Chapter 457 — The Left Hand

CHAPTER 457

The Left Hand

Iron Fist Gate kept its war treasury in a cellar under a barracks, and its treasury keeper had one good hand.

Shi Feng saw it before he saw the man. A right hand rested on the counting table in a leather brace, bent like a claw. His left hand moved slowly over a ledger; writing with it was still difficult. Then the keeper raised his head, and Shi Feng saw the black cruiser captain's face from the Jinsha docks.

Bao Kun.

He had not been promoted since. The Gate had made its disgraced elder a treasury keeper. With his right hand crippled, he could no longer command the docks.

“Hall of Supply,” Lin Langtian announced, filling the cellar door. He wore the black beard again, and he had added a limp. “Quartermaster Dong. My clerk, Bi. We are collecting the vassal war pledge early, by order of the Palace war council. Here is the order.”

“Early,” Bao Kun repeated.

“The war council wants it now, Elder,” Lin Langtian replied impatiently.

“Pledges come due on the first of the month,” Bao Kun said.

“Then take it up with the council after we leave,” Lin Langtian snapped. “Do you want to explain why its troops haven't been paid?”

Bao Kun looked at the paper. It was gilt-edged, and the seal of the Hall of Outer Affairs sat clearly printed in the corner. He read it twice, holding it flat with his one good hand.

Behind Lin Langtian, Shi Feng kept his head bowed and his brush ready. He was leaving every decision to his supposed superior. He kept his sleeves low. The right hand had never closed properly since the Jinsha docks, and Shi Feng had a feeling the man remembered exactly why.

“You,” Bao Kun said.

Shi Feng looked up.

Bao Kun's eyes went over his face. They stopped on the grey beard, then on the jaw beneath it. His brow creased.

“You remind me of someone,” Bao Kun said slowly.

“Everyone says so,” Lin Langtian said at once. “Clerk Bi has a common face. It cost him three marriages.”

“I'd have kept a wife if the face had been better,” Shi Feng said, in the low, flat voice of a man who had never been consulted.

Bao Kun's expression wavered. It was not the Jinsha boy's voice. That voice had been polite and sharp. This one belonged to a man who spent his days copying invoices.

“That boy had no beard,” Bao Kun said, mostly to himself.

“Lucky boy! Bi needs his to hide that face,” Lin Langtian said, cutting off the question. “Now, Elder, the pledge. I've an appointment at the Duanyang depot. Are you going to make me late?”

Bao Kun gave a short, hard breath and took a key from his belt.

The Gate's pledge sat in three chests against the wall. Lin Langtian, who had counted them from the door without appearing to, pointed at all three.

“The whole pledge, Elder,” Lin Langtian ordered. “All three chests. We're consolidating it, not collecting a handful for tea.”

“All of it?” Bao Kun said.

“The Palace's war doesn't pay for itself in instalments,” Lin Langtian said.

Bao Kun's mouth worked. He was a mid Golden Core elder who had already lost his dock and his dignity, and he had no wish to lose a war on its first day. Once bitten by a snake, as the saying goes, one fears the well rope for ten years. He unlocked the chests one by one, three thousand in the first, three thousand one hundred in the second, three thousand in the third.

“The receipt,” Lin Langtian said. “Bi.”

Shi Feng wrote it. The hand was the same square, tired Palace hand as the day before. At the bottom, in the little line nobody read, he added the usual repayment clause and signed Bi.

Bao Kun read the receipt. His eyes lingered on the handwriting. Shi Feng grew alert. The disguise worked until now, but Bao Kun might recognise his hand.

“You write quickly,” Bao Kun said.

“I have written eleven thousand receipts,” Shi Feng said. “They were all like this one.”

“Eleven thousand,” Bao Kun murmured. “Poor man.”

He signed.

Nine thousand one hundred stones disappeared into Lin Langtian's ring. At the door, Lin Langtian held out his hand, palm up, without looking back. Shi Feng laid the last sheet from the clerk's desk pad in it, printed HALL OF OUTER AFFAIRS across the top.

“A formal note for the Gate's strongbox,” Lin Langtian said. “For the record of its generosity. The clerk will dictate.”

“Dictate what?” Bao Kun asked.

“A courtesy,” Shi Feng said.

He wrote four lines at the empty counting table with his back to the elder, folded the sheet, and laid it in the bottom of the nearest chest. Then he closed the lid, gently.

They went out into the sun. They did not run. They walked at an ordinary pace to the first bend. Hurrying would only make the guards suspicious.

Bao Kun stood alone in the cellar and looked at three empty chests.

After a time he opened the nearest one and found the note.

To the honoured Iron Fist Gate: The Palace thanks you sincerely for your generous support in this difficult season. It remembers its friends. Borrowed in friendship, with thanks.

He read it three times. Then he sent a rider to Martial Palace, to ask why he had been thanked, and when he was getting his money back.