Chapter 920 — Iron Glacier Hold

CHAPTER 920

Iron Glacier Hold

Iron Glacier Hold was built of black stone on the shore of a frozen lake, and the lake was the size of a city.

The Helian came out to the gate with drums. There were no bows and no speeches. Two hundred big men and women in sheepskin beat on drums made of whole hides, and the noise rolled out across the ice until the whole lake hummed with it.

Helian Tieshan stood in the middle of them. He was even bigger than his nephew, with a grey beard braided into two ropes and a voice that didn’t need drums.

“Shi Feng!” Helian Tieshan roared, and slapped him on the back hard enough to knock the snow off his shoulders. “The boy who beat my Ba! It’s a joy to have a friend come from far away! Come in, come in! Ba, where’s the sheep?”

“Here, Uncle!” Helian Ba shouted.

Four men carried it in on a pole. It was a whole roasted sheep, and it was enormous.

“I promised you a sheep in Tianjing,” Helian Ba said proudly. “You said a thin one. I couldn’t find a thin one.”

“You didn’t look very hard,” Shi Feng said.

“I didn’t look at all,” Helian Ba admitted.

The hall of the Hold was long and smoky, with a fire pit down its centre and benches on both sides. Shi Feng sat at Helian Tieshan’s right hand. Qin Wuyan stood behind him until Helian Tieshan put a jar of wine on the bench and pointed at it. Then, to Shi Feng’s surprise, the old guardian sat down.

Helian Zhan sat on Helian Tieshan’s left.

He was very big and very quiet. He had a broad, plain face and a scar across the bridge of his nose, and he ate steadily and said nothing. Now and then his eyes went to Shi Feng and rested there for a while.

Halfway through the sheep, a man in the southern blue stood up at the far end of the bench.

He was the only man in the hall wearing silk, with a narrow, smiling face and a crane embroidered on his sleeve.

“This humble one is only a clerk of the Situ, visiting the Helian on clan business,” the Situ clerk said. “But since the honoured guest and the young heir are both here, and both on the Tianxing… Blades and swords have no eyes. In the north, this humble one has heard, a duel between two such men is fought to the death. As the northern custom is.”

The hall went quiet.

So that was why a Situ clerk was sitting in a Helian hall, Shi Feng thought. The Situ censor had filed the memorial in Tianjing. Now a Situ clerk was trying to arrange a second death in the north, in front of witnesses, with Shi Feng’s name on it either way. If he won, he’d killed the Helian heir. If he lost, the inquiry had nothing left to ask.

He set down his cup and opened his mouth.

Helian Zhan set his cup down first.

He set it down gently, and the whole hall heard it.

“In the north we don’t kill guests,” Helian Zhan said, without looking at the clerk. “We beat them.”

The Situ clerk went stiff with embarrassment. Helian Zhan had rejected his provocation in front of the whole clan.

“Of course, of course,” the Situ clerk said, and sat down quickly. “This humble one misunderstood the custom.”

“You did,” Helian Tieshan said loudly, and the whole hall laughed.

Helian Zhan looked across the fire at Shi Feng.

“Three days,” Helian Zhan said. “On the lake. You’ve walked a long way. Rest.”

“Three days,” Shi Feng said. “Thank you, Young Master Helian.”

Helian Zhan nodded once, and went back to eating.

The Hold had an ice cellar cut deep into the rock under its walls, where the Helian kept their winter meat. Shi Feng asked for it the same night, and Helian Tieshan laughed and gave it to him.

He spent the first day sitting in the dark among the carcasses, breathing.

The cold made his qi slow and heavy, and slow qi was easy to watch. He’d fought and bled at mid Shattering Void for months, but he’d never had a quiet day to look at it. He went through every thread of space he could hold and made each one a little steadier and a little longer. By the end of the first day, the folds he could open were a hand’s breadth wider than they’d been in Tianjing.

On the second day Helian Ba came down with two axe handles and a lamp.

“Zhan cuts the way we cut ice in winter,” Helian Ba said, tossing him one of the handles. “For the cellar. You score it, score it, then split it. Two light, one heavy. But he hides it. He changes which one’s heavy. Come on. I’ll show you.”

They sparred among the frozen sheep for the whole day. Helian Ba used the family rhythm, and changed it, and changed it again. Shi Feng took a dozen bruises before he caught it. Then he took a dozen more before he could count it without thinking.

“Score, score, split,” Shi Feng said at the end, on his back on the ice. “And when he hides it, the heavy one’s shoulder drops first.”

Helian Ba stared at him, and then laughed out loud.

“It took me eleven years to see that!” Helian Ba said. “Don’t tell Zhan I showed you.”

“You showed me the rhythm,” Shi Feng said. “I noticed the shoulder myself. I won’t blame you for it.”

On the second evening a grey horse came across the lake, and Pang Yue took a room in the Hold’s guest wing and sent no word down.

On the third night Shi Feng came up out of the cellar for food and passed the hall door. The hall was empty except for two old men sitting on the same bench by the dying fire. Helian Tieshan and Qin Wuyan each had a cup, and between them stood a jar of wine. Neither of them was talking.

“How long have they been like that?” Shi Feng asked quietly.

“Since dinner yesterday,” Helian Ba whispered beside him. “Everyone my uncle drinks with ends up talking. He’s never found one who didn’t. He’s very happy.”

Helian Tieshan tipped up the jar and found it empty. He looked at it. Qin Wuyan looked at it.

Then Helian Tieshan reached under the bench and brought out another one.

At dawn the drums started again, and the whole lake was black with people.