Chapter 1015 — The North Talks

CHAPTER 1015

The North Talks

“Three bandit chiefs!” the storyteller cried, and slapped his wooden block on the table. “Three, in ten days! And who killed them? One alchemist!”

The teahouse under the Sky Pavilion tower in Beiling was packed to the walls, with porters standing on the benches at the back. The storyteller was a fat man with a thin beard, and he’d clearly told this story six times already that morning.

“At Inkwater Ferry, the Nineteenth, with chains that nailed the very sky in place!” the storyteller cried. “At Bitter Wind Gorge, the Eighteenth, whose palm rotted the air! And at Eastreed, inside the Serene Jade’s own lands, the Seventeenth, with an arm of black iron! And the alchemist walked straight through a house full of dead air and came out the other side with his sword in his hand!”

The room roared.

Shi Feng sat at the corner table by the window with a pot of tea and listened. His lungs still burned when he breathed deep, so he breathed shallow. It had been two days. By tonight, it would be gone.

“Is it true he’s a 6 Mark?” a porter shouted.

“True as the sun!” the storyteller said. “A 6 Mark of the Sky Pavilion, and eighth on the Tianxing besides!”

“Then why is he killing bandits? Shouldn’t he be making pills?”

“Because the bandits keep coming for him, fool! A tall tree catches the wind!” the storyteller said.

The room laughed. Shi Feng drank his tea.

A young man in a plain blue scholar’s robe got up from a table near the stairs and came over to his corner. He had ink on his fingers and a slim book under his arm. He bowed very correctly.

“Elder Shi,” the young scribe said. “This humble one is a scribe of the Tianji Mansion. Forgive the intrusion. The Mansion would be honoured to record the guest elder’s own account of the Eastreed fight, for the accuracy of its issues.”

“The storyteller’s doing a fine job,” Shi Feng said.

“The storyteller says you came out of a wall,” the young scribe said politely.

“I did come out of a wall,” Shi Feng said.

The young scribe waited with his brush ready. Shi Feng calmly drank his tea; he wasn’t going to explain his spatial art in a crowded teahouse.

After a while the young scribe understood he wasn’t going to get anything more. He bowed again, just as correctly, and turned to go back to his table.

“Your tea’s on me,” Shi Feng said, and put two coppers on the table. “Have a cup before you go.”

The young scribe looked at the coppers. Then he picked them up, bowed a third time and went back to his table, where he opened his slim book and wrote something down anyway.

Shi Feng paid his own bill and went back to Northwind House.

The front hall was full of boxes.

There were lacquer boxes, a crate of spirit-iron bars, two rolls of snow-lynx fur, a jade horse as tall as a child and a long red case with a gold clasp. Tong Xian stood in the middle of them with the house ledger open, writing.

“From the Yelü,” Tong Xian said without looking up, and pointed with her brush. “The Chunyu. Two timber houses from the east road. A salt clan from the lakes. Eleven houses in all. They came while you were at tea.”

“Any letters?” Shi Feng asked.

“Every one of them,” Tong Xian said. “They all say the same thing. Gratitude for the guest elder’s protection of the north. Hope for a long friendship.”

“And a commission later,” Shi Feng said.

“They don’t say that,” Tong Xian said.

“They don’t have to,” Shi Feng said. He picked up the red case, looked inside at a pair of jade cups, and put it down again. “Send them all back. Every box. Put a copy of my price list on top of each one.”

Tong Xian’s brush stopped.

“A price list, Master Shi?” Tong Xian asked.

“If a house wants to give me something, it can buy something,” Shi Feng said. “Then nobody owes anybody, and nobody in Tianjing can say the north is buying a princess’s guest.”

Tong Xian understood the danger at once. Accepting these gifts would give his enemies something to use against him. She began listing the return addresses.

“I’ll have the porters here by noon,” Tong Xian said.

She’d barely closed the ledger when the street outside went quiet.

Through the open door Shi Feng watched the people in the street step back toward the walls on both sides, one after another, without knowing why.

At the inner door, Qin Wuyan took his hands out of his sleeves.

A tall old man in a dark brown robe walked in from the street alone. He had a square grey beard and big, square hands, and on his breast was the Myriad Marrow Sect’s emblem, a white bone crossed with a green branch. He was holding his pressure in, very carefully and very politely, but there was a great deal of it to hold. It was Profound Heaven.

He looked at Qin Wuyan first and gave him a slight nod, one Profound Heaven cultivator to another. Then he turned to Shi Feng and bowed.

“Shang Hong of the Myriad Marrow Sect’s northern branch,” the old man said. His voice was deep and slow. “Elder Shi, forgive me for coming without a card. A man who needs a doctor shouldn’t wait for the right day.”

“Elder Shang,” Shi Feng said, and returned the bow. “What do you need?”

“A Profound Marrow Pill,” Shang Hong said.

Tong Xian was startled. The ledger slipped in her hands, and she caught it against her chest.

A Profound Marrow Pill was a 6 Mark pill. A Profound Heaven cultivator’s inner heaven rested on the marrow of his bones, and when the marrow thinned with age, the inner heaven shrank with it. The pill thickened the marrow again. Only a handful of men on the continent could make it.

“The herbs are mine,” Shang Hong said. “Three million, for the refining.”

“Three million,” Shi Feng agreed. “And I keep the residue.”

Shang Hong looked at him for a moment, and then the corners of his beard moved.

“Keep the residue,” Shang Hong said. “When can you begin?”

“Tomorrow at dawn,” Shi Feng said. “Here, in the furnace room. It’ll take a day.”

The old man’s face, which had stayed calm through everything so far, finally changed.

“A day?” Shang Hong asked, staring at him in disbelief. “The last time my sect had this pill made, it took Old Tower Master Dai nine days.”