Chapter 414 — The Great Furnace

CHAPTER 414

The Great Furnace

Old Soot sneezed, and a peony bed went up in flames.

“My lilies!” Su Wanning screamed. “My peonies! My lilies, my peonies, my whole Eastern Terrace!”

“That one is a peony,” Sima Lan said. “The lilies are across the path. Only the peony is burning.”

“That makes it worse!” Su Wanning said.

On the lip of a stone fountain, Old Soot sat with its gold-rimmed eyes half shut and a thin ribbon of smoke rising from its nostrils. It looked at the burned bed. It looked at the pink petals still drifting down. Then it growled, low and offended, at a lily.

“It hates them,” Su Wanning wailed. “It hates all of them! Everything that's pretty!”

“It has good taste,” Sima Lan said. “It lives with me.”

The Cauldron Court of Hundred Flower Valley lay behind the elders' hall, a wide yard of grey flagstones with a roof of black tile on four stone pillars. Under the roof stood the great furnace. It was green bronze, three men tall, with nine curved petals around its mouth, and it hadn't been lit in eleven years. Furnace Keeper Rui Ning, a stooped man with a limp and a rag on his shoulder, had spent the whole night scraping off the soot.

“It should still work,” Rui Ning said proudly, patting the cleaned bronze. “Eleven years without a firing doesn’t mean it’s finished. I’ve kept it ready. An old horse in the stable still longs to gallop a thousand li.”

Shi Feng walked around the bronze once with his hand on its side. It was cold, solid and very old. He pressed his ear to the metal and tapped it with a knuckle, and it answered with a long, low note, deep as a temple bell.

“Good enough,” Shi Feng said.

“Good enough?” Rui Ning said. “It's the best furnace in three kingdoms.”

“Then it’ll do the work,” Shi Feng said. “I’m not insulting your furnace, Keeper Rui. I need to know whether I can trust it.”

Disciples set forty-one cots along the roof’s edge, where the furnace heat could reach them. Each pillow carried a name card. Some patients slept; others stared silently upward with grey nails on their blankets. Shi Feng realised none were coughing. The Withering left them too quiet.

Elder Zhang Pei came striding across the yard with a face like thunder.

“That beast,” Zhang Pei said, “has eaten the Southern Hedge, the shrine's incense stand and two ornamental frogs. One rat dropping spoils the whole pot of porridge!”

“The frogs were stone,” Sima Lan said.

“They were three hundred years old!” Zhang Pei said.

“Then they were very well preserved,” Sima Lan said. “Three stones per hedge, ten for the incense stand and the frogs I will estimate. It's all on the schedule.”

“It will not enter the Heart Garden,” Elder Yu Lan said, arriving behind Zhang Pei. She held a wooden board with two characters on it, wet from the brush. “I have posted a sign.”

Sima Lan read it. Old Soot read it too, or gave the board a long, appraising stare, and then it spat a ball of slag fire that hit the exact centre of the sign.

“Hmph!” Zhang Pei said, stamping out the embers. “That sign cost two stones!”

“Charged to the beast's account,” Sima Lan said. “Which is mine. I'll deduct it from my wage.”

Shi Feng thought about the cost of a toad and a week's wage and decided not to follow the conversation. He rolled up his sleeves instead.

Su Wanning came running back from the burned bed with a tray of tea and a face that was still three-quarters grief.

“Senior Brother Shi!” Su Wanning gasped. “Here's tea! I put in honey! Yu Lan said no honey because it clouds the qi, but I said you'd forgive it! Also I brought your herbs! I labelled them myself! This is dragon-bone and this is dragon-thorn and the third one is thorn-bone, or maybe bone-thorn...”

“That's dragon-thorn,” Shi Feng said, picking it up. “The label says dragon-bone.”

“Oh,” Su Wanning said. “Then this must be...”

“Ironwood bark,” Shi Feng said.

“Ah,” Su Wanning said. She set down the tray and stared at the ground. Then she looked up with big, shining eyes. “Have you eaten, Senior Brother Shi?”

“Not yet,” Shi Feng said.

“Big Sis Qingzhu would never ask you,” Su Wanning said fast, “and she told me not to ask for her, so I'm asking for me. Eat something. Please.”

He took a piece of the rice cake from the tray and ate it. Su Wanning beamed as if she had personally baked it.

At noon, a procession entered the yard. Elder Yu Lan led it, with four disciples in a square around her, and in the middle of the square one of them carried a long jade box in both arms. They walked slowly. They didn't talk. When they set the box on the stone table beside the furnace, even the poisoned, lying on their cots, turned their heads to look.

“The Heart Blossom,” Yu Lan said.

She opened the lid.

The palm-sized flower rested on pale moss. Six milk-white petals carried gold light along their edges. Its fresh scent reached the patients nearest the table. Shi Feng stopped sorting herbs to examine it; this living bloom was their chance to make the cure.

Then he saw the seventh petal.

It sat low at the base, curled against the stem. It was black.

“That petal,” Shi Feng said. “When did it turn?”

Yu Lan didn't answer. Her hand was white on the edge of the box.

“Yesterday it was white,” Yu Lan whispered.

Su Wanning's mouth fell open. Rui Ning took his rag off his shoulder. Behind them, in the cots, nobody moved.

Shi Feng set down the herbs. The black petal worried him more than the elders’ arguments had. He checked the great furnace, then the forty-one patients waiting beside it. There was no room left for another delay.

“Three days,” Shi Feng said. “If the Blossom lasts that long.”