Chapter 1019 — Fourteen

CHAPTER 1019

Fourteen

The furnace door was barred from the outside with an iron bar as thick as a man’s wrist. Shi Feng lifted it off with one hand and pulled the door open.

Heat came out, and the smell came with it: coal smoke, herb ash, old sweat and the sour smell of men who had been kept in one place too long.

The furnace hall ran back into the cliff for forty paces. Nine black iron furnaces stood along it in a row, and beside each furnace, on the bare stone, sat the people who worked them. Every one wore an iron collar. A chain ran from each collar to a ring in the floor. The chains had glowed red a few minutes ago, he could see the scorch marks on the stone where they lay, but they were dark now.

Fourteen faces turned toward the door.

Nobody spoke. Several of them were still moving their lips, counting under their breath.

“The wards are gone,” Shi Feng said. “The deacon’s at the door with his knees cut. I’m going to take your collars off. Don’t stand up too fast.”

He went down the row with the grey Sword and cut the chains one by one at the collar. With the wards burnt out, the iron was only iron, and it parted at a touch. Behind him, Helian Ba came in from the yard with blood on his axe and stopped in the doorway.

“Heavens,” Helian Ba said quietly, and then he didn’t say anything else. He went down the other side of the row and started lifting people to their feet.

The sixth collar belonged to a man of about forty with a thin, grey face and burn scars on both hands. He looked up at Shi Feng as the chain fell away, and he frowned.

“I know you,” the thin man said hoarsely. “Hall Two. You’re the boy who read the burnt slip.”

Shi Feng stopped.

In the Pill Pit, Appraiser Mei Han had once brought a scorched jade slip to his table. The Pit’s alchemists had failed that pill for months, and her younger brother in Hall One had been punished for every failure. She’d never said so. Everyone in the Pit had known it anyway.

“You’re Appraiser Mei’s brother,” Shi Feng said.

“Mei Shuo,” the thin man said, and gave a cracked laugh. “They moved six of us north from Hall One last year. I didn’t think anyone outside knew I existed.”

“She never mentioned you,” Shi Feng said gently. “But I heard about her brother in Hall One. Can you walk?”

“I can walk,” Mei Shuo said, and stood, and nearly fell. Shi Feng caught his arm.

Mei Shuo turned to the others along the wall and raised his voice.

“Stop counting!” Mei Shuo said. “All of you, stop it. Nobody’s watching the fire anymore.”

Some of them stopped. Some of them couldn’t, and kept counting in a whisper as Helian Ba helped them toward the door. Shi Feng didn’t tell them to stop. Ji Yuanhe still hadn’t stopped.

Shen Yaoqing came in from the yard last, with her sword lowered. She looked at the nine furnaces, the rings in the floor and the iron collars lying in the ash, and her face stayed cold. Shen Yaoqing felt sick with anger. She paused in the doorway, then forced herself forward to examine the collars.

“Nine furnaces,” Shen Yaoqing said. “Half a day from our boundary stones.”

“Is that your master’s answer?” Shi Feng asked.

“That’s my master’s answer,” Shen Yaoqing said. “I’ll give it to her with my own mouth.”

At the far end of the hall stood a long table stacked with ledgers, bound in grey, dozens of them. Shi Feng had seen tables like it in the Pit. The kiln’s ledgers would say what pills these people had been made to refine, how many, and where every one of them had gone.

The youngest of the fourteen was a boy of about fifteen, with a shaved head and a collar that had rubbed his neck raw. When Shi Feng cut his chain, he had gone straight to the table without a word and started stacking the ledgers in his arms. At the kiln, a worker who left a ledger behind was beaten for it.

“Leave those,” Shi Feng told him. “I’ll carry them.”

The boy looked up.

Beside the table, the air turned to glass.

It happened without a sound. A flat, bright surface stood up out of nothing, as tall as a door, and for an instant it showed the hall reflected in it: the furnaces, the open collars, the boy with the ledgers, Shi Feng halfway down the row. Then a woman stepped out of the reflection.

She was tall and pale, with silver-grey hair bound high, and her grey sleeves were embroidered with small white circles. Her aura was late Shattering Void, cold and clear.

She put one hand on the boy’s shoulder. With the other, she swept the whole stack of ledgers off the table and into her sleeve.

Shi Feng used Void-Crossing Step at once. He appeared three paces from Lan Yezhi and cut at her wrist, trying to free the boy before she could retreat.

It struck the mirror. The mirror had moved. It stood between them now, and his blade hit his own reflected blade point to point, and sparks burst across the glass.

“The Sixteenth Elder of the Heavenly Sect, Lan Yezhi,” the woman said through the mirror. Her voice was calm and low. “You’re quick, Master Shi. The Seventeenth said you were clever. He didn’t say quick.”

“Let the boy go,” Shi Feng said.

“No,” Lan Yezhi replied, keeping her hand on the frightened boy. “You’ll listen first.”

Out by the furnace door, Lu Ziqi gave a short, choking sound. A thin mirror no wider than a hand had opened at his throat and closed again. He slid down the door and lay still.

“The house doesn’t keep what’s broken,” Lan Yezhi said. She looked up, through the rock, to where Qin Wuyan stood on the ridge. “Mirror Ice Lake. Three days. Come without the old man.”

The boy was looking at Shi Feng over her arm. His lips were moving. He was counting.

“Or the boy finds out how cold the lake is,” Lan Yezhi said.

She stepped back into the glass with the boy, and the mirror folded flat and was gone. Shi Feng’s sword came down through empty air and struck the edge of the empty table.

The hall was silent except for the furnaces ticking as they cooled.