Chapter 57: The Sky Marks a Survivor and Hunts Him for Nine Hours, a Boy Buries His Brother in Glass

"It will not stop," said Old Mo.

They were back at the ridge, in the trough where they had sheltered, and the rain had thinned to a fine, cold mist that lay over the glass like breath on a mirror. Tao slept against Adam’s shoulder, wrapped in two cloaks, with the stiff, shallow breathing of a child who has cried himself empty. Adam sat with his back against the warm slope and his bare left arm resting on his knee, and watched the white lines glimmer under the skin.

"I know," he said. "The system told me."

"The system." Mo’s mouth twitched. "You say it the way other men say ’my wife.’"

"It’s less forgiving."

The old man laughed softly. Then the laugh went out of his face.

"I did not tell you this earlier because I did not think you would need it," he said. "When the sky notices a man, it does not forget. It sends a bolt every nine hours, and each one is aimed. Not at the plain. At him." He turned his scarred face toward Adam. "A pilgrim who stands near a noticed man dies. They do not know why. They only know that the lightning came down on a dozen of them at once, and a man stood in the middle, alive, with the glass smoking around his feet."

Adam looked at the pale plain stretching away on every side. Here and there, small dark shapes moved: the survivors, picking their way back toward the hills. They kept a wide circle around the ridge. He had seen two of them stop, stare, and cross themselves.

"They’re afraid of me," he said.

"They are afraid of what follows you." Click. "You should go where there is no one to hurt."

"Where?"

The old man smiled.

"The Hollow," he said.

It was a crater.

It lay two miles out, a perfectly round bowl in the glass a hundred paces across and thirty feet deep, with smooth, fused walls and a floor of pale, cracked, glittering slag. Old Mo said it had been made by the first bolt that ever fell on the Plain, three thousand years ago, and that nothing had grown in it since. A faint white mist drifted over its rim. The air at its edge tasted of ozone and metal, and Tao, who had woken, stopped at the lip and refused to go any further.

"It’s a grave," the boy whispered.

"It is a road," said Mo. "Look."

Adam looked.

From the rim of the crater, down the smooth walls, ran a thousand fine white threads, each one a hair’s breadth wide, fused into the glass like the veins of a leaf. They all led to the same place, the very center of the floor, where a single smooth pit no wider than a man’s foot plunged straight down into the dark.

"The sky has been coming here for three thousand years," Mo said. "Every bolt that falls in the Hollow follows those lines to that hole, and goes into the earth. I have stood on the lip of this place when the Heaven-Bolt fell on the rim, and watched it run down the walls like water down a drain. Not a stone was broken." His voice dropped. "It is the longest road in the world."

Adam stood a moment, looking down.

"And if I stand in the middle?"

"You will hurt," said Old Mo. "But no one else will, and the road will carry most of it. You will keep the rest."

"How much is the rest?"

"Whatever you can hold." The blind man tilted his head. "That is the whole of the Third Turn, boy. Not how much the sky gives you. How much you can keep."

The second bolt came at the end of the ninth hour, as promised.

It was smaller than the first Heaven-Bolt. It was not smaller by much. It was a white spear a dozen paces wide that walked across the plain in a slow, deliberate line, straight toward the Hollow, and when it reached the rim, it did not strike. It poured. It ran down the glass in a thousand silver threads, funneling toward the center, toward the small, patient figure standing there with his hands at his sides.

It went through Adam like a river through a gorge.

It hurt. It hurt with the long, deep, full-body ache of a muscle torn and mended and torn again. But it did not blind him. It did not stop his heart. The white lines in his skin lit from wrist to shoulder and ran down his spine, and the tempering ran in the cracks and fused them, and when the light finally died, he found that he was standing on his feet.

[Nine-Turn Immortal Body: 3rd Turn. Thunder Tempering: 3 / 9.]

[Golden Core consolidation: 2 / 90 days.]

[Notice: Tempering requires full recovery. Minimum interval before the next Heaven-Bolt: 7 days.]

He stared at the last line for a long time.

"What does it say?" Tao asked, from the rim.

"That I have a week."

"A week to do what?"

"To heal." Adam closed his eyes, and the thought came to him, slow and bright, like a coin dropped down a well. "And to think."

They buried Pei on the afternoon of the next day, in the shallow lee of a dune of glass near the edge of the first ring.

It was a small ceremony. There was no priest. Mo said the old words, in a cracked dry voice, over a body wrapped in a green cloak, and Tao scattered a handful of fine gray ash over it that he said was from the shrine of their home village. They laid a flat stone on top. Adam carved one word into it with the edge of the Void-Cleaving Sword.

Pei.

"He wasn’t brave," Tao said, afterward. He sat on the glass with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped around them, looking at the little gray stone. "He wasn’t, really. He was scared of the dark. He used to make me hold his hand when we went to the privy."

Adam sat beside him.

"He lifted a sword at the sky," he said quietly. "Because he wanted it to see he wasn’t afraid."

"That’s what I mean. He was scared." The boy’s voice broke. "He just wanted to look brave, so that I’d think it was all right."

Adam said nothing. He had learned, over the last few months, that there were things that could be said and things that could only be sat beside.

"I want to learn," Tao said, at last, to the stone. "What Old Mo knows. I want to be able to hear it. I want to be able to tell people." He wiped his face with a ragged sleeve. "So that nobody has to do it the way Pei did."

"That is a good reason."

"Is it?"

"It is the only one worth anything," said Adam.

The boy was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, very small, and leaned his head against Adam’s arm, and they sat together in the cold bright afternoon, with the thunder rolling far off over the plain.

The summons came as they reached the gate.

It was a young Warden in blue, pale and nervous, who stood in the road with a scroll in both hands and the manner of a man who had been told to carry something very hot. He bowed so low that his forehead nearly touched his knees.

"Elder Han," he said. "I am sent from the Hall of Nine Rods. Elder Lei Hong requests the honor of your company. At your convenience." He swallowed. "He asks me to say that it is, however, a convenient hour."

"Elder?" Adam said.

"A... a title of respect, sir. For survivors."

"I am not an elder."

"No, sir. But..." The boy’s eyes flickered to the white lines running down Adam’s bare forearm. "You are the first in nine years to walk out of the Plain after a Heaven-Bolt on his own feet. The Sect believes it is only proper."

Adam looked at Mo.

The old man’s face was blank. But his hand, resting on Tao’s shoulder, had tightened.

"Go," Mo said softly. "You will not learn anything by hiding. But keep your eyes open." A thin smile. "I suppose you will have to do that figuratively."

The Hall of Nine Rods stood on the highest hill in Cinder-Rest, and it was the ugliest building Adam had ever seen.

It was a squat, windowless block of black iron, as tall as a five-story tower and as broad as a barn, with a roof of overlapping copper plates and nine slender lightning rods rising from its crown like the legs of a dead spider. A wide flight of stone steps led up to a pair of great double doors, which stood open. Beyond them, a long, dim hall stretched into the dark, lined on either side with tall iron racks. On each rack, hanging on hooks, were rows and rows of swords.

They were all bent.

They were all black, and warped, and scored with long scars, like the swords in the Desolate Ghost Valley, but these were fresh. These were the swords of pilgrims. They had been taken from the Plain, one by one, from the hands of the dead.

"A trophy hall," said a voice.

The voice was soft, dry, and perfectly courteous.

Adam turned.

The man who stood in the doorway of a side chamber had the look of a very old, very tired heron. He was tall, and thin, and a little stooped, in robes of dark blue silk with a gold lightning bolt embroidered across the breast. His hair was white and thin, drawn back from a long, narrow, deeply creased face. His eyes were a pale, washed-out blue, almost colorless, and his hands, folded before him, were burned: the left a mass of old white scar tissue from fingertip to wrist, the right a smooth, shiny thing like polished wax.

"I am Lei Hong," he said. "Treasurer-Elder of the Nine-Heavens Thunder Sect. Forgive me for the swords. They are not for display. They are for remembering."

"Remembering what?"

"That the sky is not forgiving." The pale eyes rested on Adam’s arm. "Please. Come into my study."

The study was a plain square room with a low table, two cushions, and a pot of tea. A single window looked out on the Plain. The shutters were open, and the light of a lightning-lit sky flickered on the polished floor like a slow, vast pulse.

Lei Hong poured the tea himself. His hands, Adam noticed, did not shake at all.

"I should say first that I am very glad to see you alive," he said. "It is unusual. We lose nine in ten. On a bad cycle, nineteen in twenty. You will understand that a survivor is a rare thing, and a survivor who walks out is rarer still." He sipped. "I watched the whole of it from the platform. I have been a Treasurer of this Sect for sixty years. I have not seen a man take a Heaven-Bolt on his knees and rise."

"I did not rise," Adam said. "I was dragged."

"Ah." The Treasurer-Elder smiled faintly. "Modesty. It will not do you any harm."

He set the cup down.

"May I be direct?"

"I would prefer it."

"The Sect has a tradition. When a pilgrim survives a Heaven-Bolt, we honor him." He turned his hand, palm up. "A seat at the Lodge’s table. A private room, for as long as he wishes to stay. A stipend, paid monthly, in the Sect’s own scrip. In return, he lends his name to the Sect, and is seen, now and then, in the town. Pilgrims take heart." The pale eyes met his. "It is a good arrangement. We have found that a single survivor, properly displayed, is worth a thousand Lightning Licenses."

Adam looked at him.

’A billboard,’ he thought, with the clear cold detachment of a man reading a contract. ’A living advertisement.’

"What does the stipend come to?"

"Five thousand scrip a month."

"Which is how many stones?"

"At the Lodge’s rate, four thousand." The Treasurer-Elder smiled. "I am told it is generous."

"By what measure?"

"The Sect’s."

"I see." Adam picked up his tea. It was good tea, better than the tavern’s. "And if I decline?"

"Then you decline." Lei Hong spread his ruined hands. "The Plain is open to anyone who holds a license. I would only observe that the sky has marked you. A man in your position benefits from friends."

There was a faint, polite silence.

"You carry a seal," the Treasurer-Elder said, mildly. "At your belt. Dark jade, a coiled dragon."

"I do."

"It opens every gate of the Grand Qin Dynasty. I had it from my courier this morning, along with a rather curious account of a note you offered the Warden. A paper note, printed by the Imperial Alchemy Guild. Ten thousand stones, I understand."

"A deposit."

"A deposit." Lei Hong’s smile did not change. "For a corpse worth two hundred. I confess I was charmed. It is the sort of gesture a young man makes when he wishes to be seen."

"Or when he wishes to be believed."

"Ah." The pale eyes sharpened. "There is a distinction."

"In my experience, there usually is."

The Treasurer-Elder was silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, the gentleness had gone out of his voice, and what was left was something drier, and quieter, and much older.

"Who are you, Mister Han?"

"A merchant."

"A merchant who walks out of a Heaven-Bolt."

"A merchant with a good wire."

"A merchant," Lei Hong said softly, "whose cloak is lying to me. I have been watching you for three days. Your Qi is third-layer Condensation. Your bones are not. Your aura is that of a scholar. Your shadow is not." He leaned forward. "I have been a Nascent Soul cultivator for two hundred years, and I find that I cannot see you at all. I am not accustomed to the sensation."

Adam met his eyes.

"Neither am I," he said, pleasantly. "Being looked at."

A ripple of something passed through the room. It was not pressure. It was thinner than that, and colder. It was the sense of two very large things, standing in a very small place, each deciding whether the other would be worth the trouble.

Then the Treasurer-Elder sat back.

"I will not press," he said. "The Sect does not interfere with its guests. You are free to come and go." He raised his cup. "I will only say that the second Notice falls in a week, and the third in two, and that the Plain is a very long way from the Imperial City. It is a pity to be so far from one’s friends."

"I have friends here," said Adam.

"Do you?"

"A blind map-seller. A boy." He stood. "And a considerable number of pilgrims who would like their dead returned for nothing."

Lei Hong’s hand tightened on the cup.

"You are going to be a difficult guest."

"I am going to be a very ordinary one," said Adam. "Thank you for the tea."

He bowed, and left.

That night, in a corner of the tavern on Rod Street, with the fire burning low and Tao asleep on the bench beside him, Adam sat with a sheet of rough paper on his knee and wrote a letter.

It took him nearly two hours. He tore up three drafts. In the end, it was quite short.

Su Lian,

Do not be angry. I am alive. I have had three letters’ worth of adventures and will tell you about all of them in due course.

I need two things. The first is a Guild convoy, ten wagons of silver, an escort of forty, and your three best clerks. I want them in Cinder-Rest within twelve days. The route is in the enclosed map. The Dragon Seal will open every gate.

The second is a large amount of Cauldron paper, and a printing press.

The Nine-Heavens Thunder Sect has a scrip system. Pilgrims must change their coin into Sect scrip at eighty to the hundred. Every license, every meal, every night’s lodging. Twenty in a hundred, on every pilgrim, every day. It is not a tax. It is a trap, and the Sect built it so well that it no longer needs to be hidden.

I do not intend to attack it. I intend to open a stall in the square and offer to change coin at a hundred for a hundred. I should like you to see the look on the Treasurer’s face.

Write.

H.

He read it over. Then he added a postscript, and sat for a moment with the brush hovering over the page.

P.S. Thank Gu for the wire. It saved my life. Tell him the noodle shop on Rod Street is very bad, and he is welcome to come and see.

He folded the letter and sealed it with a smear of wax. On the other side of the fire, Old Mo, who had been sitting very still with his clappers silent in his lap, lifted his head.

"A stall," he said slowly. "In the square."

"A small one."

"They will burn it down."

"They might." Adam turned the letter in his hands. "But I think it will be harder than they imagine."

"Why?"

"Because they are in the business of taking," Adam said. "I am in the business of giving things back. And there are, I find, a great many people in the world who have been waiting for someone to try."

Outside the window, the thunder rolled, far off, over the glass.

The white lines in his arm glimmered, once, in the firelight.

’Twelve days,’ he thought. ’And a week to heal.’

He smiled.