Chapter 772 — Bare Sleeves

CHAPTER 772

Bare Sleeves

The heat hit the bridge like a slap.

Shi Feng felt it through the soles of his boots, forty paces away. On the shore the front row of the crowd stumbled back, and a willow branch over the water curled up and turned brown.

“White flame!” someone shouted. “That’s the Scorching Sun’s second stage!”

Cheng Mobai tried to go in again. He got two steps.

The first white sun passed a full arm’s length from his face, and his eyebrows were gone. The second came straight at his sword. He met it with the third bend, and the crooked blade glowed orange from tip to guard. Smoke rose from his hand where he held the hilt. He didn’t let go.

“Let it go, you idiot,” Shi Feng said under his breath.

Qu Ming swept his arm, and all three suns came at once, low and wide, in a line that covered the stage from edge to edge.

Cheng Mobai couldn’t go round it or through it. He went back.

He went back ten paces, then twenty, and his robe caught fire at the hem. The last sun took him full in the chest. It lifted him off the stage and threw him over the edge onto the planks of the bridge, where he rolled twice and lay burning.

“Out! The bout is—” Ke Lianshu cried, striking the gong.

Shi Feng had already thrown the towel. It flew onto the stage and burst into flame in mid-air before it landed.

Qu Ming raised his hand again.

A fourth sun formed in his palm, white at the centre. The gong had sounded, and Qu Ming’s face said he’d heard it. Shi Feng saw where he was aiming: the planks in front of Cheng Mobai, not the man himself. But the bridge was wood, and the injured man could barely move.

“He’s still going!”

“The bridge is wood! It’ll all go up!”

Qu Ming threw the sun.

Shi Feng stepped onto the bridge between them.

He didn’t draw his sword. A sword would have cut the sun in half and sprayed white fire over Cheng Mobai and the first ten rows of the shore. He held up both arms, crossed, and let the sun hit his sleeves.

The Quiet Sleeve Art closed around it.

At Major Success, the art could take a whole strike into the sleeve and hold it there, hidden, until he chose to let it go. To everyone on the shore it looked as if the sun had simply gone out against an alchemist’s arms.

It hadn’t gone out. It was still inside, burning.

Shi Feng could have folded the fire back at Qu Ming. Cheng Mobai was still burning at his feet, and if he delayed, the swordsman would die on the bridge. He knelt and clapped both sleeves down on Cheng Mobai’s burning robe and smothered the flames under them. Then he pressed his arms flat against the wet planks until the sleeves stopped smoking.

The cloth was gone to the elbows. Underneath, his forearms were red and blistered, and the blisters were still rising.

On the shore, the crowd roared so loudly that birds rose off the lake.

“He put out the white flame with his sleeves!”

“That’s the stall boy! The alchemist!”

Ke Lianshu struck the gong three times, hard. His voice shook, but he stayed perfectly polite.

“Young Lord Qu wins the bout!” Ke Lianshu cried. “This humble steward begs Young Lord Qu to hold his hand! Under the ring law, any flame after the gong is a forfeit!”

Up in the gallery, Inspector Nie Liyan turned a page of his law book and said nothing.

Qu Ming slowly lowered his hand. The blood had dried on his cheek in a long dark line. He looked at Shi Feng’s ruined sleeves and smiled, and it wasn’t a nice smile.

“Bare sleeves against the Azure Sun,” Qu Ming said. “Save it for the final, stamp boy.”

“I’ll remember this,” Shi Feng said, standing between Qu Ming and the injured swordsman. “You heard the gong. Everyone did.”

Qu Ming’s smile disappeared. He turned and walked down his steps without another word.

Two pavilion attendants carried Cheng Mobai off the bridge on a door. He was black with soot and cursing steadily, which meant he was alive.

“You threw the towel,” Cheng Mobai said, as they passed.

“Before the gong,” Shi Feng said.

“I said I’d never forgive you!” Cheng Mobai rasped, trying to raise his head from the door.

“Then stay alive and complain,” Shi Feng said. “Save your strength. They’re taking you to be treated.”

Shi Feng went up the gallery steps.

Inspector Nie Liyan was still in his seat. The ring law lay open on his knee.

“Third bout, Inspector,” Shi Feng said. “Qiao Wending’s. There was a strength pill on his breath that morning, with one herb swapped for its cousin that slows the blood.”

Nie Liyan looked at him. Then he uncapped the brush, wrote four characters in the margin, and closed the book.

“The record will show the bout was clean,” Inspector Nie Liyan said, and held his eyes a beat too long.

Ji Yuanhe was waiting on the shore with a jar of burn salve. He spread it on Shi Feng’s arms with steady fingers, counting the blisters under his breath. He reached twenty-three and stopped, because it was time.

The second semi-final was next.

Situ Jinghong was already walking up the far steps in his plain grey robe, as calm as if he were going to a poetry meeting. Two brushes hung from his belt now, both with white jade handles.

He’d brought a spare.