Chapter 29: A Sabotaged Furnace Burns in the Second Round, a Silver-Needled Appraiser Proposes a Dangerous Bargain, and the Guild’s Hidden Throne Is Revealed

The second round began with a hundred furnaces and a single rule: whatever came out of them had to be worth swallowing.

They stood in ranks across the Grand Furnace Plaza, squat bronze cauldrons with numbered plaques, each fitted with a heat array and a tray of identical herbs. The recipe was posted on a silk banner above the elders’ terrace in neat green characters: CORE-CLEANSING PILL. Three hours. One pill per contestant.

Adam stopped in front of furnace forty-seven.

He looked at it for a moment, then at the black-robed attendant with the thin mustache who had been lingering two furnaces over when he arrived, and who was now very carefully looking at nothing.

’Interesting,’ Adam thought.

He laid his palm on the cauldron’s rim, as if to steady himself, and let his Eyes of Divine Insight drift through the bronze.

The heat array was clean. The herbs were clean. But on the underside of the furnace’s base plate, where no examiner would ever look, someone had carved a single extra rune, tiny and neat, like a hair in a bowl of rice. It would pass unnoticed for two hours. Then it would begin to feed the fire, a little at a time, and at the end of the second hour the furnace would burst like an overripe fruit.

Adam smiled under his hood.

’A Ye clan trick. Quiet, deniable, and aimed at the unlicensed.’

He did not call an examiner. He did not scratch the rune off. He simply let a single thread of black Chaos-Devouring Fire slip from his fingertip into the bronze, and the rune went out like a candle in a draft, drunk down to a mark that looked, to any eye, like a casting flaw.

Then he lit the furnace, and began to cook.

Around him, the plaza filled with smoke and the smell of burning herbs. Contestants sweated over their cauldrons. A woman three rows over cursed softly when her pill collapsed in on itself. An old man two furnaces down was muttering to his fire like a man comforting a horse.

At the end of the second hour, three furnaces exploded.

The sound rolled across the courtyard like thunder, one after another, a sharp crack and a column of smoke. Contestants dove for cover. Guild attendants rushed with water barrels and shouted for the healers.

Adam did not lift his head from his work. He had counted the three plaques with a glance as they went up.

Numbers twelve, sixty, and eighty-eight. All three belonged to unlicensed contestants with no patron. All three were also, he noted, a pleasant, orderly distance from the black-robed attendant, who now stood very straight with a look of exaggerated concern.

’Accidents,’ he thought. ’The Guild will say so. Everyone will nod.’

He finished at the three-hour mark with a single pill resting in his jade dish, a High-Grade Core-Cleansing Pill with one clean halo. He had made it no better and no worse than the best of the surviving contestants.

He came twelfth.

Ye Xuan, in the first rank, took first place with a Supreme-Grade pill that was undoubtedly very fine. The attendants roared. Ye Xuan accepted their applause with a shallow smile, and his eyes drifted idly across the plaza, past the sparse and chastened ranks of the unlicensed, and moved on.

They did not stop at furnace forty-seven.

That evening, a young attendant in green robes found Adam in the street outside the Hall and handed him a folded slip of jade.

Third pavilion, west garden. Come alone. Do not bring your friend’s pills. —S.L.

The western garden of the Nine-Cauldron Hall was a small, quiet courtyard behind a screen of bamboo. In its middle stood a pavilion of old red wood, lit from within by a single lantern.

Su Lian sat inside, a pot of tea on the low table before her, the silver needles in her hair catching the light. She did not stand.

"Mister Han," she said. "Sit."

Adam sat.

"You made nine mistakes in the first round," she said. "Nine, in two hundred. I checked them. Each one was wrong in the particular way that only someone who knows the right answer can be wrong. I have been an appraiser for eleven years. It is the hardest thing I know of, to be wrong on purpose and have it look honest."

Adam said nothing.

"And today," she went on, pouring tea, "there were three explosions, and not one of them was an accident. I walked past your furnace. The base plate has a mark on it that wasn’t there this morning." She looked up. "A man who knows a sabotage rune when he sees one, and burns it out with a single touch, is not a scholar."

"Mistress Su is very observant."

"Mistress Su is very tired." She pushed a cup toward him. "I will tell you a secret, Mister Han, because I think you can keep one. The Guild’s Grand Alchemist, my master, died eight years ago. The seat has been empty since. The Elder Council cannot agree on an heir, so they have decided to let the Autumn Cauldron Trials choose one."

"The winner becomes the Guild’s heir?"

"The winner of the fourth consecutive Trials receives the Heir’s Seal. It has never happened, because no one has ever won four in a row." Her voice flattened. "Ye Xuan has won three."

Adam set down his tea.

"The Ye clan doesn’t want the prize," Su Lian said quietly. "They want what comes with it. The Heir’s Seal sits on the Guild’s board. With it, the Ye clan decides which pills enter the Imperial City, who may refine them, and at what price. They already own the herb trade, and the furnace rentals, and most of the Elder Council. If Ye Xuan wins this year, the Guild is theirs."

"And you don’t want that."

"My master built this Guild to cure people," Su Lian said. "Not to bleed them."

The lantern flickered. Outside, the bamboo whispered in the dark.

"What do you want from me?" Adam asked.

"Nothing I can’t ask. Enter the finals. Do not make nine mistakes." She met his eyes. "I cannot cheat for you. I can make sure no one cheats against you, and I can guarantee that your furnace in the final round will be mine. The seal on its base will be my own."

"And if I win?"

"If you win," Su Lian said, "the Ye clan loses the Guild, and I will have settled a debt to a dead man." Her mouth tightened. "If you lose, I will have lost nothing I wasn’t already losing."

Adam looked at her for a long time.

He had come to the Imperial City to cut a root. He had not thought to find it growing through a Guild, and a woman in green robes with ink on her cuffs who was prepared to bet her master’s memory on a stranger.

"The finals," he said slowly. "Are they public?"

"In front of the entire Guild, the Elder Council, and any noble who cares to watch." She hesitated. "Including the Ye clan’s Ancestor, as he does every year."

The tea in Adam’s cup had gone still.

Somewhere beyond the bamboo, in the dark above the Inner Noble Ring, an old, pale eye was opening.

"Then I’ll try not to make any mistakes," Adam said.