Chapter 48: Two Young Masters at the Greenwater Inn

Greenwater was a town of one street, three wells, and a great many fences.

They were the first thing that Li Xuan noticed. They ran away from the road on either side, in long gray lines of split timber and braided thorn, over hill after hill of dry brown grass, and where the fences crossed the road, there was a stone. It stood waist-high, weathered and chipped, carved with nine small seals in a ring, and beneath them, in clear, square letters: Pasture Tithe of the Nine Great Sects. One in ten of every herd that grazes.

He stopped the cart and read it twice.

"It is a tithe," said Gu. "The Wilderness is full of them."

"One in ten," said Li Xuan. "That is a great deal."

"It was one in sixty, once." The old Marshal’s eyes narrowed on the nearest hill, where a thin line of sheep were being driven along a fence by a boy of eleven. "My teacher told me. The Sects took a sixtieth, long ago, to keep the roads open and the wolves off. Then it was a thirtieth. Then a twentieth." He spat over the wheel. "A tax is the only thing that grows when you do not feed it."

Li Xuan said nothing. He took out his writing-brush, in his mind, and made a small note in a ledger that he had not yet learned to read. Then he flicked the reins, and they went on into the town.

The Greenwater Inn was low and long and smelled of mutton fat and woodsmoke.

They were three steps inside the door when the shouting began.

"I am telling you," said a loud young voice, in a tone of enormous and wounded dignity, "that the Sky-Clearing Sect pays its debts!"

"It does not pay yours," said the innkeeper, who was a round, tired, bald man with a ladle in his fist. "Three nights. Two bowls of noodles a night, and a jar of plum wine, and one broken stool."

"The stool was already broken."

"It was a stool," said the innkeeper, "when you sat on it."

In the center of the room, at a table covered in empty bowls, stood a very tall, very lean young man in a sky-blue robe with a high collar and a sash of silver thread. His hair was bound up in a high knot with a plain bone pin, and his face, which was long and clear-skinned and honest, was pink to the ears. He had a long plain sword at his hip. His left eye was swollen nearly shut. There was a fresh dark bruise on his jaw, and the front of his robe was torn from collar to waist, and he carried himself like a man who has recently been thrown down a flight of stairs and would be very much obliged if no one mentioned it.

Beside him, hunched on a bench with a bowl in each hand, sat a stout, round, soft-faced youth in a patched brown apron over a similar blue robe. He was eating. He did not appear to have noticed the argument. He had the dreamy contented air of a man who has eaten four bowls and sees no reason to stop.

"Tianxiao," he said, with his mouth full, "I think we should pay."

"With what?"

"I have two copper."

"I have half a copper." The tall young man’s voice cracked. "And a broken token. And a debt of honor, and I will have you know, Guo Qing, that I will not be shamed by a... a noodle man..."

Gu, in the doorway, made a small noise. It was something between a cough and a laugh.

The tall young man spun round.

He took in the group in the doorway, an old man in a black coat with a sword, a young woman in gray with frost on her boots, a thin scholar with a straw broom and a donkey’s lead rope, an old woman with a medicine box, and a girl clutching a black box. His one good eye settled on Ji Ling’er’s hip.

It widened.

"That is ice-jade," he said, in a voice of reverent awe. "That is Feathered Frost. A first-grade sword of the Feathered Frost Sect. I have only ever seen one in a book."

"It is a sword," said Ji Ling’er.

"It is the finest..." He stopped. He drew himself up. He put one fist to his palm and bowed from the waist, so low and so fast that he nearly overbalanced. "I am Yun Tianxiao, of the Sky-Clearing Sect. I ask for guidance!"

There was a short silence.

"Guidance," said Ji Ling’er.

"A duel! A friendly one! I do not wish to presume, but I have never met a swordsman of the Feathered Frost, and I should like to learn."

"It costs a bowl of noodles," said Ji Ling’er gravely.

"I... what?"

"Guidance. It costs a bowl of noodles. I have not eaten since dawn."

Guo Qing, on the bench, swallowed a mouthful, and said with great and sincere sympathy: "That is very reasonable. The noodles here are quite good."

Yun Tianxiao looked at him. He looked at Ji Ling’er. His face went through three expressions in rapid succession, and arrived, finally, at a look of fierce, lit, boyish joy.

"Done!" he said.

It lasted three moves.

They fought in the yard behind the inn, on a patch of trodden mud between a woodpile and a pen of indignant geese, with the entire population of the Greenwater Inn leaning out of the windows to watch. Yun Tianxiao’s sword was a handsome, honest, straight-edged blade, and he used it with a flat-out, headlong, entirely sincere ferocity. Every stroke was at full strength. Every stroke was loud. When he attacked, the air cracked, and the geese fled.

Ji Ling’er touched him on the wrist, the elbow, and the ribs, in that order, with the flat of her ice-jade blade, and he sat down in the mud.

"One," said Gu, from the fence.

"Two," said Ye’er.

"Three," said Guo Qing, around a mouthful of rice cake.

Yun Tianxiao sat in the mud with his sword across his knees, staring at the sky. His chest was heaving. He did not look angry. He looked like a man who has been shown, quite suddenly, an entire new country on the far side of a mountain he had thought was the edge of the world.

"Again," he said.

"No," said Ji Ling’er. "One is enough for a bowl of noodles." But she held out her hand, and pulled him to his feet, and there was a small smile at the corner of her mouth. "Your sword is loud," she said. "Your feet are quiet. I should work on that."

"Which is which?" he said, bewildered.

"Everyone says that," said Gu, from the fence. His dark eyes were bright. "Boy. Come here."

They ate in the long room, afterward, at the big table by the fire, with the innkeeper standing silent and rather glazed behind a steaming bowl. Gu had settled the debt with a single silver bit, and Yun Tianxiao, who had tried to protest, had been sat down by main force and given a bowl of noodles the size of a washtub. He was so intent on the food, and on Gu’s low, dry voice describing the proper position of the back foot in a lunge, that for a time he said nothing at all.

It was Guo Qing, in the end, who told them.

He did it in a mild, rueful, rather apologetic way, between mouthfuls. He was an apprentice to the sect’s one alchemist, an old man named Elder Bai, and he had been sent along on the journey to carry the pills. They had gone down, he said, to the Sky-Fall Platform, a month’s journey south and east, at the edge of the Wilderness. It was where the sects of the southern border sent their best young swordsmen, once a decade, to try for a token.

"A token?" said Li Xuan.

"To go up the mountain." Guo Qing’s round face grew somber. "There is a summit above the Platform. The Arch-Court Heavenly Summit. It is where the old masters of the border are said to have left their inheritances. But the Platform is held by the Jiang Clan, and the Jiang Clan sell the tokens. Or they give them to the sons of their friends."

"And you were not their friends," said Gu.

"We were the Sky-Clearing Sect." He shrugged. "We have nobody."

Yun Tianxiao, across the table, had put down his bowl. His long young face was set. "I fought the young master of the Jiang Clan," he said. "Jiang Chen. In the first round, on the Platform. It was a fair match. I thought." His hand tightened on the table’s edge. "He is Foundation Establishment. I am Qi Condensation, the Ninth Layer. I should not have won. But I should have been permitted to lose."

No one spoke.

"His men threw me from the Platform," said Yun Tianxiao, quite calmly. "With my token. They said that a sect without gold had no business with a sword." He gave a small, crooked, terrible smile. "I fell eleven zhang. I landed on a goat."

"It was a very large goat," said Guo Qing.

"It was a very angry goat." He rubbed his jaw. "I wanted to bring a token home. A sect that is going to be attacked ought to have one champion, and I thought, if I could win the token, I could go up the mountain, and bring an inheritance down." His eyes dropped. "I could not. And my father says that the Third Terrace is lost anyway."

"The Third Terrace?" said Li Xuan.

They looked at him. It was the first time he had spoken since they came in.

"It is where the library is," said Guo Qing. "The old Archive of the sect. Five thousand years of scrolls. It is the only thing we have left that is worth anything, and the Blood-Blade Sect has been trying to buy it, or burn it, for twenty years." He lowered his voice. "They have sent an ultimatum. At the new moon, they come for the Third Terrace, or the sect pays tribute for it. My father says..." He glanced at Yun Tianxiao. "The Master says that we shall pay."

"My father is a good man," said Yun Tianxiao, rather tightly, "and a tired one."

"Who keeps the library?"

The two young men looked at one another.

"No one," said Guo Qing.

"There is a post," said Yun Tianxiao, with some reluctance. "It is the oldest post in the sect, older than the Master’s. The Custodian of the Third Terrace. But the last custodian died fifty years ago, and no one has taken it since. It is said to be cursed."

"How cursed?"

"Three men have tried. One fell down the steps. One went mad. One was found in the morning, sitting at a desk, with his hair gone white, and he would not say anything at all." Yun Tianxiao shrugged, uneasily. "The steps have not been swept in fifty years. No one will go up them. The pine needles are up to the knee."

There was a pause.

"A flight of steps that no one has swept in fifty years," said Ji Ling’er, in a very level voice, without looking at anyone in particular.

Gu gave a small, stifled cough.

Li Xuan set down his cup.

"I am a scholar of no great account," he said mildly. "I have a donkey, and an old man, and a number of strays. I am looking for a library with a vacant post." He smiled. "I wonder if you might know of one."

Yun Tianxiao stared at him.

His one good eye went from the thin young man to the straw broom propped against the wall, and back, and a slow, dawning, entirely transparent hope began to spread across his battered face like sunrise over a dung-heap.

"You," he said. "You would take the post?"

"If it is offered."

"It is cursed."

"I have heard."

"It pays three bowls of rice and a broom."

"I have a broom already," said Li Xuan. "But I should like the rice."

Guo Qing, on the bench, began very slowly to grin.

The Blood-Blade scouts came in at dusk.

There were three of them. They were big, loose-limbed young men in black robes trimmed with red, each with a curved blade at his hip whose sheath was stained dark with something that was not wine. They came in the way that men come into a place that is theirs. The first kicked the door wide. The second said something low to the innkeeper, who went the color of tallow, and put a small leather bag on the counter. The third looked slowly round the room, and his eyes came to rest on the sky-blue robe of Yun Tianxiao.

"Ah," he said. "The little thrown-away swordsman."

Yun Tianxiao rose.

"Sit down," said Gu, very softly, not moving.

"He insulted..."

"Sit. Down."

He sat, with his jaw set.

The scout swaggered across the room, and stopped at their table, and leaned on it, with his hands wide. He smelled of old blood and sour wine.

"Message," he said. "For the Sky-Clearing Sect. The new moon is in nineteen days. At the new moon, the Third Terrace is ours, or the tribute is doubled." He grinned. His teeth were stained. "The Sect Master of the Blood-Blade sends his regards, and says that there is a very great man come to help him, who has a particular grudge against a certain scholar, and who would like to see that scholar dead."

The room did not breathe.

Li Xuan looked up from his noodles. His face, in the firelight, was perfectly calm.

"Do you know," he said conversationally, "I think that you have mud on your boots."

The scout blinked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Mud. On your boots. I think that you have tracked it across the innkeeper’s floor." He nodded gently toward the door. "There is a very good scraper by the step. It would be a kindness, if you would use it."

The scout stared at him. Then, with an enormous, slow, delighted grin, he lifted one heavy black boot, and brought it down, quite deliberately, on the middle of the table.

The noodle-bowls jumped. Broth went across the cloth.

He did not complete the gesture.

A thin white line ran out from beneath Ji Ling’er’s chair, across the floor, and up the leg of the scout’s boot, and in the space of half a breath, the whole of his left leg was a pillar of frost from the sole to the knee. He did not scream. He only gaped, in a stupid, astonished way, with his mouth open. The other two went for their blades, and discovered that their sheaths had frozen solid.

"Take your friend," said Ji Ling’er coldly, not rising. "And go home. And tell your Master that the Third Terrace has a custodian."

They went. They went with the first, hopping and cursing, between them, and the door slammed. In the silence after, someone dropped a ladle.

Gu was laughing. It was a low, silent, shaking laugh, and he did not seem able to stop.

"Did you," said Yun Tianxiao, in a stunned voice, looking from the door to the table, "arrange that?"

"I merely said that he had mud on his boots," said Li Xuan.

He took up his broom, and rose, and began to sweep the broth from the innkeeper’s floor.