Chapter 510 — The Voice in the Carriage

CHAPTER 510

The Voice in the Carriage

The carriage came down out of the rain without a sound.

Shi Feng turned his head and saw it settle onto the road forty paces away. It was long and dark, lacquered the colour of wet slate, with four wheels that never touched the ground until the very last breath. No beast pulled it. Two lanterns of pale green glass hung from the eaves, and the rain slid off them in neat lines.

On the closed door was a carving he could see even through the gloom. A lotus, cut from white jade, with seven layers of petals.

He had never seen that emblem. He knew at once it didn't belong to anything in Great Liang.

An old woman held the reins. She wore plain grey, with a single bone needle pinning her hair. Her face was still and unreadable. She kept her eyes on the road ahead. Even after the carriage stopped, she gave no sign that she’d noticed him.

The carriage windows were covered. Beaded screens of green jade hung behind the lattice, and no light came through them. He sensed no qi from within. Not weak qi. None at all, as though the inside were an empty room. That was strange for a carriage that floated.

The door of the rear compartment didn't open. A smaller door beside the driver's bench did.

A young woman climbed down under an oil-paper umbrella. She was perhaps nineteen. Her robe was a fine pale green with silver edges, and she walked with her chin lifted. She stopped at the edge of the road and looked at what lay there.

Her lip curled.

“Another one,” Yuzhu said. “The roads out here grow them like weeds.”

“Yuzhu,” Lanxin called from the bench. She was younger, with a rounder face. “He's breathing.”

“I can see that, Lanxin.” Yuzhu tilted her umbrella, and the light from the lanterns fell across his face. She flinched, then covered it with annoyance. “Soul-fire. And he's stinking up the verge. Leave him. We've no time for this worthless cripple.”

Shi Feng heard it.

He knew that contempt. People in the Shi clan’s courtyard once spoke about him in the same careless way. He’d spent three years proving them wrong. Now he lay on the road again, unable even to raise himself enough to answer her.

“Our young miss mustn't be delayed,” Yuzhu went on. “Matron Yue, drive on.”

The old woman at the reins didn't answer. She didn't move either.

“Yuzhu.”

The voice came from the carriage.

The voice was soft, but it carried clearly through the closed door, the jade screens and the rain. It wasn’t faint or uncertain. The woman inside didn’t raise her voice to demand attention. Yuzhu listened as soon as she heard it.

Shi Feng stopped breathing.

Shi Feng had never heard a voice so pleasant. It wasn’t sweet or teasing; its calm seemed to reach deeper than his chest and torn meridians. After a night and a day of pain, he felt his soul ease. His chest, clenched for just as long, loosened. The pain remained, but for the first time he could listen to something besides it.

“Young miss,” Yuzhu said, and the contempt vanished from her voice at once.

“Is he alive?” the voice asked.

“Yes, but,” Yuzhu said.

“Then you have your answer.” A short silence. The rain tapped on the lacquered roof. “Saving one life is better than building a seven-storey pagoda.”

Yuzhu's mouth opened and shut. Lanxin, on the bench, looked down at her hands to hide a smile.

“Yes, young miss,” Yuzhu said.

The idiom hung in the air.

Shi Feng stayed silent. He wasn’t going to answer the saying. He lacked the strength for a reply, and he’d already understood her choice: she intended to save him. He knew he’d remember those words as clearly as the voice that spoke them.

There was one thing he could ask for. He used what breath he had.

“Water,” Shi Feng said.

It came out as a crack of dry wood. He thought no one would hear.

“Give him water,” the voice said.

Lanxin was already off the bench with a covered cup. She knelt in the mud, ignoring her skirt, and carefully raised his head. The water was warm and tasted faintly of lotus root and honey. Shi Feng drank slowly. At last his throat eased enough for him to swallow without pain.

“Slowly,” Lanxin said. “Don't choke.”

“Lanxin,” Yuzhu hissed. “You'll ruin that dress.”

“Then I'll ruin it,” Lanxin said, without looking up.

Shi Feng swallowed. He looked past her shoulder at the carriage door, at the white lotus, and at the screens that gave him nothing. He did not try to see through them. He had no idea why he knew that he shouldn't.

“Can you move, young sir?” the voice asked.

He tried. His right hand twitched. His legs did nothing.

“No,” Shi Feng said.

“Then you'll be carried,” the voice said. “Matron.”

“Yes, miss,” Matron Yue said. It was the first thing she had said. Her voice was low and dry, like a branch being drawn across stone.

She turned her head and looked at him at last.

Her eyes were the colour of old iron. They rested on him for exactly one breath, and in that breath he felt something pass over him that wasn't quite pressure and wasn't quite a gaze. It was larger than both, and it asked nothing of him at all.