Chapter 490 — Three Pens, One Pact

CHAPTER 490

Three Pens, One Pact

The Pavilion had provided three pens, three seats and one very nervous clerk.

Clerk Du stood under the glass dome of the Qingyun City tower hall with a scroll as long as his arm. Six hundred seats lay empty around the table. Light poured through the dome onto three delegations who did not look at each other.

Shi Feng sat at the back of the Artificer Hall row. Elder Tian Luo and Elder Qian Mo had the front seats. Beside Shi Feng, Lin Langtian peeled a sweet potato while watching the three delegations.

“Why am I here?” Shi Feng asked.

“Lesson twenty-five,” Lin Langtian said. “Attend every signing you aren't paying for. You learn what other people think a promise is worth.”

“And the potato?” Shi Feng asked, glancing at his hands.

“Is for me. I'm grieving,” Lin Langtian replied, still annoyed at being excluded from the Ruin.

Across the table, Valley Master Mu Shuyun sat with her hands folded and her deeper green sash arranged to the finger. Su Wanning sat behind her with a pen case in her lap. Su Wanning kept looking at the door. Ling Qingzhu was not in the row.

On the third side stood the Palace's empty chair.

“Martial Palace will sign last,” Clerk Du said, with the weary tone of a man repeating a decision made for him. “Elder Qu Jiang is on his way. Shall I begin?”

“Begin,” Mu Shuyun said.

Clerk Du unrolled the scroll.

“‘Item one. The ruin in the neutral hills thirty li north of this city is to be known as the Legendary Cultivator's Ruin,’” Clerk Du read. “‘Item two. Its outer formation admits only cultivators below Nascent Soul. The Pavilion tested this with two of its own elders. Both were returned to the gate unharmed, and extremely annoyed.’”

Lin Langtian's peel snapped in half.

“Again,” Lin Langtian muttered. “Am I not good enough for anybody's hole?”

“Item three,” Clerk Du went on. “Slots. Hundred Flower Valley, thirty. Martial Palace, thirty. Artificer Hall, twelve. The Pavilion holds six more by public lot, for independent cultivators.”

“Twelve,” Qian Mo said at once. “We asked for fifteen.”

“The Palace asked for forty,” Clerk Du said. “Everybody asks for more. It is the nature of paper.”

“Item four?” Tian Luo asked quickly.

“‘Item four. Whatever a person finds inside belongs to the finder, and no sect may take a tithe,’” Clerk Du continued.

Qian Mo's mouth opened. Shi Feng watched his hand creep toward the abacus. Qian Mo had a form. The form said one third. He had written it himself.

“No tithe,” Qian Mo said, unhappily, taking his hand off the abacus.

“Item five,” Clerk Du said. “‘No party may open the Ruin to any outsider without the written consent of all three sects. Whoever breaks this forfeits its slots and carries a Pavilion mark on its trade record for ten years.’”

“Ten years is a long time to be marked,” Su Wanning whispered.

“It's meant to be,” Mu Shuyun said. “Once words are spoken, even four horses can't pull them back. That is why I asked for it.”

Heavy boots sounded in the passage outside. The hall doors swung open, and Elder Qu Jiang came in with Tuoba Hong a step behind him.

Shi Feng looked them over. The Palace elder's long grey beard was neater than before, and his fingers were stroking it too often. Tuoba Hong, the Palace's chief disciple, looked unwilling to spend any longer in the hall than necessary. Nobody in the hall spoke. The Palace had lost its field leader, a war seal, a great deal of coin and its good opinion of itself, all in one season. Yet a starved camel is still bigger than a horse, and the Palace carried itself like one.

Qu Jiang's eyes passed over the Artificer Hall row and stopped at Shi Feng.

“Elder Qu Jiang,” Shi Feng said politely.

Qu Jiang said nothing at all.

“Please sit, Elder,” Clerk Du said hastily. “Everyone else already has.”

Qu Jiang sat. He read the scroll to the end without moving his lips. Then he took the third pen and held it over the paper for such a long time that Clerk Du shifted from one foot to the other.

“The Palace accepts,” Qu Jiang said at last, “because the Ruin is a matter of the whole region. Not because of what happened at Yunze. Not because of the arbitration.”

“Of course,” Mu Shuyun said.

“Naturally,” Tian Luo said.

“Nobody said a word about the arbitration,” Lin Langtian said happily, “before you did.”

Qu Jiang's beard shook. He signed. The ink had barely dried when Qian Mo leaned forward.

“There is a five-stone fee for the third pen,” Qian Mo said. “I noticed it on the receipt.”

“The pens are free,” Clerk Du said weakly.

“Then it's a five-stone fee for noticing,” Qian Mo said.

Mu Shuyun covered her mouth with a sleeve. Su Wanning squeaked into her pen case.

Clerk Du sealed the three copies and, since the Valley had proposed the pact, handed them to Mu Shuyun for safekeeping. She tucked them into her sleeve without looking at them.

Then the doors slammed open again, much harder, and a white-sashed runner skidded across the polished floor with his chest heaving.

The runner gasped out his report to Clerk Du. Three unregistered carriages were descending over the north wall from the cloud line.

“Whose crest?” Clerk Du asked.

The runner described a sun and a bolt of lightning. The carriages weren't slowing.

The pens were still wet on the table.

Lin Langtian put his half-peeled potato down and looked at the dome. For one breath his face held no expression at all.

“Junior Brother,” Lin Langtian said, “smile at the guests. We're the weak sect, remember.”