Chapter 36: The Crimson Welcome

The first problem was the wine.

Madam Su stood in the Crimson Lantern House cellar with a ledger in one hand and a cup of Zhou family vintage in the other. The vintage was good. It was too good, which meant the previous city lord had kept the best bottles for himself and sold the dregs to his guests. She tasted, spat, and made a note.

"Seventy bottles suitable for an elder's table," she said to Lin Cang. "Another thirty that will pass if the elder is already drunk. The rest should be poured into the river before it embarrasses us."

Lin Cang leaned against the cellar wall, watching her work. Six days had passed since the first stone was laid in the Buried Hall valley. Six days of timber cutting, wall raising, and the particular madness of preparing a city to welcome a man they intended to deceive.

"Will he notice the difference?" Lin Cang asked.

"Elder Cai has spent forty years drinking tribute wine. He will notice if we serve him vinegar." Madam Su set the cup down. "He will also notice if we serve him something better than he deserves. The trick is to give him exactly the wine his rank expects, so he feels respected but not suspicious."

"And the gift?"

"A jade carving of a river spirit. Local work, but the jade came from a collapsed Zhou warehouse. It is pretty enough to please a vain man, expensive enough to flatter his greed, and worthless enough that we will not miss it." She smiled. "I also had Xiao Rou prepare a box of wound salves and fever pills. Healers' gifts. Humble. Useful. The kind of thing a grateful city lord sends to a passing elder."

"You have done this before."

"I have watched men do this before. There is a difference." Madam Su closed the ledger. "The dancers are hired, the musicians are rehearsed, and the kitchens have enough lamb to feed fifty. What I do not yet have is a good reason why a city lord who seized power two months ago should be this eager to please an Azure Sky tribute collector."

"He does not need a reason. He only needs to believe I am afraid."

"Are you?"

Lin Cang considered the question. "No. But I have learned that fear and respect look similar from a distance."

They climbed from the cellar into the afternoon light. The Crimson Lantern House had changed since Lin Cang had first walked through its doors. The painted screen in the receiving room had been cleaned. The carved chairs were polished. Madam Su had turned a brothel into something that looked, at first glance, like the residence of a minor noble. At second glance, a man who knew what to look for would see the guards in the corridors, the hidden exits, the listening holes behind the decorative panels.

A young man waited in the courtyard with a stack of papers bound in hemp string. He was thin, with ink-stained fingers and the permanent stoop of someone who had spent too many years reading by lamplight. He bowed deeply when Lin Cang appeared.

"My lord, the market dispute reports."

Lin Cang took the papers. "Shen Bao. You are early."

"I thought it best to finish before the elder arrives, my lord." The young man's voice was soft and precise, each word placed like a tile in a mosaic. "There are three unresolved claims. A butcher accuses a tanner of dumping offal into the north canal. A grain merchant claims his neighbor's scales are shaved. Two beggars dispute ownership of a copper begging corner."

"Your recommendation?"

"The butcher is correct, but the tanner employs eleven people and pays his taxes. Fined two silver. The grain merchant's scales are indeed shaved, but his neighbor once sold spoiled millet during a famine. Both fined five silver. The copper corner belongs to whichever beggar has held it longest, which is the one-armed woman. The younger man should be moved to the temple steps."

Lin Cang handed the papers back. "Do it."

Shen Bao bowed again and hurried toward the street.

"An interesting choice," Madam Su said. "A former Zhou clerk who refused to sign a death warrant. You could have hung him with the others."

"He refused to sign because the warrant was unjust, not because he lacked courage." Lin Cang watched the young man go. "A man who will defy a city lord over a principle will defy me too, if I become worse than Zhou."

"You are recruiting a conscience."

"I am recruiting a law. The fourth guardian seat needs someone who understands rules more than power." Lin Cang turned toward the inner courtyard. "Watch him. If he survives the next month without taking a bribe or breaking under pressure, he may be useful."

In the back courtyard, Feng Mei sat on a low wall with her splinted wrist bound against her chest. Before her, six trainees stood in a line, each holding a wooden knife. Little Sparrow was at the end, her face unreadable.

"Again," Feng Mei said.

The trainees moved through the drill: strike low, turn, strike high, fade back into shadow. They were clumsy. One stumbled. Another held his knife like a sword.

"Stop." Feng Mei stood and walked down the line. With her good hand, she adjusted a trainee's elbow. "A knife is not a club. You do not beat someone with it. You insert it. The difference is two inches of pressure and a lifetime of practice." She stepped back. "Again."

They moved through the drill once more. Better this time. Not good, but better.

"You push them hard," Lin Cang said from the courtyard gate.

"I push them hard because their first real opponent will not be patient." Feng Mei did not turn. "Little Sparrow has a gift. The others have desperation. Desperation can become skill, but only if it survives the training."

"And your wrist?"

"Healing. Xiao Rou says another ten days before I can hold a blade properly." Feng Mei finally looked at him. "Ten days is too long. Cai arrives tomorrow."

"You will not fight him."

"I know. But I should be able to."

Lin Cang crossed the courtyard and stopped before the trainees. They froze, wooden knives half-raised.

"Your teacher is wounded," he said. "She trains you anyway. Remember that when you want to complain about sore muscles." He looked at each of them. "Tomorrow, the Azure Sky Sect will walk through Ironblood. Some of you will watch from rooftops. Some of you will serve wine. Some of you will listen from behind screens. You will not be noticed. You will not be remembered. That is the job."

They bowed.

"Dismissed. Eat, sleep, and be in position before dawn."

The trainees scattered. Little Sparrow lingered long enough to sign a question with her hands: Will there be killing?

"Not tomorrow," Lin Cang signed back. "But soon."

She nodded and slipped away.

Feng Mei watched the exchange. "You are learning my signs."

"I need to know what my shadow is saying."

"You have many shadows now, sect master." Feng Mei touched her bound wrist. "Make sure none of them fall behind you."

Xiao Rou found Lin Cang in the small room they had set aside as a medical preparation chamber. She was grinding dried feverfew with a mortar and pestle, her silver-grey hair tied back with a scrap of cloth. The window behind her was open, and the smell of late-summer herbs filled the room.

"You have not slept," she said without looking up.

"I sleep when there is nothing better to do."

"That is not an answer." Xiao Rou set the pestle down and turned to face him. Her dark eyes were serious in a way that still surprised him. "You were in the valley for four days, then Ironblood for two. You have eaten twice, and one of those meals was wine in a cellar."

"I will eat after Cai leaves."

"You will eat tonight. I will make sure of it." She crossed the room and took his hands, turning them palm-up. The burns from the stone-scale's jaws had scabbed over, but the skin was still tender. "These have not healed. You should not be using Crimson Palm until they do."

"I used it once today, to test whether the pain distracted me."

"Did it?"

"Yes. Which is useful information."

Xiao Rou sighed, the small exasperated sigh of a woman who had learned that arguing with Lin Cang was a conversation, not a contest. "Then use it only when you must. And let me wrap them again before dinner."

She worked in silence, spreading salve over the scabs and wrapping clean linen around his palms. Her fingers were gentle but efficient, the fingers of someone who had learned that pain was easier to bear when it was acknowledged.

"Will this elder hurt us?" she asked.

"Not tomorrow. Tomorrow he will drink our wine and accept our gifts and think us harmless."

"And the day after?"

"That depends on what he learns and what we learn." Lin Cang watched her tie off the bandages. "If I must, I will kill him before he reaches the sect valley."

Xiao Rou's hands paused, then resumed. "You say it so simply."

"Killing is simple. Deciding whether to kill is not." He flexed his fingers, testing the wrapping. "Cai is a tool of Azure Sky, but he is also a man with debts and appetites. If I can turn him, he becomes a door into the sect. If I cannot, I must make sure his death looks like an accident or an enemy's work."

"And if turning him means giving him what he wants?"

"Then I find out what he wants and give him something cheaper." Lin Cang stood. "I told Madam Su: no children. That rule stands for everyone in this house, including elders."

Xiao Rou looked up at him, and for a moment her eyes held something more than worry. "Sometimes I think you are cruel, Lin Cang. Then you say something like that, and I remember why I am still here."

"Because I refuse to feed children to monsters?"

"Because you draw a line." She returned to her mortar. "Most men in your position would have erased the line by now."

Dinner was simple: rice, salted fish, pickled vegetables, and tea that Xiao Rou insisted he finish. Lin Cang ate mechanically while Madam Su reviewed the final schedule and Feng Mei sharpened knives one-handed at the edge of the lamplight.

At the door, Han appeared with dust on his boots.

"My lord. Outriders on the western road. Azure Sky colors. They will reach the city gates by midday tomorrow."

The room went still. Lin Cang set down his cup.

"How many?"

"Twelve in the vanguard. A larger party behind, with wagons." Han paused. "And a palanquin. Elder Cai travels like a man who expects to be carried."

"Then we will carry him." Lin Cang stood. "Madam Su, the wine and the dancers. Feng Mei, the shadows. Xiao Rou, the healers' gifts. Han, I want the streets clean, the beggars fed and moved from the main road, and every merchant warned that their behavior reflects on the city."

They moved to obey.

Lin Cang walked to the window and looked out at Ironblood under the moon. The city was his now, in the way that a blade was his: held by the handle, dangerous if mishandled, capable of cutting either direction.

Tomorrow, an elder of the Azure Sky Sect would walk through the gates believing himself a lord among sheep.

Lin Cang smiled into the dark.

The sheep had teeth.