Chapter 1099 — Forty Li

CHAPTER 1099

Forty Li

He woke to the smell of smoke and burnt rice.

Above him was a stone ceiling, black with soot, cut straight out of the mountain. A fire burned in a ring of old stones a few paces away. Beyond it a doorway let in grey light and a thin line of wind, and outside the wind the snow was falling on pines.

Shi Feng lay still and looked inward first.

His meridians were scorched from the left shoulder to the hip. Three of his golden ribs were cracked, and the cracks ached each time he breathed. His sea of qi was nearly dry. There was enough in it to keep him warm and not much more.

The last thing he remembered was the sledge stopping at a frozen river, the Wanyan drivers turning back, and Lin saying, “From here we walk.” After that there was nothing.

“Awake?” Lin Langtian said cheerfully. He was squatting by the fire with a ladle, stirring a blackened pot. “Good. Welcome to Cold Pine Abode. Before you say anything, I want it known that Yours Truly carried you the last forty li. On his back. Uphill. In snow up to the knees.”

“Forty li,” Shi Feng said, his voice rough.

“Forty li!” Lin Langtian said, and pointed the ladle at him. “I’ve decided to charge by the li.”

“How much a li?” Shi Feng asked.

“I’m still deciding,” Lin Langtian said. “It goes up every time you ask.”

Shi Feng quietly checked Lin Langtian’s aura with Spirit Sense. His joking voice didn’t hide how weak he’d become.

The peak Profound Heaven pressure that had broken the Cage was gone. In the basin, Lin’s aura had pushed down the snow for a hundred paces and made a Profound Heaven Elder flinch. Now it was thin and low. Shi Feng had felt stronger auras on Pavilion stewards.

Lin ladled broth into a clay bowl and held it out.

His hand shook. The broth slopped over the rim and hissed on the hearthstones, and he caught the bowl with his other hand and laughed.

“Cold,” Lin Langtian said. “This place is freezing. Even my hands are complaining.”

He was squatting a foot from the fire.

Shi Feng looked at the hand. Then he took the bowl with his good arm.

“It’s cold,” Shi Feng agreed.

Shi Feng was worried. Using the hammer had hurt Lin Langtian, yet he’d still carried him forty li uphill. He wouldn’t embarrass his senior brother by questioning him now. He drank the broth. It was burnt, and too salty, and it was the best thing he’d tasted in ten days.

When the bowl was empty he worked his private book out of his sleeve and turned to the back page, where he kept what he owed. He wrote one line under the others.

Lin. Forty li. Hands.

“What are you writing?” Lin Langtian asked, craning his neck.

“What I owe you,” Shi Feng said, closing the book. “Forty li. I won’t forget.”

“Good! Good,” Lin Langtian said, settling back on his heels in satisfaction. “Write it big. A debt should be written big, or the debtor forgets.”

The light in the doorway darkened. Qin Wuyan came in out of the snow with white on his shoulders, his bound arm against his chest and his good hand empty. He stopped at the edge of the firelight and bowed to the bed.

“The valley rim is clear,” Qin Wuyan reported. “This one’s report has reached Tianjing under seal. The Sixth Elder’s rift was seen closing far to the south. Nothing has followed.”

Four sentences. Shi Feng had known men at the Pavilion who couldn’t say good morning in four sentences.

“How far is the nearest tower from here?” Shi Feng asked.

“Twelve days, for a man who can walk,” Qin Wuyan said.

“Then it’s far enough,” Shi Feng said.

Qin Wuyan turned to Lin Langtian, and bowed again.

It wasn’t the bow he gave Shi Feng, a guardian to the alchemist he guarded. It was lower and slower, the bow a junior gives a senior of his own path. Lin was sitting on his heels in a stained robe with a ladle in his hand, and the Pavilion’s early Profound Heaven guardian bowed to him anyway.

Lin Langtian looked at the floor and coughed.

“Sit,” Lin Langtian said, and pushed a second bowl along the hearth with his foot. “There’s congee. It’s burnt on the bottom, so don’t scrape. Eat.”

Qin Wuyan sat down at once on the cold stone, took the bowl in his one good hand and ate. He didn’t argue and he didn’t thank him. He was told to eat, so he ate.

Shi Feng watched them for a while.

Qin Wuyan had come out of the sealed fold bleeding and set himself in front of the Cage’s falling fragments. Lin had come through the top of the Cage with a hammer. Neither of them had said a word about it since, and from the look of it, neither ever would.

He would just have to keep the book.

The fire popped. Snow hissed in the doorway. His eyes were already closing again, and the last thing he heard was Lin complaining that the guardian ate faster than a man with two arms.

Then he was asleep. And sometime before the fire burned down, he started to talk in his sleep.