Chapter 565 — Line Sixty-One

CHAPTER 565

Line Sixty-One

“Arms out, Alchemist Shi,” Ning Zhe said pleasantly. “Both of them.”

A man in grey turned out Shi Feng’s sleeves with no interest at all. The cold sweet potato rolled into his palm, still wrapped in its square of oiled paper.

“Food,” the man in grey said.

“So I see,” Ning Zhe said, turning it over once. “Four days on rice and greens, and you never touched it. A hungry man who won’t eat his food is keeping something else.”

Shi Feng was upset with himself. He’d concealed his strength, but keeping the potato untouched had shown Ning Zhe something he valued. That was enough for the receiver to notice. A small mistake could cost him more here than a failed escape.

“I-I was saving it, Receiver Ning,” Shi Feng said in a small voice. “I bought it at a stall before the trip.”

He said it too fast, on purpose. Let Ning think a homesick boy was embarrassed over a potato. Homesickness had no name and no sect attached to it.

“Then the house will keep it for you,” Ning Zhe said. “Small leaks sink great ships. Clerk Shu.”

Clerk Shu opened his ledger to a page that was nearly full, wet his brush and wrote in a small, square hand.

“Sixty-one,” Clerk Shu said as he wrote. “Sweet potato, roasted, cold. One. To the vault, with the ring.”

The man in grey carried it off down a side corridor. It was twenty-six steps to the corner. Shi Feng counted every one, and his face didn’t move.

Line sixty-one, Shi Feng thought. One sweet potato, from Senior Brother, for the road. I’ll want that back with interest.

He wanted the potato back because Lin Langtian had given it to him. He could imagine his senior brother demanding a sack in compensation, then the vault and the whole mountain. The thought nearly made him smile. He kept his face miserable instead.

“You’re upset,” Ning Zhe said, studying him.

“It’s only a potato, Receiver Ning,” Shi Feng said with a sheepish smile. “I’d just ask the vault to keep it somewhere cool. It goes soft.”

Ning Zhe laughed very softly and went up the ramp. He hadn’t even needed to unfold his chair.

Behind Shi Feng, wheels creaked. A porter was pushing a low cart down the row, and at each station Kong Ba tipped the cycle’s failures into it with his tongs.

“Slag, slag and more slag!” Kong Ba grumbled. “You’d think this lot were cooking for pigs!”

Shi Feng’s three lumps went in. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

Those waste pills were poison to anyone else, but their herbs’ qi remained. His Physique could absorb all of it. Three batches of fifty-year marrow root were about to be dumped in a hole. Clerk Shu counted every successful pill. Shi Feng hadn’t heard him count a single lump of slag.

“Overseer Kong,” Shi Feng said timidly, twisting his sleeve. “Could I haul the cart? As penance. So I don’t forget.”

Kong Ba stared at him, then laughed until he started coughing.

“Penance!” Kong Ba wheezed, pounding his chest. “The boy wants to push slag for his sins! If you love your failures that much, eat them, then!”

Shi Feng went red on cue and bowed lower.

Since you insist, Overseer, Shi Feng thought, I’d hate to be rude.

The cart would let him travel through the halls instead of returning straight to his cell. The loss of face didn’t trouble him. What mattered was seeing the passages while the guards believed he was too ashamed to look around.

“Let him,” Ning Zhe said from the top of the ramp.

The laughter stopped. Nobody had heard him come back. A tiger doesn’t need to roar to be feared.

“Let him haul it,” Ning Zhe said, looking at Shi Feng, not at Kong Ba. “I want to see what it does to him.”

Shi Feng didn’t like how carefully the man had chosen those words. Either way, the answer was the same: push the cart and look miserable.

Stay alive and let them underestimate you, Shi Feng told himself. He could resent Ning Zhe’s interest later. For now, being allowed to push the cart was the opening he needed.

“Th-thank you, Receiver Ning,” Shi Feng stammered.

“Guard Bao!” Kong Ba shouted. “You’ve got the boy. Don’t let him fall in.”

It was the bored guard from the slot in his door.

“I always get the walking jobs,” Bao Liang said, falling in behind the cart. “Do they pay extra for walking? They don’t. Paid by the shift.”

He talked the whole way, about his blistered left foot and the Pit’s boots, which were a size too small. His pay was also a size too small.

“The mountains are high and the emperor is far away,” Bao Liang said gloomily. “Nobody up top ever hears about a guard’s feet.”

Bao Liang’s complaints gave Shi Feng something useful to remember. A guard with sore feet might welcome a small kindness later. He listened without asking about the route, counting turns and steps while Bao Liang talked. Questions would only teach the man what to watch.

A bell rang ahead, two flat strokes, and at every corner the guard on duty walked off and a fresh one took his place.

Two strokes, Shi Feng noted. Everyone moves at once, and for about ten breaths nobody at any corner has settled in.

They passed Hall One, loud and bright. Hall Three’s doors were shut, with no light under them. A flue ran up the wall beside them into the rock, and when the cart rattled past, Shi Feng let his knuckles brush it.

It was cold, as if nobody had lit a fire there in years.

Third kiln, cold. Shi Feng had read the old man’s margin as a curse. Now he thought it might have been directions.

Past Hall Three, a long stair climbed into the dark, and a breath of outside air came down it. At the top, small with distance, two figures sat on stools on either side of a great iron gate, their heads tilted down toward the halls, as if Clerk Shu’s counting, carried up from Hall Two, were the only thing in the Pit worth hearing.

Bao Liang stopped talking and walked faster.

Bao Liang was Soul Formation, and he’d shut up, Shi Feng thought. So those two are beyond Soul Formation. And they’re standing at the only door.

“Don’t look at them,” Bao Liang muttered once they’d passed. “Those two aren’t paid by the shift.”

The corridor bent behind Hall Three and sloped down. The air smelled of lime, and under the lime there was something damp.

“That’s the pit,” Bao Liang said, leaning on the wall. “Tip it in and don’t lean over. If you fall, I’m not climbing down. It’s not in my shift.”