Chapter 656 — Last in Line

CHAPTER 656

Last in Line

“Batch one!” Tao Xiaoyu called. “Thirty pills!”

The Sky Pavilion’s great hall had never looked like this. Its polished floor was covered in porters, washerwomen, carters and dock boys, sitting in rows on straw mats the Pavilion had brought in that morning. Two hundred and thirty-one of them. Most sat very still with calm, empty faces, and waited to be told what to do.

At the front of the hall, Shi Feng worked a Pavilion furnace with his right hand. His left arm hung in a splint across his chest.

“You’re slow,” Tao Xiaoyu told him, chalk in hand.

“I’m one-handed,” Shi Feng said. “Most alchemists can’t do this with two.”

He’d spent half the night on the cure. Steady Heart didn’t poison a body. It laid a thin, cheap structure over the heart’s meridian that made a person easy to steer. The antidote had to dissolve that structure without hurting a mortal who’d never cultivated, and the herbs for that weren’t cheap at all. Three hundred thousand stones’ worth, from his own stock. He charged nobody for it.

Senior Brother would scold him for that, Shi Feng thought. Then Senior Brother would do the same thing and lie about it.

Clerk Rao and the Pavilion physicians handed out the pills down the rows. A carter swallowed his, blinked twice and burst into tears without knowing why. A washerwoman stood up, looked around the grand hall, and asked in a loud voice who had let her sit on the floor in her good skirt.

That was how Shi Feng knew it worked. People who’d been steered came back angry.

“Batch two!” Tao Xiaoyu shouted. “Sixty!”

“Batch three! Ninety!” Tao Xiaoyu shouted.

He kept going. The furnace was hot and his arm ached, and it was slow, careful work with one hand. One mistake could hurt a patient, Shi Feng reminded himself. The next batch could wait until this one was right.

By the sixth batch the hall was noisy. By the seventh, two dock boys were arguing about whose turn it was, and a Pavilion physician had to separate them. Clerk Rao smiled at the noisy argument. The two boys could think and complain for themselves again.

“Batch eight!” Tao Xiaoyu called, and her voice cracked. “Two hundred and thirty-one! That’s everybody!”

An old washerwoman came up to the front table on her own feet and bowed to Shi Feng with both hands pressed together.

“Good is repaid with good, Master Feng,” the old washerwoman said. “I’ll remember your face.”

“Come by the shop when you’re well, Granny,” Shi Feng said warmly. “I’d like to see you on your feet again.”

Branch Master Cen Rong came down at noon with a sealed draft. She didn’t make a speech about it.

“The purge reward,” Cen Rong said, and laid it on the furnace table. “One million. The nose fee is included.”

Shi Feng looked at it. Against three hundred thousand in herbs, it left him seven hundred thousand ahead.

“Branch Master, I didn’t ask the patients for anything,” Shi Feng said.

“You didn’t,” Cen Rong said. “The Pavilion is paying for its market. Not for them.” She turned away before he could refuse. “Take it. You’ve already paid for the herbs.”

He took it. Tao Xiaoyu wrote it in the Book on the spot: eight million, seven hundred thousand.

Hong Ba was the last in line. He’d been the first to bring the pill and somehow the last to take the cure, because he’d been helping carry mats all morning without anyone asking him to.

He swallowed it, stood there for a breath, and then his face turned red.

“Brother Feng!” Hong Ba roared, so loudly that the whole hall turned. “I carried three shifts a day for a month! For the same pay! That son of a turtle foreman!”

“Welcome back,” Shi Feng said.

Hong Ba wiped his eyes with the back of his huge hand and looked at the empty furnace.

“Wine meets a friend, a thousand cups are few,” Hong Ba said, suddenly shy. “What do I owe you, Brother Feng?”

Shi Feng looked at him with a perfectly straight face.

“Your price,” Shi Feng said, “is to be loud and late again. Every day. Starting tomorrow.”

Hong Ba stared at him. Then he laughed so hard he had to sit down on a mat.

That night Shi Feng couldn’t sleep.

The shop was dark. Ji Yuanhe lay on his pallet by the back furnace. Shi Feng sat on the back step with his arm in its splint and looked at the back alley, where the lane’s eleven houses turned their kitchens to the canal.

The tribulation illusion had lasted no time outside and many years inside. Tonight, after treating two hundred calm faces that obeyed every order, he couldn’t keep that memory away. For a long while he couldn’t tell whether the alley in front of him was real.

Things that are real can be counted, he told himself.

So he counted. Tao Erniang’s bowls on the drying rack: twenty-two. The back shutters of the lane: eleven houses, forty-four boards. The tiles she’d had replaced on her roof after the lightning: three, slightly redder than the rest.

“…Twenty-three,” Ji Yuanhe said beside him, quietly correcting the count instead of asking what was wrong.

Shi Feng hadn’t heard him get up. The old man sat on the step and pointed at the rack, where one bowl had been left upside down on top of the others.

“Twenty-three,” Shi Feng agreed.

They counted together until the sky went grey. Shutters, bowls, tiles, the cracks in the step. By then it was real again.

At first light Shi Feng walked down alone to the canal to look at the water. A Pavilion runner found him there, bowed politely, and handed him a folded note in Cen Rong’s hand.

Tomorrow, my office. Bring the arm.