To Practise, Read and Plant

There were many eyes on Zhang Chengling, the new master of Four Seasons Manor, as he took up his new position and began to rebuild both the sect and the famed Manor itself, and yet no one in the jianghu could say that he behaved wrongly.

Yes, as an unseasoned youth, he held closely to the advice of Prince Qi and the Great Shaman, but they had been placed as his advisors by his shifu and guided him well. With their help, none of the eighteen new members of the Four Seasons Manor lacked for necessities in that difficult first winter, after their sect home had burned down and half the jianghu, it seemed, had been rushed to their own deaths by machinations and schemes.

It was true that his martial arts were weak, both the Four Seasons Manor techniques he had been latterly taught by Zhou Zishu and those of the Mirror Lake Sect where he had grown up, but Zhang Chengling trained diligently, leading the younger disciples and accepting the teaching of those who were older than him, until he was the equal of any of his peers. Bi Xingming, as his first disciple and the living man with the greatest knowledge of the Four Seasons Manor's martial arts, did what he could to aid him. Together, they built up a training regimen that captured much of what had been lost with the deaths of their elders.

When it came to treating with the leaders of other sects, Zhang Chengling quickly showed that he should not be judged by his still-round face and bright eyes. The naïvety had been scorched out of him by the events that brought him to his position.

As the work of bringing a sect back from its near-extinction carried on, then, Zhang Chengling's reputation in the jianghu solidified. The disciples of Four Seasons Manor, loyal and hard-working, would certainly never have said anything against their master. Their questions remained silent, held in glances flicked at one another's impassive faces and in heads tilted, very occasionally, to one side.

Zhang Chengling was the master of Four Seasons Manor, and had been since its previous master and his shidi, Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing, had gone into the mountains to prevent Prince Jin from opening the legendary Armoury. Still, it was a fact that several of his disciples, approaching his study to bring him tea or announce a visitor, had overheard his voice addressing a 'shixiong'.

First disciple Bi Xingming, accompanying Master Zhang and Prince Qi to discuss lumber prices and the day rates of the craftsmen who would work it, had watched his master's gaze drift away from the merchant's eloquent pitch and light on a patch of empty space. He'd ignored the merchant for long enough that the man had stuttered to a confused halt, whereupon Master Zhang had simply smiled, nodded as if to himself, and skewered him with questions that brought the Manor's outlay down by a quarter.

Prince Qi had not said a word about it, on the journey back, and so of course Bi Xingming had not raised the subject.

Zhang Chengling's selections of new disciples were always good ones, but he was known, now and then, to change his mind about a recruit according to some inscrutable assessment—sending a boy away before calling him suddenly back to join the sect after all.

All of this could be ignored in the face of Master Zhang's thoughtful leadership and the slow growth of the sect. When the day came, however, that enough of the Four Seasons Manor had been rebuilt that the disciples could move into it, the small oddities they had noticed began to increase.

Little Wang Yue, the youngest shidi, was the first to see the mysterious figure. Having woken up his whole dormitory by returning from the toilet at a run and tripping over the boy sleeping nearest the door, he insisted he'd seen someone lingering in the hallway: a tall shadow, dark and shapeless as if wrapped in a cloak, but clearly a man from the outline of his topknot. The whole room got up, in the end, took candles and scoured their wing of the manor for the intruder. Aside from the lecture they all got the next morning, however, they found nothing.

It was put down as a trick of the light and a child's imagination, even by Wang Yue himself, but he wasn't the last to see it. By the summer, when the nights were short and the shadows few, it was well known that a disciple walking by himself, along a corridor or across a courtyard, might turn his head and find himself, for the blink of an eye, accompanied by a form in dark robes.

Years later, when the status of the Four Seasons Manor was secure enough not to be shaken by gossip, when the junior disciples were seniors and many of them had wives and children, they all said the same thing: how strange it was that none of us were scared away, back in those days! Somehow, though they knew the manor that housed them hosted, too, this other presence, every boy and man rose in the morning, trained and studied and took pride in his pale-blue uniform. They were content to tend to the new peach trees that had been planted in the ash-laden soil, and to follow the wisdom that had been passed down from Qin Huaizhang to Zhou Zishu and then to Zhang Chengling.

At the great summer feast to celebrate the first visit of Zhou Zishu and the white-haired Wen Kexing from their mountain, the head table was set for six. If the servants bringing out dishes and pouring wine kept adding a seventh cup, with puzzled frowns on their faces, no one else noticed—and with Zhou Zishu's appetites, who could even say they were wrong to do it?

The celebrations lasted well into the night, to the sound of cicadas making their own festival and lit by cunningly-devised lanterns hanging from every eave and tree branch in the great courtyard. On his way to bed, much belated by making sure all his shidis would recover from their indulgences by the next morning, Bi Xingming passed close enough to the two immortals and his sect leader to overhear their conversation. (He would never pass on anything he heard, of course! Bi Xingming was a truly loyal man, but he was also a curious one.)

"You've done well, Chengling."

"Better than we would have expected!" put in Wen Kexing, interrupted by the soft sound of scuffling.

Over the noise of Grandmaster Zhou wrestling with his shidi, as if it weren't worth paying attention to, Master Zhang said, "Of course, I could never have managed without Qi Ye and Da Wu, or Han-shixiong."

There was a silence. All three men dipped their heads in thought—Bi Xingming turned away, unwilling to see a fourth figure in its topknot and dark uniform.

"Good," said Grandmaster Zhou, at length. "Good."

Master Zhang took his responsibilities as heir to the Longyuan Pavilion seriously. Each autumn, when the roads were most reliable, he led a group of hand-picked disciples to that legendary stronghold. For a month, they would examine the complex traps and mechanisms that riddled the rock beneath the Pavilion. Everything they learned was carefully drawn up and bound into books, to be added to the library Zhang Chengling had already compiled from the three sects he had inherited. It became his custom, in the dark winter months, when the excitement of the jianghu was tempered by snow and cold winds, to maintain and extend the already considerable defences of Four Seasons Manor.

Bi Xingming was fully trained in how to operate all of these, of course, but he was also content to admit that designing and fixing the delicate systems were not the tasks he was best suited to. Sometimes he would listen to Master Zhang and his shidi, Cheng Zichen, discussing the work and marvel at how little of it made sense to him. Master Zhang was well known to be mechanically gifted, but to hear him speak, it was as if he could see parts of his machines that were hidden, as if he knew well before they wore out exactly which spring would snap and which cog would fail.

Of course he did, Bi Xingming realised at last. What could there be, in this manor, that was hidden from a ghost?

By the time of the second great fire of Four Seasons Manor, Bi Xingming had grown a moustache and a fine, greying goatee. He wasn't woken up by the fire itself, or by the smoke that had started creeping into his bedroom along the seam of the door, but by Cheng Zichen's hand violently shaking his shoulder and the raised voices of dozens of disciples evacuating. In his night clothes, he raced outside to find the others already organising a bucket chain to the wing that had caught alight.

"Where is Master Zhang?" he asked, as soon as they were clear of the building.

"He's safe," Zichen said. "He just went to make sure the Lady Gao and her family, in the guest house, are all right."

"Has everyone else got out?"

"We're counting heads now—"

An enormous crash sounded from the burning wing of the manor. Over the roofs, they saw flames lick higher into the sky and sparks gush upwards. The disciples carrying buckets began to run faster, and Bi Xingming rushed to follow them and see the destruction for himself.

It had been the final collapse of the roof that made such a hellish noise, he found when he got there. That wing, and the dormitories and kitchen it had held, were an utter loss—but somehow, with the falling-in of the building and a change in the wind direction, it now looked as though the rest of the manor would be spared. He tallied up what those other buildings contained: the two libraries, the treasure room and armoury, the sect's ancestral hall... perhaps this would not be a total disaster.

"Wang Yue, report," Bi Xingming told the senior who was in charge here.

"Everybody is safe, shixiong," he said smartly, despite his soot-smeared face and reddened eyes. "The doorway stayed clear until we had all got out."

Something in Wang Yue's tone pricked Bi Xingming's curiosity, despite the heat and chaos that surrounded them, the shouts and the hissing of water turning to steam, settling the fire into embers. He slid a look at the younger man through the corner of his eyes. "What else, Wang Yue?"

"The beam over the main door, shixiong," he answered, not quite meeting Bi Xingming's eyes. "It should have collapsed a lot sooner than it did, but it held—it was held—we saw somebody holding it up as we ran past," he finally admitted. "A tall man, with a black cloak, and his hair drawn up high. No one has seen him out here, but he saved our lives."

"Of course," Bi Xingming said, his eyes sore and running from the smoke now too. "Han-shixiong would never allow Four Seasons Manor disciples to die."