The carriage didn’t land. It skidded thirty yards across the gravel courtyard on two splintered wheels. It took out a drying rack of linen bandages before slamming into the castle hitching rail with a sickening crunch of varnished cedar.
The carriage door flew open, and Elder Wu DeZheng tumbled into the mud.
He was wearing his full formal ritual robes of Azure Cloud Sect Senior Logistics Overseer, complete with four layers of stiff lavender damask and a gold-trimmed crane-feather coronet. But the coronet was knocked sideways over his left ear, his white goatee was coated in dust. He was clutching a locked, velvet-lined office strongbox to his chest with the white-knuckled desperation of a drowning man gripping a spar.
“My pension!” Wu wailed, scrambling to his knees in the slush, fully ignoring the forty armed students staring at him from the castle walls. “Eighteen months! Eighteen miserable lunar cycles until full old family vesting! They’re going to strip my tenure! They’re going to audit my firewood allowances!”
Lin Ke walked over from the array sanctum, his bandaged hands held gingerly at his sides. The goose-grease salve had cooled the skin burns. But his fingers still felt like five blisters wrapped in raw canvas.
