Chapter 1005 — The Helian Commission

CHAPTER 1005

The Helian Commission

“He ran up the chain! A chain of fire, hanging in the sky, and he ran up it like a staircase!”

The storyteller in the Warm Pelt teahouse slapped his table so hard the teacups jumped. It was the third storyteller in Beiling that week to tell the Inkwater fight, and the third one to make the chain longer.

“How long was it this time?” a fur trader shouted from the back.

“A hundred paces!” the storyteller said.

“Yesterday Old Liu said fifty!”

“Old Liu wasn’t there!” the storyteller said. “Neither was I, but my wife’s cousin rows a ferry!”

Shi Feng sat in the corner with a bowl of mutton noodles and his hat pulled low, and ate. The noodles were good. Nobody looked twice at a young man in a plain dark robe with his left arm held a little stiffly, because everyone in the room was looking at the storyteller.

“They say he’s an alchemist,” a hunter said to his friend at the next table. “A 6 Mark. The Pavilion’s own.”

“An alchemist who kills bandit chiefs?” his friend said. “Since when do alchemists do that?”

“Since this one,” the hunter said.

Shi Feng finished his noodles, paid, and went back to the tower. Qin Wuyan was waiting at the gate. So was Helian Ba.

Helian Ba stood in the tower courtyard in a bearskin coat with his great axe slung across his back, and the moment he saw Shi Feng he threw his head back and laughed so loudly that two tower servants dropped what they were carrying.

“Master Shi!” Helian Ba boomed. “The whole north is talking about you! I came to Beiling to find you, and I didn’t even have to ask where you were. Every teahouse in the city told me!”

“Every teahouse in the city has the chain at a different length,” Shi Feng said. “Which one did you believe?”

“The longest!” Helian Ba said. “It’s the best story!”

He laughed again. Then he stopped laughing, took a red card from inside his coat, and held it out with both hands and a proper bow. The card had the Helian seal on it, a white axe on a black field.

“This is a formal request, Guest Elder,” Helian Ba said, his voice lower now. “From my clan master, Helian Tieshan, to the Sky Pavilion’s guest. My uncle, Helian Dun, was struck by bandits nine days ago on the caravan road. He’s late Shattering Void, and he’s rotting from the wound. Our alchemists have fed him every 5 Mark healing pill in the Hold. The flesh closes. Then it rots open again.” He swallowed. “He’s my father’s younger brother. He taught me to hold an axe.”

Shi Feng read the card, then looked at Helian Ba. The big man’s voice had shaken when he spoke about his uncle. This wasn’t a visit to boast about another fight.

“Let’s go,” Shi Feng said.

Iron Glacier Hold lay a day’s hard sledge ride east of Beiling, a black stone fortress built against a wall of blue ice. The Helian came out onto the walls to watch the Pavilion’s guest arrive. Last time he’d come, he’d been a mid Shattering Void stranger with a duel to fight on their lake. This time the clan’s warriors lined the gate road and bowed as the sledge went past.

Helian Tieshan met him in the hall. The clan master was a huge grey-bearded man with a deep, rough voice, and he didn’t waste it on greetings.

“Through here,” Helian Tieshan said.

Helian Dun lay on a fur-covered bed in a side room that smelled of herbs and something worse. He was a big man gone thin. His eyes were open, and he knew who had come in.

“The Pavilion’s boy,” Helian Dun said hoarsely. “Ba said you’d come.”

“He came straight to me, Senior Helian,” Shi Feng said, kneeling beside the bed. “Let me see the wound.”

He drew back the fur. Across Helian Dun’s left side, from the bottom rib to the hip, ran a line as thin as a hair and perfectly black. The flesh around it was grey for three fingers' width on each side. The grey had a faint sheen, and it was spreading. On the edges, where the healing pills had worked, new pink skin had grown over the grey, and the grey had already started eating it again.

Shi Feng looked at it once and understood.

“This isn’t a cut,” Shi Feng said. “It’s a seam.”

“A what?” Helian Tieshan asked.

“A palm struck him and tore space inside his body, and left the tear open,” Shi Feng said. “The rot isn’t in the flesh. It lives in the seam. Every pill you gave him healed the flesh, and the seam rotted it again. You could feed him healing pills for a hundred years and it would never close. No ordinary 5 Mark pill closes a hole in space.”

The Helian alchemists standing at the wall went pale. One of them looked at the floor.

“Then he’s dead,” Helian Tieshan said heavily, and his big hands closed on his knees.

“No,” Shi Feng said. “He needs a pill that carries a fold inside it. Something that can go into the seam and stitch the tear shut from the inside. A Seam-Closing Pill.”

“Can you make one?” Helian Ba asked.

“I can,” Shi Feng said. “It’s a 5 Mark pill, but it needs nine clouds folded into the cauldron while it forms, the way I did at my sitting. It will take a day. Give me your furnace hall, and tell your clan they can watch from the walls if they like.”

He looked at Helian Dun. The old warrior was staring at him.

“You’ll be on your feet by month’s end,” Shi Feng told Helian Dun firmly. “Hold on until tomorrow. Ba didn’t bring me here to watch you give up.”

Helian Dun laughed until he coughed.