Chapter 1101 — Some Dead Man’s Array

CHAPTER 1101

Some Dead Man’s Array

Lin Langtian led them to the valley’s only entrance. He meant to close it before anyone could follow their tracks.

It was a narrow cleft between two black cliffs at the valley’s southern end, barely wide enough for a sledge. Snow lay deep in it. Their own tracks from three days ago still ran through it, half filled in, three lines of footprints and one that wandered where Lin had stumbled with Shi Feng on his back.

Shi Feng stood at the mouth of the cleft leaning on a pine staff. Qin Wuyan stood beside him. It had taken them most of the morning to walk four li.

“Right here,” Lin Langtian said, and crouched by a boulder half buried in the drift.

He brushed the snow off it. Underneath, the stone was smooth and grey, and there was a palm print worn into the top of it by a great many hands over a great many years. Lin set his own palm in the print. It fit.

Then he said a word.

Shi Feng didn’t know it. It wasn’t Imperial speech, or any frontier dialect he’d heard, or the old script the Pavilion used on its seals. It was short and low. Shi Feng had the feeling that nobody had said it aloud in a very long time.

The boulder hummed.

On both cliffs, the snow lifted. It rose off the ledges in long white sheets and drifted inward without any wind to carry it, and it closed over the cleft from both sides. The footprints vanished. The cleft vanished. In ten breaths there was only a slope of unbroken snow between two cliffs, and nothing in it said a path had ever been there.

Shi Feng sent out his Spirit Sense. It went to the edge of the valley and stopped. Beyond that point there was only blankness, smooth and solid, and his sense slid off it without finding a seam.

He’d felt arrays at the Sky Pavilion that cost millions. None of them had felt like this.

Qin Wuyan’s expression changed for the first time since the basin.

“This one has seen this style of array once,” Qin Wuyan said, looking at the cliffs. “On a jade slip in the Pavilion’s oldest archive. The style has been extinct for centuries.”

“Has it?” Lin Langtian said, and stood up, dusting off his knees.

“Whose house is this?” Qin Wuyan asked.

“Some dead man’s,” Lin Langtian said. “I’m borrowing it.”

“Without asking him,” Shi Feng said.

“He hasn’t complained so far,” Lin Langtian said cheerfully, and started back up the valley.

They walked back slowly. Halfway to the abode, beside the path, a stone stele stood in the snow under a thick coat of moss. Shi Feng had passed it twice without seeing it. Lin stopped in front of it.

He scraped the moss off the top with his thumb. Under it was a line of carved characters in a script Shi Feng couldn’t read, old and heavy, cut deep. Lin scraped away one character, then a second, then stopped with his thumb on the third.

He stood there for a long moment and looked at what he’d uncovered.

Then he pressed the moss back over it with the flat of his hand, smoothed it down, and walked on.

Shi Feng saw Lin Langtian’s reluctance and kept quiet. Whatever the stele meant to him, he wasn’t ready to explain it. Qin Wuyan also looked away.

That night Lin was in a much better mood. He sat by the fire roasting a sweet potato on a stick and gave them the frontier news, all of it, in one loud run.

“Artificer Hall’s still standing,” Lin Langtian said. “Barely. Gongsun Ce lost a bet on you, then won it back betting on you, then lost it again betting against himself. Zhu Liu writes receipts for the receipts now. And Sima Lan!” He pointed the sweet potato at Shi Feng. “She opened a new column in your ledger. ’Absence (billed).’ Every month you’re away, she enters a fee.”

“Who does she bill it to?” Shi Feng asked.

“I asked her that,” Lin Langtian said. “She looked at me and said, ’Him.’ Then she went back to her figures.”

Shi Feng laughed despite the pain in his ribs. He was glad Sima Lan was still busy scolding him from so far away.

“And the Sect Master?” Shi Feng asked.

“The old man had his broom rebound,” Lin Langtian said. “Three coppers. He complained about it for a week. He says a good broom outlives three sect masters.” He turned the sweet potato. “Oh. And the Ling girl left Great Liang.”

The laugh went out of Shi Feng’s face.

“Left?” Shi Feng asked.

“Walked out of the capital one morning with an old man who smelled like a tree,” Lin Langtian said. “That’s what the gate guards said. Like a tree. Nobody knows which sect he came from. The court’s still arguing about it.”

“Did she go willingly?” Shi Feng asked.

“She walked in front of him,” Lin Langtian said. “The guards were very clear about that.”

Shi Feng was relieved. Ling Qingzhu had gone willingly and hadn’t simply followed the old man’s orders. He knew how proud she was. She must have wanted whatever lay ahead.

He looked into the fire for a while. Qin Wuyan said nothing, and Lin, for once, let the quiet be.

“Good,” Shi Feng said at last.

Lin Langtian peeled his sweet potato and burned his fingers on it, and swore. The wind moaned outside over the snow that had swallowed the path.

Shi Feng lay back on his bedding and closed his eyes. Tomorrow he would have to find out exactly how badly he was broken, and he didn’t think he would like the answer.