Chapter 562 — The Mark on the Wall

CHAPTER 562

The Mark on the Wall

The lamp-stone dimmed at regular intervals. Shi Feng had learned its schedule, not the time of day.

By his count it faded for the length of a long meal, then brightened for a short one. A cycle, set by someone who wanted prisoners to lose their sense of days. He had been awake through three of those cycles since Ning Zhe's visit. He had slept through none.

During this dim interval, Shi Feng sat with his knees drawn up and thought about the corridor furnace.

Four hundred and twelve.

Ji Yuanhe's pills had been flawless. His hands stayed steady while his tired voice counted, and he barely reacted until Shi Feng said his name. Then came that frightened whisper. That was what troubled Shi Feng: they could exhaust a man and leave him desperate, yet still get perfect work from his hands.

That's the stick, Shi Feng thought. Not the cord. Not the room. It's what they leave of you when you've been here a year.

He took a slow breath.

The lamp-stone sank from pale to dull. The edges of the cell went soft. He shifted on the mat to ease his shoulder, and the back of his left hand scraped across the stone at the foot of the shelf, where the mat stopped.

There was a groove.

Shi Feng went very still.

He couldn't see it. The lamp's light didn't reach that far down. But his fingertips knew carved edges, smooth and deliberate, nothing like a scratch. He slid off the mat onto the floor, knelt, and pushed the mat aside.

A line ran straight up the wall, about a forearm long. Around it was a circle. Three short bars hung from the upright, one under another.

He laid his fingers into the shape and followed it.

The groove was clean and deep and had been filled with something black and dry that crumbled a little under his nail. Old lacquer, maybe. Someone had taken the trouble to make this mark last. It hadn't been cut by a prisoner in the dark. It had been put here by the ones who built the room.

Beneath the circle was a single hole, the size of a fingertip.

A circle split by one upright line. Three short bars hanging from it like ribs. One dot beneath.

He couldn't check the sketch; Volume One was in the confiscated ring. But he remembered studying that page by lantern light in his one-man tent on the road to the central plateau. He'd never forgotten it. The old man's hand, cramped and angry, had drawn it in the margin beside two words.

Third kiln, cold.

And above them, the sentence he had read at the time as the rant of someone who'd lost his temper with a clerk.

They came at the third kiln. They don't fight. They take.

Shi Feng stayed on his knees in the dark with his fingers in the groove.

He compared them stroke by stroke. The circle, a little flattened at the right. The upright, a hair off-centre. The bars, shorter at the bottom. The dot, set slightly to the left. The old man had drawn it from memory, in a hurry, and he had still gotten every line right.

It was the same mark.

Shi Feng understood now. Nie Wufeng's warning. They collect alchemists. The young ones last longest. The Thunder Abyss junior who looked at his folding flame and said the last man to do that was being hunted. The old teacher had not been a man the world had forgotten. He'd been a man somebody was looking for. For longer than anyone should have to run.

And he had known them well enough to draw their sign, years after, in a margin, and to leave it for whoever came next.

Not a feud, Shi Feng thought. A harvest.

No wonder the old man had cursed, and no wonder he had never said the name aloud.

Shi Feng ran his thumb across the dot once more. Below it, almost lost in the dark of the stone, was something else. Short scratches, shallow, done by a nail or a spoon handle. Not part of the sigil at all. They ran in rows of five, one stroke crossed over four, one row after another, down the wall and out of sight behind the shelf.

He counted the first few rows by touch. Then he stopped counting. There were too many.

So they all counted, he thought. Every man who lay here counted.

The Ledger spoke up quietly in the back of his mind.

[Wall: spirit-eating stone. Devour: not yet.]

“Not yet,” Shi Feng agreed.

The slot in the door clicked. The guard from his first meal spoke through it, still bored but sounding tired now.

“Receiver Ning says to tell you he's pleased you're resting,” the guard said. “Your first furnace is lit at dawn.”

“Tell him I'll be ready,” Shi Feng said.

“He knew you would,” the guard said. “They all are.”

The slot closed. The footsteps went away down the corridor, and in the quiet after them, the furnace somewhere in the dark drew its slow breath and let it go.

Shi Feng slid the mat back into place.

He climbed onto the shelf and lay down. In his sleeve the sweet potato pressed against his arm, still uneaten. He didn't take it out. He would save it until he needed it.

He thought of Ling Qingzhu, and then he made himself stop, because worry for her would show on his face.

Be slow. Be late. Let them come to the door.

They had come. They had carried him through it and shut it behind him, and they believed the shutting was the end of the matter.

“I'll learn every room in you,” Shi Feng said quietly to the dark. “Then I'll take back my ring.”

The wall said nothing, and the mark on it said nothing either.

Beyond the stone, the furnace went on breathing.