Chapter 1018 — The Flues

CHAPTER 1018

The Flues

The kiln door opened before they reached it.

A man in a grey robe stepped out onto the packed earth in front of the building, with a lamp in one hand. He was about fifty, neat and soft-faced, and he had the look of a counting-house clerk. His aura sat at Deity Transformation, steady and plain. Four more men in grey came out behind him and spread out on either side.

All four were Shattering Void.

“Guest Elder Shi,” the soft-faced man said, and bowed as politely as any Pavilion steward. “This one is Deacon Lu Ziqi. We felt you on the ridge. The Elders want you alive and your hands unharmed. They said nothing about your friends.” He looked past Shi Feng at Helian Ba and Shen Yaoqing. “And the kiln doesn’t need anyone alive but its workers.”

High on the ridge behind them, Qin Wuyan stood against the stars and didn’t move.

“Master Shi,” Helian Ba said, pulling his axe off his back. “Which ones are mine?”

“The two on the left,” Shi Feng said.

“Then the right are mine,” Shen Yaoqing said, and drew her sword.

Helian Ba laughed and charged. The Void-Splitting Axe came down in a long black line that split the air in front of him, and the two takers on the left had to throw themselves apart to keep from being split with it. On the right, the Moonlit Jade Sword left its first line of pale light hanging across the ground, then a second, and the two takers there found a fence between them and the door before they’d taken three steps.

Shi Feng walked toward the building.

He didn’t go for the door. He felt the wards as soon as he came within ten paces of the wall. They ran through every stone of it in thin hard lines, and they ran down into the cliff, and in the cliff they ran into the chains.

It was the Pit’s design. He’d lived inside it.

In the Pill Pit the wards didn’t have their own power. They drew it from the furnaces, through the flues, so the alchemists’ own fires kept them locked in. And every chain was tied into the ward. If someone outside broke a ward line by force, the backlash didn’t go into the stone. It went down the chains, into the people wearing them.

Shi Feng was angry, but couldn’t strike recklessly. If he smashed the wall, the backlash would burn fourteen alchemists alive in their chains.

Lu Ziqi watched him stop at the wall and smiled.

“You know how it’s built,” Lu Ziqi said. “Good. Then you know there’s no door you can open.”

“You still need the flues,” Shi Feng said, looking up the cliff.

He went up the cliff in three strides of Riverless Step, across the face of the rock, and came out on the top beside a low stone stack where nine flues came up out of the hill. Heat shimmered over them. The wards were drinking from them, a little at a time, as they’d been drinking for years.

He put his left palm flat on the stack and struck the Second Anvil Fire into it.

Clang.

The first beat went down all nine flues at once. Heat poured into the cliff, far more heat than nine banked furnaces had ever given, and the ward lines took it the way they took everything that came up the flues. They had been built to drink. They hadn’t been built to stop drinking.

Clang. Clang.

Below him, the stones of the kiln wall began to glow, one thin red line at a time.

“Stop him!” Lu Ziqi shouted.

The soft-faced deacon came up the cliff after him, faster than any Deity Transformation cultivator could move. Shi Feng felt the aura change halfway up. It wasn’t Deity Transformation. It was early Shattering Void, and it had been hidden very well.

Ning Zhe had hidden his realm the same way. Deacons of that house all seemed to learn it.

Lu Ziqi came over the cliff edge with his right palm open. The Banked Coal Palm didn’t strike hard. It struck hot, and the heat stayed. It caught Shi Feng on the right side under the ribs as he twisted, and the burn didn’t stop when the hand left. It sank in and kept smouldering under his skin.

The burn hurt, but Shi Feng kept his left hand on the stack. He needed to finish the sequence before Lu Ziqi reached the prisoners.

Clang. Four. Five.

The ward lines were burning from the furnace end now, back up through the cliff, toward the stack and away from the chains. That was the point. Every line he burned out from this end took its backlash into the furnaces, and the furnaces were only iron.

Lu Ziqi struck again, at his left wrist this time, to break his hold.

Shi Feng let go of the stack, stepped inside the palm and cut once with the grey Sword. Sunset-Splitting Sword at Perfection didn’t need to be big. It opened the deacon’s forearm from wrist to elbow and turned the palm aside, and Shi Feng put his hand back on the stack before the next beat was due.

Clang. Six. Seven. Eight.

Down in the yard, Helian Ba’s voice boomed up the cliff.

“The walls are on fire!” Helian Ba shouted anxiously. “Master Shi, the whole wall’s glowing!”

“Not on fire,” Shen Yaoqing said coldly, without turning from her fence of light. “The wards are burning out. Keep your eyes on your own two.”

Clang. Nine.

The last ward line flared bright red through the whole front of the kiln and went dark. Inside the cliff, Shi Feng felt the nine furnaces jump as the backlash went into them, iron ringing, and then go quiet. Nothing went down the chains.

He took his hand off the stack. His palm was blistered to the wrist.

Lu Ziqi was already going back down the cliff, holding his cut arm. He wasn’t running away. He was running for the furnace door at the back of the kiln, where the chains were.

Shi Feng stepped through the void and came out in front of the furnace door before Lu Ziqi reached it.

The deacon stopped two paces away, in the dark passage inside the cliff, with heat pouring off the furnaces on both sides. His soft face had gone white.

“If they die, they’re no use to anyone,” Lu Ziqi said quickly. “Let me pass, and...”

“No,” Shi Feng said.

Lu Ziqi struck with both palms at once, everything he had left.

Shi Feng cut twice. The first cut turned the right palm aside and opened the deacon’s shoulder. The second went across both his knees. Lu Ziqi went down against the furnace door, and Shi Feng put the flat of the grey Sword against his throat and pinned him there.

Behind the door, the counting had stopped.

“Who’s out there?” a prisoner called hoarsely through the iron. “Who’s there? We didn’t let the fire go long! We kept the count!”

“I know,” Shi Feng said. “You can stop counting now.”