Chapter 456 — Quartermasters

CHAPTER 456

Quartermasters

“Your beard is crooked,” Lin Langtian said.

“It's glued,” Shi Feng said.

“It's still crooked,” Lin Langtian complained, straightening it with one finger. “We're meant to look like clerks, not boys playing at disguises. There! Now try to look bored.”

They stood in a dry gully a li behind Shimen Pass, in crimson tabards with the Hall of Supply badge on the breast. Lin Langtian had acquired the tabards the way he acquired most things, from a laundress who owed him a potato. His own beard was black and magnificent. Shi Feng's was grey, short and itchy.

“Lesson twenty-one,” Lin Langtian said. “Never forge a person. Forge a clerk.”

He took a folded paper out of his sleeve and shook it open. It was gilt-edged, three feet long and covered in neat crimson seals.

“Best six stones the Hall ever spent,” Lin Langtian said happily. “Real Palace paper, real ink, and a Palace hand I copied while Elder Li argued about the case. And this.” He tapped a small seal of red wax at the foot. “The Hall of Outer Affairs, countersigned by one Deacon Kong Hui, who honoured a loan of six thousand stones in friendship and left us the proof.”

“His receipt,” Shi Feng said.

“His receipt!” Lin Langtian folded the paper. “The order says that the Palace is consolidating its forward chests for safety. Nothing mad. Half goes to the Duanyang depot and half to Qingyun, so that no single road carries the whole chest. That kills two birds with one stone: safety for the council, and a free road for us.”

“And Hou Ping?” Shi Feng asked.

“At the far end of the palisade, a li from the tower, inspecting a dispatch signed by Tuoba Hong,” Lin Langtian said. “Which I wrote last night, on a washing board. I have swept the post twice with Spirit Sense. Six guards, mid Foundation Establishment. A clerk in Qi Condensation. Nobody inside the depot above late Foundation Establishment.” He grinned. “They don't expect thieves, Junior Brother. They expect Palace men.”

“We're not thieves,” Shi Feng said.

“Never. We're borrowers,” Lin Langtian said.

An hour later, they walked up the stone steps of the depot with a sentry saluting on each side. One of them asked if the quartermaster would take tea. Lin Langtian told him in a magnificent roar what the Hall of Supply thought of that, and the sentry apologised twice and opened the door.

Inside was a bare stone room with a heavy iron-bound chest at its centre, and a small desk at the side. At the desk sat a thin clerk with a bald head and ink on his thumb.

“Quartermaster Dong of the Hall of Supply!” Lin Langtian announced, striding in. “And my clerk, Bi. Consolidation order, forward chest, by the Palace war council. Stand up, man. I'm in a hurry.”

The clerk jumped to his feet, alarmed by Lin Langtian's shout.

He protested that nobody had told him about a consolidation order.

“Then read it now,” Lin Langtian snapped, slapping the paper onto the desk. “I haven't come all this way to discuss who forgot to tell you!”

The clerk read it. His lips moved.

The clerk read the seals carefully. He pointed out that Outer Affairs had no authority over a war chest.

“It's a wartime order. Are you questioning the war council?” Lin Langtian demanded. “Refuse if you want, but I'll need your name on the report. Once words are written, even four horses can't pull them back. My clerk is already holding his brush.”

Shi Feng held his brush and looked bored with great concentration.

The clerk looked at the Deacon's mark. He looked at the brush waiting over a blank line. Shi Feng watched him decide that a name on a refusal was more dangerous than a signature on an order.

He sighed and opened the chest.

The clerk counted twenty-one thousand stones. Ten thousand five hundred would go each way, so he needed two receipts.

“Bi,” Lin Langtian said.

Shi Feng stepped forward. The clerk's desk pad was printed HALL OF OUTER AFFAIRS across the top. He tore off a sheet and wrote.

Shi Feng wrote in a neat, square hand, copying the dull style of an experienced clerk. Received at Shimen Pass, forward war chest, ten thousand five hundred spirit stones. For consolidation. He signed it Bi. Underneath, in a hand so small it could have been a flaw in the paper, he added a line: Repayment at the Palace's convenience. Then he wrote the second one.

The clerk peered at the first receipt and asked about the last line.

“Form language,” Shi Feng said.

The clerk accepted the explanation and signed both, unwilling to reveal that he didn't understand the wording. Nobody noticed the rest of the pad slide into Shi Feng's sleeve.

Twenty-one thousand stones went into Lin Langtian's ring, sack after sack. When the last was gone, Shi Feng laid a folded sheet in the bottom of the empty chest and closed the lid. “Filing copy,” Shi Feng said, and the clerk nodded. The clerk expected a filing copy, so leaving it reassured him.

They were forty paces down the road when a line of crimson riders came around the bend, and at their head, looking pale and tense, rode Hou Ping.

Shi Feng kept his pace. His hands stayed in his sleeves.

Hou Ping looked at Lin Langtian's magnificent black beard, and nodded to it. Then his eyes moved to the grey beard beside it, and he stopped nodding. For two breaths, he stared at Shi Feng. Fear showed on his face. Even the beard couldn't fully hide the person he'd dreaded meeting again.

Then he looked at the ground, flicked his reins, and rode very quickly around them.

“...” said Lin Langtian, delighted, once the hooves had faded.

“He knows,” Shi Feng said.

“He recognises you, but he won't dare say it,” Lin Langtian replied, wiping a tear of laughter from his eye. “That was the easy one, Junior Brother. Tomorrow is Iron Fist Gate.”

“Bao Kun will remember my face,” Shi Feng said.

“Then don't let him see it,” Lin Langtian replied. “I'll do the talking. You keep writing those lovely receipts.”