Chapter 992 — Two Guardians

CHAPTER 992

Two Guardians

Black Mirror Lake lay two li beyond Shuoyang’s north gate, and it was frozen so clear that a man standing on it could see the weeds forty feet down.

The black ice was bare. Mountain winds swept away the snow nightly, leaving the whole lake shining. Shuoyang’s fishermen said it hadn’t frozen cloudy in three hundred years.

Two old men walked out across it side by side.

Qin Wuyan wore his Pavilion grey and kept his hands in his sleeves. Lei Wanjun of the Thunder Abyss Valley walked on his left, a heavy, square old man with a scorched grey beard and arms as thick as a young man’s legs. Every step he took left a faint white star in the black ice, and the stars faded slowly behind him.

They didn’t speak. They walked a circle three hundred paces wide, out from the south shore and back to it, and the ice under them hummed faintly as their two pressures touched.

Shi Feng watched from the shore with Yan Lianbi. Long Zhenlei watched from beside him, bouncing on his heels. Xie Yuejian stood a little apart.

“What are they doing?” Long Zhenlei asked. “Why aren’t they talking? Uncle Lei talks to everybody. He talks to his horse.”

“They’re measuring the ring,” Yan Lianbi said, holding a brush ready over the terms. “Two Profound Heaven guardians have to agree on where their pressure will hold the line.”

“They could agree faster if they talked,” Long Zhenlei complained.

The two old men came back to the south shore and stopped in front of Yan Lianbi’s table.

Qin Wuyan looked at Lei Wanjun.

“Neither of us steps in,” Qin Wuyan said.

Lei Wanjun looked back at him.

“Unless a life is at stake,” Lei Wanjun said.

Both turned to the table, waiting for the clerk.

Yan Lianbi blinked, then wrote it down. Eleven words between two early Profound Heaven elders, and the ring for an imperial prince’s bout was set.

“That’s it?” Long Zhenlei cried. “I thought you’d argue for an hour!”

“Fists and feet have no eyes, Your Highness,” Lei Wanjun said gruffly, and signed the terms with a thick thumb. “Old men’s mouths do. Nothing to argue about.”

Qin Wuyan signed under him in small, neat characters, then stepped back and put his hands in his sleeves again.

Shi Feng looked out at the black ice. Three hundred paces across. Clear to the bottom. No snow to slide on, no water to walk on, and no cover anywhere. It was a good ring for a man who fought with thunder and his fists. It offered little help for Riverless Step. Shi Feng would need another way to move against the prince.

He didn’t say so. The prince was watching his face, and so was Xie Yuejian.

“Three days,” Lei Wanjun said to the prince. “Rest your hands.”

“Three days!” Long Zhenlei said, delighted, and punched the air. A crack of blue light went up off his knuckles, and every gull on the shore took off at once.

The princess’s letter came that afternoon.

A Long household outrider brought it to the tower gate in a plain lacquer case and waited in the cold for an answer, as he’d been told to. The steward carried it up. Shi Feng broke the seal at the window of the upper room.

It was one sheet, in her small, fast hand. It had no greeting.

Cleared, in the Hall of Clear Rule, before the court. Situ Kerang goes to the western salt marshes as a post censor. The canal is ruled misadventure. Nobody is charged.

The token stays with you. My business in the north isn’t finished.

My pavilion has billed you for bringing the salt train north. 150,000. The bill is enclosed.

L.

The bill was enclosed. It was itemised, line by line, from fodder for forty-four mules down to the cost of a new axle on Hao Dafu’s third wagon.

Shi Feng read the letter twice, and the bill three times. Then he laughed quietly, sat down at the table and took out a sheet of tower paper.

Yan Lianbi, passing the door with a stack of Pavilion records, stopped to look.

He wrote it in receipt form, the way a tower clerk would.

Received from Her Highness’s pavilion: one finding, cleared. One censor, sent west. One token, kept.

Paid to Her Highness’s pavilion: 150,000, for eleven wagons, forty-four mules, one axle and the drivers’ trouble.

I would rather owe Your Highness nothing but the contract.

Shi Feng.

He counted out 150,000 in stone notes from his ring, sealed them in with the receipt, and handed the case to the steward.

“Most men would write something warmer,” Yan Lianbi said from the doorway, “to a princess who carried their case to court herself.”

“I’ll thank her in person,” Shi Feng said. “She protected those drivers for me. Paying the bill doesn’t settle what she did, but I can at least pay their expenses.”

Yan Lianbi considered this, wrote something down in a private notebook, and went on along the corridor.

Shi Feng watched the outrider ride out of the gate with the case. Then he looked north again, past the city wall, to where the black lake lay flat and bright under the afternoon sun.

There were three days left. Shi Feng still hadn’t settled how to move safely on that ice. He’d test his step before facing the prince.

He went down to the furnace room. Long Caili had had it stocked with thunder-burn herbs before anyone had agreed to a bout. They were still on the shelves in rows, sealed in jade, with her pavilion’s tags on every jar.

He looked at them for a while. Then he closed the door and went to find Qin Wuyan.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said. “Tomorrow at dawn I’m going out on the ice. Will you come and watch?”

“This one always watches,” Qin Wuyan said.