Chapter 941 — Wait and Work

CHAPTER 941

Wait and Work

That evening Shen Yaoqing came to Snowpine Court with a lamp and a record book.

She didn’t sit. She stood just inside the gate of the small guest court, in the snow, with the book open on her arm and a brush in her hand.

“The outer hall keeps a record of every guest’s intentions,” Shen Yaoqing said. “As your host, I’m required to enter yours after a hearing. So. What will you do now?”

“Wait,” Shi Feng said. He was sitting on the step of the furnace room with a cup of tea. “And work.”

“Wait for what?” Shen Yaoqing asked coldly. “The hall gave you its answer.”

“It answered what I asked,” Shi Feng said. “I’m not asking again. But I’m not leaving the north either. The Zhangsun patriarch is freezing from the inside. The other houses have sent letters too. I’ll refine for them and come back up here between commissions.”

“So you’ll sit on our doorstep and refine pills for our neighbours,” Shen Yaoqing said.

“Yes,” Shi Feng said.

“Elder Kong will call it a siege,” Shen Yaoqing said.

“I won’t use the commissions to press the hall,” Shi Feng said. “If the sect wants a pill, it can ask separately.”

Shen Yaoqing wrote something short in the book. She didn’t show it to him.

“The guest waits and works,” Shen Yaoqing read aloud in a flat voice, and closed the book. “A long line catches a big fish. Is that the plan?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She turned and went out through the gate with her lamp, and her footprints went straight across the snow and didn’t wander.

Qin Wuyan came out of the guest room and sat down on the other end of the step.

For a while neither of them spoke. The lamp in the furnace room’s window threw a square of yellow light on the snow. Beyond the wall, the dark shape of the peaks stood against the clouds.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said at last. “I have one question. I won’t ask it of anyone on this mountain. But I’ll say it once to you, so it’s said.”

Qin Wuyan waited.

“In the carriage that day, I could feel the old woman who drove it,” Shi Feng said. “I had no Spirit Sense yet, but I could feel her pressure. She was as strong as my sect master. From inside the carriage I felt nothing at all. No pressure. No qi. Nothing.”

He turned the cup in his hands.

“So either the lady was so far above me that I couldn’t feel her,” Shi Feng said, “or she has no realm to feel. If she were that far above me, she’d be famous. Nobody has ever heard of her. Then the sixth desk seals her name, and the strongest man on the continent sets the seal, and the hall can’t even pass a request to him.” He set the cup down. “A girl with no realm doesn’t need guarding like that. Someone is guarding something about her. That’s my question. What is it?”

Qin Wuyan didn’t look at him. He looked north, toward the dark place where the eighth peak would be.

“The eighth peak has no road a guest may walk,” Qin Wuyan said.

That was all he said. Shi Feng waited, but nothing else came.

“I won’t try to reach it,” Shi Feng said, picking up his tea. “But I haven’t stopped wondering.”

The next morning, Shi Feng rode east before dawn.

He took the white guest horse down the White Stair, then a day’s ride along the frozen river road through the pine country. Qin Wuyan rode behind him on a grey mule from the sect’s stable, which he had chosen himself and which seemed to be afraid of him.

The Zhangsun fortress stood on a bend of the frozen river, black stone on white snow, with wolf banners hanging stiff from every tower. The sable-coated steward from Lianxia was waiting at the gate. He almost ran to take the horse.

“Master Shi! You came first, just as you said!” the Zhangsun steward said. “Quickly, please, every hour counts!”

The patriarch’s hall was hot. Braziers burned along every wall, and the clan’s elders stood among them, sweating in their furs. In the middle of the floor, on a stone bed, lay Patriarch Zhangsun Gang.

He was a huge man, and he was white. Frost covered his beard and eyebrows from the inside. His skin was grey-blue, and his chest barely moved. Shi Feng’s Spirit Sense touched him and came back cold. Every meridian in the patriarch’s body had frozen solid, and the ice had reached his heart’s door.

A plump man in a 5 Mark alchemist’s robe stood beside the bed, bowing over and over. Sweat ran down his face in spite of the frost.

“This humble one is Pan Shouren, the clan’s alchemist,” Pan Shouren said, wiping his forehead. “Master Shi, I’ve failed three times. Three Vein-Thawing formulas, every herb correct. Each time the pill went down warm, and each time the frost swallowed it before it reached the veins. I’ve no face left to show you.”

Shi Feng laid his palm on the patriarch’s chest.

The cold climbed his wrist at once, so fast that frost whitened his sleeve. He held his hand there and read the ice all the way down to the root.

Then he took his hand away and shook the frost off it.

“Your formula is right, Master Pan,” Shi Feng said. “Light the furnace in the courtyard, not in here. And put out every brazier in this hall.”

Pan Shouren’s mouth fell open.

“Put them out?” Pan Shouren asked faintly. “Master Shi, he’ll freeze!”

“He’s already frozen,” Shi Feng said. “It’s the warmth that’s killing him.”