Chapter 687 — The True Name
CHAPTER 687
The True Name
“Before the name, the fees,” Sitting Officer Ou Jin said. “One million four hundred thousand, honoured guest.”
The Sitting Officer had come down from upstairs while the wager was being blotted. He was a lean, grey-haired man in white sleeves, and the clerks around the desk had all stopped breathing quite so loudly.
Shi Feng counted the stones onto the counter in neat stacks of a hundred thousand. Fourteen stacks. That left him six million seven hundred and forty thousand, and he watched every stack leave his hands. It was the largest sitting fee he’d ever paid.
The most expensive signature of my life, Shi Feng thought. It had better come with good terms.
“The Pavilion’s terms for the sitting,” Ou Jin said, unrolling a contract. “First, any herbs the Pavilion supplies and the candidate doesn’t use belong to the furnace, which is to say the Pavilion. Second, a Perfect pill is kept by the Pavilion, for the record. Third, a Tribulation Pill, should one occur, and any waste pill, return to the candidate.”
Shi Feng’s eyes brightened.
“Waste returns to the candidate?” Shi Feng asked.
“Nobody wants it, honoured guest,” Ou Jin said. “A waste pill is poison to anyone who eats it.”
“And the Tribulation Pill clause?” Shi Feng asked. “Has anyone ever used it?”
“Not in my time,” Ou Jin said.
Shi Feng read those clauses again, delighted. They’d return the failures and let him keep a pill better than Perfect.
“Lesson forty-three,” Shi Feng said happily. “A contract is a kindness with a clause. I accept every word, Officer Ou.”
Ou Jin looked at him a breath longer than he needed to, and slid the candidate’s line across.
Shi Feng dipped the brush.
For a whole year he’d written two characters in one order on the shop sign, the Commission Book, the contest register and the Pavilion’s quarterly list. Now he wrote them the other way around. He did it with a flourish, and he was grinning the whole time.
Shi Feng.
“There. The right order this time,” Shi Feng said, blowing on the ink.
The clerk read it out, frowned, and read it again.
“Shi… Feng?” the clerk said. “Honoured guest, the provincial register says Feng Shi.”
“There’s a typo,” Shi Feng said.
For a moment the lobby didn’t understand. Then it did.
“He wrote his name backwards for a whole year?”
“The Wanhe shop, the Situ order, the quarterly list, all of it backwards?”
“And nobody noticed!”
“…”
Yuwen Dewei looked at the register as if it had bitten him.
Shi Feng wasn’t looking at Yuwen. He was looking up at the gallery, where a man in a plain coat with no badge sat alone by the rail. The man looked once at the register, the way a buyer looks at a price, stood up and walked out without hurrying.
There goes the name, Shi Feng thought.
He’d known it would happen the moment he signed. That was why he’d waited a year to sign. He hadn’t been strong enough to survive what came after being found. Now he was, or near enough.
Candidates lodged on the Guest Terrace behind the tower for the sitting week, under tower law. That evening Shi Feng and Ji Yuanhe moved in from Willow Ford with a handcart, a bag of Auntie Niu’s buns and Mo’s cauldron wrapped in sacking.
Auntie Niu packed the buns twice, so the night bell had already rung when they reached the Terrace gate, and it was shut.
The back lane was four paces wide, with the Terrace wall on one side and lodging houses and a noodle stall on the other. Six paper lamps with bronze caps hung along the wall, one every ten paces. Beside the gate stood two great bronze water vats for fire, each with a skin of ice on top.
Shi Feng knocked. A grille opened in the gate, and an attendant’s face appeared behind it.
“Candidate Shi Feng, the 4 Mark stand,” Shi Feng said. “And my attendant.”
“Welcome, honoured guest,” the attendant said, drawing the night bar. “Attendants are registered at dawn. Until then, Master Ji is your guest, not ours.”
He pointed through the grille at a strip of white stone set into the threshold.
“Inside the line, the Terrace answers for everyone,” the attendant said. “Outside it, I’m afraid it doesn’t answer for anyone.”
“Then we’ll come inside quickly,” Shi Feng said.
The bar was halfway drawn when the lamp at the far end of the lane went out.
Ji Yuanhe’s hands tightened on the cart.
“Five,” Ji Yuanhe said quietly. “Four. Three.”
The lamps went out one after another, coming closer. The fourth went dark, and then it stopped. Two lamps still burned, one on each side of the gate.
Five men came out of the dark. They wore grey, and they walked like men who’d done this many times. Four of them carried the steady pressure of Soul Formation. The fifth walked at their head with an empty sleeve pinned up at the shoulder, and on the sleeve was a grey band.
Shi Feng’s Spirit Sense touched the fifth man and slid off, as it had on Tower Street. Shattering Void, one arm fewer, and no less dangerous for it.
They’d followed the name here, Shi Feng thought. He moved in front of Ji Yuanhe before they could reach the cart.
He understood the plan at once. Take the old man and the cauldron, and the alchemist would withdraw from the sitting to get them back. They hadn’t put the lamps out to hide. These were Pavilion lamps, like the ones in Wanhe. In their light, the one-armed man couldn’t fold space. In the dark, he could. All they had to do was drag Ji Yuanhe a dozen paces.
Behind him, the night bar stopped moving.
“Honoured guest,” the attendant said through the grille, very politely. “Tower law. The gate doesn’t open on a fight. I’ve sent a runner for the Sitting Officer.”
“How far away is he?” Shi Feng asked, without turning around.
“The far side of the tower, honoured guest,” the attendant said. “He walks at a dignified pace.”
The grille shut.
The one-armed man stopped at the edge of the light, where the fourth lamp had died. His eyes went from the cart to Ji Yuanhe to Shi Feng.
“The porter with a friend who counts,” the one-armed man said softly. “And the alchemist who signs backwards. One man.”
He smiled.
“Porter,” the one-armed man said.
Something whistled out of the dark, straight at Ji Yuanhe’s throat.