Chapter 27: The Spider's Web

Madam Su found the safehouse by following the money.

"A woman matching your description rented a room above the leatherworker's shop on Silk Thread Lane," she told Lin Cang the morning after the alley fight. They sat in her study at the Crimson Lantern House, the plum-blossom window open to let in the cold dawn air. "She paid two months in advance with spirit stones. The landlord remembers her hands, scarred knuckles, calluses in the right places for a knife fighter. He also remembers that she asked which direction the manor wall faced and whether the roof tiles were loose."

"Has she returned?"

"Not since last night. She left in a hurry and did not come back." Madam Su smiled. "But people like her always have more than one hole. I have boys watching every boarding house, every stable, every whore's closet that charges by the hour. She will surface."

Lin Cang touched the bandage on his forearm. The cut was healing faster than it should, fed by Xiao Rou's bond and the Codex's unnatural vitality. "What else do we know?"

"Her name is Feng Mei. Red Silk Sect, third-rank blade. They call their ranks by color: white for trainees, red for proven killers, black for masters who take only high contracts. She is red, which means she has killed between twenty and forty targets and survived long enough to be expensive." Madam Su poured tea, her movements calm and precise. "She was sold to the sect at six. Trained in Thornhaven. Her first kill was a tax collector who beat her instructor. She is proud, impatient with failure, and has a habit of cutting her contracts' throats slowly when they lie to her about targets."

"You learned this in one night?"

"I have a girl who beds a Red Silk messenger whenever he passes through. He talks after wine." Madam Su set the cup before him. "The messenger also says Feng Mei does not abandon contracts. She once spent eleven months hunting a merchant who fled to three different countries. She brought back his ears and his account books."

Lin Cang drank the tea. It was bitter, the way he preferred. "Then she will come again."

"She will come again," Madam Su agreed. "And she will be more careful. The alley taught her that you are not easy prey. She will study your routines, your guards, your women. She will wait for a wound, an illness, a moment of distraction."

"Then I will give her one."

Madam Su's eyebrow rose. "You plan to let her close?"

"I plan to make her believe she has found a way close." Lin Cang set down the cup. "Spread word that I have received a message from an Azure Sky defector. Someone willing to sell the location of Elder Fang's border safe houses. Say that I will meet this person alone at the abandoned Moon Lotus Shrine tomorrow night, because I do not trust the informant inside the city walls."

"And the informant?"

"Does not exist." Lin Cang smiled. It was a cold expression, the kind that did not reach his eyes. "But Feng Mei will want it to exist. An ally inside Azure Sky is the kind of prize that would make any ruler careless. She will think I am leaving the city to protect a secret, and that means I will be vulnerable away from my guards and my compound."

"It also means you will be away from your guards and your compound."

"Not entirely." Lin Cang leaned forward. "I want Guo, Han, and Little Sparrow hidden at the shrine two hours before I arrive. I want oil-soaked rags placed where we can block the exits. I want Auntie Ru's people along the road to make sure no one follows Feng Mei without us knowing. And I want you, Madam Su, to play the informant."

She went very still. "You want me to bait an assassin?"

"You will be gone before she arrives. I need someone to leave the shrine by the east path at the right moment, hooded and hurrying, so Feng Mei believes the meeting has ended and I am alone inside." He met her eyes. "She will not see your face. You will be safe."

"I am not afraid of being seen. I am afraid of being wrong about how fast she is." Madam Su touched the mark on her hip without thinking. "But I trust your nets, my lord. I will play the part."

"Good." Lin Cang stood. "One more thing. Tell Xiao Rou nothing. She cannot lie to save my life, and Feng Mei will be watching her face for warning."

"Xiao Rou will know something is wrong."

"Xiao Rou always knows." Lin Cang paused at the door. "That is why I love her."

The Moon Lotus Shrine had been abandoned for twenty years, ever since a landslide buried the pilgrim road and the priests decided the goddess had withdrawn her favor. Now it was a shell of white stone half-swallowed by creeping vines, its roof collapsed in one corner, its altar cracked by frost. It stood in a hollow two li from the city walls, hidden from the main road by a stand of dead cedars.

Feng Mei watched it from the branches of an elm tree, two hundred paces to the north.

She had followed the hooded woman from the city, not Lin Cang, but someone smaller, walking with the careful grace of a person used to being looked at. The woman had entered the shrine, stayed inside for the time it took to burn half a stick of incense, and then left by the east path with her hood still raised.

Now the shrine was still. No lamps burned inside. No voices carried on the wind. But Feng Mei did not move.

Something was wrong.

She had spent the day watching Lin Cang's household from three different rooftops. She had seen the hooded woman leave through the back gate of the Crimson Lantern House, moving with the tense hurry of someone carrying secrets. She had seen no guards follow. She had seen Lin Cang himself leave the manor an hour later, walking alone toward the west gate.

It was perfect. Too perfect.

A man who had survived her first strike would not walk into a secret meeting without checking for shadows. He would not leave his women unguarded. He would not trust an informant enough to meet alone outside the walls.

Unless he wanted to be seen doing exactly that.

Feng Mei smiled into the dark. A trap, then. How flattering.

She considered leaving. The contract was still open; she could wait for a better moment, a real vulnerability. But pride was a dangerous thing, and hers had been stirred by the alley fight. She wanted to see what kind of net this mine rat had woven. She wanted to cut her way through it and leave him watching the empty threads.

She descended from the tree and moved toward the shrine in a wide arc, not along the path. The ground was soft with fallen leaves, and she placed each foot with the care of a woman who had once crossed a hall of sleeping guards on a floor covered in dried beans.

The shrine had three entrances: the main door facing south, a side door facing west, and the collapsed corner where the roof had fallen in. She checked each from a distance. The main door was closed but not barred. The side door hung open like a waiting mouth. The collapsed corner offered shadows deep enough to hide a dozen men.

Guards in the corner, she decided. Oil at the doors. He wants me to enter, then burn me alive.

It was not a bad plan. Fire was one of the few things even skilled assassins feared, because fire did not care about speed or stealth.

Feng Mei reached into her sleeve and withdrew a small clay jar. Inside was a paste made from pine resin and crushed glass. She smeared it along her forearms, her throat, any exposed skin. It would not stop fire, but it would give her three extra heartbeats before the burns became disabling.

Then she moved to the side of the shrine and pressed her ear to the stone.

Inside, someone breathed. One person. Controlled, quiet, sitting near the altar.

Lin Cang.

She circled to the collapsed corner. Through the gaps in the fallen stones, she could see the dark shapes of three people crouched in the rubble, waiting. Disciples, not cultivators. She could smell the oil they had soaked into the timbers.

Feng Mei made her decision.

She would not enter the shrine. She would bring the shrine down around him.

From her belt she took three small spheres: thunderclap beads, expensive and unreliable, but perfect for stone. She had bought them from a disgraced alchemist in Thornhaven, never expecting to use them. Now she placed them at the base of the shrine's weakest wall, the one supporting the already damaged roof, and retreated behind a fallen pillar.

She struck the flint.

The explosion was not loud, but it was precise. The weakened wall groaned, shifted, and collapsed inward, carrying half the remaining roof with it. Stone dust billowed into the night. From inside came shouts, the sound of someone coughing, and then the sharp crack of a beam giving way.

Feng Mei did not wait to see if he was dead. She ran.

Not back toward the city, they would expect that. She ran west, into the dead cedars, where the undergrowth was thick enough to break up pursuit. Behind her, voices rose in confusion. Someone shouted orders. A moment later, a crimson light flared through the dust, searching.

She had taken perhaps thirty paces when the wire caught her ankle.

It was thin, almost invisible, stretched between two saplings at knee height. Her foot snagged. She threw herself forward rather than fall, tucked into a roll, and came up running. But the delay had cost her two heartbeats, and in those two heartbeats a figure dropped from the branches above and landed in her path.

Little Sparrow. The mute thief. She held a knife in each hand and her eyes were wide with fear, but she did not run.

Feng Mei did not slow. She feinted left, went right, and slipped past the girl with a contemptuous ease. A knife nicked her shoulder, the girl was faster than she looked, but Feng Mei was already gone, melting into the trees.

Crimson light flared behind her. Lin Cang's voice cut through the dark: "Let her go."

Feng Mei did not look back. She ran until the city walls were in sight, then doubled around to the north gate and entered with a group of night-soil collectors, stinking and hooded and beneath notice.

Back in her third safehouse, a cramped room above a fishmonger's shop, she stripped off her clothes and examined her wounds. The shoulder cut was shallow. Her left side was bruised where a falling stone had glanced off her ribs. The paste had saved her skin from the worst of the heat, but her hair was singed at the ends and smelled of smoke.

She had survived. She had even hurt him, perhaps. But she had not killed him, and now he knew she could think her way through a trap.

That changed the game.

Feng Mei wrapped her ribs and lay down on the narrow bed, staring at the ceiling. For the first time since taking the contract, the thought arose that two hundred spirit stones might not have been enough.

Outside, the night crept toward morning. Somewhere in the city, Lin Cang was doing the same thing she was: planning, adjusting, preparing the next move.

Two spiders, she thought. One web.

The next meeting would end one of them.