Chapter 690 — The Eve and the First Fire

CHAPTER 690

The Eve and the First Fire

“The line runs from the Terrace gate to the Tower wall,” Ou Jin said, and drew it in the frost with the toe of his boot. “Inside it, the sitting-week array answers to the Pavilion. Outside it, nothing does.”

It was the morning after. Two Pavilion servants were scrubbing the back lane with hot water, though there was nothing left to scrub. Five men had bitten five pills, and the array had kept even the smell.

“And Ji Yuanhe?” Shi Feng asked.

“Master Ji was entered as your registered attendant at dawn,” Ou Jin said, with a small bow toward Ji Yuanhe. “Wherever you’re covered, he’s covered. The gap in the back lane has been closed. That’s everything the Pavilion will do, honoured guest, and more than it will say.”

“What will it say?” Shi Feng asked.

“That bandits tried the Guest Terrace and regretted it,” Ou Jin said. “We regret the disturbance.”

Bandits, Shi Feng thought. Five men in grey, led by a one-armed man who knew his name. The Pavilion wouldn’t name the sect behind them, and arguing wouldn’t change that. At least Master Ji was now covered by the same protection.

“Since the Pavilion regrets it so much, Officer Ou,” Shi Feng said brightly, “does the regret come with a discount on my fees?”

“It doesn’t, honoured guest,” Ou Jin said, with perfect courtesy. “It comes with tea.”

“Then I’ll take the tea,” Shi Feng said, glancing toward Ji Yuanhe. He needed a moment to sit down himself.

Ji Yuanhe stood behind him, watching the servants scrub. His lips moved. He was counting the brush strokes.

That afternoon Song Wuya sealed the cauldron.

The Eldest Examiner was a bent old man with ink on both thumbs. He pasted the Pavilion’s paper strip across the lid, pressed his seal on it, and ran his thumb down the side of the bowl to check the bronze. Then his thumb stopped.

Mo’s hammer marks ran round the cauldron in rows, dent after dent, all exactly the same distance apart.

“Not seen marks like those in thirty years,” Song Wuya said. “Who hammered this?”

“A man who hated clerks, Eldest Examiner,” Shi Feng said.

Song Wuya looked at him for a long moment.

“Then he and I would have got on,” Song Wuya said, and wrote a line in his book. “The pine stands in the snow.”

Madam Liu Su found him in the Terrace courtyard that evening with her odds-book open on one arm.

“I’ve closed the old question,” Liu Su said. “You signed, so you sit. Now the book asks whether you pass. Twenty to one against, Young Master Shi.”

“Twenty?” Shi Feng said, delighted. “Who’s taking the one?”

“Nobody sensible,” Liu Su said coldly.

Shi Feng took out ten silver and laid it on her page.

“On myself,” Shi Feng said. “And since I’ve paid you a million in rent this year, Madam Liu, do you offer a loyalty discount?”

“Loyalty is what I charge extra for,” Liu Su said, and wrote down his ten silver in very small characters, as if she were embarrassed for him.

She glanced once at the back lane, where the frost had been scrubbed off the stones.

“Sleep, at least,” Liu Su said. “If you die before the sitting, the book has no clause for it.”

Winter Onset came in grey and cold.

The Glass Hall was a round tower with a roof of clear glass, so the clouds above a furnace could be seen and counted from every seat. Galleries rose in three rings to the roof. Soul Formation and Deity Transformation guests sat in the lowest ring, examiners below them in black, and capital alchemists packed the upper two. Yuwen Dewei’s circle had the front row of the second ring, fans already moving.

There was one 4 Mark stand on the floor this Winter Onset. Shi Feng was the only man at it.

Mo’s cauldron stood on its three legs on the candidate’s stand. Ji Yuanhe sat on the attendant’s stool beside it, with his hands flat on his knees.

“A frontier pot,” someone in the upper ring said loudly. “Does the Pavilion lend him a ladle too?”

The circle laughed. Shi Feng bowed to the gallery cheerfully, as if they’d paid for the joke, and lit his fire.

The Thousand Forge Flame Art rose at Perfection, a clean white flame under the bowl. Then he lit the Second Anvil Fire inside it, a smaller flame that struck the heat in beats like a hammer on an anvil.

For an hour it stuttered. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the beats stopped fighting each other and fell into one steady line.

Minor Success, Shi Feng thought, grinning into the heat. The two fires had settled into one rhythm. Now he could stop correcting each beat.

The day went by in roots and turns of the lid. The hall’s bell clock rang each double-hour, and each time he let the steam lie still, because this was exactly where his fold had failed ever since the sealed room. He didn’t touch it. He waited.

The midnight bell began to ring.

The cauldron rang with it.

It wasn’t loud. The hot bronze sang along Mo’s hammer marks, one dent after another, every note the same length as the one before, with the even spacing of the count he knew from the Pill Pit.

Ji Yuanhe’s face went white.

“That’s the count,” Ji Yuanhe whispered.

So that’s what you hammered into it, old man, Shi Feng thought. The Pit’s own rhythm. You built a pot that keeps time with the house that caught you.

On the eighth stroke of the bell, he folded the steam left.

It moved in front of a thousand eyes, a few feet of furnace steam curling down over the lid exactly on the beat, and it held. The bell rang on, and the fold didn’t break.

The gallery went quiet. Then, somewhere in the upper ring, one low voice began counting the cauldron’s notes under its breath.