Chapter 1039 — The Tally

CHAPTER 1039

The Tally

The north gate of Beiling opened at the first bell, and the wind came straight through it off the wilds.

Shi Feng stood in the gateway with his road bag on his good shoulder. The splints were off. His left forearm was bound in plain linen now and ached in the cold, but the bone held when he made a fist. Ten days of his own pills had done that much. Beside him, Qin Wuyan stood in his mended grey robe with his hands in his sleeves, looking at the road and nothing else.

Two people had come to see them off. The rest of the city was still asleep.

“You’re really going west to see a lot of fortune-tellers,” Helian Ba said, scowling. He’d ridden in from Iron Glacier Hold the night before and hadn’t slept, and his axe was on his back as if he thought he might be invited. “After the plateau. After all that. You’re going to go sit in a hall full of Daoists and let them read your palm.”

“They read stalks and water, I’m told,” Shi Feng said. “Not palms.”

“Same thing!” Helian Ba said loudly. “If you want to know your future, ask an axe. It always tells the truth!”

“Your axe won’t answer the question I’m asking,” Shi Feng said, smiling at Helian Ba’s scowl.

Helian Ba stared at him. Then he threw his head back and laughed so hard that a gate guard dropped his spear.

“Then come back and I’ll give you an axe,” Helian Ba said, and gripped Shi Feng’s right forearm hard. “The Helian owe you an uncle, a village and a bridge. My father says so. Iron Glacier Hold’s gate is open to you as long as there’s a Helian left inside it. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t,” Shi Feng said.

Tong Xian stepped forward with a cloth bundle and held it out in both hands.

“Dried meat, millet, salt, a jar of the plum pickle you ate three bowls of,” Tong Xian said briskly. “Mei Shuo made you a second pill last night and asked me to tell you it was better than the first. It has four clouds. He wanted you to know.”

“Tell him that’s good progress,” Shi Feng said, taking the bundle. “I want to see his third one when I return.”

“He’s already started it,” Tong Xian said. She bowed. “Northwind House will keep your room as it is, Master Shi. Her Highness’s instruction. The furnace room will be working when you come back.”

“Thank you, Steward Tong,” Shi Feng said, and bowed back to her properly.

“Go on, then,” Helian Ba said gruffly, and waved his hand. “Before I change my mind and follow you.”

Shi Feng and Qin Wuyan walked out through the gate. At the top of the first rise, half a li along the north road, Shi Feng looked back once. Helian Ba was still standing in the gateway with his arms folded. Tong Xian had already gone back inside.

The road ran north across white ground toward a line of low hills. The first waystation was a smudge of smoke at their foot, where a thin Daoist was presumably keeping the fire going.

At the top of the rise, Shi Feng stopped and sat down on a milestone out of the wind. He took his small private book out of his robe and opened it on his knee.

Qin Wuyan waited without asking why. He’d seen him do it before.

Shi Feng turned past the old pages. Ticket 3041. The tally from Tianjing. Lotus Gate. Then he wet the brush and wrote underneath, one line at a time.

Peak Shattering Void. Mirror Ice Lake.

Five numbered Elders. Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen. All bandits.

Fourteen alchemists. Nine going home. Five at Northwind House, working at their own pace.

Twenty-two million seven hundred thousand, near enough. Her Highness’s vault untouched.

One stick of candied hawthorn.

He stopped there and looked at the last line for a while.

The hawthorn was still in his ring, wrapped in a strip of clean cloth. The sugar had gone dull and cracked in the cold. He didn’t know why Rong Tianshou had left it on the ice. A taunt, maybe. Or a courtesy, from a man who’d waited for him to be whole enough to fight. He’d never be able to ask now.

At Luoxia, the man had folded him out of an alley in the middle of a sentence. On Bitter Sky Plateau, he’d folded him into the same sky again, and Shi Feng had walked out of it.

Shi Feng felt relieved. He’d finally escaped the man who took him from Luoxia. He didn’t need another line in the book to remember that.

He wet the brush again and wrote one more line beneath the tally.

Tianji Mansion. Ask about her.

He blew on the ink until it was dry, closed the book and put it away inside his robe. Then he stood up and brushed the snow off.

“Ready,” Shi Feng said.

“This one is,” Qin Wuyan said.

They walked down toward the waystation smoke. Behind them, morning mist slowly hid Beiling’s walls.

[Mark: 6 | Note: the alley is closed.]