Chapter 359 — Triple Price

CHAPTER 359

Triple Price

The queue at the herb counter moved slower than the ox.

Shi Feng stood in it with his token in hand, and Sima Lan stood beside him with the ledger open. It was late afternoon. Candidates drew their practice herbs from the tower's allowance counter, one old man at a time, and each old man had a great deal to say about the weight of his ginger root.

“Fourteen candidates ahead of us,” Sima Lan said. “At this speed, we'll reach the counter after the bell.”

“Then we'll reach it after the bell,” Shi Feng said.

“I’m not complaining. I’m calculating,” Sima Lan said, writing the total. “The rice, the candle and the dormitory bed come to eleven stones if bought outside. The fee cost two thousand. I'd like to meet whoever calls that very good.”

“Elder Qian Mo,” Shi Feng said.

“That was a rhetorical question,” Sima Lan said.

Behind the counter stood a senior clerk of the Sky Pavilion, a lean man with grey temples and a white sleeve band. Clerk Shang had weighed herbs for forty years and had little patience for quarrels at his counter. A candidate shouted about a missing leaf, and he turned the scale and showed him the leaf was there. “Next,” Clerk Shang said when a merchant accused him of favouring a rival.

At the head of the queue, an old alchemist grumbled and left with his bundle. The line shuffled forward.

Then the door opened, and the whole hall noticed it.

Nothing happened loudly. A man in a long grey cloak came in from the evening street and stopped just inside. The hood was up, and the cloth of it was plain and dull, with no crest and no badge. He didn't look around. He walked straight past the queue to the counter, without pushing, and the candidates stepped aside without being asked.

The cloaked man greeted the clerk in a level, polite voice. Shi Feng couldn’t tell his age.

A candidate objected that the queue was behind him.

The man assured them he wouldn’t be long. He laid a small cloth bag on the brass scale and offered triple the shelf price for all the Deep Marrow Moss.

The bag tipped. A flat gold leaf slid half out of it, and a murmur went along the line.

“Triple?”

“For moss?”

“That's a month's pay for a mid-grade alchemist!”

“Take it, you fool, take it! Money makes even ghosts push the millstone!”

Clerk Shang glanced at the bag. He left the gold untouched and looked into the man’s shadowed hood.

“The Pavilion doesn't trade with your house,” Clerk Shang said.

The hall went still.

Shi Feng was surprised by the direct refusal. The clerk hadn’t even examined the payment, and no one in the hall seemed willing to interrupt him.

The cloaked man raised his offer to quadruple.

“The Pavilion doesn't trade with your house,” Clerk Shang said again.

The cloaked man accepted the refusal without arguing. He picked up his bag and tucked the gold leaf back in with two fingers, neatly. He bowed to Clerk Shang by a precise inch. Then he turned and walked back through the hall, past the queue, past the old alchemists, and out into the street. The line parted for him again. The door closed behind him without a sound.

Silence held for three breaths.

“What house?” a candidate whispered.

“Martial Palace?”

“Don't be stupid. Martial Palace buys here every morning.”

“A southern house, then. Some sect with a grudge.”

“The Pavilion has no grudges! It sells to everyone!”

“It sells to demons if they pay on time…”

“…”

“Next,” Clerk Shang said.

The line moved. The old men returned to their ginger root, though more quietly than before. Nobody was laughing at anything now.

Shi Feng stayed where he was, with one hand resting on the violet purse string at his belt. He had seen the Sky Pavilion do many things in the last months. It haggled, certified, fined and rented. But it dealt with Martial Palace and Hundred Flower Valley and Artificer Hall in the same polite voice, and it dealt with strangers and rivals and criminals if they brought the proper price.

He had never heard it refuse a customer for who he was instead of what he offered.

And he had never seen a man take a refusal like that, without even a curse.

“Sima Lan,” Shi Feng said.

“I counted,” Sima Lan said. She hadn't looked up from the ledger. “Triple, then quadruple. Refused twice with the same sentence. The Pavilion didn't ask his name, and he didn't give it.”

“He brought gold leaf,” Shi Feng said.

“Which is what a man carries when nobody has ever told him no,” Sima Lan said. She underlined something. “A house that can pay quadruple in gold and is told no without a single raised voice. I'd like to know its name.”

“Why?” Shi Feng asked.

“Because it will have a very good memory,” Sima Lan said, “of who stood closest to the counter. As the saying goes, when the city gate catches fire, the fish in the moat suffer.”

The line shuffled forward by one. Shi Feng stepped up to the brass scale when his turn came, and Clerk Shang looked at his token for a long moment.

“Candidate Shi. Thirty-two,” Clerk Shang said. “Your allowance.”

“Which house was that?” Shi Feng asked.

Clerk Shang pushed a tray of ordinary herbs across the counter. He clearly had no intention of answering the question.

“Herbs for the first round are on the tray,” Clerk Shang said. “Next.”