling now. I think I’ve earned a hot bath.”