Chapter 1116 — Nobody Leaves

CHAPTER 1116

Nobody Leaves

Lin Langtian relit the array by hand.

When they’d first come to the valley, he’d woken the outer ring with one word. The array’s heart had been dead for centuries, though. Waking it fully meant walking the rim and putting qi into each of the forty-nine stones with his own palm. Some were buried to the shoulder in snow.

Shi Feng watched from the cave mouth with a blanket round his shoulders, worried for him. By the twelfth stone, Lin Langtian was sweating. By the thirtieth, he had to brace his shaking hand against the rock with his other hand to keep it steady. At the forty-first he sat down in the snow with his head between his knees. Qin Wuyan took one step from the door and then stopped himself.

Lin Langtian forced himself up and finished the circuit.

At the forty-ninth stone he said a word in a dialect nobody had spoken for a very long time. The valley rim hummed. A thin grey light ran from stone to stone around the whole valley, met itself, and sank out of sight into the snow. The wind dropped.

Lin Langtian came back down the slope slowly, wiping his face with his sleeve.

“There,” Lin Langtian said, dropping onto the crate in the doorway. “Now the house is awake. It’s grumpy, but it’s awake.”

“Senior Brother,” Shi Feng said. “Take the back path north tonight, before the valley closes.”

Lin Langtian looked up at him.

“You can’t lift the hammer. You said so yourself in Pinefall,” Shi Feng said. “If I open and it fails, there’s nothing you can do here except die beside me. The Sixth Elder has seen your sky. He said a name to you at the basin. He wants you more than he wants me.”

“Is that all?” Lin Langtian asked.

“That’s all,” Shi Feng said.

“Then listen to Senior Brother’s answer. It’s very short.” Lin Langtian reached into his robe, took out a sweet potato, cold and black-skinned from yesterday’s fire, and bit into it. “Senior Brother doesn’t run from bandits in a house he’s borrowing. It’s bad manners. What would the owner think?”

“The owner’s dead,” Shi Feng said.

“Then he’d think it even more,” Lin Langtian said with his mouth full, and settled himself more comfortably in the doorway. “I’m sitting right here. If anyone wants to come in, they can step over me. Go and get ready.”

Shi Feng looked at him for a long moment, moved and worried at once. Lin Langtian went on eating the cold sweet potato with great enjoyment.

Shi Feng accepted his choice and didn’t ask again.

At dusk, the Heretic vanguard came to probe the valley mouth.

Shi Feng felt them before he saw them: three presences at Shattering Void, sliding through the pines below the rim, very quiet. They’d found the edge of the array and were testing it carefully. One of them tore a small rift to see through the array’s grey veil.

Qin Wuyan didn’t leave his post.

He stood at the door of the abode, half a li from the valley mouth, and lifted his good hand. Still Mountain Seal came down on the pines.

The air over the three men grew so heavy that the pines around them bent flat. Their rifts folded shut in their hands. One of them tried to tear a new one and couldn’t. Under a Profound Heaven seal, Shattering Void men couldn’t move space at all. The snow under them pressed into ice. The seal crushed them where they stood, and the valley mouth went silent.

Qin Wuyan lowered his hand.

“Three,” Qin Wuyan said. “Scouts. The rest will come behind.”

Lin Langtian, still in the doorway, whistled softly. “Guardian Qin, you didn’t even step off the porch. The old ginger really is the spiciest.”

Qin Wuyan said nothing, and went on watching the pines.

That night, when Shi Feng went toward the abode’s heart with the four jade cases, Qin Wuyan followed him as far as the passage and stopped him there.

“Master Shi,” Qin Wuyan said. “This one’s orders say what is to be done if the Pavilion’s alchemist dies.”

“What do they say?” Shi Feng asked.

“This one dies first,” Qin Wuyan said.

Qin Wuyan said it as plainly as any report. He stood in the narrow passage with his bound arm across his chest and waited, expecting Shi Feng to argue the order.

Shi Feng was moved, and he didn’t argue it.

“Then stay alive, Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said. “I want you beside me on the road back. The Pavilion couldn’t send me a better guardian.”

Qin Wuyan was pleased. For the first time since the Lotus Gate, the corner of his mouth lifted.

“This one will try,” Qin Wuyan said, and went back to the door.

Shi Feng went on into the dark of the abode’s heart alone. He sat down in the middle of the worn carved lines, set the four jade cases in a row in front of his knees, and opened the first one.