Chapter 1075 — Eight Clouds over the Waste

CHAPTER 1075

Eight Clouds over the Waste

At dawn the courtyard had been swept, and the whole house was already in the galleries.

The house gathered in furs, children between the adults’ knees. Mo’s black, round-bellied cauldron stood on a low stone table, surrounded by the vault’s jade boxes.

Shi Feng came out of the guest wing with his left arm in a sling. The numbness had gone out of his hand in the night, but not out of his shoulder. He’d have to work the fire mostly with his right hand, and the right palm was still bound from the plate.

He dropped the bandage on the table. The new pink skin would split before noon, but he couldn’t work through the cloth.

“He’s taking the bandage off!” a child said in the gallery.

“Hush,” an old aunt said. “Watch his hands. A 6 Mark’s hands are worth more than this whole estate.”

Hong Lie stood at the sickroom door, as he had last night. Qin Wuyan stood by the gate with his arms folded, watching the sky and the walls more than the cauldron. Wanyan Che stood at the front of the main gallery, very straight.

Shi Feng laid his right palm on the cauldron’s side and lit the Thousand Forge Flame inside it.

He began with the ground.

Earth Marrow Crystal went in first, both fists. The low fire slowly melted it into heavy grey liquid. It settled at the cauldron’s bottom, forming the pill’s base as black stone formed the ground of the patriarch’s heaven.

Then the three Pine Hearts, one at a time, to bind the ground to the qi of the north, because the patriarch’s heaven was a northern heaven and wouldn’t take anything foreign. Then Wind-Still Grass, cut fine, and the dozen small herbs that held the rest together.

By mid-morning the smell of pine resin had filled the courtyard.

“He hasn’t stopped once,” someone said in the gallery.

“He hasn’t even looked up,” someone else said.

Then Shi Feng opened the box of Star-Ice Lotus.

All nine white petals had blue veins. Their cold spread frost across the stone table. He laid them into the fire one by one. Each one hissed as it went in. The Star-Ice Lotus was the seal itself, the part of the pill that would close what had cracked. It was also the hardest herb in the pill to hold, because it wanted to freeze the fire that was melting it.

He struck the Second Anvil Fire.

Clang!

The beat rang across the courtyard, and the children in the galleries jumped. Nine beats and a rest. The heat came up the cauldron’s sides in steady pulses, and the lotus stopped fighting the fire and began to melt into the grey ground beneath it.

Then came the hard part.

The pill had to be a seal, and a seal is a fold. Shi Feng had seen the crack in the patriarch’s heaven. It was in the fold itself, a break in the seam that held a copied heaven shut. A pill that only carried cold lotus into it would fill the crack for a day and then wash out. The pill needed a fold of its own, shaped to match the crack, so that it could lie in the break and hold the edges together.

So he folded space inside the cauldron.

He’d done it before, in the Glass Hall in Tianjing, nine pockets at once. This time it was one fold, very thin and very long, and its shape had to match a line he’d seen only once, running across a grey-blue sky from one horizon to the other. He held the shape in his mind and laid it into the cauldron with his right palm.

The fold heat came up through the cauldron’s wall into his hand.

The new pink skin on his palm split. Blood hissed on the black bronze. Shi Feng didn’t lift his hand. If he lifted it, the fold would close on its own, the lotus would freeze, and the house’s thousand-year herbs would come out as a lump of scorched grey stone.

In the gallery, a woman put both hands over her mouth.

“His hand’s bleeding!”

“He’s not letting go,” Hong Lie said quietly from the door. “Look. He’s not even shaking.”

Then Heaven-Thread Vine, last of all. Shi Feng fed it in whole, root first, and let it run along the fold he’d made, end to end. The vine was the stitch. It would sew the fold’s edges to the edges of the crack once the pill was inside the patriarch.

At noon, the first cloud stood up over the Wanyan estate.

It came out of the clear northern sky directly above the cauldron, white and round, and hung there. The galleries went silent.

“One,” a child counted.

A second cloud formed beside the first. Then a third.

“Two! Three!”

The whole house began to count with the child. Four. Five. Their voices got louder with each one. Six. At six, the old aunts stood up from their stools. Seven. At seven, Hong Lie stopped watching the door and looked up.

“Eight!” two hundred voices shouted together.

The eighth cloud stood over the courtyard, white against the sky, and Shi Feng felt the ninth beginning to gather behind it.

He stopped it.

He let the Second Anvil Fire drop to its rest and didn’t strike again. The ninth cloud thinned, broke up and blew away east. Eight clouds stayed.

“Why did he stop?” Wanyan Che asked hoarsely. “He could have had nine. I saw it. He could have had nine!”

Qin Wuyan answered him from the gate without turning his head.

“Nine and past it calls heaven down on the pill,” Qin Wuyan said. “Your father’s heaven has a crack in it. Master Shi doesn’t want heaven looking.”

Wanyan Che’s face went pale, and he said nothing more.

Shi Feng lifted the lid.

One pill lay at the bottom of the cauldron, the size of a quail’s egg. It was white with a thin blue line running down its whole length from top to bottom, and the cold coming off it frosted the cauldron’s rim.

Eight clouds. Perfect.

He sealed it in jade with his bleeding right hand and turned to the sickroom door. Hong Lie opened it for him before he reached it.

“Tonight, Patriarch,” Shi Feng said, putting the jade box in Wanyan Bo’s grey hands. “Swallow it whole. Let it reach the crack by itself. Guiding it would disturb the fold I put inside.”

Wanyan Bo’s big hands closed round the box. They were trembling.

A day’s ride out on the frozen waste, in a hollow out of the wind, three herders were driving their yaks home when the youngest of them stopped and pointed south.

Over the edge of the world, where the Wanyan estate stood, eight white clouds hung in a row in the empty sky.

“Look at that,” the youngest herder said. “There’s never a cloud over the waste in winter.”

“Eight of them,” the oldest herder said slowly, and pulled his hood back to see. “Something’s being made over there.”

That night every tent in their camp heard about it.