Chapter 390 — Third Night

CHAPTER 390

Third Night

The shovel was not his only company.

Shi Feng put his eye to the gap and saw a lantern. It stood on a flat rock at the foot of the rubble heap, throwing yellow light over broken glass and grey boulders. The night sky above it was clear and cold. After eleven days in the dark, the light hurt his eyes. He blinked several times before he could make out the stars.

He widened the hole with the grey Sword, slowly, a finger at a time. Ember Rain would have lit up the whole cliff, and he wanted to see before he was seen.

When the gap was wide enough, he slid out onto a ledge of fused ash and lay flat. Dust stuck to his hair, his face and his robe. He was grey from head to foot. Forty paces below, a small figure was digging.

It was Ling Qingzhu.

She had no veil. Her violet robe was grey to the knees, and her sleeves were torn off at the elbow. She was prying at a slab with both hands, and each time the slab shifted, a little blood ran down her wrists. The lantern showed her nails. Three of them were gone.

Shi Feng stayed where he was.

He told himself she was a Valley disciple, that the Valley team had left days ago, and that he had no business watching. All three were true. None of them moved him.

Footsteps crunched across the glass. A second light came out of the dark, small and red. It was the glow of a sweet potato on the end of a stick.

“Second night?” Lin Langtian asked.

“Third,” Ling Qingzhu said, without turning around. “Don't tell him.”

Shi Feng frowned. He couldn't tell whom she meant. The Valley, her friend, Lin, or the man buried under her feet. Perhaps all of them.

“Which him?” Lin Langtian said.

“Any of them,” Ling Qingzhu said. She kept her eyes on the slab.

“I never tell anyone anything,” Lin Langtian said. “Ask the contract clause. It cost me twenty-one stones.”

Ling Qingzhu said nothing. She put her shoulder under the slab and heaved. It moved a finger-width and slid back. She sat down hard on the glass and held her hands against her chest.

Lin Langtian didn't comment. He walked over, set a flask and a roll of clean cloth beside her knee, and picked up a second shovel from the dark.

“Don't,” Ling Qingzhu said. “I don't need your help.”

“I'm not helping,” Lin Langtian said. “I'm digging my own hole. My junior brother owes me four sweet potatoes. A man doesn't get to be buried before he pays.”

“He's been under there eleven days,” Ling Qingzhu said, gripping the torn cloth at her wrist.

“Elders give up quickly,” Lin Langtian said. “It's the beards. They get tired.”

“Tian Luo said the Spirit Sense found nothing,” Ling Qingzhu said. Her voice was quieter now.

“The glass scrambles it,” Lin Langtian said. “I swept it six times. I found a lot of glass.”

He dug beside her. His shovel went in clean, and he made a great deal of noise about the effort, grunting and complaining about his back. She watched him for a moment. Then she wrapped one hand in the cloth and picked up the slab again.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

“He's alive,” Lin Langtian said at last. His voice wasn't loud now, and the cheerfulness had gone out of it. “Calamities live a thousand years. Nothing in that boy dies quietly.”

“You said that last night,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“I'll say it tomorrow too,” Lin Langtian replied, setting his shovel under another stone.

Ling Qingzhu bent her head. A strand of hair had fallen over her cheek, and she didn't push it back.

Shi Feng lay on the ledge and found that his throat was tight.

He could have stood. He could have called out, and in ten breaths she would have been looking at him across the glass. He thought about it honestly. Then he thought about what she had said.

Don't tell him.

She didn't want that man to know. She hadn't come for gratitude, or for a story, or for the rumour of a champion's wife. She had come in the night, with no veil and no guards, and she had asked the only person who'd found her to keep it secret. If he stepped into the light now, he would take her secret away from her without asking.

He had never been good at taking things people hadn't offered.

Besides, his hair was full of glass, he smelled like an ash beast, and he hadn't spoken to her in months. He had no plan for the first sentence.

So he did the dull thing. He turned over on the ledge, slid down the far side of the heap, and walked away into the dark. His feet found the dust easily. Drifting Ash Step took him between the boulders without a sound, and behind him the two shovels went on ringing.

He didn't look back. It was easier that way.

At dawn he reached the lake road. A man in an Artificer Hall grey jacket sat on the edge of a cart, knocking a stone out of the wheel. The cart held a long box of black-bordered cards.

“You look like you came out of the cliff,” Courier Pan Hu said, not looking up.

“It did,” Shi Feng said.

“Everyone's a scavenger these days,” Courier Pan Hu said, spitting beside the wheel. “Nothing's left. Don't waste your boots. Are you walking? No? Then stand aside, I've got a funeral to deliver.”

“Whose?” Shi Feng asked, taking a step toward the cart.

“Champion Shi Feng's. Tomorrow at noon,” Courier Pan Hu said, holding up a card. It said, in careful brush strokes, that Artificer Hall mourned its champion and would accept offerings at the Treasury window, receipts issued. “Terrible waste. A tall tree catches the wind. He owed me four coppers.”

Shi Feng took the card and read it twice.

“Is it a good funeral?” Shi Feng asked.

“Elder Qian Mo says it's the cheapest he can make it look,” Courier Pan Hu said. He finally glanced up and scowled at the grey figure in front of him. “Do I know you?”

“No,” Shi Feng said. “Could I ride?”