Chapter 557 — The Hawthorn Alley

CHAPTER 557

The Hawthorn Alley

The tanners' alley was barely wide enough for two people.

Wet stone walls rose on both sides, and shuttered doors were set into them at long intervals. The air smelled of hides and lime and cold water. Every twenty paces, a single red lantern hung from a bracket, and between them the dark was thick. Behind them, the noise of the canal streets faded to a hum. It sounded like a different city.

Ling Qingzhu walked a half step ahead of him with the rabbit lamp swinging in her hand. She had put her veil in her sleeve at the bridge and hadn't taken it out again. Nobody was there to look at her. A cat watched from a windowsill and didn't move.

At the far end, the alley opened into a small yard. A light was shining there, a warm red one, brighter than the lanterns.

“Husband,” Ling Qingzhu whispered. “Look.”

An old man sat behind a low stand, wrapped in a quilted coat, with a pole of straw bound to the stand's side. The pole was covered in sticks, and every stick held a string of small, shining red fruit. Sugar glaze caught the lantern light and turned each one to amber. There must have been fifty sticks. In the cold dark, the whole pole glowed.

“That must be Old Bian,” Shi Feng said.

“It's him!” Ling Qingzhu said. She almost shouted it. Then she let go of his hand.

She ran.

It wasn't a dignified run. The first fairy of Great Liang, a Golden Core and the first name on Hundred Flower Valley's register, lifted the hem of her violet robe in one hand and the rabbit lamp in the other and ran down the wet alley toward the hawthorn stand, too excited to care who saw her. Her hair came loose. Her slippers slapped on the stones.

“Old uncle!” Ling Qingzhu called. “The big ones! I want the big ones! Two! No, three! He's paying!”

The old man raised his eyes slowly. He looked at the running girl, at the young man behind her, and his whole face creased.

“Pay first,” Old Bian said. “Then pick.”

“Husband!” Ling Qingzhu called, turning to walk backward with three fingers raised. “Three! Come and pay!”

Shi Feng smiled.

He noticed only because his cheek hurt a little. It was a small, ordinary smile. For once, he wasn't smiling at a joke or trying to reassure someone. He was simply happy watching her. He stood in the wet alley with his hands in his sleeves, and for a moment there was nothing in the world except a woman walking backward and three red sticks and an old man with a cold nose.

He took one step toward them.

The street sounds were the same. Water dripped from a gutter. Somewhere, a late cart rattled over a bridge. The sugar crackled faintly in the old man's pan.

But the air above the yard had changed.

His Spirit Sense had been quiet all evening, a single hair-thin thread at his feet. Now it stirred without his willing it. It leaned upward on its own. Straight overhead, high beyond the lantern glow, was the weight he had touched on the lantern street. It wasn't high anymore.

It was directly above him.

It was a Pavilion ship, he had told himself. A Pavilion ship wouldn't have followed him into an alley.

“Ling Qingzhu,” Shi Feng said. He heard the edge in his own voice. “Come here.”

“What?” Ling Qingzhu asked with a laugh. She was ten paces away. “You haven't even—”

The alley emptied.

It did not happen quickly or slowly. There was no flash, no sound, no gust of wind. One breath, the walls, the lantern, the old man and the red pole stood in the yard. The next breath, they weren't there. Ling Qingzhu was in the middle of her sentence, with her mouth open, one foot lifted. Then she wasn't.

For a moment he could still hear the gutter dripping and the distant cart. Those sounds no longer had a street around them.

Then they stopped too.

Shi Feng didn't move. His heart was beating in his ears. He reached out with every thread of his Spirit Sense, all of it, all at once, and found nothing. No wall. No ground. No people. Nothing was there for it to touch.

He called qi into the Cloud Ladder Step, the Golden Core-grade art that could climb on air. Even that needed something to push against, and there was none.

His foot did not find a floor. His body had no weight. He was looking up, and he realised he had been looking up for several breaths, because there was nothing else to look at.

The sky.

It was enormous and close, black as ink, filled with cold stars. It had no roofs, no lanterns, no city. It stretched in every direction, and it was perfectly silent.