Chapter 1054 — The Star-Weighing Plate

CHAPTER 1054

The Star-Weighing Plate

“Third ring, one step back,” Daoist Mingshu said, walking the edge of the terrace with his sleeves tied up. “Fourth ring, sit when you’re told to sit. Nobody speaks after the first breath.”

It was the dark of the moon. There was no lamp on the highest terrace of Star-Reckoning Mountain, only the stars, and there were more of them up here than Shi Feng had ever seen from any roof.

The whole Mansion had come up. Disciples, scribes, readers and old men who hadn’t left their rooms in years stood in rings around the centre of the terrace, nine rings deep, in grey robes that were almost black in the starlight. Nobody whispered. Shi Feng felt their nervous anticipation as the wind died.

In the middle of them lay the Star-Weighing Plate.

It was a bronze disc a man wide, set flat on a squat stone base. Every star the Mansion had ever named was cut into its face, in rings from the centre to the rim, each one a small pit filled with silver. Shi Feng had tried to count them on the walk up and stopped after four hundred.

“Master Shi,” Daoist Mingshu said, and bowed him to a low stone stool on the plate’s south edge. “The asker’s seat.”

Shi Feng sat carefully. His wounded ribs pulled, but he was too anxious about the reading to care about the pain.

Elder Sang Lingyue stood on the plate’s west side with a bowl of still water in her hands and a bundle of yarrow stalks tucked under one arm. Her blind eyes were turned up at the sky.

“Hands on your knees, Master Shi,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. “Don’t touch the bronze. Don’t let your qi touch it either. The plate reads the question, and the asker is part of the question.”

“What should I hold in my mind?” Shi Feng asked, and set his hands on his knees.

“You don’t have her face,” Elder Sang Lingyue said flatly. “Don’t try to make one. Hold the question. A false face gives a false reading.”

Shi Feng nodded. He’d been too small to remember anything when his mother vanished. He had a hairpin, a sheet of his father’s diagrams and no face at all. He held the question instead. Where is she?

Mansion Master Taishi Xu came last, through a gap the rings opened for him.

He wore a plain grey robe tonight instead of his embroidered one, and his round face was still smiling, though less than usual. He stopped beside the plate and held out his hand. Shi Feng took the folded cloth from his sleeve and gave it to him.

Taishi Xu unwrapped the hairpin. It was old silver gone dark, with three thin crescents set round a small grey bead. He held it up to the starlight for a long moment.

“Twenty-one years,” Taishi Xu said lightly. “And it still holds a little of her. Good silver.” He looked at Shi Feng. “Last chance, Master Shi. Man proposes, heaven disposes. Once I’ve laid it down, I won’t lift it until the plate’s finished.”

“Lay it down,” Shi Feng said firmly. He’d come all this way for an answer and wouldn’t turn back now.

Taishi Xu laid the hairpin at the exact centre of the plate. Then he knelt at the north edge, facing Shi Feng across the bronze, and put both palms flat on the rim.

Profound Heaven pressure rose from him, slow and steady. It didn’t push outward. It went down into the bronze, and the silver in the nearest pits began to glow.

“One,” Elder Sang Lingyue said.

The plate turned.

It turned very slowly on its stone base, with a deep grinding sound that Shi Feng felt through the soles of his boots. The first ring of stars lit around the hairpin, small and white. Then the second.

“Two,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. “Three.”

Daoist Mingshu had come to stand behind the asker’s stool. He spoke quietly, without moving his lips much.

“Each ring is a measure of how far a fate reaches,” Daoist Mingshu said. “A farmer lights two. A sect elder lights four. The deepest reading I’ve ever seen was six, and that was for a dying Emperor’s uncle.”

“Four,” Elder Sang Lingyue said.

The fourth ring lit. Then the fifth, and the sixth, one after another, each one a little faster.

A watcher in the second ring gasped in surprise. Daoist Mingshu was alarmed; the reading had already reached the deepest ring he’d ever witnessed.

“Seven,” Elder Sang Lingyue said, and her voice was still flat.

The seventh ring lit. The plate was turning faster now, and the grinding had turned into a low hum. Light was rising off the bronze in a thin white haze, and the faces of the nearest watchers were white in it.

“Seven rings?” a young scribe whispered behind them.

“Quiet!” an old reader hissed.

“Eight,” Elder Sang Lingyue said.

Shi Feng kept his hands on his knees. He kept the question in his mind and didn’t let anything else in, not the light and not the whispers. The bronze was a hand’s width from his boots. He could feel the hum in his teeth.

Across the plate, Taishi Xu’s smile had gone. His palms were still flat on the rim, and the veins stood out on the backs of his hands. Sweat ran down his round face and dripped onto the bronze.

“Nine,” Elder Sang Lingyue said.

The ninth ring was the rim. The Mansion had named no stars further out than that.

The ninth ring lit.

For a moment nothing moved. The whole plate was white from centre to edge, every named star burning at once, and the watchers in the outer rings had raised their sleeves against it. Daoist Mingshu’s hand had closed on the back of the asker’s stool, hard enough that Shi Feng felt the stone creak.

At the far side of the terrace, outside every ring, Qin Wuyan stood with his back to the plate and his eyes on the dark ridges. He didn’t turn round.

“Ten,” Elder Sang Lingyue said.

There was no tenth ring.

At the centre of the plate, the hairpin moved.

It didn’t roll. It lay where it was, but the three crescents set round the bead began to glow, a pale blue light of their own that was nothing like the white of the stars. The light rose straight up from them in three thin threads, higher than the haze, higher than Shi Feng’s head, towards a part of the sky where the Mansion had named nothing at all.

The hum stopped.

In the silence, Shi Feng heard Taishi Xu’s breath catch.