NOVEL NEXT Chapter 272: Still Awake
Yan Luo walked out of the cellar without washing his hands.
Blood dried dark on the inside seam of his sleeve; he left it there on purpose. It kept men honest… and a tiny bit scared.
"Pull every thread," he told the lieutenant at the alley mouth. "Reed sellers, basket weavers, the night apothecaries who sweeten tea for children. Quiet hands at first... if they don't appreciate that, feel free to do what you do best."
The lieutenant—Gaoyu, a slab-shouldered man with a permanently split lip—nodded briskly before vanishing into the darkness. Yan Luo stood in the lane for a moment, watching the mist lift off the canal like breath leaving a sleeping animal.
He pictured the boy's face, the way it had softened when he held Shadow's ruff, the way it had hardened when anyone tried to touch him that he had not already chosen.
They took a child to measure a woman. He smiled without humor. They will learn just how… idiotic they were the hard way.
Then, he moved.
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The reed quarter woke before dawn because reeds don't wait for sun.
Men with rope-burned palms and women with knife-callused fingers split mats into lengths and lengths into threads. The smell of wet river and green rot lay in the air—familiar, honest.
A bell rang in the back of a stall as Yan Luo stepped beneath its awning. The owner's eyes flicked to his sleeve and then politely away. He had made money from men poorer than Yan Luo and lived long enough to know when not to count it out loud.
"I want the weave that doesn't splinter," Yan Luo said without preamble. "The kind used to line baskets when you don't want what's inside to cry."
The man's hands stilled. "We sell sleeping mats, Excellency," he said carefully. "For floors."
"And for carts," Yan Luo smiled softly. "Please, don't test my intelligence again."
A thin woman in the shadows behind the counter stopped tying her bundle. Her eyes were clever the way only hungry eyes can be.
Yan Luo didn't look at her directly. "Two nights ago," he went on, "someone bought a mat and asked you to cut it to the width of a door. Not for wind. For silence."
The stall-keeper licked his lips. "We sell many lengths."
Yan Luo placed his hand flat on the table. His palm covered the ledger the man thought he had pushed far enough away. He smiled. "Put your hand beside mine."
The man hesitated, then obeyed. Yan Luo's fingers were slender, elegant; the reed seller's were thick and scarred.
"See," Yan Luo said gently as he snapped the man's pinky finger. "I can still break yours. I want names."
The woman in the back coughed once. The stall-keeper, pale with pain, glanced in her direction without meaning to. That was enough.
Yan Luo shifted his gaze. "Auntie Reed," he said, using the city's name for her. "Do you want to count coppers this morning or teeth?"
Her mouth tightened. "Teeth don't spend."
"Mm. You are a smart woman for someone so dumb."
She came forward, wiped her hands on her skirt, and picked up a strand of reed. "Three boys came at the dog-watch. Not palace boys. One walked like his shoe hurt, like he'd twisted it the week before and didn't let it rest. He did the talking. The other two looked where he looked, like dogs trying to guess where the meat will fall."
"And they wanted quiet mats."
"They wanted quiet everything," she said, and now that she'd started, the words came easier. "They asked for the rolled edge. Not many know to ask for that. It doesn't crack when you flex it tight."
"Did they bring a cart?"
"They borrowed one from Chen at the end of the lane and returned it before first bell. Paid full rate plus a coin for silence."
"Which direction?"
She didn't answer immediately. She looked at his sleeve again, not at the blood now but at the tailoring, the way fine clothes sat on a man who never had to buy them. She made a small decision and pointed. "West. Toward the paper sheds."
Yan Luo's smile reached his eyes for the first time that night. "Thank you." He laid three coins on the counter, each one real, each one heavy. "Spend them on something that makes you harder to move."
She took them without bowing.
The King of Hell liked her better for it.
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The paper sheds smelled of glue and rice and old water. Steam fingered up from a vat someone had not scrubbed properly; a fly worried the surface and drowned.
Yan Luo's men fanned through the shadows like they'd been poured there. He listened, not with his ears—men lie with sound—but with the back of his neck, with the way a room keeps secrets when it thinks it can.
"Here," Gaoyu grunted.
A reed fiber had snagged on a splinter of threshold. Another clung to a nail head hammered crooked decades ago. The floor showed a scar line where someone had dragged a plank, not far, then set it back carefully enough to fool anyone who didn't know to look for the notch.
"Cold Palace run," Yan Luo said. He tapped his toe against the plank; it thunked back like a closed eye refusing to open. "They rehearsed here."
"Then why not use this place to keep him?" Gaoyu asked.
"Because smart men do not sleep in their first hiding place," Yan Luo said. "And because scared men always try to get farther than they are."
He knelt, traced a smear no one else would have noticed: a fingerprint of rice paste on the underside of a shelf, low, the height a child would reach if his hands were tied and he caught himself from falling against it. He straightened. His teeth ached from the force with which he kept his jaw from breaking.
"Pull the ledgers," he said. "The sheds buy from the same men and sell to the same men. We'll see which names came awake on a night they shouldn't."
By the time the ledgers were in his hands, the sun had not yet thought about considering dawn. He flipped pages without looking at the ink, listening instead to how the paper spoke against itself. One page rasped differently. He stopped there.
"Wharf tins," he murmured. "They ordered twice their usual glue."
"Glue for what?" Gaoyu asked.
"For faces," Yan Luo said.
Gaoyu spat. "The market."
"The market," Yan Luo agreed. "Let's hope they followed the Empress' orders and are still awake. I would hate to wake up people who didn't see us coming."