Chapter 330 — The Dock Is Paid For

CHAPTER 330

The Dock Is Paid For

Bao Kun came forward with a slow, heavy step, and for once Shi Feng didn't move away.

He stood on one leg at the edge of the dock with the Sword hanging from his right hand. His left boot lay in a puddle. A loop of wet, tarred mooring line lay flat on the dark planks where Bao Kun's front boot was about to land, and nobody was looking at it.

“A broken ankle and a dead sword,” Bao Kun said. “You've got courage, boy. Where I come from, we call that stupid.”

“You never move your front foot,” Shi Feng said, watching the elder approach.

Bao Kun's eyes narrowed. He hadn't known anyone was watching his feet. He stepped forward anyway, right into the loop, and his right palm rose, glowing gold-brown to the elbow. He breathed out. The palm came down.

Shi Feng let the Sword fall.

He dropped, on purpose, onto his good knee. It looked like collapse. Bao Kun's palm swept over where his head had been, and the wind of it tore the lantern off the nearest post. At the same moment, Shi Feng's left hand caught the tail of the mooring line and heaved with everything the Ember Rain Sword had left in his arm.

The loop around Bao Kun's front boot snapped tight.

Bao Kun’s front leg shot sideways before he could brace it. He’d already committed his weight to the palm strike. With his footing gone, he couldn’t stop his hand swinging into Shi Feng’s reach.

The Slag Weight was in Shi Feng's right sleeve. It came out into his hand, grey, ugly and heavy as a brick.

He met the fist halfway.

Crack.

The crack was brief and clear. Bao Kun stared at his hand in disbelief. The pain hadn’t reached him yet, but he could see that the Slag Weight had broken his knuckles.

The knuckles bent in a way knuckles aren't meant to.

Then he screamed.

“My hand! My hand!” Bao Kun screamed, losing all thought of the watching crowd.

The dock went mad.

“He broke Elder Bao's fist!”

“With a lump of slag!”

“From the floor!”

“He fell on purpose! Playing the pig to eat the tiger!”

“…”

The Iron Fist disciples shouted that it was cheating.

“It's a dock,” Sima Lan said, in a voice that cut across the noise. “He didn’t ban ropes when he signed the terms. Read the clause.”

“What clause?” somebody shouted back.

“The one I haven't written yet,” Sima Lan said.

Bao Kun rolled on the planks, clutching his right wrist. Gold-brown qi leaked out of his broken hand and drifted over the river like smoke. His twelve disciples sprang forward, iron gloves raised.

“Kill him!”

“Elder Bao is hurt!”

“Stop!” Tang Hai shouted from the lead boat.

The disciples halted at his shout.

Tang Hai had stood up in the lead boat. Behind him, eighty Black Water men rose too, all at once, and every one of them was holding an oar or a hook in both hands. The reed boats rocked. A hush fell over the water.

A young gangster looked anxiously toward Tang Hai.

“Easy,” Tang Hai said. He looked at the twelve iron gloves on the dock and then at the grey lump in Shi Feng's hand. “We're paid by the day, boys. And I think we know who's paying.”

“Aye!” the rest shouted, more or less together.

The twelve disciples looked at the oars, the hooks and the eighty grins. They put their gloves down, one at a time.

“Elder Bao had eyes but failed to see Mount Tai,” a Black Water man muttered.

Zhu Liu came forward with the receipt, hands shaking so hard that the paper crackled. He held it out to Bao Kun, who lay on his side, white as a sheet.

“Elder Bao,” Zhu Liu said. “You said you'd pay for the dock.”

“I…” Bao Kun struggled to answer through the pain.

“Sima Lan has itemised,” Zhu Liu said. “Planks, two hundred and eleven. Pilings, forty. Bollards, nine. One lantern. One mooring line, burned. One post, bent. And a charge for 'public dignity of the dock.'”

“That’s… that’s ridiculous…” Bao Kun protested weakly.

“One thousand nine hundred and sixty stones,” Zhu Liu said.

“Pay,” Lin Langtian said.

Everybody turned.

Lin Langtian was sitting on his salt barrel. He hadn't moved. He was just looking at Bao Kun, with the sweet potato in one hand, and he wasn't smiling at all.

“Pay, Elder Bao,” Lin Langtian said. “It isn't much. I'd hate to see you lose a second hand over a few planks.”

Nobody asked what he meant. Bao Kun's good hand fumbled a storage ring off his finger, and Zhu Liu took it with both of his.

Shi Feng picked up the Sword. He leaned on it, since he had nothing else to lean on.

“One more paper,” Shi Feng said. “Iron Fist Gate withdraws from Jinsha. Its men don't collect. Its boats don't dock. The ferry's money stays with the ferry.”

Bao Kun looked at the paper. Then he looked at the six hundred faces on the dock.

“Martial Palace will hear of this,” Bao Kun whispered.

“Yes,” Shi Feng said. “Sign.”

He signed.

The ferry warehouse smelled of tea leaves and tar.

Shi Feng sat on a crate with the Sword across his knees. His ankle was bound with two planks and half a bedsheet by a boatman who had done it a hundred times. In the lamplight, a faint line of text appeared in his mind.

[Core: 12% | Note: a real fight fills faster than a floor]

He stared at the number. Nine parts higher than it had been in the morning.

The door opened without a knock. Sima Lan stood in the doorway with a piece of chalk, looking at the whitewashed wall.

“What are you doing?” Shi Feng asked.

“You were nine short,” Sima Lan said. “The river supplied nine. Two dunkings. One ankle. One boot. One rope burn. One cracked Sword wrapping. One fake collapse, which I charge as a failure of honour.”

“That’s seven,” Shi Feng said, following the count despite the pain.

“Two more for the dock,” Sima Lan said. “I consider it generous.”

She drew a long line on the plaster, crossed it at the top, and wrote beside it, in neat small characters, 1,000.

“That's the ferry's wall,” Shi Feng said.

“The wall travels with me,” Sima Lan said.