Chapter 800 — Ash for the Wardens

CHAPTER 800

Ash for the Wardens

The smile was the only warning.

Shi Feng’s left hand shot out for the man’s jaw. His fingers were wet with his own blood and closed a breath too late. The second taker’s teeth came together on something in his cheek with a small, dry crack.

His eyes stayed open. The smile stayed too. He knelt there on the needles for a moment longer, with the grey Sword under his chin, and then he fell over sideways and didn’t move.

Shi Feng lowered the grey Sword.

“Brother Shi!” Yue Shaoan cried. “The other one!”

The first taker, lying in his own blood by the fire, had his jaw clenched too. His grey face had gone slack. He had bitten his own pill while everyone was watching his partner.

“They—they killed themselves,” Hou Tieshou said. He stood over the two bodies with his fists clenched and didn’t seem to know what to hit. “Why? He had a sword at his throat, not an axe! You were going to question him!”

“Yes,” Shi Feng said. “He knew what I meant to ask.”

He crouched and went through their sleeves and belts quickly, one-handed. There was a pouch of plain silver, a bone comb, a little roll of grey cord and a folded paper with a rough sketch of four figures round a fire, and one of the four was circled. There were no jade tokens.

“No tokens,” Jiao Lanyin said, watching him. “They aren’t hunters.”

“Then the killing clause doesn’t touch the banner,” Yue Shaoan said, and sagged with relief. “Heaven be thanked. I thought—I thought we’d be struck off—”

“Nobody here killed anybody,” Shi Feng said. “They did it themselves.”

He put the sketch into the fire and watched it curl. Then he stood up, held out his right palm over the first body and lit the Thousand Forge Flame.

It came out of his hand pale and quiet. Inside it he struck the Second Anvil Fire, and the beats ran one after another, like a smith’s hammer. At Minor Success one beat in five still came out wrong. Each one that landed drove the heat deeper. The grey sleeves went first, then the hooked knife, which sagged and ran. In thirty breaths, the first body was a long smear of fine white ash on the needles.

He did the same to the second. The ash-grey palms burned last.

“Cut the grass and pull out the roots,” Jiao Lanyin said under her breath.

The rest of the banner watched in silence. Hou Tieshou’s mouth was hanging open.

“Brother Shi,” Yue Shaoan said nervously, “won’t the wardens want to see them?”

“That’s exactly why I’m burning them,” Shi Feng said. “If the wardens find two men in grey sleeves with poison pills in their cheeks and that palm on their hands, they’ll have to write something besides ‘bandits’. Then someone will have to ask why such men came after the princess’s alchemist. Then they’ll ask where he keeps his old friend, and how well that room is guarded.”

He let the fire die and shook out his hand.

“This way,” Shi Feng said, “bandits came to our camp at night and died there. That’s true. It’s all anyone can prove. When the wardens ask, you won’t have to lie to them.”

Hou Tieshou looked at the two smears of ash for a long time.

“Bandits,” Hou Tieshou said slowly.

“Bandits,” Shi Feng agreed, putting away his sword. “Remember what happened, not what you think you ought to tell the patrol.”

Hou Tieshou gave a short, uneasy laugh. He understood now: Shi Feng wanted no official questions leading back to the old alchemist. He still glanced at the ashes before returning to the fire.

Jiao Lanyin came round the fire with a roll of bandage and a jar of salve.

She sat down beside Shi Feng without asking, took his left wrist and turned it to the light. The hooked knife had opened the forearm from wrist to elbow. It was deep, and still bleeding steadily, and his sleeve was soaked to the shoulder.

“Hold still,” Jiao Lanyin said.

“I am holding still,” Shi Feng said.

“Hold stiller,” Jiao Lanyin said, and slapped the salve on hard enough to make him hiss.

She wound the bandage round his arm quickly and tightly, with neat, cold, exact turns. She didn’t look at his face once.

“Thank you,” Shi Feng said, keeping his wrist steady for her. “That arrow bought me the time I needed. You didn’t have to bandage me as well.”

“My quiver is on this side,” Jiao Lanyin said coldly. “You’ve been bleeding on my arrows for a quarter of an hour. Frost Feather Arrows don’t fly straight with blood in the fletching. Stop bleeding on them.”

“Then I owe you clean arrows too,” Shi Feng said. The salve stung badly, but he did not pull his hand away.

“Try not to bleed at all,” Jiao Lanyin said. “It’s a waste of bandage.”

She tied off the end with a hard tug and went back to her watch log on the other side of the fire. Hou Tieshou looked from her to Shi Feng and back, grinning enormously, and said nothing, which for him was a great achievement.

Shi Feng flexed his fingers. They worked. The arm would hold a sword by morning, if not well.

The wardens’ patrol came past the stream at first light.

The lead warden looked at the two long scorch marks on the needles, at the blood, and at Shi Feng’s bandaged arm. He took the brush from behind his ear.

“Bandits?” the warden asked.

“Bandits,” Hou Tieshou said firmly. “Two of them. They came at the second watch. They’re dead.”

“Who killed them?” the warden asked.

“Nobody,” Yue Shaoan said quickly. “They bit something.”

The warden wrote it down without a word. But as the patrol rode on, Shi Feng heard the man behind him say quietly to his companion, “The princess’s banner. That’s the one with the alchemist. Two of them, at night, and he’s walking about. Heroes really do come from the young.” By noon, every warden in the Silver-Pine Ring would have heard it, and by the evening, so would the stand.

Shi Feng tightened the bandage with his teeth and stood up.

East of the camp, past the last pines, the ground fell away into a long grey valley. White fog lay over it, so thick that only the tops of dead trees stuck up out of it. The air coming up from it smelled of mud, rot and something very large.

“The Mist Marsh,” Yue Shaoan said, sniffing, and went pale. “Brother Shi, everything in there smells bigger.”