By the time I reached the Blue River, the estate I had called home for the last year had become a beacon of flame in the center of the city. Smoke billowed in a column to the sky, gongs were ringing, and I could hear the distant shouts of the bucket line.

  The “Blue” River, for its part, was so dark and placid on the surface that I would understand if this were somehow my River’s namesake. I also knew that the current was strong beneath both of them, and that crossing them could be deadly.

  “This is definitely the right place,” I said to Windstopper, his eyes unconcerned but alert. “But what are we looking for here?”

  Windstopper glanced in my direction.

  “We Are Looking For River, Right.”

  Even running for my life, my bodyguard could make me smile. “Right you are.”

  There were a dozen or so piers dotting the riverbanks on this side, including one major one used by armies, dignitaries, and a strange procession of warlords a few months back, when an Emperor had gone missing. That was where Dreadwolf had made his all-too-successful play for power over the small boys we had called Emperor and prince. Now, one of those boys was rotting in a gilded cage somewhere far in the north, and who knows what horrors the other faced living in the palace.

  There were some piers dotting the far side too, I knew, but could only make out flickering torchlight in the darkness. Choosing the wrong side might mean missing my rendezvous with River entirely, but staying too near the wolf and the Demon risked capture, torture, and death.

  There was one small flicker of flame that seemed out of place to me. It hovered over a disused pier that was half sunken and nearly entirely overgrown with reeds.

  I knew this waterline in the daylight, and knew that pier to be unusable. So who had lit the torch? This. This had to be River’s rendezvous.

  I stepped off the road and pressed for it, Windstopper breathing heavily beside me.

  There was a single slight figure there in a dark hooded cloak, holding the beacon, I saw as I got closer.

  Upon spotting her, I was so relieved I ran to embrace her.

  “Umm, I am glad you are alive as well,” said the woman. It was not River’s voice.

  I released the stranger as if they were an adder and stepped back, grabbing for the stolen sword tucked crudely into my sash.

  “Easy, easy,” said the woman in a calm, clear voice, throwing back her hood and holding her torch between us. It was Brass Bell, another of my co-conspirators. “It’s just me. Sorry if you were expecting someone else.”

  I hesitated before answering. “You sent me into a trap. Tell me why I don’t cut you in half here and now.”

  It was no way to treat one’s allies, but I had only just met Brass Bell earlier tonight and I had no idea who to trust just now.

  “Your, um, friend sent me. River, I mean. Sorry, I’m not quite sure what to call her. Is she a handmaid, a concubine, a wife?”

  I adjusted the sword in my sash and offered nothing.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Brass Bell went on. “She’s waiting back at my house. She knew at about the same moment I did that the plot had failed and she came for me. I don’t know how she knew where to find me, or how she knew what I was involved in, but…”

  “Yes,” I said, finally relaxing, “she does that. Do not worry about it too much. She has eyes everywhere.”

  “I was worried about it. If a woman I had never met before knew what we were up to, I was suddenly wondering just how tight our little conspiracy actually was.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  Brass Bell beckoned to a small rowboat and Windstopper boarded first, the sorry pier groaning as he stepped off it. Then I followed Brass Bell on, hand never leaving my sword, eyes flicking among the reeds.

  Upon my order, Windstopped heaved at the oars and we shot downriver like a waterstrider before Brass Bell recommended that we try to blend in a bit better. There were few boats on the water at this hour, and they mostly belonged to the early-rising villagers from the agrarian side of the river, so if someone spotted a rickety old boat so obviously powered by a Mandate from Heaven, they might take note.

  “Have you heard from Lion?” I asked, once we were around the first bend and the only thing visible of the City of Lanterns was the glow from my first successful arson. There was probably an ‘achievement’ in that, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing in which I took pride.

  “Gone to Frozen Bay, a few hours ago by the water clock,” Brass Bell responded, still in a low voice.

  I frowned; a few hours ago I would have still been in the palace. “He didn’t wait for a message from me? He didn’t wait to know if I had succeeded or failed?”

  Brass Bell snorted. “We have three different seers with three different Mandates that can tell us how your assassination attempt went. We always knew your decision in the palace would determine the next few forks on the crossroads of destiny. So we knew the moment you knew that you weren’t going to kill Dreadwolf.”

  I shrugged.

  “Fair enough. Wait… three seers? I only counted Celestial Master and Ghostcaller. Who is the third?”

  “You’re looking at her,” said Brass Bell, then pulled an old, tarnished chain from around her neck to hold out a pendant of the same aged metal toward me.

  BRASS BELL

  RANK 103: Village Chief of Moon’s Reflection

  WORTH: 550 dan

  CLAN: Tan Ox | STAR: Silver

  FATE: Iron-Iron “Open Lake”

  MANDATE: Tolling Bell Ripples the Water

  “About an hour before calamity strikes my head starts splitting,” she went on. “It's like someone rolled a dozen bells down a mountainside. My Mandate doesn’t tell me what exactly is going to happen but when bandits have been spotted not thirty li away, or when we just launched an assassination plot, it's pretty easy to guess where the danger’s going to come from.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Hence the name.”

  “And hence the position. You don’t think I would have lasted this long as chief of a village so close to the capital without having a very useful Mandate. Not after all the upheaval in the last few years.”

  “And the Gray Wolf soldiers? Lion said your village suffered at their hands.”

  Brass Bell tucked the pendant carefully back into her tunic and pulled her cloak tighter around herself. She cast her eyes forward, past the prow. “Wolf caught us all by surprise. I had the headache of a lifetime that morning, but with no one to say where the danger was coming from, I did all I could. Even so, we didn’t expect raiders from the capital.”

  I nodded, remembering that day. The Gray Wolf soldiers came back with heads on spikes and a dozen girls being dragged by chains from the back of the wagons. They had said they had quelled a rebellion not a town away. But what little remained of the girls’ clothes suggested merchants’ daughters and farmers, not rankless bandits.

  I pulled my mind from the grizzly memory.

  “And River?” I asked.

  “Based on what little I know of the woman… she probably knew before any of us. I don’t think it's a Mandate. I think she just knows this kind of thing.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle. That sounded like River.

  “We’re getting close. No more talking. Sound carries over water.”