Chapter 1034 — The Bandit King

CHAPTER 1034

The Bandit King

Commander Wei Changhe reached the plateau an hour after the fold came down, on a horse white with sweat, and wrote his report standing up on a writing board propped against a Helian shield.

He was a lean man with a frost-burned face, and he wrote the way he did everything, quickly and without asking for anyone’s opinion. Two of his scouts held the shield steady. The clerk held the inkstone so it wouldn’t freeze.

“Bitter Sky Plateau,” Wei Changhe said aloud as he wrote. “Ninth Beacon reports. One bandit, slain by the Pavilion’s guest.” He stopped and looked over at the body on the broken rock. “No. Not one bandit. This one ran the rest.”

He crossed out a word and wrote two more.

“Bandit king,” Wei Changhe said, and turned the board around. “Elder, will the sect sign?”

The Serene Jade outer elder was an old man in white who had kept his patrol at the plateau’s edge all morning, exactly as the sect had promised. He read the line twice. Then he took the brush and signed beneath it.

“The Serene Jade witnessed it,” the outer elder said. “This old man will say the same in the sect’s book.”

Shi Feng sat on the stones while a Helian bonesetter strapped his left arm between two spear shafts. Somebody had found a pot of millet congee in the Helian camp. It was cold, and it was the best thing he’d eaten in a month.

“There,” Helian Ba said, crouching beside him. “Bandit king. They’ll sing that one in every hold from here to the ice.”

“It’s the right word,” Shi Feng said.

“It is?” Helian Ba asked.

“It’s what he was, as far as anybody in the north needs to know,” Shi Feng said, and set down the empty pot. “Now I’d like it to stay that way.”

He got up on his good leg, with Helian Ba’s shoulder under his right arm, and limped to the rock.

Rong Tianshou still sat where he’d died, his kind face turned a little to one side. Shi Feng went through the grey sleeves first. He found a storage ring on the left hand and slid it off. Then he stepped back and put his right palm out over the body.

“What are you doing?” Helian Ba asked.

“Someone could dig him up and use his identity against everyone here,” Shi Feng said. “Once he’s ash, they’ll have to argue against the signed reports instead.”

Helian Ba understood and stepped back. The witnesses had signed their names; Shi Feng was trying to keep them out of the coming dispute.

The Second Anvil Fire came out of Shi Feng’s palm, nine beats and a rest, low and steady. It didn’t need the third anvil. It only needed to be hot. The grey robe went first, then the rest of it. The rock under the body cracked again in the heat, and the snow around it turned to steam and blew away across the plateau.

The Helian warriors watched in silence. A few of the Serene Jade disciples turned their faces away.

“Hard,” a young scout muttered.

“Clean,” Wei Changhe said, without looking up from his board. “When you cut grass, pull out the root.”

When it was done, there was only a dark stain on two halves of a rock, and the wind took that too.

Shi Feng opened the ring on the spot, because there might be something in it that couldn’t wait.

There wasn’t much. Rong Tianshou had lived three hundred years and carried almost nothing. There were some silver notes, a spare grey robe, a jar of dried dates. There was a bone token the size of a palm, yellow with age, stamped with one word: Fifteen.

And there was a thin book bound in grey silk. The title on its cover was written in an old, neat hand.

Hollow Sky Fold.

Under the title was a smaller line: Shattering Void-grade.

Helian Ba stared at it.

“That’s his art,” Helian Ba said. “The thing he put you in. Aren’t you going to read it?”

“Not today,” Shi Feng said, and put it back in the ring without opening the cover. “I’ve had enough of his sky for one day.”

Shen Yaoqing came over the snow from the Serene Jade line. She’d stood with the patrol all morning in her white robe, with her sword at her hip, and hadn’t spoken once. She stopped two paces off and bowed to him with exact courtesy.

“Master Shi,” Shen Yaoqing said. “The token. The elders' hall will want a rubbing of it for the sect’s book. With your permission.”

“For the sect’s book,” Shi Feng said.

“The bandits left a grey sleeve on our gate at Whitereed,” Shen Yaoqing said coldly. “The hall keeps a record of every number that comes onto our land. This one should be in it.”

Shi Feng held out the bone token. She took a sheet of thin paper and a stick of ink from her sleeve, laid the paper over the stamp and rubbed it with three quick strokes. Then she returned the token with both hands, folded the paper and put it away.

Shen Yaoqing checked his splinted arm, then bowed again. She returned to the patrol without asking how badly he was hurt.

Helian Ba watched her go.

“She came out on the snow and stood there all morning,” Helian Ba said. “For a rubbing.”

“For her elders' hall,” Shi Feng said. “She told you.”

“So she did,” Helian Ba said, and scratched his beard.

That afternoon, in the back of a Helian sledge with his arm strapped and a blanket over his knees, Shi Feng asked Wei Changhe for a sheet of paper and a brush. The princess’s sledge had left Beiling at dawn on the same day, on the south road, and a Ninth Beacon rider could catch it before Frost Pass.

He wrote one line on it, small and neat.

Instruction received and carried out. Not dead. Shi Feng.

He folded it once, sealed it with a thumb of wax and gave it to the rider.

“That’s all?” Wei Changhe asked, weighing the light letter in his hand.

“I promised she’d hear from me,” Shi Feng said. “That tells her enough.”

The rider galloped south. The sledge turned toward Beiling. Halfway there, the heat that the third anvil had left in his meridians began to climb into his face, and by the time the city walls came into sight, Shi Feng could no longer tell whether the snow was cold.