Chapter 1085 — False Fires

CHAPTER 1085

False Fires

Shi Feng ran all night.

He ran through the cracks in the locked space three body-lengths at a time, falling and getting up again. The Sixth Elder didn’t chase him in a straight line. He didn’t need to. He stood in the middle of the basin and swept it with his Spirit Sense, and the sweep went out across a hundred li of snow and pines and came back.

Every time it came back, it came closer.

“Master Shi!” the Sixth Elder’s voice rolled across the basin. “You can’t leave! Nobody leaves my Cage! Your Pavilion dog is still in the fold, and he’s bleeding! Nobody is coming!”

Shi Feng lay flat in a gully under a fallen pine, snow over his back, and held his breath.

The sweep passed over him. It was a Profound Heaven Spirit Sense, much wider and finer than his own, and he felt it go over the gully, cold and thorough. It didn’t stop. It had been looking for a moving man with broken ribs, and he hadn’t moved.

Shi Feng knew it wouldn’t work twice. The next sweep would come slower and search more carefully.

Shi Feng crawled out from under the pine and looked at the slope above him. There were three gullies running down it side by side, each a few hundred paces from the next.

He went up the first gully on his knees, as far as he could go. At the top he scraped a hollow in the snow, put his palm in it and lit the Thousand Forge Flame. It was the plainest fire he had, and he struck no anvil in it. He fed it a scrap of his own qi, enough to give off the qi of a wounded man trying to stay warm, and left it there. He meant the Elder’s Spirit Sense to mistake it for him.

He did the same in the second gully and the third.

It cost him. Every scrap of qi he put into the fires was qi he didn’t have. By the third fire his hand was shaking, and the cold from the Pale Moon Palm had crept back up past his shoulder into his neck.

He crawled back down into the dark between the second and third gullies and lay still.

The sweep came.

It went out from the centre of the basin and touched the first fire, and stopped. It touched the second fire and stopped there too. It touched the third. For a long moment Shi Feng felt it hanging over all three of them at once, split three ways, trying to decide.

“Clever,” the Sixth Elder’s voice said, much closer. “Clever, clever little dog.”

The sweep went to the first fire and pressed down on it. The fire went out. Then the second.

Shi Feng ignored the fires and counted the sweep’s timing.

The sweep went out and came back on a rhythm. A hundred breaths out, a hundred breaths back. That alone wasn’t much use. But by the fourth time, he’d noticed something else. Wherever the sweep had gone, it always finished on the north side of the basin, from the north-east, before it went out again.

He watched it twice more to be sure. Both times, it finished in the north-east.

Shi Feng understood why. Somewhere up on the north rim, the Ninth Elder was still holding Qin Wuyan in a fold, and the Sixth Elder couldn’t stop checking on him. Shi Feng was relieved. If the Ninth Elder still needed watching, Qin Wuyan was still fighting.

The pattern gave Shi Feng something he could use.

The south-west side of anything was always the last to be searched.

Shi Feng chose to move at once, before the Elder changed his rhythm.

He went south-west along the bottom of the slope, a crack at a time, on his knees when he couldn’t stand. The third fire went out behind him. The Sixth Elder was furious, and he cursed it, loud and ugly. All his courtesy was gone.

“When I catch you, I’ll freeze you one finger at a time! Do you hear me? I’ll keep the hands, and I’ll send the rest of you to your princess in a box!”

The threat to send his body to Long Caili angered Shi Feng, but he kept crawling.

By dawn the grey dome had turned a lighter grey. He was on the west slope of the basin, among rocks, and he couldn’t feel his feet anymore. Ahead of him was a black gap low in the rock face, half hidden by a dead pine. Somebody had stacked stones at its mouth and left a basket hook hammered into the rock beside it.

Shi Feng recognised a herb-gatherer’s cave.

He crawled into it. It went back twenty paces and turned, and around the turn it was dark and dry and smelled of old smoke and roots.

Something moved in the dark.

Shi Feng had the grey Sword up before he’d seen it, and his good hand was shaking so badly that the blade rattled against the rock.

“Don’t! Don’t kill me! I’m a headman!” Tan Ershu’s voice squeaked. “I’m the Lower Pine headman! Tan Ershu! I’m Tan Ershu!”

Shi Feng lowered the sword.

Tan Ershu was sitting against the back wall of the cave with his knees pulled up to his chest. His beard was still singed on one side. He was clutching a short bamboo flute in both hands, holding it in front of his face for protection.

“What are you doing here?” Shi Feng asked. His voice came out as a rasp.

“My grandson’s flute,” Tan Ershu said, bursting into tears. “He wouldn’t stop crying for it on the other side! It was his father’s! While you and that moon-man were gone, I squeezed back through the crack for it. It was only a crack by then, and it took half my coat, and then it shut behind me, and I couldn’t get out, and I’ve been in here all night, and I thought, Tan Ershu, you old fool, you’ve thrown your life away for a flute!”

Shi Feng stared at him. He was exasperated, and moved that the old man had risked his life for his grandson.

Then he slid down the cave wall and sat on the floor beside him, because his legs had stopped holding him up.