The afternoon spent itself in the slow rhythm of a city that had not asked them to hurry.

They walked. They argued about a dumpling stall whose owner was charging twice the going rate and getting away with it because the dumplings were that good. Su Qingyue tried one and conceded the point. Lin Xuan paid.

They drifted through a bookbinder’s lane where she stopped to read a spine, frowned at it, and put it back. He pretended not to notice the small smile she wore for the next three streets.

By the time the sun had pulled itself low behind the rooftops, neither of them had said the word combat aloud once.

"It is getting late."

"It is."

"I should head back to the Frostmoon residence before the elders send someone."

"I will walk you to your gate."

She inclined her head a fraction in agreement, and they turned south.

The lane they took narrowed as it went. Lin Xuan had walked this quarter twice during the last two days and did not remember it narrowing, but the buildings were Yuncheng’s, and Yuncheng was the city of small lanes that bent on themselves. Su Qingyue walked half a pace ahead, the small parcel from earlier still hanging from her left hand by its paper string.

The lane bent. Then it bent again.

[ Xuan. Stop walking. ]

He stopped a half pace into the next bend.

[ Something is wrong. The architecture of this lane does not match the maps of Yuncheng I have on file. We should not be in a dead end here. ]

’...Illusion screen?’

[ A good one. I did not catch the seam when we crossed it. The air resistance changed two streets ago, and I dismissed it as wind off the river. That was a mistake. Sorry... ]

Su Qingyue had reached the end of the bend ahead of him. Her shoulders had begun to ease into a forward step before she registered what her eyes were telling her, and the step never finished. The lane ended at a brick wall four paces in front of her.

Three windowless walls and a strip of sky overhead that had darkened a shade since they had entered the bend.

She turned her head a quarter.

"...This is not on the map of this district."

He felt the air move differently against his cheek. A faint sweetness in it. The kind of sweetness that did not come off the carts of a fruit market or the kettles of an evening kitchen.

[ Incense. Heavy. Distributed through the screen. I am reading three diffusion points, two on the side walls and one above. Probably been seeping for the last hundred paces and we walked into the saturated section without registering. ]

’Qingyue.’

She had already started to sway.

The parcel slipped out of her hand and made a small soft sound on the stone. Her knees gave a fraction before she caught them. She turned toward him with a confusion that was already losing its edges, opened her mouth to say something, and the breath she drew to say it carried more of the air than her body could process.

She fell forward.

He caught her by the shoulders before her face met the ground and lowered her slowly to the stone. Her cheek pressed to the inside of his forearm. Her breathing was in a slow rhythm.

[ She is asleep. Pulse is steady. Whoever set this calibrated for incapacitation, not for harm. The dose would put a Stage Five down in three breaths. ]

’And me?’

[ The minor defensive talisman in your inner robe activated the moment the third diffusion point reached you. It is consuming itself slowly to neutralize the compound at the throat. I am running a parallel filter across your meridians. As long as you do not exert hard, you have around four minutes of clean breathing. After that, the talisman burns out. ]

He went very still on one knee with Su Qingyue’s weight braced against his thigh.

The brick wall at the end of the alley shimmered.

Five figures stepped out of it.

The screen had been doubled. Not just an illusion of the lane. An illusion of the wall itself, hiding a doorway that had been waiting for them since the morning.

The first man through was an old man in a plain gray traveling robe with his hands folded into his sleeves, walking the way a craftsman walked into a workshop he had visited many times before. Lined face. Thin mouth. The cadence of his steps was the cadence Lin Xuan had heard once through a wooden partition at the tea house and never since.

[ That is him, Xuan. Voice and gait match. Master Hu. Confirmed. ]

Behind him, four more men spread along the width of the alley. Plain clothes. No sect crests. The line of their shoulders said hired blades. The line of their footwork said the kind of hired blades who did not take a contract under three thousand spirit stones.

Lin Xuan kept his hand on Plain Steel and did not draw it.

Master Hu stopped two paces from him and let out a small sound through his nose that was not quite a sigh and not quite a laugh.

"Argh. Honestly. You have made me spend more resources on this than I had budgeted, young master. I cannot afford the reputation of a man who does not deliver his work. All you had to do was lose your first round of the tournament and we would not be standing here. Now you have me hiring out, scouting routes, calibrating doses to a girl who was not even on my list this morning. It is bad form."

He inclined his head as if he were apologizing for the inconvenience.

"We are only going to incapacitate you. Nothing dramatic. A simple sealing of the meridians. You will be back to your old crippled self in the blink of an eye. Do not worry about a thing."

Lin Xuan held the alley with one knee on the stone, Su Qingyue’s breathing slow against his arm, and four minutes of clean air at the back of his throat.

The four hired men spread their stances.

Master Hu unfolded his hands from his sleeves.