Chapter 1040 — The Envoy

CHAPTER 1040

The Envoy

Daoist Mingshu tended the waystation fire beside a heavily stained teapot.

“Master Shi! Senior Qin!” Daoist Mingshu said, getting up from the waystation bench so quickly he knocked his ruler onto the floor. “You’ve come. This humble Daoist was beginning to think he’d have to print a correction.”

The waystation was a long timber hall with one hearth, three tables and a stable at the back. A few carters sat at the far table eating noodles. They looked at the old man in Pavilion grey and moved their bowls a little farther down the bench without being asked.

Shi Feng sat across from Mingshu and let him pour.

“How far is it?” Shi Feng asked.

“From here to Star-Reckoning Mountain, a little under nine thousand li,” Daoist Mingshu said. “North-west across the Wolf Plain, then the gorges, then the mountains. The Mansion’s own couriers do it in twenty days on beasts. A Shattering Void cultivator who can tear a good rift might do it in less.” He looked hopeful. “Much less, perhaps.”

“I’ll carry you,” Shi Feng said. “Senior Qin can go his own way.”

“This one goes beside,” Qin Wuyan said.

“Beside, then,” Shi Feng said.

Daoist Mingshu bowed his thanks over the table. Then he waited, because he was the kind of man who could tell when there was another question coming.

Shi Feng turned his cup on the table once.

“Daoist,” Shi Feng said. “Can the Mansion read for someone who isn’t there to ask? Someone who can’t come and sit in front of a reader?”

Daoist Mingshu didn’t answer at once. He picked up his ruler from the floor, wiped it on his sleeve and laid it on the table, very straight.

“Anyone who has a fate, Master Shi,” Daoist Mingshu said. “That is our trade.”

“Anyone?” Shi Feng asked.

“Some are harder than others,” Daoist Mingshu said honestly. “Some cost more than others. But the Mansion has never said a fate can’t be read. Only that it hasn’t been read yet.”

Shi Feng nodded slowly, and drank his tea.

That night the waystation keeper gave him the small back room, with a cot, a brazier and a table under the window. Shi Feng shut the door and sat down at the table and took three things out of his ring.

The first was the hairpin.

It was dark silver-grey and no longer than his finger, and it didn’t shine and didn’t tarnish. At its head, three tiny crescents curved around a single bead. He tilted the lamp until the fine lines caught the light. His aunt had kept it for him for years in a cloth, and Sima Lan had looked at it once in a carriage and said nobody in Great Liang had made it.

It was the only thing his mother had left that was hers. If a diviner was going to read her by anything, it would have to be this.

The second was his father’s diagram, wrapped in oiled cloth. He didn’t unwrap it. He knew every line in it without looking. His father had brought it home from the same border where he’d met her. Shi Feng had never known whether the two things were connected, and he’d never had anyone to ask. He laid it beside the hairpin and left it folded.

The third was a pouch of herbs.

He lit the brazier, set his small travelling cauldron on it and refined road pills for an hour. They were simple pills that put qi back into a tired sea quickly. He’d tear many rifts carrying a second man over nine thousand li, and he didn’t intend to arrive at the Mansion empty. The fire was low and steady. Two clouds stood over the brazier for a moment and faded, and he tipped thirty brown pills into a jar.

Then he took out a sheet of paper and wrote a note.

Shi Feng paused over the paper. Long Caili would want to know where he’d gone. He kept the note short in case someone opened it on the road.

He left out the question about his mother.

Destination: the Tianji Mansion.

Reason: a family matter.

Return: uncertain.

He read the three lines, then signed beneath them. They told her where to find him without revealing his mother’s hairpin.

The door opened behind him without a knock. Qin Wuyan came in and stood at his shoulder, looking down at the map of the north-west that Mingshu had lent him. It lay open across the end of the table, held down by the jar of pills. Mingshu had marked the route on it in red, a careful line across the Wolf Plain and into the hills.

Qin Wuyan put one finger on a knot of narrow lines halfway along the route, where the red ink went into the mountains through a long chain of valleys.

“The gorges,” Qin Wuyan said. “Bad ground.”

“Why bad?” Shi Feng asked.

“Narrow,” Qin Wuyan said. “Long. One way in.”

Shi Feng looked at the place under the old man’s finger. A long, narrow road through high walls, with one way in and one way out, on the only route to the Mansion. Anyone who knew where he was going would know he’d have to pass through it.

And by now, a lot of people knew where he was going. Daoist Mingshu had waited ten days at a public waystation on the north road, in a Tianji robe.

“We’ll check the cliffs before entering,” Shi Feng said, studying the narrow route.

He folded the note, sealed it and gave it to the waystation keeper at dawn, for the Long household’s relay south. Then he and Qin Wuyan and Daoist Mingshu walked out into the snow behind the stable, and Shi Feng tore the first rift of the road.