Chapter 589 — The Herb Room

CHAPTER 589

The Herb Room

“Weighing run, boy! Move those legs!” Kong Ba bellowed, and slapped the key-slip into his palm.

It was the last day of spring, though nobody under Duanya Mountain had seen it. The shift bell would ring at the end of this cycle, and half of Hall Two was already yawning.

“Y-yes, Overseer Kong,” Shi Feng said, holding the thin bamboo slip in both hands as though afraid to drop it.

“Three months, and he still carries a key like it’s going to bite him!” Kong Ba laughed. “Diligence makes up for dullness, eh, Shu? That’s why I send the dull one.”

“Two hundred and six,” Clerk Shu said to his tray.

Shi Feng bowed his way out with his shoulders hunched. Inside, he was humming.

The herb room was a narrow cave behind an iron grille, with shelves up to the roof on both sides. Two hundred and twelve jars sat on them. Today the porter was sick, and the key-slip opened the inner lock as well.

Shi Feng stepped inside and breathed in. Fire root. Marrow moss. Seven-year frost sap. Every jar was Soul Formation-grade stock, and every jar was full.

Then he saw the tags.

Each jar wore a paper tag on a string, with a lot number, a weight, and a red ink stamp of the Pit’s small square furnace. He lifted lot ninety-one. Eleven liang, the tag said, and it was eleven liang exactly.

So they count here too, Shi Feng thought. Of course they do.

At dawn weighing, a clerk would read every tag, weigh every jar and write the sums in the black book. A missing jar would shout. A light jar would shout louder.

But dawn weighing came after shift change. And shift change was when his furnace was going to blow.

Shi Feng started to smile.

Until dawn, the tags were the only record anyone would check. Shi Feng studied the red stamp carefully. If he copied it correctly, the jars could be gone before weighing exposed the new words on their labels.

He took a lump of seal-candle wax from his sleeve, a spare joint left over from the counting machine. He pressed it over the red stamp, counted to ten and peeled it away. The little square furnace sat in the wax, perfectly backwards.

He’d need a carved copy, a pinch of red ink from Clerk Shu’s tray, and one tag that said something new. He already knew what it would say.

He smiled openly among the shelves. There was nobody here who needed to see a frightened prisoner. After three months of lowered eyes, it felt good to inspect what he meant to take with his head up.

“Don’t worry, everyone,” Shi Feng told the shelves cheerfully. “You’re about to change owners. The new one’s much more generous with heat.”

The jars didn’t object. He took their silence as a yes.

He weighed out the next cycle’s portions exactly as written, locked the grille and shuffled back with his head down.

The striker went in at the long meal.

Shi Feng pushed the waste cart through the arch with Bao Liang trudging behind, complaining about a new corn on his toe. At Ji Yuanhe’s black iron furnace, he crouched to sweep the slag from around its foot, and under the broom his left hand set the machine into the soot.

It was the same lump of dirty slag that had kept time beside his own furnace, smaller than his fist: a wound scale coil, a chisel-chip arm and three wax joints. Gongsun Ce’s wax-joint puppets had only ever kept a dice count honest. This one had already fooled a Guard Captain.

He touched the coil. The little arm lifted and fell.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

It was Ji Yuanhe’s lid rhythm, four beats to a bar, the one the whole Pit had heard for a year. Down the hall, Clerk Shu’s count went on without a hitch.

“Three hundred and eleven,” Clerk Shu said. “Three hundred and twelve.”

He didn’t look up. Nobody ever looked up at a sound they already expected.

“Done yet?” Bao Liang asked, leaning on the cart. “My toe’s dying.”

“Almost, Guard Bao,” Shi Feng said meekly. “There’s a lot of slag today.”

He swept behind the furnace, beside the old man’s ankle cord. Copper wire ran through the braided hemp. Three months ago he’d thought cutting it would be the hardest part. Now he understood that the unchanged hammer beat mattered far more.

The chisel came out of his sleeve. He cut strand by strand until only a thread of hemp was left. One good tug would break it. A careless look would see nothing.

Ji Yuanhe didn’t stop refining. Then, under the count, so softly that only a man at his ankle could hear, he spoke.

“Will you come?” Ji Yuanhe whispered.

It was the first sentence Ji had spoken to him since the night he’d warned him about the counting.

Shi Feng kept sweeping.

“I’m carrying you,” Shi Feng said quietly. “Hold on and keep counting.”

“Four hundred and eighty-two,” Ji Yuanhe said to his flame.

Back at station nine, Shi Feng laid out the night batch.

The house recipe for the Ember Blood Pill asked for five herbs. He counted out five, the way a careful boy should.

Then, with Kong Ba snoring on his bucket by the door, he laid nine more in a neat row beside them.

Only the shift bell remained, Shi Feng thought. He checked the extra herbs again. Everything else was in place, including the machine that would count for Ji Yuanhe while he was carried away.

A furnace could only swallow so much. He meant to find out exactly how much.