Chapter 567 — Four Hundred and Nineteen
CHAPTER 567
Four Hundred and Nineteen
Ji Yuanhe’s hammer came down early.
For one bar, the fourth beat landed a breath early. After so many years at the furnace, Ji Yuanhe wouldn’t make that mistake by accident. His free hand shot out and smothered the fire. Shi Feng watched, tense, to see whether the warning had reached him in time.
The fire is in the hands, not the furnace, the old craftsmen said. Ji’s hands had remembered what his ears had forgotten.
The blue flame sank to nothing. The lid jumped once against its rim, hissed out a thin ring of steam, and settled.
Shi Feng put his ladle back in the jar and wiped his wet palms on his robe, like a boy scared by a loud noise. That part was easy. He had been scared.
A cloud rose above Ji’s furnace. Then another. They kept coming, pale and round, stacking up under the arch.
“Six,” Clerk Shu called from his table. “Seven. Eight.”
The eighth cloud hung there and didn’t fade.
“Eight again! Doesn’t the old ghost ever miss?”
“I heard the lid go. I thought we’d be scraping him off the wall!”
“…”
“Perfect, and he nearly cooked his own fingers doing it!” Kong Ba laughed, slapping his thigh. “Hide a pearl in the mud and it still shines, eh? Shu, write it down before his luck runs out!”
“Eight. Perfect,” Clerk Shu said, and wrote.
Mei Han came through the arch a moment later, lifted the pill with jade tweezers and held it to the lamp for a long time. She said nothing at all. She wrote one line in red and left.
Nobody in Hall Two looked at station nine even once.
Shi Feng bent over his furnace, hiding his relief behind a meek expression. Shouting would have exposed his ability to read a 2 Mark’s flame from across the hall. Bad tapping only confirmed Kong Ba’s opinion of him. Ji Yuanhe had recognised the warning, and nobody else had noticed there was a message to recognise.
Two hours later, Shi Feng pushed the waste cart through the arch with Guard Bao Liang trudging behind him.
“My left foot’s gone numb,” Bao Liang complained. “Eleven years on stone, and they pay by the shift.”
“That’s terrible, Guard Bao,” Shi Feng said sympathetically.
The wheels squeaked past Ji’s furnace. Ji was on a new batch, his hammer keeping time. Tak, tak, tak, tok. As the cart came level, he lifted his eyes for less than a breath and spoke so low that the words fell between the beats.
“Four. Hundred. And. Nineteen,” Ji Yuanhe whispered.
Bao Liang didn’t even turn his head. He’d heard the old man count every day for a year.
He understood, Shi Feng thought, relieved. They heard Ji Yuanhe count all day, so nobody listened closely anymore. Four hundred and nineteen was the batch he’d saved. Now those same words could tell him the old man had received his warning.
Shi Feng didn’t stop the cart. He tapped two fingers on the handle in time with the hammer, two quick beats and one slow. It was the knock every debt collector in Qingshi Town used on a door. It meant: you’re welcome, and the bill comes later.
Ji’s hammer didn’t miss a beat. But the corner of his mouth twitched. It was the first time Shi Feng had seen it move for anything but a number.
“What are you grinning at?” Bao Liang asked. “My feet are dying, and you’re grinning.”
“Sorry, Guard Bao,” Shi Feng said meekly. “I was thinking about soup.”
[Reservoir: 14% | Note: first conversation, no words.]
On the second night after the Taking, Sima Lan waited at the side door of Artificer Hall’s kiln yard for the third watch to pass. Old Soot sat on her shoulder, cold and motionless.
“He was due back at noon yesterday,” Sima Lan said to the dark.
Sima Lan was worried. He argued over every fee, but he never missed a return time he’d agreed to in writing. This wasn’t ordinary lateness. She’d checked the terms again before coming here, wishing she could find some harmless reason he hadn’t returned.
Zhu Liu came across the yard with a ring of keys and nearly dropped them.
“Miss Sima! Once bitten by a snake, ten years afraid of a rope, and you’ve bitten me twice!” Zhu Liu said, flustered. “Every door is locked at the third watch!”
Sima Lan held out her hand. Zhu Liu looked at her face and handed over the keys. She pushed the door open a hand’s width.
“It’s open,” Zhu Liu said weakly.
“A standing item,” Sima Lan said, giving the keys back.
Lin Langtian was on gate duty, with his feet on the duty log and three sweet potatoes in the brazier.
“Attendant Sima!” Lin Langtian said cheerfully. “If you’ve come to bill me for the charcoal, it isn’t mine.”
“He didn’t come back yesterday. He didn’t come back tonight. He has never missed a day he signed for. Something happened to him in Luoxia,” Sima Lan said.
That was four sentences. She’d counted them on the walk over.
Lin Langtian lowered his feet. He took a potato from the coals and set the tongs down carefully. Sima Lan watched his cheerfulness vanish. He understood her fear without making her explain it again.
“Hold the sect. Tell nobody,” Lin Langtian said quietly. “Beat the grass and you startle the snake.”
He didn’t take the main gate. He crossed the dark yard to the door she’d unlocked, and it swung shut behind him without latching.
At dawn on the third day, Lin Langtian dropped out of the sky into the alley in Luoxia. Old Bian was lighting his sugar pot. On the shelf sat a packet of oiled paper with three sticks of candied hawthorn inside.
Lin Langtian took one down and bit into it.
“Hey! Those are set aside!” Old Bian cried. “The young lady wouldn’t pay. She said the young man was paying.”
“Then put it on his account,” Lin Langtian said, chewing.
He swept the bare wall at the end of the alley with his Spirit Sense and found stone and mud. Then he laid his palm flat on the bricks and waited.
With his hand on the bricks, Lin Langtian felt the faint remnant of a spatial fold. Someone had closed space around one man and restored it with extraordinary care. No torn edge or heat remained. His Spirit Sense alone hadn’t been enough to find it.
To think that a fold this clean had gone in under his own sect’s nose.
“That isn’t a frontier hand,” Lin Langtian said.
He didn’t smile.