Chapter 824 — The Hairpin

CHAPTER 824

The Hairpin

Ning Zhe took the hairpin out of his sleeve again and held it up between two fingers.

“Three paces,” Ning Zhe said mildly. “That’s close enough, Alchemist Shi. It’s an old pin. Old things break easily.”

Shi Feng stopped.

For a breath neither of them moved. Behind Shi Feng, Hou Tieshou was swearing through his teeth over his broken shoulder, and the frosted taker was cracking the ice off his own legs one piece at a time. In front of him, the man on the folding chair sat with his legs crossed, as calm as a clerk at a counting desk.

He wants me to stand here and bargain, Shi Feng thought. Every breath I stand still is a breath his last taker gets free.

So he didn’t bargain.

He took the Slag Weight out of his ring and threw it, low, not at Ning Zhe but at the chair.

Crack!

The black iron lump took the front legs off the chair, and the chair went out from under Ning Zhe all at once. For the first time since the Pill Pit, Shi Feng saw him move in a hurry. Ning Zhe came up off the falling seat onto his feet. His folder stayed tight under his arm, and the hairpin stayed in his fingers.

“That was a good chair,” Ning Zhe said.

“The hairpin,” Shi Feng said, closing the distance before Ning Zhe regained his balance.

Ning Zhe snapped the folder open in front of his chest. Threads poured out of its spine and wove themselves into a grey square, page-sized, ruled from edge to edge, between Shi Feng and his body.

“Every line holds a little, Alchemist Shi,” Ning Zhe said. “A whole page holds a great deal.”

The grey Sword struck the page and stopped dead. The threads clung to the steel and began to write lines on it. The blade grew heavy in Shi Feng’s hand.

He let the Thousand Forge Flame run down the sword into the threads.

The grey steel went red, then the colour of a setting sun. The Sunset-Splitting Sword at Perfection didn’t push at the page. Its thin, precise red edge entered the burning threads and cut across their connections. The page could no longer hold together. The square of thread went up in a sheet of red fire.

The sword went through the ash and opened Ning Zhe’s grey robe from shoulder to hip. It didn’t cut deep. It didn’t have to. Ning Zhe staggered back two steps toward the gate, and his guard was gone.

His hand came up with the hairpin in it, his thumb against its middle.

“Last chance,” Ning Zhe said quietly. The pleasantness was gone from his voice.

Shi Feng’s left sleeve passed across the front of Ning Zhe’s hand.

It didn’t touch him. It didn’t need to. The Quiet Sleeve Art at Major Success hid anything that went into it, and to every sense Ning Zhe had, nothing had happened. His thumb pressed down, hard, on the pin.

It pressed on nothing.

Ning Zhe looked down at his empty fingers. He turned his hand over, as if the pin might be stuck to the back of it. Then he looked up at Shi Feng’s sleeve.

His face didn’t change. His eyes did. They were bright, and almost happy.

“...Interesting,” Ning Zhe said.

Then he bit down.

Shi Feng was already reaching for his jaw, but a Deacon’s pill was a Deacon’s pill. Ning Zhe’s legs went loose, and he sat down on the causeway beside his broken chair, still holding his folder. He died with his eyes open, looking at Shi Feng’s sleeve.

Behind them, two more men bit down at almost the same moment. The frosted taker fell forward into the marsh, half out of the ice. The one with the temple wound had come round where he lay, and his jaw clenched.

The people who sent them didn’t accept men who came home.

At the Tally Pavilion, the ninth Mirror showed three grey-sleeved men lying still on the causeway, and the stand broke into noise.

“Bandits! At the Crater gate!”

“Again? How are bandits getting into an Imperial preserve?”

“The princess’s banner held them off. Three of them are hurt!”

“Wardens! Where are the wardens?”

Long Caili didn’t stand up. Her veil hung perfectly still.

“Send the wardens to the gate,” Long Caili said. “And the physicians.”

Beside her, Shen Yaoqing looked at her friend’s hand and saw that it had gone white around the cup.

On the causeway, Shi Feng took the folder out of the dead man’s arm and opened it.

The first page was a drawing of his own face, done in fine grey ink, from the front and from the side. The second page had Ji Yuanhe’s name at the top and a column of figures under it, long and neat. Shi Feng tore that page out himself.

Then he lit the Second Anvil Fire one more time and laid the page, the folder and the drawing on the dead man’s chest. He burned all three men where they lay, until there was nothing on the causeway but ash and a broken chair.

The wardens arrived as the fire died, six of them, running.

“Three bandits,” the lead warden said, writing on his slate. “At the Crater gate. All dead. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct,” Shi Feng said.

The warden looked at the ash and didn’t ask any more.

Shi Feng went back to his banner. He set Hou Tieshou’s shoulder with one twist, and the big man shouted loud enough to scare frogs a hundred paces away. He bound Jiao Lanyin’s bow arm against her body with a strip of his own sleeve. She let him, coldly, without a word, and that was the strangest thing Hou Tieshou had seen all Hunt.

“Brother Shi,” Yue Shaoan said carefully. “The thing he was holding—”

Shi Feng took the hairpin out of his sleeve. He looked at it for a long moment in the last of the light. Then he put it inside his robe, against his chest.

He didn’t say a word about it for the rest of the night.

Behind them, the brass light in the black arch flickered once and went out. With a long, low groan of stone, the Old Crater gate opened.