The Rooster Who Would Be Immortal · an original cultivation (xianxia) serial · Chapter 10 · The Betrayal
Senior Brother Hua came into the kitchen yard with his head bowed, and Brass, who had waited his whole life for an inner disciple to bow to him, believed every word. Elder Mo went inside and counted the spoons.
Brass was on the kitchen step at the time, with a stick of charcoal in his beak, trying for the fortieth time that morning to copy the one character Ling had written there for him. His name. It had a great many strokes, and so far he had drawn a very fine fence.
"The Deacon has given me to Keeper Wen for the season," said Hua. "For the Dawn Terrace." His jaw tightened on the words. "If any harm comes to the Scripture Pavilion while it is in my care, I leave the sect."
He looked across the valley, where black clouds were piling up behind Crane Rock.
"The storms are coming. Lightning has struck the Pavilion roof three times in the keeper's life. Every time, something burned." Then he did something Brass had never seen him do. He looked the rooster in the eye. "I know it is you, bird. The beam. The bell. The lines. I am not asking the girl. I am asking you."
Ling put down her buckets. "Brass. Remember the rope at the Bell Trial."
But Brass was already off the step. An inner disciple had bowed to him. Had asked him.
They went up to the Pavilion that afternoon. Brass scratched in the mud at the foot of the steps: a roof. A tall stick standing up above it. A line from the stick down the wall and deep into the ground. In the doorway, Keeper Wen opened one eye. He watched the rooster add a jagged stroke coming out of the sky to hit the top of the stick, and then he closed the eye again.
Hua frowned at it. "A spear. On the tallest roof in Cloudpine." He straightened, offended. "You want to invite the sky in."
Brass pecked the line that ran down into the ground. Once, twice, three times.
Hua looked again. He was not stupid. That had always been the worst thing about him.
"Not in," Hua said slowly. "Around. Down the side and into the earth."
Hua had understood it on his second look. Brass felt nine feet tall.
The board came back to him, as it always did. Chalk dust. A jagged line drawn for children who were not listening.
Lightning is looking for the easiest way down to the ground. Give it a road of metal, from above the roof down into wet earth, and it will take that road instead of tearing through the wood. It does not stop the lightning. It only gives it somewhere safe to go. The road has to be whole: leave one gap, and the lightning jumps the gap into whatever is nearest. One rod guards only the roof close around it; a long roof needs several. It guards nobody standing outside in the storm. And it is work for people trained to do it, because a home-made rod with one bad joint is itself the gap.
[SYSTEM] Brass learned: a metal rod, joined unbroken to wet earth, gives lightning a safe road down · cost: it stops nothing, and one gap sends the strike into the walls
It took two days.
Hua came down to the kitchen to borrow Elder Mo's long iron roasting spit. "Bring it back," said Mo. "Not bent." While Mo fetched it, Hua stood very still. He looked at the coop, where the straw was newer than anywhere else in the yard. Then he looked at the high shelf, where two oilcloth bundles sat, one grey with dust and one new.
"The cook keeps his treasures high," said Hua pleasantly.
Brass did not hear it. Brass was busy being thanked.
Keeper Wen had a roll of spare copper for mending the roof, and Hua cut it into one long strip as wide as a hand. On a dry, sunny afternoon, without a cloud in the sky, he climbed the Pavilion and lashed the spit to the middle of its short ridge, the highest point, so that its point stood an arm's length above the highest tile. He wrapped the copper round its foot and nailed it tight. He ran the strip down the wall in one piece, without a single join, and buried the end as deep as a man is tall, beside the rain barrel, where the earth never dried. Then Brass walked the whole strip from the ridge to the ground and pecked every nail.
"You will all be there when it comes," said Hua. "The cook too. He should see it."
That was another warning. Brass missed that one as well.
The storm came on the third night. Keeper Wen let nobody stand outside, so they watched from inside the Pavilion door, well back from the wall where the copper ran: Ling, Brass, Keeper Wen in his chair, and Elder Mo, complaining about the damp. Hua stood with them until the first great roll of thunder.
"I will bring the Deacon," he said. "She should see this." And he went out into the rain.
The sky went white.
It hit the spit. The thunder came in the same instant, so loud that Brass felt it in his crooked tail feather. At the foot of the wall, where the copper went into the ground, the wet earth jumped and hissed and threw up a puff of steam.
Then only rain again. The roof above them was dark. No smoke. No fire.
"Keeper," Ling whispered. "How many times has it been struck now?"
Keeper Wen opened one eye. "Four."
"And how many times has it burned?"
"Three," said Keeper Wen, and closed the eye.
[SYSTEM] Scripture Pavilion: one strike carried down the copper into the ground · cost: the point of Elder Mo's roasting spit, melted for good
Brass puffed up. Then Elder Mo bent down and spoke very low, so that only the rooster heard.
"The Deacon lives up the hill. I saw Hua in the flash. He went down."
The high shelf. The cook too, he should see it. The kitchen, empty at night for the first time in twenty years.
Brass ran. Mo put a hand on Ling's shoulder when she started after him.
It was a fool's run. There is no safe ground outside in a lightning storm, and he knew it, and he went anyway, low and fast, from roof to roof. The kitchen door stood open. He hopped onto the table. On the high shelf there was one bundle, grey with dust. The new one was gone. Boot prints went out through the mud toward the front gate.
He found Hua in the little gatehouse beside the Gate Stone, out of the rain, with the bundle on his knees.
"Broker Shen's runner comes up for my payment at first light," said Hua. He did not look ashamed. He looked tired. "Your flags ran through that yard. The straw under your coop is new. And a cook who never climbs has a new bundle on his high shelf." He patted it. "A relic of the founder will pay Shen, and more. Who will you tell, bird? You hid it from the Hall yourselves."
Brass's spurs went hard as steel.
He could fly at him. He could crow. One real crow, and the whole sect would wake and come down the path, and Hua would be gone from the sect by noon.
And the jar would be opened in front of all of them. With the bird's tracks on the back of the inkstone.
And Hua would be gone. Brass found that he did not want that either.
He did not crow. He walked to the bundle, pulled the oilcloth loose, put his beak into the jar, and laid the brush at Hua's feet. Then the bamboo strip.
Hua read it aloud. "'For the next one. They will not hear you until you can write it down. Begin with your name.'" He looked at the brush, golden-red, with a kink near the tip. He looked at Brass's crooked tail.
"This is it?" he said. "Eleven days of holes, and the Founder's Gift is a brush. For a chicken." He laughed once, with no fun in it. "Shen would not give me two coppers for this."
He did not reach into the jar for the rest. Brass was standing on it.
"You could have woken the whole sect," said Hua, after a long time. "Why didn't you?"
Brass only looked at him.
Hua carried the jar back up the hill in the last of the rain, under his robe, because a rooster cannot carry a jar. He put it on the high shelf without a word. In the morning Elder Mo looked at the damp oilcloth and said nothing at all.
At sunrise the Deacon of Duties came to see the Pavilion, with her ledger. Half the outer dormitory came behind her. The point of the spit had melted into a little bead.
"Keeper," said the Deacon. "Who put iron on the roof?"
"Hua," said Keeper Wen.
Hua stood beside the rain barrel. His face had gone the colour of the copper. "Ask him whose idea it was."
The Deacon raised an eyebrow. "Whose idea was it?"
"The rooster's," said Keeper Wen.
Somebody laughed. Then several people did. Hua stood in the middle of it, ears burning, and did not take back one word.
The Deacon wrote in her ledger. "Pavilion unharmed. Service continues."
On his way past, Hua stopped beside Brass and spoke low. "We are not friends, bird." A pause. "But I will not forget last night."
Ling brought the brush to the Pavilion that afternoon. She had a reason. "He only ever says what is there," she whispered. "If Keeper Wen reads it, it is really writing."
Keeper Wen pushed his own ink across the desk without being asked, which was more than anyone had seen him do in years.
Brass took the brush in his beak. His neck shook. The first stroke was too long. The second leaned. There was a blot. But he did not stop, and the strokes went down one after another, the way Ling had shown him in charcoal a hundred times, until the character sat on the paper.
"Keeper," said Ling. "What does this say?"
Keeper Wen opened one eye.
"Brass," he said.
[SYSTEM] Level up: Brass can write his name, read aloud by someone who only says what is there · cost: it is ugly, and it is the only word he has
Brass stood very still. Somebody had read him. Not guessed. Not patted his head. Read.
When you can write your name, the bamboo said, come up and find me. He had written it once, badly. Above the cloud line, the peak waited, and nothing at his realm could climb to it.
Then Keeper Wen opened his other eye.
He was not looking at the name. He was looking at the end of every stroke, where the kinked feather had left the same small hook each time.
Keeper Wen looked at the feather's hook for a long time.
"I have seen that hook once before," said Keeper Wen. "On page two."
He looked at the brush, and then, for a long moment, at the rooster.
"Where did you get her brush?"
Keeper Wen, who answered questions, had asked one.
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