The Capital Sends Eyes

Three weeks after the night of the painting, a delegation arrived from the Cang Imperial capital.

It was framed as an inspection tour — routine review of northern territory governance, the kind of thing that happened every two years and generated an enormous amount of paperwork and an elaborate series of banquets in which officials tested each other's political loyalties by the order in which they offered toasts. Yun Su had attended enough of these, in a former life, to recognize the format.

What was not routine was the identity of the delegation's head: Lu Zheng.

Lu Zheng was perhaps thirty-five, the son of one of the Cang Empire's founding generals, currently serving as deputy minister of the Inspectorate — which was to say, the empire's primary intelligence apparatus. He was, by all available accounts, extremely intelligent, completely loyal to the current Cang Emperor, and possessed of the particular coldness that comes from spending enough years in the business of identifying and eliminating threats to find the work simply professional.

He was also, Yun Su recognized with the particular lurch of a carefully-laid plan encountering an unforeseen variable, the man who had conducted the final search of the Yuan Imperial Palace the night it fell. The man who had, presumably, expected to find a prince's body and found nothing.

He had been looking, in the years since, for what had happened to that missing prince.

"He knows there's a surviving Yuan royal," Yun Su told A-You that night, in the stables where their conversations were least likely to be overheard. "He may not know it's me specifically. But he knows someone survived."

A-You's eyes were sharp and worried. "Should we run?"

"No." Running would confirm suspicion. Running would abandon the network they had spent a year building. Running would leave Xiao Hou Chuan —

He didn't finish the thought. "We stay. We're careful. Lu Zheng is suspicious of everyone; I can't give him specific reason to suspect me."

"And Lord Su?" A-You asked. Carefully.

"Lord Su knows what he knows and has chosen not to act on it," Yun Su said. "That's his decision to make."

"Yes, but if Lu Zheng gets close enough to start asking Xiao Hou Chuan questions —"

"Then Xiao Hou Chuan will tell him the truth," Yun Su said flatly. "Because Xiao Hou Chuan tells everyone the truth." He paused. "Which is why we need to ensure Lu Zheng has no reason to ask the specific questions that would lead to the specific truths."

This was the problem with Xiao Hou Chuan's honesty: it was a shield and a liability simultaneously. He would not lie for Yun Su. He was constitutionally incapable of it. But he was also perfectly capable of not mentioning things that had not been asked, and of answering exactly the question posed without volunteering the larger context — not because he was deceptive, but because he answered questions, not vague implications.

It was the narrowest possible safe passage, and they would need to navigate it perfectly.

— ✦ —

Lu Zheng was charming at the welcome banquet. This was the most alarming thing about him.

Yun Su had met men of Lu Zheng's type before, in his years of careful survival: men who had elevated intelligence into something cold and watchful, who measured every room they entered and every person in it, who used warmth the way a cook uses fire — not to enjoy but to prepare. He recognized the warmth as performance and filed it accordingly.

What he had not expected was for Lu Zheng to be interesting.

"Lord Su," Lu Zheng said, midway through the third course, in the easy tone of a man making conversation. "I understand you've acquired a new household steward in recent months. A southerner."

At the far end of the table — household stewards did not sit at the main table; Yun Su had positioned himself against the wall with the serving staff, which gave him an excellent view of everything and technically made him invisible to men who did not look at serving staff — Yun Su went still.

"I have," Xiao Hou Chuan said. He was eating a piece of braised pork with the focus of a man who finds pork genuinely interesting. "He's capable."

"Where in the south?"

"He mentioned Xuanhe."

"Xuanhe." A pause. The word landed in the air without weight, which meant it had weight. "I have an uncle in Xuanhe. Fine city. The textile district is — do you know, I haven't been able to confirm that the new steward's guild registration is current? It's a minor thing, purely administrative."

"I'll have him provide it tomorrow," Xiao Hou Chuan said, without any change in his expression or his attention to the pork.

From his position against the wall, Yun Su was already mapping exits and calculating how long it would take to retrieve A-You from the kitchen, where the boy was helping with the serving.

Then Xiao Hou Chuan set down his chopsticks and looked at Lu Zheng, and the directness of his gaze made two nearby officials briefly straighten their spines involuntarily.

"Is there a specific reason the Inspectorate is interested in my household staff, Deputy Minister Lu?" Xiao Hou Chuan asked, with the absolute unflappable courtesy of a man who has nothing to hide and is therefore genuinely curious about your reasons for looking. "If there's a concern, it would be efficient to address it directly."

A beat. Something moved through Lu Zheng's face — not discomfort, exactly, but the recognition of an approach that didn't respond to the usual techniques.

"No concern," he said pleasantly. "Simply thoroughness."

"Of course," said Xiao Hou Chuan, and returned to his pork.

From the wall, Yun Su exhaled slowly and revised his timeline. Lu Zheng wasn't asking because he knew. He was asking because Xiao Hou Chuan was the kind of man who collected unusual people — the kind of man, Lu Zheng was surely calculating, that a Yuan loyalist might seek out. The search was still general. But it was looking in the right direction.

He had, at most, a week before the net drew close enough to require drastic action.

— ✦ —

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