Chapter 872 — The Porter

CHAPTER 872

The Porter

Shi Feng didn’t say anything. He bent over the fifth crate and breathed in slowly through his nose.

The crate held six jade boxes packed in cold sand. The fourth box from the left held the Nine-Turn Heart Root, the herb that would bind every other herb in the 6 Mark pill together on the third day. Without it, the pill would have no centre.

The smell was very faint. It was sweet, and under the sweetness there was something wet and old.

He opened the box.

The root inside looked perfect. It was as thick as a thumb, deep red and coiled nine times. Anyone would have passed it. He picked it up and pressed it gently with his thumbnail, near the base.

The skin gave a little. Underneath, the heart of the root was soft and brown.

“Master Shi?” Ji Yuanhe whispered, lifting the lamp.

“It’s rotted at the heart,” Shi Feng said quietly. “Somebody’s swapped it. The outside’s been painted with fresh sap so it looks alive.”

Ji Yuanhe’s face went white.

“Would it have…?” Ji Yuanhe asked, unable to finish the question.

“Day one, nothing,” Shi Feng said. “Day two, nothing. On day three, when the fire reached the heart, the rot would burst, and the whole pill would go with it. In front of three 6 Marks and the whole capital. Everyone would say the frontier boy’s hands failed.”

He didn’t sound amused at all. He put the root back very carefully and closed the lid.

The guard captain had come away from the door, one hand white-knuckled on the sword hilt.

“I’ll find the porters,” the guard captain said. “All of them. Tonight.”

“Please don’t,” Shi Feng said. “Not yet.”

He turned slowly in the lamplight and breathed in again. The sweet rot was in the crate. But there was another smell in the storeroom, very faint, coming from the far corner. It was clean and sharp, like crushed cinnamon. It was the smell of a living Nine-Turn Heart Root.

Behind a stack of grain sacks in the corner, wrapped in an old sack and pushed against the wall, he found it. The real root, still perfect, worth more than four hundred thousand.

“He swapped it,” Shi Feng said. “But he didn’t take the real one out. He couldn’t carry it past your guards tonight. So he hid it to come back for.”

“Then he’ll come back,” the guard captain said.

“Before the crates go to the Pavilion in the morning,” Shi Feng said. “After that it’s under Pavilion seal and nobody can touch it. So tonight.”

He put the real root back exactly where he’d found it, wrapped in the same sack. Then he resealed all eight crates, nodded to Ji Yuanhe, and Ji Yuanhe blew out the lamp.

The three of them sat down in the dark behind the crates and waited.

It took until the fourth watch.

The storeroom door opened a crack, very slowly. A thin man slipped in sideways with no lamp. He went straight to the corner without bumping into anything and knelt behind the grain sacks.

Shi Feng let him find the root. He let him pick it up and unwrap it.

“That’s not yours,” Shi Feng said gently from behind the crates.

The man screamed and dropped the root.

The guard captain had him by the collar before he reached the door. Ji Yuanhe lit the lamp. In its light, the thief was a porter of about forty in a stained blue jacket, with a pockmarked face and a missing front tooth. He was shaking all over.

“Ge Laosan,” the guard captain said flatly. “Porter. Third year in the pavilion’s service.”

“I didn’t! I didn’t do anything!” Ge Laosan wailed. “I came for a sack of rice! I was hungry!”

“You came for a four-hundred-thousand root and left a rotten one in its place,” Shi Feng said. “It’s here beside you. We saw you unwrap it. Who paid you?”

“Nobody! It was—” Ge Laosan stammered.

Shi Feng picked up the rotted box and held it out to him.

“If you won’t say,” Shi Feng said, “then the guard captain hands you to the city watch for theft from the princess’s vault. Theft from a princess’s vault goes to Imperial justice. I’m told it starts with the hands.”

Ge Laosan looked at the box. Then he looked at his own hands.

“The purser!” Ge Laosan cried. “The purser at the Azure Sun residence! The fat one with the gold ring! He gave me two hundred silver and the painted root, he said nobody would ever know, he said the root would look fine until the third day!”

“Would you say that again in front of a clerk?” Shi Feng asked.

“Yes! Yes, anything!” Ge Laosan cried, looking from the box to the captain’s saber.

The guard captain had already sent a runner upstairs.

Long Caili came down in a dark cloak, with her hair loose and her veil in place even at that hour, and stood in the storeroom doorway. She didn’t look at Ge Laosan. She looked at the two roots side by side on a crate lid, the living one and the rotten one.

A pavilion clerk wrote Ge Laosan’s confession word for word. Ge Laosan put his thumbprint on it in red ink, and the guard captain took him away.

Long Caili read the confession through once.

“An Azure Sun purser,” Long Caili said. “Not an elder. Not a young lord. Just a purser, with a ring.”

“Nobody will ever prove who gave the purser his orders,” Shi Feng said. “They didn’t mean us to.”

“No,” Long Caili agreed coldly. “They didn’t.”

She folded the confession, sealed it with her own seal, and handed it to her clerk.

“Take this to Elder Qu Hanshan’s residence,” Long Caili said. “Tonight. Give it to him in person, and tell him it comes with my compliments. Courtesy demands a return.”

The clerk bowed and hurried out.

Shi Feng looked at her.

“You’re not going to the watch,” Shi Feng said.

“If I go to the watch, it’s a porter and a purser, and it’s over in a day,” Long Caili said. “This way Qu Hanshan reads it himself, and he knows that I know. And he has to sit in the gallery for three days wondering what I’ll do with it.”

She turned to leave. At the door she paused.

“Count them again,” Long Caili said, without looking back. “All of them.”

“Master Ji Yuanhe will,” Shi Feng said. “Aloud.”