Chapter 715 — Coil Arithmetic

CHAPTER 715

Coil Arithmetic

“You want my bell?” Old Pang the night watchman asked. “At the fourth watch?”

“Only until dawn,” Shi Feng said. “I’ll give it back before you need to ring the morning. And I’ll pay you twenty coppers for the trouble.”

Old Pang looked at the coppers, then at the bell hanging from his pole.

“What are you going to do with it?” Old Pang asked suspiciously.

“Hit it,” Shi Feng said. “Gently.”

Old Pang took the coppers.

Shi Feng hung the bell from the courtyard’s drying beam, right beside the gate with the palm print. Ji Yuanhe brought a lamp and sat on the step with his knees drawn up.

“Master Ji, I’ve got one problem,” Shi Feng said. “Huangfu Lie’s palm stacks. The first coil is a slap. By the ninth, it’s a thunderbolt. I need to know how to stop the ninth before it reaches me.”

“Can’t you hide it?” Ji Yuanhe asked. “Like the fist yesterday.”

“Let’s see,” Shi Feng said.

He struck the bell with two fingers and a little qi. It rang, a low, long note. Then he wrapped his sleeve around the rim and let the Quiet Sleeve Art close.

“The sleeve conceals it,” Shi Feng said, shaking his arm. “It doesn’t stop the vibration passing through me. I can’t rely on this to hold nine coils.”

“Fire, then?” Ji Yuanhe asked.

Shi Feng laid his palm on the burned spiral in the gate. He let a thread of the Thousand Forge Flame Art run out into the wood. The flame went into the print, and the print didn’t care. A trace of old violet thunder still lived in the char, and it bit his palm through the heat like a needle.

“Fire burns what can burn,” Shi Feng said, taking his hand away. “Thunder isn’t fuel. Thousand Forge won’t do either.”

“Then you’ll step,” Ji Yuanhe said.

“I’ll step,” Shi Feng agreed. “Riverless Step will carry me off the first few. But nine coils on one stone? Sooner or later he’ll put me in a corner, and I’ll have to meet one.”

He struck it again, harder, and watched the bronze. The rim was trembling so fast it blurred. Lower down, the shaking ran round and round the bell in rings.

He reached up and laid one fingertip on the very top of the crown, where the bell hung from its loop.

It was still. Everything else was shaking, and that one spot didn’t move at all.

Shi Feng’s eyes lit up.

He compared the two centres. Every turn of the thunder print had charred the wood. The coin-sized patch at its heart stayed clean. The bell shook around a still point too.

“Master Ji, look at this,” Shi Feng said.

Ji Yuanhe got up and looked.

“It’s not burned,” Ji Yuanhe said.

“It’s not burned because the coils turn around it,” Shi Feng said. “Like the bell. The whole palm spins around a centre that stays still. The more coils he stacks, the faster they spin, and the centre has to hold all of them. It’s the strongest part of the palm, and it’s the only part that can’t move.”

“So you hit the centre,” Ji Yuanhe said slowly.

“I split it,” Shi Feng said. “Sunset-Splitting Sword was made to split a thing at its centre. If the centre breaks, the coils have nothing left to turn around. They fly apart.”

He tapped the dot of clean wood with his fingernail.

“Timing is the problem,” Shi Feng said. “This centre is coin-sized because the gate stayed still. In a moving palm, it’s smaller than a rice grain. Too early, it hasn’t formed. Too late, the coil reaches my chest.”

Ji Yuanhe was looking at the bell, still humming faintly on its beam. His lips were moving.

“Strike it again,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Shi Feng struck it.

Ji Yuanhe listened with his eyes half closed. Then he started counting, very softly, in a rhythm Shi Feng knew at once — the beat that had run through every furnace in the Pit, day and night, for as long as Ji Yuanhe had been chained to one.

“One. Two. Three,” Ji Yuanhe counted. “It comes on the beat, Master Shi. Each ring is one beat. The hammers in the Pit were the same. You always knew when the next one would fall.”

The sound came in pulses. Years beside a hammer had trained Ji Yuanhe to hear the interval.

“A coil is a beat,” Shi Feng said. “If Huangfu Lie stacks on a rhythm, then the ninth comes on the ninth count. I don’t have to guess it. I only have to hear it.”

“I can count it for you,” Ji Yuanhe said. “From the rail.”

The old man’s hands were cold, but his voice was perfectly steady.

“Master Ji, that’s exactly what I need,” Shi Feng said.

They practised until the sky greyed. Ji Yuanhe counted each pulse while Shi Feng struck the bell and touched its crown on the ninth beat. At first Shi Feng watched for it.

“Early,” Ji Yuanhe said, and stopped counting. “You’re early again. The bell isn’t.”

He struck on the number. On the next ninth his hand moved a breath before the ring, and Ji Yuanhe tapped the beam. “Again. Don’t look for it. Listen.” Each time Shi Feng’s eyes went to the bronze, the old man stopped the count and made him begin the run again. Past the hundredth ninth, his hand went on the number alone.

“Don’t call me master,” Ji Yuanhe said. “I was a 2 Mark in Hongye. A 2 Mark doesn’t teach a 4 Mark.”

“I’m learning from a 2 Mark,” Shi Feng said. “Ask the rail tomorrow. They’ll hear you count.”

When the first light came over the wall, Old Pang was standing at the gate in his padded coat, holding his empty pole.

“My bell,” Old Pang said. “Did you break it?”

“No,” Shi Feng said, and lifted it down from the beam. “It taught me something.”

Old Pang shook the bell doubtfully.

At the lane mouth, a household runner in Long-family red was coming toward them at a trot.

“Tally one thousand one hundred and seven!” the runner called. “The centre platform is swept. Noon!”