Chapter 563 — Delayed

CHAPTER 563

Delayed

On the night Shi Feng vanished in Luoxia, the rabbit lamp was still burning.

Ling Qingzhu stood in the middle of Old Bian’s yard with it in her hand. The tanners’ alley smelled of vats and wet hides. The sugar pole glowed red under its little roof, and three sticks of candied hawthorn lay on the board.

A moment ago, a man had been standing beside them.

“Shi Feng,” Ling Qingzhu said.

Nobody answered. She said it again, louder, and all the teasing she’d put into his name that day was gone.

Ling Qingzhu hurried through the yard, searching for any disturbance in the lingering qi. She held the lamp high and checked the wall and roofline.

Then she searched the alley, the canal bank and the moored barges. She questioned people along the lantern streets and kept looking overhead for a departing artifact. By the time she returned, her head ached from straining to catch the slightest trace.

There was nothing. No blood, no torn qi, no trace of a flying artifact.

Ling Qingzhu was frightened. Someone had taken him without a struggle, almost within reach of her hand. Whoever it was had left her nothing to follow.

“Miss?” Old Bian called softly.

The old man had come out from behind his pole with sugar on his fingers.

“Did you see him?” Ling Qingzhu asked at once.

“He was there. Then he wasn’t,” Old Bian said slowly. “A grey sleeve went by, I took it for a clerk.”

“Which way did it go?” Ling Qingzhu asked.

“It just went by, miss. Up there, maybe,” Old Bian said, waving at the top of the wall. “Heaven has storms nobody sees coming. I’m sorry.”

A grey sleeve. The youngest 3 Mark in the Sky Pavilion’s records had been taken from three steps behind her by a grey sleeve, and she hadn’t felt a thing.

She pressed her thumb into the bamboo handle until it creaked. She didn’t cry.

Old Bian cleared his throat.

“Miss, the sticks,” Old Bian said carefully. “Six coppers. I don’t mean to trouble you at a time like…”

“I’m not paying,” Ling Qingzhu said calmly. “He’s paying for everything today. That was the deal, and I’m not taking it away from him.”

Old Bian looked at her face and didn’t argue. He set the three sticks on a square of paper at the end of his bench.

“I’ll keep them aside, then,” Old Bian said quietly. “Unpaid.”

Ling Qingzhu sat down on the narrow bench beside the sticks and set the lamp on her knee. Then she took a paper crane talisman from her sleeve and wrote on it in small, neat strokes. Luoxia, tanners’ alley, come now. She breathed qi into it, and it flew over the wall toward the capital.

By dawn she was still on the bench, and the candle had burned down to a black stub.

She wrote a second crane to Hundred Flower Valley with one word on it. Delayed.

“Big Sis Qingzhu!” Su Wanning shouted.

Su Wanning burst through the gate with half her hair out of its pins.

“Five words! Your crane had five words, Big Sis! You send me whole pages about tea!” Su Wanning gasped. “The boatman was so slow I nearly pushed him in, and…” She stopped and looked around the yard. “Where is he?”

“He’s paying,” Ling Qingzhu said. “He said so.”

Su Wanning looked from the dead lamp to the candied hawthorn. Ling Qingzhu was sitting beside an unpaid treat as if he might return for it at any moment. Her face made Su Wanning’s next question catch in her throat.

“He was three steps behind me last night,” Ling Qingzhu said evenly. “I turned around, and he wasn’t anywhere.”

“…” Su Wanning said.

Su Wanning had always found something to say in the eleven years Ling Qingzhu knew her. She’d even talked through two funerals. Now she stood helplessly in the yard, unable to offer comfort or pretend this was an ordinary delay.

That frightened Ling Qingzhu more than the empty alley had.

“Did you tell the Valley?” Su Wanning finally asked, in a small voice.

“I told them I’m delayed,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“Delayed? Your husband vanished and you wrote delayed?” Su Wanning cried. “Elder Mu would send twenty disciples!”

“Wanning. Listen to me,” Ling Qingzhu said.

Su Wanning shut her mouth.

“Twenty disciples would take a week to get here. Distant water can’t put out a nearby fire,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“Whoever did this folded the air shut in front of me and left nothing. Nobody on the frontier can do that, not even Artificer Hall’s sect master. Someone that strong will be listening for whoever comes looking. So I’m not going to shout,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“Then what are you going to do?” Su Wanning asked.

“Ask you for a favour,” Ling Qingzhu said. “A clever woman can’t cook without rice. The Pavilion’s couriers log every ship that flies over Great Liang, and the river customs log every boat. I want every entry for last night, from here to the border. Anything beyond Soul Formation. A Shattering Void traveller, if the old stories about that realm are true.”

“And if the logs have nothing?” Su Wanning asked.

“Then it was something that doesn’t get logged, and I’ll know that too,” Ling Qingzhu said. “Alive, I’ll see the man. Dead, I’ll see the body.”

“Did you sleep at all?” Su Wanning asked.

“I’m fine,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“You said that too fast,” Su Wanning said.

Ling Qingzhu’s thumb pressed the lamp’s handle again.

“I’m fine,” Ling Qingzhu said again, slower, which was worse.

On the bridge he’d promised her later. When it counts. Ling Qingzhu was desperate to hear him say it again. Until she knew what had happened, she wouldn’t speak as though that later had been taken from them.

Su Wanning wiped her face hard with her sleeve and jabbed her hair back into its pins.

“Every log from here to the border. Three days. Two, if the Pavilion clerk’s sister still likes me,” Su Wanning said. “When the water falls, the stones show.”

She ran out as fast as she’d run in.

Ling Qingzhu walked out of the alley without looking back at the wall.

Behind her, Old Bian wrapped three sticks of hawthorn in oiled paper and put them on his highest shelf, where the cat couldn’t reach.

Far to the south-west, under a mountain no frontier map had a name for, a door was already bolted on the man who owed for them.