Chapter 903 — Grey Goose Pass

CHAPTER 903

Grey Goose Pass

“Twenty silver to the top of the pass,” Hao Dafu said. “Food included. You walk. My mules don’t carry passengers.”

“Fifteen,” Shi Feng said, and shifted the chest. “I’ll carry my own chest, and I’ll walk faster than your mules.”

Hao Dafu looked him up and down. He was a short, wide man with salt crusted in his beard, and he had the voice of someone who’d spent thirty years shouting at mules.

“Eighteen,” Hao Dafu said. “And if you fall off the cliff path, I keep it.”

“Done,” Shi Feng said.

Three days north of Tianjing the farmland ended and the road began to climb. Hao Dafu’s salt train was eleven wagons, forty mules, twenty drivers and four hired caravan guards, and it climbed slowly. Ahead, a pass cut through the grey mountains like a notch in a blade.

“Grey Goose Pass,” Hao Dafu said, pointing with his whip. “Two days up, one waystation at the top, then down into Hanli country. The geese fly through it every autumn. Nothing else gets through it easily.”

“You’ve made the climb before,” Shi Feng said.

“Twenty-two years,” Hao Dafu said proudly. “Keep to the inside of the path and don’t argue with the mules.”

The cliff path began the next afternoon. It was a ledge cut into the mountainside, three carts wide at its best and one cart wide at its worst, and on the right the drop went down into cloud.

At dusk the train stopped on the widest stretch. The drivers lit fires and set water to boil. Shi Feng put his chest down, walked to the edge, and looked across at the next ledge along the cliff. Between them lay a gap of about ten paces, with nothing in it but wind.

He folded the space across the gap and stepped.

At Minor Success, Void-Crossing Step could hold a fold for one breath. His foot came down on the far ledge. The fold snapped shut behind him, and the wind rushed back into the gap.

Around the cooking fires, everyone had stopped talking.

“Did he just—”

“He walked across the air!”

“He didn’t walk! He was there, and then he was over there!”

Shi Feng folded back. This time the wind pulled at the fold, and he came down half a foot short and caught the rock with one hand. Pebbles rattled away into the cloud. He hauled himself up and dusted off his knees.

“Ten coppers he falls on the next one!” a driver shouted.

“Twenty says he doesn’t!”

“Thirty says he falls on the fourth!”

In no time the whole camp was betting. Hao Dafu came over with his whip under his arm and a bowl of noodles in his hand. He looked at the gap, and then at Shi Feng.

“Young man,” Hao Dafu said, “you paid me eighteen silver to walk up this mountain. Why are you jumping off it?”

“I’m practising, Master Hao,” Shi Feng said. “A fold that holds in a furnace doesn’t always hold on a cliff. The wind pulls at it. I’d rather find that out here, where there’s a ledge to grab, than somewhere there isn’t one.”

“And if you fall?” Hao Dafu asked.

“Then you keep the eighteen silver,” Shi Feng said.

Hao Dafu thought about that.

“Fifty coppers says he doesn’t fall,” Hao Dafu told the camp, and went back to his fire.

Shi Feng crossed eleven more times before it grew too dark to see the far ledge. He landed short twice more. He didn’t fall. Thirty coppers changed hands, and the driver who lost them swore he’d been cheated by an immortal.

“I’ll be quicker tomorrow,” Shi Feng told him, taking a bowl of noodles from the pot. “Bet accordingly.”

The waystation at the top of the pass was a stone yard with a wall, a stable, and a long hall with lamps hung along its eaves. The train reached it the next evening, and the drivers went straight inside to drink.

Shi Feng sat at the end of a bench and ate noodles. Beside him, a young caravan guard had the Tianji Mansion’s issue open on the table and was reading it by lamplight, tracing the lines with one finger.

“Twentieth,” the young guard said to the man beside him. “Shi Feng. Beat Baili Xuan of the Azure Sun on the Pavilion steps. Baili Xuan! I saw him in Tianjing once. He punched a horse over a wall.”

“What does this Shi Feng look like?” the other guard asked.

“Doesn’t say,” the young guard said. “Seven feet tall, I bet. Shoulders like a door.”

The young guard turned to Shi Feng. “Hey, brother,” he said. “You came up from the capital. Ever see this Shi Feng?”

“Never,” Shi Feng said, and looked away. “Could you pass the chilli?”

Strictly speaking, it was true. He had only ever seen himself in a basin of water.

The young guard passed the chilli. “Not that it matters up here,” he said, and waved his chopsticks. “The sky is high and the emperor is far away. In this pass, nobody cares about the list. It’s bandits that matter.”

Shi Feng ate his noodles.

He’d heard that before. It hadn’t been true at any gate yet.

Near midnight the hall emptied. The drivers went out to sleep by their carts, and two guards took their posts at the gate. Shi Feng lay down on a salt sack under the eaves with his herb chest beside him.

The lamp at the far end of the eaves went out.

There was no wind. There was no breath and no sound of a hand. The flame was there, and then it wasn’t.

The next lamp went out. Then the one after it.

Shi Feng opened his eyes.

One by one, without a single sound, the lamps of the waystation were going dark, and the darkness was coming along the eaves toward him.