Chapter 1017 — Counting in the Dark

CHAPTER 1017

Counting in the Dark

Qin Wuyan looked at the map for a long time without touching it.

Shi Feng turned the oiled paper over on the bench. On the back, in the same hand as the front, someone had written two short lines in the corner.

Cold Kiln.

Rice, fourteen bowls. Coal, nine carts.

“It isn’t a kiln,” Shi Feng said. “Nobody needs nine carts of coal every ten days to fire pots. That’s a furnace house. Nine furnaces, fourteen people to work them.”

“Fourteen bowls,” Qin Wuyan said.

“In the Pill Pit they counted us in bowls,” Shi Feng said. “One bowl, one alchemist, one chain. They didn’t count the guards. The guards ate somewhere else.”

He didn’t say anything more about the Pit. He’d worn its chain himself, and Ji Yuanhe had worn one far longer.

Qin Wuyan folded his hands back into his sleeves.

“Not Pavilion business,” Qin Wuyan said.

“No,” Shi Feng said, looking directly at Qin Wuyan. “I was chained in a place like that. I won’t leave them there.”

Shi Feng’s voice was flat. Qin Wuyan understood his anger and didn’t argue. The guardian had heard him joke through danger before. Tonight, Shi Feng wasn’t joking.

“This one goes where you go,” Qin Wuyan said at last. “This one does not fight that house.”

“I know,” Shi Feng said. “I’m not asking you to.”

Helian Ba came the next morning.

He’d heard it from Tong Xian’s porters, who’d heard it from the coal yard, where somebody had asked why the Pavilion’s guest wanted to know who bought nine carts of coal for the Greyback Hills. He strode into Northwind House’s yard with his axe on his back and his fur coat open, laughing before he was through the gate.

“Master Shi! You’re going hunting and you didn’t invite me? After the gorge?” Helian Ba shouted. “I’m insulted. The whole clan’s insulted!”

“It’s not a hunt,” Shi Feng said. “It’s a prison.”

Helian Ba’s laugh stopped halfway.

He looked at Shi Feng’s face for a moment. At the gorge, Shi Feng had laughed even with blood on his face. His anger now frightened Helian Ba more than a shout would have.

“You’re not smiling,” Helian Ba said.

“There are fourteen people in chains in those hills,” Shi Feng said. “When they’re out, I’ll smile.”

Helian Ba was quiet for a moment. Then he pulled the axe off his back and set its head on the ground.

“Then I’m coming to break those chains,” Helian Ba said firmly. “You helped my people. Let me help these ones. When do we leave?”

“Tonight,” Shi Feng said.

Shen Yaoqing arrived at noon, alone, on the grey horse.

She didn’t come into the yard. She stopped at the gate and waited, and when Shi Feng came out to her, she didn’t dismount.

“My master read the copy,” Shen Yaoqing said. “She has a question for the guest elder.”

“Ask it,” Shi Feng said.

“Whether the Heavenly Sect is building furnaces half a day from our boundary stones,” Shen Yaoqing said. “If it is, the elders’ hall will need more than a map to believe it. My master wants a Serene Jade witness who saw it with her own eyes.”

“You,” Shi Feng said.

“Me,” Shen Yaoqing said coldly. “The hills aren’t the sect’s lands. Nobody in the sect has ordered me to go there. I’m going on my master’s question, and I’ll answer to her.”

“It’ll be a fight,” Shi Feng said.

“I know what it’ll be,” Shen Yaoqing said.

They rode out of Beiling at dusk, four of them: Shi Feng, Qin Wuyan, Helian Ba and Shen Yaoqing. Nobody filed their route. Shi Feng stopped that after the clerk’s hanging.

The Greyback Hills were half a night’s hard ride west. They were low and bare. As Shen Yaoqing had said, only goats moved on the grey slopes. The wind came down off the Serene Jade mountains and went through the valleys with a long, steady moan.

They left the horses in the first valley and went up the second on foot.

At the top of the second ridge Shi Feng stopped and lay flat on the cold rock. The third hill stood in front of them, with a cliff on its south face, and at the foot of the cliff was a low stone building with a slate roof. There were no lights. No smoke came out of it. To the eye, it was an abandoned kiln in a valley full of goats.

He closed his eyes and let his Spirit Sense go down the slope.

It went through the stone. Behind the front wall the building ran back into the cliff, much deeper than it looked from outside, and in the cliff there was heat. Nine pockets of heat in a row, steady and banked low. Furnaces.

Around them were wards. He could feel the lines of them running through the walls, thin and hard, the way he’d felt them every day in the Pit.

And under the wind, very faint, there were voices.

He held his breath and listened.

“…six. Seven. Eight. Nine. One. Two…”

It wasn’t one voice. It was several, low and tired, coming from different parts of the cliff, all counting the same count. One to nine, and back to one. It was the count the Pit’s overseers had made them keep, so a fire never went a beat too long. It was the count Ji Yuanhe had kept to hold his soul together when Shi Feng had found him chained to a black iron furnace.

Shi Feng opened his eyes.

“Well?” Helian Ba whispered beside him.

“Nine furnaces,” Shi Feng said quietly. “Wards on every wall. And people in there counting.”

“Counting what?” Helian Ba asked.

“Counting to stay alive,” Shi Feng said.

On his other side, Shen Yaoqing said nothing. But she’d taken her sword off her back and laid it across her knees, and her thumb was on the guard.