Chapter 898 — The Card Is Spent

CHAPTER 898

The Card Is Spent

The 6 Mark’s quiet room was at the top of the Ninefold Tower, and it was smaller than the 3 Mark desk’s room.

There was one window, one brazier, one low table and two cushions. A kettle sat on the brazier. Jiang Xu sat beside it in the same plain grey robe he’d worn at the Jiang banquet, with his hair tied in the same cord, as if nothing in the past year had been worth changing clothes for.

The servant who had shown Shi Feng up bowed and closed the door. The latch clicked.

Shi Feng took a plain white card from his sleeve. It had no crest, no seal and no name, and it had been in his sleeve for more than a year. The corners had gone soft. He laid it on the table and held out both hands, palms up.

“Master Jiang,” Shi Feng said. “You wrote that I should come when my hands had a Mark.”

Jiang Xu took the left hand first, the same as at the banquet. His fingers were warm and dry. He turned the hand over and looked at the old burn ridges. Then he looked at the new lines, pale and shiny, across the heels of both palms, where the Glass Hall’s furnace had burnt his sleeves off and kept going.

He pressed one of the new lines with his thumb.

“These are new,” Jiang Xu said in his gentle voice. “Fold heat. Not flame.”

“The clouds went into the furnace, Master Jiang,” Shi Feng said. “Their heat had to go somewhere. My hands were nearest.”

Jiang Xu let go. He picked up the card and looked at his own handwriting for a moment. He turned it over once, though there was nothing on the back. Then he tore it in half, and in half again, and dropped the pieces into the brazier. The old paper gave easily.

“You came,” Jiang Xu said. “It is spent.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Shi Feng said. “I was going to frame it.”

Jiang Xu laughed his small, real laugh and poured the tea.

They drank for a while without talking. The window looked north over the roofs of Tianjing, past the palace walls, to a grey line of hills.

“Ji Yuanhe,” Jiang Xu said. “Does he know you’re going north?”

“Not yet,” Shi Feng said. “When he hears, he’ll say I took too long to tell him.”

“Most old men would,” Jiang Xu said.

He set down his cup.

“You read the sixth desk,” Jiang Xu said. “Everyone in this tower knows. So I’ll give you one fact and one warning, and then I’ll stop. The fact first. A 6 Mark of the Pavilion is admitted to the outer hall of the Lotus Gate by old courtesy. Nobody remembers when it started. The Serene Jade has never refused it.”

“I’m a guest elder,” Shi Feng said. “Not a member.”

“The Mark was stamped in this tower, and the seat is the Pavilion’s,” Jiang Xu said. “That’s enough for an outer hall. But the outer hall isn’t the inner one. The courtesy gets you through the door. Past the door, they’ll treat you however they like.”

“And the warning?” Shi Feng asked.

Jiang Xu looked at him for a while before he answered.

“The seal on that girl was set by the strongest man on the continent,” Jiang Xu said quietly. “Not by her sect. By him. Every rule around her is his. The gate, the desk, the courier. He doesn’t bargain, he doesn’t need anything from anyone, and nobody has ever embarrassed him into a kindness.”

Shi Feng said nothing. For once there was nothing to haggle over.

“So do not be clever at that gate,” Jiang Xu said. “Cleverness is often undone by cleverness. You’re a very clever young man, Master Shi. I watched you fold a sky into a pot. Don’t fold anything at the Lotus Gate.”

“Then what should I do?” Shi Feng asked.

“Ask,” Jiang Xu said. “Plainly. Once. Then wait for the answer, even if it’s no.”

Shi Feng thought about it. For a year he’d bluffed and talked his way through every door in the capital. Not one of those tricks would work on a man who didn’t need anything.

“Then I’ll ask plainly,” Shi Feng said. “Once. And I’ll wait.” He bowed over his cup. “You have my word, Master Jiang.”

Jiang Xu nodded, as if he’d expected nothing else.

“Good,” Jiang Xu said. He picked up the kettle again. “More tea?”

“Please,” Shi Feng said.

They drank the second pot slowly. Jiang Xu asked about the nine pockets inside the cauldron, and Shi Feng told him how he’d held them apart. Jiang Xu listened without interrupting, and at the end he said only, “Left. Of course it was left,” and smiled into his cup.

When Shi Feng stood to leave, the pieces of the card in the brazier had burnt down to grey flakes.

“One more thing,” Jiang Xu said at the door. “The Jiang paid you three million for that meridian pill. My cousin complained about the price for two days.”

“Was it too high?” Shi Feng asked.

“It was too low,” Jiang Xu said. “Charge the north more.”

Shi Feng went down the tower stairs laughing. At the bottom he remembered that he still owed a bun tray, and he went to Willow Ford to find out what it was going to cost him.