Chapter 805 — Fifty-Seventh

CHAPTER 805

Fifty-Seventh

The pythons came up out of the pool together, and this time the banner was ready.

Jiao Lanyin shot first. Her Frost Feather Arrow hit the water in front of the nearest python and the pool froze white for three paces around it, locking its coils in ice. Hou Tieshou leapt onto the ice and brought both fists down on its skull with the Mountain-Carrying Fist. The ice cracked, and so did the python.

“One!” Hou Tieshou roared happily.

Yue Shaoan stood on the bank pointing at ripples and shouting where the others were. Shi Feng took the second one at the neck with Iron River, sitting down, without getting off his tussock. Jiao Lanyin froze the third, and Hou Tieshou broke it. The fourth tried to slide away into the reeds, and Jiao Lanyin put an arrow through its eye before it got there.

It was over in less time than it took to drink a cup of tea.

Zhuge Wuyan had watched all of it from the far bank, with his banner standing behind him, soaked and sullen. When the last python stopped moving, he walked round the pool to Shi Feng’s tussock.

“What’s your name?” Zhuge Wuyan asked. “Not ‘the cook’. Your real one.”

“Shi Feng,” Shi Feng answered, meeting the swordsman’s gaze.

Zhuge Wuyan repeated it once, quietly, as if writing it down somewhere inside himself.

“A hero knows a hero,” Zhuge Wuyan said. “I’ll remember the name, Brother Shi. Next time we meet, I’ll have thought about that step.”

He bowed, deeply and properly, and led the Cangming banner away round the nest into the fog.

“He’ll really remember it,” Yue Shaoan said nervously. “Those Cangming people never forget anything. Is that good or bad?”

“Good,” Shi Feng said. “He admitted the loss in front of his whole banner. I’d rather meet him again than men who promise friendship and reach for a hidden knife.”

On the long roofed stand of the Tally Pavilion, above the Antler Gate, the sixteen banner lords sat in a row under the Nine Mirrors.

Princess Long Caili sat at the ninth place, veiled from brow to chin, with her back straight and a cup of tea in front of her. Shen Yaoqing sat at her right in plain white, with the Serene Jade lotus at her collar, and watched the second Mirror with her chin on her hand.

At the end of the stand, a Tianji Mansion scribe in a grey Taoist robe had a thick ledger open on his knees. He looked up at the second Mirror on the wall, looked down, and wrote a small note in the margin.

57.

A prince’s attendant leaned over, glanced at the note and leaned back again. Nobody else on the stand looked at the scribe at all. They were all looking at the cores.

“Four python cores and Zhuge Wuyan’s,” a Situ lord said sourly. “That banner’s moving up.”

Shen Yaoqing didn’t care about the cores.

“That step,” Shen Yaoqing said. “At the end. Which art was that?”

“His,” Long Caili said.

“That isn’t the name of an art,” Shen Yaoqing said, turning toward her friend.

“It’s the only name he’ll give you,” Long Caili said, lifting her cup. “His guest contract doesn’t require him to teach me his arts. I hired him to hunt, not to explain every movement he uses.”

“He walked over a Cangming tide,” Shen Yaoqing said. “You don’t find it strange that your recruit won’t tell you how?”

“I find it strange that he wasn’t polite about it,” Long Caili said coolly. “He told Zhuge Wuyan to name his stake. In front of nine mirrors.” She set her cup down without a sound. “But I didn’t hire him for his manners.”

Shen Yaoqing looked back at the second Mirror. The princess’s recruit was sitting on a tussock with his robe open, and the nervous tracker was winding a bandage round his ribs.

“Then what did you hire him for?” Shen Yaoqing asked.

Long Caili didn’t answer that. She picked up her cup again. It was empty, and she didn’t seem to notice.

By dusk the banner had moved half a mile east to a low island of dry ground, and Hou Tieshou had caught six fat marsh fish with his bare hands.

“People are iron and food is steel!” Hou Tieshou announced, turning them over the fire on sticks. “Eat, eat! You lost half your blood today, Brother Shi. Fish puts it back!”

“Is that a body cultivator’s medicine?” Shi Feng asked.

“It’s my mother’s,” Hou Tieshou said proudly.

The fish were burnt on one side and raw on the other. Shi Feng ate two anyway, because Hou Tieshou was watching him with such hope.

Jiao Lanyin ate one, slowly, and checked her arrows one at a time.

“Your bandage is crooked,” Jiao Lanyin said, without looking up.

“Yue Shaoan tied it,” Shi Feng said, giving the tracker a grateful glance. “It’s stayed on through the walk. That will do until we change it.”

“I know,” Jiao Lanyin said. “That’s why it’s crooked.”

Yue Shaoan looked wounded and said nothing.

The fire crackled. The fog closed in around the little island until the reeds on every side were grey shadows. Then Yue Shaoan sat up straight and sniffed, and before he could say what he’d smelled, a woman’s voice came out of the fog, light and warm.

“Is the cook’s fire open to guests?” the voice asked. “I’ve brought my own cup.”