Chapter 379 — The Margin

CHAPTER 379

The Margin

“Eleven stalks of ash-lotus,” Pei Gang said proudly. He held up a sack with both hands. “Four bundles of soot-leaf. And a whole root of red cinder ginseng. One third goes to the sect, as Elder Qian Mo's form says. Heaven rewards the diligent.”

“Where's the form?” Gongsun Ce asked.

“I wrote it on my sleeve,” Pei Gang said. He lifted the cuff to show the cramped characters, taking care not to spill his sack.

It was dusk by the realm's rusty light, and the nine seniors had found them at the foot of a ridge on the road to the central plateau. They looked tired but pleased, with torn robes and grey ash in their hair. Yao Min stood a little behind the rest. She had a bandage on her palm and kept glancing at Shi Feng, and when he looked at her she bowed so quickly her braid whipped.

“Thank you for the ointment,” Yao Min said.

“It's four stones,” Sima Lan said. “Put it on your account.”

“Sima Lan,” Shi Feng said.

“Fine. It's on his,” Sima Lan said.

Pei Gang looked at the three of them, and at the toad, and at the book in Shi Feng's hand. “What did you find?”

“A legacy hall,” Gongsun Ce said. “A Martial Palace man took it.”

“And you?” Pei Gang asked, looking for a second sack.

“We were ejected,” Sima Lan said. “It was fair.”

“And the book?” Pei Gang asked. He pointed at the cracked cover.

“Volume one,” Shi Feng said. “Three coppers.”

“Three coppers?” Pei Gang repeated, disappointed. “Then what's the point of keeping it?”

“It was free,” Shi Feng said.

They made camp in the lee of a boulder, with a small fire of dry ash-wood that gave more smoke than heat. The seniors slept in two small tents pitched against the stone. Shi Feng, Sima Lan and Gongsun Ce each had a one-man tent on the far side of the fire, and Sima Lan's stood exactly four paces from Shi Feng's. Gongsun Ce sat apart, rebuilding the silver crane with cooling wax. He kept a broken wing between his teeth while he worked on the joint, swearing through it whenever the wax stuck to his fingers. Sima Lan wrote in her ledger, her pen scratching, with the toad curled a careful arm's length from her knee.

Shi Feng sat on the other side of the fire and opened the book.

It was dull. He had expected it to be. The first pages were a record of kiln firings, in a clerk's cramped hand: the date of each burn, the weight of clay, the colour of the flame, the hour the fire went out. Page after page of ash ratios and chimney draughts. Somebody long dead had kept careful track of every pot.

Then he turned a page and saw ink that wasn't the clerk's.

It was brown and quick, slanting hard to the right, squeezed into the narrow margin beside a line about the kiln's clay mixture. Wrong. Four parts to one, not three. A child could see it. Did no one test this?

Shi Feng's hand stopped.

He knew that writing. It was Mo Tianheng's.

He had met it long before Artificer Hall, in the margins of old manuals, in the corners of recipes, in scrawled complaints about ingredients and the men who had grown them. He knew the way the downstrokes pressed hardest and the way the tails of the letters ran off the page, as if the writer had been in a hurry to be right.

He turned another page. Rubbish. Anyone who fires at this heat deserves the crack. Another. This master said the same forty years ago. Nobody listens. The old man had read every line of the book, and he had been irritated by every one.

Shi Feng turned slowly toward the back.

The clerk's hand grew shorter near the end. The entries came further apart. On the second-to-last leaf, beside a line that said only Third kiln, cold, the brown ink changed.

It was no longer quick. The strokes were short, hard, and pressed so deeply they had torn the paper in one place.

They came at the third kiln. They don't fight. They take.

Below it, in the same dark ink, someone had sketched a small mark.

It was a circle split down the middle by one upright line. Three short bars hung from the line like ribs, and a single dot sat beneath them. Whoever drew it had gone over it more than once, as though it mattered that it be exact.

Shi Feng had never seen it before. He looked at it for a long time.

The fire popped. A crumb of ash-wood drifted up and out into the dark.

They don't fight. They take.

He thought of the old man's voice, loud, vain and contemptuous, shouting about how the heavens had once knelt at his feet. The voice in these margins had not been shouting. It had been pressing very hard on the paper.

“You've stopped turning pages,” Sima Lan said.

She hadn't looked up from her ledger. She never seemed to.

“It's a dull book,” Shi Feng said.

“Then why are you staring at one page?” Sima Lan asked. Her pen rested on the paper while she waited for him.

He closed the cover. He didn't tell her what was on the leaf, and she didn't ask. She wrote a short line in the ledger, tore it out and slid it across the dirt.

It read: Volume one. Three coppers. Not true.

He put the paper in his sleeve with the book and sat for another long moment, listening to the ash rain tick on the boulder.

Then, at the edge of the firelight, someone's boots shifted on the gravel.

Gu Zhan stood at the border of the dark with his spear in his hand, the cloth wrapping already pulled off its head. He didn't look at the fire, or at the sleepers, or at the toad. He was looking at Shi Feng.

“You said after the opening,” Gu Zhan said. “It is after.”