Chapter 1041 — The Nailed Sky

CHAPTER 1041

The Nailed Sky

The seventh rift of the day closed behind them on a hillside of brown grass, and Shi Feng sat down on the nearest rock and ate a road pill.

“That’s the last one today,” Shi Feng said.

“Master Shi is tired?” Daoist Mingshu asked anxiously. He’d come through every rift with his eyes shut and both hands on his ruler, and he still looked slightly green.

“I’m keeping enough qi in reserve,” Shi Feng said. “Peak Shattering Void can tear a rift a long way. Carrying a second man through it is something else. Seven a day, and I’ll still have enough qi left to fight if somebody’s waiting at the other end. Eight, and I won’t.”

“Is somebody likely to be waiting?” Daoist Mingshu asked.

“On this road, yes,” Shi Feng said, and stood up.

Qin Wuyan came out of the air beside them a moment later, in a single step, without tearing anything that Shi Feng could see. He looked at the hillside, then at the sky.

“Waystation,” Qin Wuyan said, and pointed.

It was the fourth day. They crossed the Wolf Plain in two days, passing wild horse herds, then spent the third climbing into the foothills. The waystation at Twin Springs was the last one before the gorges. It was bigger than the one outside Beiling, with a teahouse built against its wall where caravans waited for the weather.

It was crowded that evening. Two merchant trains were stuck there, and every table was full.

A caravan guard was reading aloud from a Tianji issue near the hearth. It was the same issue the Bright Cup Teahouse had argued over, carried west on a fast horse, and it had been read so often that the paper had gone soft.

“Seventh, Shi Feng,” the guard read. “Sky Pavilion. And in the north, a note. 'Bitter Sky Plateau: a bandit king slain by the Pavilion’s guest, witnessed by the Ninth Beacon and the Serene Jade.'” He lowered the paper. “They put it right beside his name. The Mansion never does that.”

“So he’s a fighter, then,” a merchant said. “Seventh on the list. He killed a bandit king. Where’s the argument?”

“The argument,” an old caravan master said, banging his pipe on the table, “is that he’s a 6 Mark. A 6 Mark alchemist! There are only a handful of them alive in the whole Empire. What’s a 6 Mark doing on a list of fighters?”

“Being seventh, it looks like,” the guard said.

“It’s not right,” the old caravan master said stubbornly. “The Tianxing list is for martial geniuses. People who train with the sword from dawn to dusk for thirty years. If he’s a 6 Mark, he should stay in his furnace room and let the fighters have their list.”

“Tell that to the bandit king,” the merchant said.

“I can’t. He’s dead,” the old caravan master said, and pointed his pipe at the room. “Three hundred and sixty trades, and every trade has its own champion. That’s how it ought to be.”

The teahouse laughed. Shi Feng sat by the wall with his tea and kept his head down. Daoist Mingshu sat next to him, very carefully not looking at him at all.

“Master Shi isn’t going to say it’s a misprint?” Daoist Mingshu murmured.

“Not with you sitting next to me,” Shi Feng said.

They left at dawn. Beyond Twin Springs the hills closed in fast. By midmorning they stood at the mouth of a long, narrow valley with cliffs going up on both sides higher than any city wall, grey rock streaked with old ice.

“Nine-Bend Gorge,” Daoist Mingshu said. “The road runs through it for nearly thirty li. After the ninth bend it opens out, and from there it’s four days to the mountain.”

“Then I’ll rift past it,” Shi Feng said.

He gathered qi and tore at the air in front of him, the same way he’d torn it fifty times on this road.

Nothing happened.

The air didn’t open. It didn’t even bend. It sat in front of him, ordinary and grey, and his qi slid off it and went nowhere.

Daoist Mingshu stared.

“What was that?” Daoist Mingshu asked. “Master Shi? Did it fail?”

Shi Feng frowned. The obstruction wasn’t natural. He examined both cliffs with Spirit Sense, searching for what held the space shut.

He found them a hundred paces in. Iron nails, each as long as a man’s arm, driven deep into the rock on both cliffs at even intervals. Every nail was cut with a dense pattern, and from every nail a thread of force ran out into the air and pinned space down where it was. He followed the line of them along the cliffs. They went on and on.

“Void-lock nails,” Shi Feng said. “Both walls. For about three li.”

“Who would nail a gorge?” Daoist Mingshu asked, very pale now.

“Someone who knew I’d come this way,” Shi Feng said plainly. “There’s only one road to the Mansion from the north, and this is the narrowest part of it. They’ve pinned space so I can’t tear a rift through, and so I can’t step anywhere I can’t walk. Whoever did this wanted me on foot.”

“Then we go back,” Daoist Mingshu said at once. “Around. There must be another—”

“Behind us,” Qin Wuyan said.

Shi Feng turned. Far back down the valley, at the gorge mouth they’d come in by, a merchant caravan of eleven wagons was rolling into the gorge with its banners up, and its drivers were singing.

Shi Feng was worried for the drivers. They were singing as they approached the trap, with no idea what waited above.

Up on the cliff top, above the wagons, a little snow slid off the edge.