"Then we bury it," Han Jiu said.
"Bury what?"
"Everything down there." He sat down on the floor across from her. "The seams I cut, and the cave where the flower grew. All of it is past the old rockfall. To get through, you have to crawl under the broken rock on your stomach. The rock has jammed together into a kind of arch, and a few old wooden supports are still holding it up. If those supports come out, the arch comes down."
"And you’d be under it when it comes down."
"Not if I tie a rope around the supports and pull them out from further up the tunnel."
Yun Qingshuang picked one of the thirty stones up from her lap and rolled it between her fingers.
"And when my uncle takes the council down there?" she asked.
"They find an old mine that fell in. Old mines fall in all the time. Nobody will be surprised."
"He’ll say you did it."
"He can say whatever he likes. He can’t prove it. A pile of rock looks the same, whether it fell by itself or somebody helped it."
"There’s still frostmarrow down there. Probably a lot of it."
"We’re leaving in thirteen days," he said. "After that, it doesn’t matter what’s down there."
"And if somebody sees you going up there tonight?" she asked.
"Then that’s the incident, and we lose. So nobody sees me."
"Don’t go while you’re still at the sixth stage," she said. "If that arch comes down faster than you think it will, I want you as strong as you can be. And if it comes down on top of you, then the marriage has failed, and I go back to my uncle."
Her hand had closed tight around the stone.
"Go up to the pools this afternoon. Use whatever you have left. Then go tonight."
...
He walked up the north track to the pools and sat down above the highest one. Then he took the first piece of frostmarrow out of the inventory. The seventh stage would take eighty pieces.
Master Lu’s roots had each given him a thin trickle of cold. This was different. The cold came out of the frostmarrow all at once, and it sank straight into his palm and up his arm. The piece went pale. Then it went clear. Then there was nothing left in his hand.
He took out the next one.
By the fortieth piece, his chest felt full. By the sixtieth, the Qi was pressing against the inside of his ribs. At the eightieth piece, his limit broke.
Qi Gathering, seventh stage.
He moved his Qi, and six iron bulls rose above his head. The seventh stage was four iron bulls, and the four folds of the Canon made it six.
Ninety-six.
The snake in the mine had shown forty-eight. He had twice that now.
He let the bulls fade.
There were two hundred and forty pieces left. The eighth stage would take a hundred and sixty of them. He wanted it before tonight, so he took out another piece.
This time, the cold wouldn’t go in. It came into his palm and stopped there. When he pushed it, it leaked back out through his skin and drifted away over the water. He could feel it going to waste.
He put the piece away.
Qingshuang had told him not to do two breakthroughs on the same day. Now he understood why. His body had just grown, and it needed time to settle before it could take any more.
He cut three bundles of moss before he left, and carried them home under his arm. The last time he had come back from the pools with nothing in his hands, Yun Hai had noticed.
...
He left again an hour after midnight.
The courtyard was dark, and nobody was in it. He went around the back of the kitchens to the moss shed, and reached for the hook inside the door.
The hook was empty.
He felt along the floor under it, and behind the moss baskets in the corner. The rope wasn’t there.
Nobody else in the Han Clan cut moss.
He went up the north track fast, and he didn’t make a sound.
At the top of the ridge, he stopped.
There was a light at the shaft. It was yellow lamplight, and it was flickering.
Han Jiu dropped down behind the frozen bushes, forty feet away. He drew his Qi in and held it still, so that nothing showed above his head. Then he looked.
The boards had been pulled off. Somebody had stacked them in a neat pile beside the shaft. The red wax seal was gone.
Two Yun cultivators were standing at the mouth of the shaft. He knew both of them. They were the two men who had waited in the courtyard while Yun Hai drank his tea.
One of them was holding the lamp. The other had a coil of rope over his shoulder.
"How far down does he want us to go?" the man with the lamp asked. He was looking down into the hole, and he didn’t sound happy about it.
"As far as it goes." The other man shifted the rope on his shoulder. "Elder Yun wants to know what the moss boy found down there. And he wants this left at the bottom of it."
The lamp swung around, and the light fell across the rope.
It was dark green, almost black, from four years in the frost pools. Near one end, there was a fat, ugly knot. The rope had worn through there when Han Jiu was fifteen, and he had tied it back together because he couldn’t afford a new one.
The man with the rope climbed down into the shaft. The man with the lamp followed him. The light went down with them, and the ridge was dark again.
Han Jiu lay in the frozen bushes and didn’t move.
He had told Yun Hai about that rope himself. He had sat on the floor of his own room, with his bandaged hands in his lap, and said it to him.
’My rope is still in the shed.’