Chapter 970 — Down from the Lotus Gate

CHAPTER 970

Down from the Lotus Gate

The Lotus Gate looked the same as it had on the morning he arrived. It was white jade, three times a man’s height, carved with a thousand petals, and nobody had ever seen it closed.

Shen Yaoqing walked him to it as his host. She stopped two paces inside the threshold, exactly where the outer hall’s ground ended, and turned to face him.

“By the Grand Elder’s grant, the outer hall is yours whenever you come,” Shen Yaoqing said coldly, in the same voice she used for reading out sect rules. “Snowpine Court will be kept. Nobody else will be lodged in it while you’re away. That’s been entered in the outer hall’s book.”

“Then I’ll leave my herb chest in it,” Shi Feng said. “If the court in Shuoyang finishes quickly, I’ll want it again.”

“It will be recorded,” Shen Yaoqing said.

“And Elder Ye’s tea?” Shi Feng asked.

“Master already sent it down to Lianxia this morning,” Shen Yaoqing said. “Two jars. She said one wouldn’t last you.”

“Elder Ye knows me too well,” Shi Feng said.

Shen Yaoqing didn’t answer that. She looked past him down the long steps, toward Lianxia and the plain beyond it.

“The sect’s courtesy to you hasn’t changed because of a summons,” Shen Yaoqing said. “Master wanted you to hear that from this disciple before you left. So did the Grand Elder. If anyone in Shuoyang asks how the Serene Jade treats its guest, that’s the answer.”

“I’ll tell them,” Shi Feng said.

He bowed to her as a guest bows to a host, with his hands together. She returned it exactly, no lower and no higher. Her formality hadn’t softened, but she met his eyes without looking away. Shi Feng understood her promise and respected it.

Gate Elder Qiu Moshan came out of the gatehouse to see him off too. He bowed to the 6 Mark, and then, a little to everyone’s surprise, he bowed to Qin Wuyan.

“Only when the year turns cold do you see the pine stay green, Guest Elder,” Gate Elder Qiu Moshan said. “This old man has kept this gate for sixty years. I’ve seen a great many people come up these steps to ask for something. Most of them left angry. You’re the first one I’ve seen leave with more than he came with.”

“You received me properly, Elder Qiu,” Shi Feng said. “I won’t forget that, or the people who helped me while I was here.”

The young gate disciples laughed and then quickly stopped, because Shen Yaoqing was still standing there.

Shi Feng turned and went down the steps. Qin Wuyan followed him ten paces behind.

There were nine thousand and ninety steps from the Lotus Gate to the outer slopes, and he’d counted them on the way up. Going down, he didn’t bother. The snow had stopped. The sky over the seven peaks was very clear and very blue, and the cold was the dry kind that made every sound carry a long way.

He didn’t look back at the eighth peak. He’d looked at it enough.

At the foot of the steps there was a flat stone where porters rested their loads. Shi Feng sat on it, took out his small private book and opened it on his knee.

The last page held two words in his own hand. Lotus Gate. He’d written them on a cold ridge south of here, the night Hao Dafu’s train turned east.

Under them, he wrote the tally one line at a time.

Late Shattering Void.

Tenth on the Tianxing.

Cash: about 16.78 million, carried. Herbs: about 1.85 million. Her vault: untouched.

Asked once. Refused once. Waiting.

He looked at the last line for a while.

He’d promised Jiang Xu that he would ask plainly, once, and then wait for the answer even if it was no. He had. The answer had been no, from the elders’ hall, with every courtesy. Nobody higher than the elders’ hall had answered him at all, and nobody higher would, until he was somebody worth answering.

The elders had refused him. The people above them hadn’t answered. Shi Feng thought he still needed to prove himself to those people. Even a 6 Mark, tenth on the Tianxing and a Pavilion guest elder, couldn’t demand entry to that peak.

He blew on the ink until it dried and closed the book.

Lianxia was an hour’s walk below the steps. By the time he reached the main street, the lamps were coming on. The Caili pavilion’s new furnace room had smoke coming out of its chimney, although nobody was using it. Kang Yi met him at the front door with a bow and a key.

“Your room, Guest Elder,” Kang Yi said, and handed it to him with both hands. “Upstairs, at the back. It looks over the furnace room. Two jars of tea came down from the Serene Jade for you this morning. They’re already on the table.”

“At the house rate?” Shi Feng asked, weighing the key in his hand.

“At the house rate, Guest Elder,” Kang Yi said. “It’s on the door.”

The room was small, clean and warm. There was a bed, a desk, a brazier and a window, and through the window he could see the furnace room’s slate roof and the white peaks above it. The two jars of tea stood on the desk with Ye Wanqiu’s seal on their lids.

Qin Wuyan took the room next door and closed the door without a word.

Shi Feng sat at the desk and counted the days. The court sat at Shuoyang on the eighth day of the coming month. That was nineteen days off, and three of them were river road. He had sixteen days in Lianxia with a furnace room under his window and nothing he was allowed to knock on.

He opened one of Ye Wanqiu’s jars and made tea.

[Mark: 6 | Note: not yet qualified to knock.]