Chapter 902 — The North Gate

CHAPTER 902

The North Gate

Ji Yuanhe counted him out of the pavilion gate at first light.

“One,” Ji Yuanhe said, as Shi Feng stepped over the threshold. Then the old man stopped, nodded once, and went back inside to his furnaces. It was the shortest count he had ever made, and Shi Feng thought it was the best. He waited until Ji Yuanhe was through the door before he walked away.

By sunrise Shi Feng was at the North Gate of Tianjing, with a bag on his shoulder, a herb chest strapped across his back, and eighteen of Auntie Niu’s buns.

The teahouse beside the gate was full of carters waiting for the gate to open. A thin man in a scholar’s cap stood on a bench in the middle of the room with the Tianji Mansion’s newest issue in his hands. His voice carried to every corner, and he had the look of a man who had been ignored all morning. He was reading the Hundred Famed Tianxing aloud for anyone who’d buy him a pot of tea.

“Twenty-first, Baili Xuan of the Azure Sun Sect, mid Shattering Void,” the reader called. He turned the page. “Twentieth. Shi Feng. Mid Shattering Void. No sect. Defeated Baili Xuan before witnesses on the steps of the Ninefold Tower.”

A carter near the door put his bowl down.

“Shi Feng?” the carter said. “Read that again.”

“Shi Feng,” the reader said, annoyed. “Twentieth.”

“Isn’t that the princess’s alchemist? The one with the two Marks?”

“Don’t be stupid! Alchemists don’t fight on steps.”

“Baili Xuan had his arm in a sling at the tower. My cousin saw it!”

“Shi’s a common surname!”

“Twentieth isn’t common!”

The whole teahouse started arguing at once. One table was sure the 6 Mark and the fighter were the same man. The next table was sure they were brothers. A third table was taking bets. Somebody put a copper down on brothers, and somebody else matched it.

For a year the name on that list had been nobody’s business. At ninety-third, at sixty-third, at forty-fourth, at twenty-eighth, nobody had read that far down. At twentieth, people had started saying it back.

Shi Feng sat at the counter and ate a bun.

“Heroes come from among the young,” an old carter said, shaking his head. “A boy beats a Shattering Void genius, and the next morning nobody even knows his face.”

“It wasn’t like this in my day,” his friend said gloomily.

The reader had given up trying to read the next entry over the noise. He climbed down from his bench and looked sadly into his empty teapot.

Shi Feng caught the server’s eye and put a coin on the counter.

“A pot for the reader,” Shi Feng said. “He’s earned it. It isn’t easy reading to a room that won’t let you finish.”

“Thank you, young sir,” the reader said, surprised. “Are you travelling north?”

“I am,” Shi Feng said.

“Then mind yourself at Grey Goose Pass,” the reader said. “There’s talk of bandits on the high road this winter.”

The gate bell rang. Every carter in the room stood up at once, and Shi Feng went out with them.

The North Gate was a tunnel thirty paces long through the city wall. Carts went out on the right and came in on the left, and the gate guards shouted at anyone who mixed them up.

Shi Feng was halfway through when a carriage came up behind him on the outgoing side.

It was lacquered red, flying the gold-red banners of the Azure Sun Sect, drawn by four horses and ringed by a dozen riders in red. The crowd pressed against the tunnel wall to let it pass. Its curtains were drawn.

Outside the gate the road split. The north road climbed toward the hills. The west road ran flat toward the Azure Sun’s mountains, many days away.

The carriage turned west.

As it turned, the wind lifted one curtain for a moment. Qu Ming sat inside, alone, in a plain robe with no gold on it. His hands lay in his lap, and he was looking at the floor.

He didn’t look out. He didn’t see who was standing at the fork, and Shi Feng doubted it would have mattered if he had.

The curtain fell. The red riders closed in around the carriage, and it went west at a walk.

A week ago the whole capital had been talking about the Azure Sun’s young lord. The sect had kept him in its residence until his hands were steady enough to travel. This morning, nobody in the gate tunnel had even turned to look at his carriage.

Shi Feng hitched the herb chest higher on his back and turned north.

On top of the wall above the gate, a man in a grey-sleeved robe stood alone by the parapet. He had no brush and no paper. He watched the young man with the herb chest walk out along the north road, all the way to the first bend, and he didn’t write anything down.

Shi Feng felt the look on his back and didn’t turn round.

A spy who doesn’t write anything down already knows where you’re going, Shi Feng thought. He didn’t need a report. He only needed to know that Shi Feng had left.

When the road bent round the hill, the man on the wall was still standing there. At the next bend, he was gone.