Chapter 668 — Eleven Roofs

CHAPTER 668

Eleven Roofs

The tug at his belt was so light that Shi Feng almost admired it.

He looked down. His pouch was gone, and so was the wax-sealed Shattering Void-grade pill inside it. Ten paces away, a skinny boy in a patched jacket was already scrambling up a drainpipe, reaching for the roof edge.

“Hey!” Shi Feng called, delighted. “That’s mine!”

The boy reached the roof and ran.

Inside Tianjing’s walls, the Peace Law banned qi-flight and burning arts, and the Law Guards on the ward towers enforced it with chains. A man who flew after a thief would be arrested before the thief was.

So Shi Feng went up the drainpipe on his hands and feet, like the boy.

The first roof was green tile. The second was thatch, and the boy jumped the gap without looking. Shi Feng jumped it too, on plain legs, with no qi in his feet and no light around him at all. By the fifth roof the boy was looking back. By the eighth he was panting.

On the ninth roof, something in Shi Feng’s stride settled. His feet stopped thinking about the tiles. He landed without checking each tile and crossed the gaps without breaking stride. Riverless Step had reached Major Success, and he’d done it chasing a child over a laundry yard.

On the eleventh roof, the boy dropped down to the ward gate and ran straight into Shi Feng’s hand.

“Let go! Let go!” Gou’er shrieked, kicking against Shi Feng’s grip. “I didn’t take anything!”

Shi Feng took the pouch out of the boy’s jacket and checked it. The wax seal was unbroken.

“What’s your name?” Shi Feng asked.

“…Gou’er,” Gou’er muttered.

The boy’s knee was scraped bloody from the last jump. Shi Feng sat him on the gate step, tied his own handkerchief around it and bought a bun from the stall beside the gate. Gou’er grabbed it and ate half in one bite, glaring the whole time.

“Now listen, because this lesson is free,” Shi Feng said. “You picked the wrong pouch. First, it’s sealed with wax, so any fence in this city would know it came off a master and turn you in. Second, it holds a pill nobody can sell, not even me. Third, the owner runs. Next time, pick a fat man’s pouch with a loose string.”

“You’re telling me how to steal?” Gou’er asked, and stopped chewing.

“I’m telling you why you were caught,” Shi Feng said. “Wax, a master’s pill, an owner who can run. You checked none of them before grabbing it.”

“Then what do I owe you?” Gou’er asked suspiciously.

“One favour,” Shi Feng said. “A real one. An errand, later. I’ll find you when I need it.”

Gou’er looked at the handkerchief, then at the bun, then at Shi Feng. He nodded once.

Heavy boots came up the street. Sergeant Chai of the ward watch stopped in front of them, a big man with a tired face and his belt let out two notches. He looked at the boy, at the bun, and then for a long time at the handkerchief.

“Nothing happened, I assume,” Sergeant Chai said.

“Not a thing, Sergeant,” Shi Feng said cheerfully. “He tripped. I bought him a bun.”

“Good. I hate paperwork,” Sergeant Chai said, and walked off.

Eight house commissions came through Liu Su that month, and Shi Feng’s money climbed back to 8.9 million. On the first day of autumn, he took Ji Yuanhe to the Glass Hall.

It was examination day. The Pavilion held its sittings there, and the public gallery ran around three walls above the floor. Below, nine bronze furnaces stood in a ring, and an array was cut into the ceiling to count the clouds that rose under it. At the far end stood a tenth furnace under a dust sheet. Nobody went near it.

That one’s for the 6 Mark, Shi Feng thought. And it hasn’t been lit in years.

Eldest Examiner Song Wuya sat at the judges’ table, a thin old man with a voice like a temple gong. He counted every cloud aloud.

“One. Two. Three. Four,” Song Wuya said.

A 4 Mark candidate’s furnace shook. The fifth cloud began to form, and the lid blew off with a bang.

“Hah! There goes his face!”

“Five clouds is five clouds, boy! Go home!”

“His master will be crying tonight!”

The candidate bowed to the judges with a pale face and walked out. The next was a 3 Mark candidate, a nervous woman from some eastern city. Her four clouds rose small and shaky, but they rose.

“Four. Pass,” Song Wuya said.

“A cornered dog will jump the wall!” somebody in the gallery shouted, and a few people clapped.

Shi Feng watched everything. He watched which furnaces ran hot and which drew cold, how long the array took to count, where the judges looked when a cloud wavered. He watched the dust sheet. Ji Yuanhe counted the furnaces over and over under his breath, nine and then ten.

Halfway through the afternoon, Shi Feng noticed the man in the brown coat.

He sat three rows down, a plain man in a plain coat, with no badge, no crest and no sect colours. He didn’t clap. He didn’t heckle. He yawned through two sittings and wrote nothing down.

The man gave Shi Feng no reason to object to him. That very lack of interest made him uneasy.

Shi Feng found that he had already picked up his cushion and moved Ji behind a pillar.