Chapter 665 — The Fire Licence

CHAPTER 665

The Fire Licence

“Token, honoured guest,” Surveyor Ju Dewei said, and bowed.

Earlier that afternoon, twenty paces past Huo Weiran’s stretcher, the Pavilion had set a table under an awning at the five-li post, and nobody left the basin without stopping at it. Ju Dewei was a square, patient man in white with a brush behind his ear. He read Shi Feng’s token, looked at the borrowed coat and the bandaged hand, and wrote.

“Hunter, unaffiliated, 3 Mark, departing,” Ju Dewei read aloud. “Is that correct?”

“That’s me,” Shi Feng said. “You don’t want to know what I saw?”

“A rope-seller has already told us,” Ju Dewei said politely. “He says a Deity beast passed its tribulation in the lake bed. The Pavilion lists no Deity Transformation without a body, so for now it is a story.” He set down his brush. “There is one thing in our records. Since this morning there is a line in the air above the dead centre, a finger long. It wasn’t there yesterday. It will keep growing.”

“What is it?” Shi Feng asked.

“A seam,” Ju Dewei said. “When the Pavilion knows more, it will post a notice. Safe travels, honoured guest.”

The Pavilion had cleared the rim camp when the ring died. Huo Weiran had watched from his stretcher, and Old Zuo had stayed in the drainage ditch, but neither understood Shi Feng’s breakthrough. The rope-seller was already telling everyone about a Deity beast. Lesson thirty-seven, Shi Feng thought happily. Inspect the place yourself. Nobody had seen his pagoda.

By the time he reached the river road, Old Zuo’s Deity beast was in every inn along it.

On the second day of the walk north, the stomach ache arrived.

It cramped under his ribs. Devouring the stone had been quick; digesting it was another matter. Shi Feng walked bent over and thought about it.

A ring of fire and a ring of ice, held in perfect balance for who knew how long. A stone at the middle humming the note of balance itself. Lift the stone, and the ring died at once, and a line opened in the air above it the very next morning.

That’s not a treasure, Shi Feng thought. That’s a lock. The ring was holding something shut, and that stone was the keystone.

He looked at his own belly.

“And I ate it,” Shi Feng said aloud, to nobody, and started laughing so hard that he had to sit down by the road.

“Eight,” Ji Yuanhe said at the Willow Ford gate. “Eight days.”

He stood in the doorway with a sack of counted chestnuts in his arms, and he didn’t move until Shi Feng had stepped all the way inside. Then he shut the gate and counted the bolt.

A paper was pinned to the wall beside Ji’s door. It was a summons from the Ward Office.

The next morning he went to the Ward Office.

Warden Kan Zhaoxi was a dry, narrow man with a seal on a cord around his neck. He didn’t stand up.

“Feng Shi,” Kan Zhaoxi said, reading the household register. “Provincial. 3 Mark. No sect. You applied for a fire licence.”

“I did, Warden Kan,” Shi Feng said. “The workshop grade, if possible.”

“Small household grade,” Kan Zhaoxi said, and stamped it. “You may keep a furnace in your kitchen. No cloud above your roof-ridge, ever. The Sky-Watch on the Drum Tower counts every ridge in the ward at dawn.”

“And if a cloud slips out by accident?” Shi Feng asked.

“The first time, a fine. The second time, the licence,” Kan Zhaoxi said. “Next.”

Shi Feng took the paper with both hands and bowed deeply. Keep the furnace quiet, Shi Feng thought. An unknown alchemist with a small licence gave the ward little reason to inspect his house.

Lesson thirty-eight. If they hand you the smallest licence, thank them. Nobody inspects the smallest licence.

Auntie Niu had sold buns at Willow Ford for thirty-one years, and in all that time her buns had smelled of buns.

For three days now, they had smelled of bitter root.

It came over the wall from the new tenant’s kitchen, a thick brown smell of boiling salve, and it settled into her steamers. On the fourth morning she wiped her hands on her apron and marched next door.

The young master opened the gate himself. His face was peeling and three fingers were bound up, but her anger didn’t disturb him. He waited patiently while she told him what his salve had done to her business.

“Young Master Feng,” Auntie Niu said loudly. “Your medicine is in my buns! My customers are asking if I’ve started selling cures! That smell has cost me business, and somebody’s going to pay for it!”

“How much?” Shi Feng asked.

Auntie Niu had planned to start at fifty coppers and come down to twenty. She opened her mouth to argue, and found there was no argument.

“…Fifty coppers,” Auntie Niu said.

He counted out fifty and put them in her hand. Then he counted out more.

“And a basket of buns,” Shi Feng said. “Every morning. Whatever’s left in the top steamer.”

Auntie Niu stared at the money.

“I came to bill you,” Auntie Niu said.

“And I paid,” Shi Feng said, very pleased about something. “Auntie, I must be the only man in Tianjing who pays for a smell. That’s the best bun-shop pitch I’ve ever heard.”

Auntie Niu went home with seventy coppers more than she’d come with and no idea how it had happened. She told the cloth seller across the lane, and the cloth seller told the water carrier.

“For the new neighbour,” Auntie Niu said, and filled the basket with the best buns from the top steamer.

She sent her grandson Tiezhu next door with it. He was back a long while later, frowning.

“Grandma,” Niu Tiezhu said. “The thin old man in there counted the buns. Every one. He said ‘Good.’”

“That’s polite of him,” Auntie Niu said.

“Then he sat on the step,” Niu Tiezhu said, “and put both hands over his ears, and sat like that for a long, long time.”