Chapter 1056 — What the Fall Says

CHAPTER 1056

What the Fall Says

Taishi Xu woke as the first grey light came through the paper window.

They’d carried him down to his own rooms on a door taken off its hinges, and Shi Feng had sat by the bed all night with his burned hand bound in a physician’s linen. Elder Sang sat on the other side and didn’t move. Daoist Mingshu had gone in and out a dozen times with tea nobody drank.

The Mansion Master opened his eyes, looked at the ceiling for a while, and then turned his head on the pillow.

He wasn’t smiling. Shi Feng had never seen his face without the smile, and without it the face looked like someone else’s.

“Master Shi,” Taishi Xu said. His voice was thin and hoarse. “You’re still here.”

“I’m waiting to be told,” Shi Feng said.

Taishi Xu laughed once, very weakly, and it turned into a cough. Elder Sang held a cup to his mouth. He drank, and lay back.

“The pill,” Taishi Xu said. “That was yours, in my sleeve. I’d forgotten it was there. I’d have died.”

“It was in your sleeve,” Shi Feng said. “We gave it to you as soon as I stopped the light.”

“So it was,” Taishi Xu murmured, lifting one hand off the blanket to examine it. The skin was thin and spotted. He looked at the white hair across the pillow, too. “Thirty years, Elder Sang?”

“Closer to forty,” Elder Sang Lingyue said flatly.

“Hm,” Taishi Xu said, and put the hand down.

Shi Feng waited. He didn’t ask again. He’d asked once at the start, and the old man had paid forty years to answer it. He could sit for a while longer.

“I’ll tell you what the plate did, and what it means,” Taishi Xu said at last. “Then I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean, because you’ll want to fill in the gaps, and you mustn’t.”

“Go on,” Shi Feng said.

“The plate didn’t fail to find her,” Taishi Xu said. “That’s the first thing. A reading that fails just goes dark. It stops at the third ring or the fourth, and the stars stay cold. Yours went through all nine rings. It found her road and followed it past everything the Mansion has ever named. Then it was thrown back.”

“Thrown back by what?” Shi Feng asked.

“I don’t know,” Taishi Xu said.

He said it plainly, without any of his usual evasions, and Shi Feng believed him.

“There are only two things I know of that can do that,” Taishi Xu went on. “Either she stands somewhere so far above us that the Mansion simply can’t read her, the way a man can’t read the bottom of the sea from a fishing boat. Or something is guarding her fate, and it didn’t want to be looked at. I can’t tell you which. I can’t even tell you they’re different.”

“Is she alive?” Shi Feng asked.

The room was quiet for a moment.

“I don’t know that either,” Taishi Xu said. “I’d like to tell you she is, Master Shi. I won’t say what I don’t know. Not to you.”

Shi Feng nodded.

Shi Feng was disappointed, but the reading hadn’t told him nothing. For twenty-one years, he’d known only the hairpin. Now he knew her fate could resist a Profound Heaven diviner and take forty years of his life in the time it took to count to ten.

His mother’s disappearance involved far more than the Shi clan had known. He felt certain of that, even without knowing whether she was alive.

“Is there anything else?” Shi Feng asked.

Taishi Xu turned his head and looked at him for a long time.

“One thing,” Taishi Xu said. “The Mansion won’t cast for her again. Not the plate, not the yarrow, not me and not any reader in this house. I’m not refusing you, Master Shi. I’m telling you what’s sensible. Next time it won’t stop at forty years.”

“I won’t ask you to,” Shi Feng said.

“Good,” Taishi Xu said, and closed his eyes. “Then we’re square. Mingshu will give you anything else you want. I’m going to sleep for a month.”

Elder Sang rose and drew the blanket up to the old man’s chin. Then she turned her blind eyes on Shi Feng and spoke more quietly than he’d ever heard her.

“Look after the hand, Master Shi,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. “What comes back off that plate doesn’t heal quickly.”

Shi Feng bowed to the bed and went out.

The corridor outside was full of grey robes. Readers and disciples stood along both walls, and they went quiet when he came out of the door. Nobody said anything to him. They only looked at his bound hand, and then at his face, and stepped back to let him pass.

“He pulled it out of the light with his bare hand,” someone murmured behind him as he went.

“And then refined the Mansion Master back to life without Spirit Sense,” someone else said.

“Heaven’s will is hard to fathom,” an old reader said.

“Who is his mother, to do that to a plate?”

“Shh!”

Qin Wuyan was waiting at the end of the corridor, by the stairs. He looked at the bound hand, then at Shi Feng.

“The palm,” Qin Wuyan said.

“It’ll heal,” Shi Feng said. “My Spirit Sense will come back in a few days. Elder Sang says so.”

“And the answer?” Qin Wuyan asked.

“There isn’t one,” Shi Feng said. “Not yet.”

Qin Wuyan said nothing more. He fell in a step behind as Shi Feng went down to his guest hall.

In his room, Shi Feng sat on the bed and took the hairpin out of his sleeve with his left hand. It was dark silver again, three crescents round a grey bead, exactly as it had always been. He wrapped it in the cloth slowly, one-handed, folded the corners in, and put it back inside his robe, against his chest.

Then he took out his private book and opened it on his knee. He held the brush awkwardly in his left hand. The strokes came out crooked.

Asked. The plate cracked. Not yet.

He looked at the line for a while. Then he closed the book.

Outside, far below, a bell rang the morning hour, and somewhere in the Mansion a scribe began to read the next issue’s proofs aloud.