Chapter 479 — A Wager of Nothing

CHAPTER 479

A Wager of Nothing

The old patched boat creaked northwest through the afternoon cloud, and for once nobody on it was counting anything.

Zhu Liu slept flat on the deck with the empty scroll rod in his arms. Li Changyuan slept sitting up, his basket of cabbages in his lap, his broom propped against his shoulder. Sima Lan lay in the cabin under a blanket she'd agreed to only because it was on the Hall's account. Up on the cabin roof, Lin Langtian was working steadily through a sweet potato and the day's gossip, which he was reading aloud to a cloud.

Shi Feng sat in the stern with his back against a coil of rope. He'd intended to do nothing for three hours.

A shadow fell across his knees.

“May I?” Gongsun Ce asked.

He held a flat puppet case in one arm and a folded sheet of paper in the other hand. His grey robe was creased from the hearing. There was still cooling wax on one cuff.

“It's a boat,” Shi Feng said. “It isn't mine.”

“That is not a refusal,” Gongsun Ce said.

“No,” Shi Feng said.

Gongsun Ce sat stiffly on the rope coil's other side, plainly unsure how to start. He set the case between them. For a while he looked at the clouds.

“I wish to propose a wager,” Gongsun Ce said at last.

Shi Feng waited for the usual odds. He waited for a stake in puppet cores, a payment in the usual currency, a line about the next Assessment.

“What is the stake?” Shi Feng asked.

“Nothing,” Gongsun Ce said.

“And the subject?” Shi Feng asked.

“Nothing in particular,” Gongsun Ce said. “I merely wish to talk about refining, and I find I cannot do it without a wager. It is a long-standing habit. I do not know how to begin otherwise.”

From the cabin roof came a delighted gasp.

“Junior Brother!” Lin Langtian called down, upside down over the edge, with a potato in his teeth. “Lesson twenty-three! The old drunkard's heart is not in the wine! When a gambler offers you a wager of nothing, he wants something that costs more than anything!”

Gongsun Ce did not turn around.

Lin Langtian's head disappeared. Gongsun Ce let out a slow breath and unfolded his sheet of paper.

It was a sketch of the grey blade. The ugly one, from the exam. Gongsun Ce had drawn it from memory, with the lumpy fat tang, the single hair of a hammer mark, and a long wavering line down the steel that Shi Feng recognised as grain.

“The grain,” Gongsun Ce said, putting a finger on it. “It runs against the draw. Everything I was taught says that blade should have snapped on the third strike of the hardness test. A refiner would call that a flaw in the folding. I stood three paces from the anvil and I saw it hold.”

“It was an accident,” Shi Feng said.

“Accidents do not hold,” Gongsun Ce said. “They break, usually in public. I have watched ten years of puppets break in public.” He moved his finger. “You folded in something at the second fold. The Slag Weight, filed. The Pavilion's examiner called it forge-scale. It was not scale.”

Shi Feng said nothing. After a moment, because Gongsun Ce's finger had not moved, he picked up the sheet and turned it to the light.

“The filings don't weld,” Shi Feng explained, pointing to the sketch. “They seat. The grain bends around each one instead of joining it.”

“Seat,” Gongsun Ce repeated. He took out a pencil, a stub no longer than his thumb, and wrote the word on the margin. “Seat. And then the fire?”

“Hold the heat low and let the grain settle around the filings,” Shi Feng said. “Don't force the fire while it's arguing with you.”

“Argue,” Gongsun Ce repeated.

“My fire used to argue,” Shi Feng said. “Now it doesn't. I don't know why I notice it.”

The pencil stopped. Gongsun Ce looked up.

“That is the first time you have told me anything about your craft,” Gongsun Ce said, “without being billed.”

“I haven't billed you,” Shi Feng said.

“I noticed,” Gongsun Ce replied, looking down. “You owe me nothing this month. I counted the ledger three times. Nothing, either way. I find it very unsettling.”

“You could be pleased,” Shi Feng said.

“I could be,” Gongsun Ce said. “I am working on it.”

They sat. The boat swung gently on a rising current, and Zhu Liu muttered paid in full in his sleep. In the bow, He Zhen turned the rudder a finger's width, for no reason anyone could see.

“The pressure at your gate,” Gongsun Ce said.

Shi Feng didn't move.

“I built half of the formation the Palace is afraid of,” Gongsun Ce said, quietly. He wasn't looking at Shi Feng now. He was looking at the old man asleep with the cabbages. “I know what my puppets did that night, and what they did not. They did not do that. Something swept the sky, and my puppets are not that large.”

“Put it on the ledger,” Shi Feng said.

“Some things do not go on the ledger,” Gongsun Ce said seriously, folding the sketch and holding it out. Shi Feng took it. “I merely wished you to know that there is something here I am not asking.”

“Thank you,” Shi Feng said.

“Do not thank me. I do not know what I am doing,” Gongsun Ce admitted with an awkward little smile. “It is the first thing in my life I have declined to bet on.”

On the cabin roof, a sweet potato peel drifted slowly down past the stern and out into the cloud, and nobody said anything about it.