Chapter 911 — The Old Man on the Road

CHAPTER 911

The Old Man on the Road

By dawn the frost had come down off the ridge and turned the whole slope white.

Shi Feng reached the foot of the Hanli ridge with his robe stiff and his breath smoking. The north road ran straight on across a plain of frozen grass toward a line of grey hills. There was nobody on it.

Then there was one old man.

He stood in the middle of the road twenty paces ahead, in a plain robe of Pavilion grey, with his hands folded in his sleeves. He was thin and upright, with a short white beard and frost thick on his shoulders. He’d been standing there for hours.

Shi Feng stopped. His Spirit Sense had swept that stretch of road a moment ago and found frost, grass and nothing else. He hadn’t known the man was there until he saw him with his own eyes.

That told him most of what he needed to know.

“Honoured guest Shi Feng,” Qin Wuyan said, and bowed exactly as deep as a guardian should bow to a guest elder, and not a hair deeper. “This one is Qin Wuyan, guardian of the Sky Pavilion.”

Qin Wuyan took a letter from his sleeve and held it out in both hands. It was sealed in grey wax with the mark of the Ninefold Tower.

Shi Feng broke the seal. Old Tower Master Dai’s hand was large and careless.

The Pavilion’s most important alchemist does not walk alone. Qin Wuyan goes where you go. Don’t argue with him. He won’t argue back, and you’ll only tire yourself out.

Under the seal was one more line.

He doesn’t eat much. Don’t let that fool you.

Shi Feng folded the letter into his sleeve. He understood the reason. Linghu Yan had come for him in the dark at Grey Goose Pass, and the Heretic Sect hadn’t forgotten the furnace that walked out of its Pill Pit. The Pavilion had just stamped a 6 Mark on a man of twenty-three who wasn’t at Profound Heaven. It wasn’t going to let him die on a frozen road. Refusing the guard would mean refusing Old Tower Master Dai’s face.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said, stepping closer. “Before we walk together, I’d like to ask one thing plainly.”

“Ask,” Qin Wuyan said.

“What will you do in a fight?” Shi Feng asked.

“If it is your fight, this one watches,” Qin Wuyan said. “If it is above your realm, this one stands in front.”

“And who decides which it is?” Shi Feng asked.

“The realm decides,” Qin Wuyan said, and let out his pressure.

It lasted one breath. There was no wind and no sound. But the frost grass around him lay down flat, all at once, in a circle that ran fifty paces out across the plain. Every blade pointed away from him. The frost on the road under Shi Feng’s boots cracked into fine white lines.

Shi Feng’s knees wanted to bend. He kept them straight, and his heart struck twice, hard, against his ribs.

Early Profound Heaven. One breath of it had flattened a field.

Then the pressure was gone, and the grass began to rise again, slowly, blade by blade.

“This one does not look inside a guest,” Qin Wuyan said. “This one stands where the order says.”

Shi Feng let the breath out. A Profound Heaven Spirit Sense could read every meridian in a man’s body, and Shi Feng’s meridians were the one thing he showed nobody. Qin Wuyan had promised not to examine him. Shi Feng relaxed a little, though he still kept his qi steady.

“Then I accept,” Shi Feng said. “On one condition.”

Qin Wuyan waited.

“You pay for your own noodles,” Shi Feng said, starting down the road. “And if I ask you to join me for a meal, sit beside me. I don’t need someone standing guard over my bowl.”

“Agreed,” Qin Wuyan said.

He said nothing else.

He fell in three paces behind Shi Feng’s left shoulder and stayed there. When Shi Feng walked faster, the three paces stayed three paces.

By noon Shi Feng had tried three times.

“Is the north road always this empty, Senior Qin?” Shi Feng asked.

Qin Wuyan looked at the road.

“Do you know Frost Pass City?” Shi Feng asked an hour later.

Qin Wuyan nodded once.

“Is the food any good, or are you keeping that from me too?” Shi Feng asked.

“…” Qin Wuyan didn’t even turn his head.

A carter came south in the afternoon with a load of pine logs. He saw the grey robe and pulled his ox off the road.

“Pavilion grey on the north road!” the carter muttered as they passed, to nobody in particular. “When the tree grows tall, it catches the wind. Whoever that young master is, somebody’s worried about him.”

At dusk they reached a waystation with a noodle stall under a reed roof. Shi Feng ordered two bowls. The stall keeper set them down, saw the grey robe and started to bow.

Qin Wuyan put eleven copper coins on the counter, in a neat stack, before the man had finished bowing.

“Old sir, the young master already ordered for—” the stall keeper began.

Qin Wuyan pushed the stack one inch closer to him.

The stall keeper took the coins very carefully. Qin Wuyan ate half his bowl and set the chopsticks down side by side.

Shi Feng found he was enjoying himself. A guard who never talked couldn’t gossip and couldn’t be bought. Old Tower Master Dai had sent him the most expensive kind of man there was.

The second day was the same. Frost, road, three paces.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said on the second evening, with the hills turning dark ahead of them. “If a man talks to you for two days and you never answer once, is it still a conversation?”

Qin Wuyan thought about it for a long time.

“It is a road,” Qin Wuyan said.

Shi Feng laughed out loud. It was the first thing the old man had said in two days, and it was the right answer.

The road topped the last hill, and Frost Pass City lay below them: black walls, a hundred smoking chimneys and a tall grey tower with the Pavilion’s banner on top.

There were lamps at the south gate. Under them, standing in two long rows in the snow, forty people in Pavilion grey were waiting.