Chapter 16: Rain on Tiles
The storm came at midnight. Tiles turned slick. Eaves dripped. The world smelled of iron and forgiveness. Ghostblade Du came with the storm.
He rose from the shadow of Qin's window, chain-sickle spinning, blade whispering, face expressionless as a temple stele. His first cut severed a candle in two; the wick died with a hiss. The second wanted a throat.
Qin rolled backward over the low table, let the table take the cut, and kicked it into Du's knees. The assassin vaulted, chain hissing, hook carving the air into hooks. Ao Ling woke under the bed with a furious squeak and blew a thread of azure. The chain's links glazed.
They fought across tiles, feet painting cold realities. Du's style was to erase distance. He wrote his body into Qin's shadow and stabbed where breath collected. Qin bled lines of red at sleeve, cheek, hip. He gave ground and took information.
Du overcommitted on the ninth exchange; Qin turned the overreach into an invitation. He stepped into the arc, shoulder to chest, raised forearm to noose the chain, and yanked. Du stumbled a hair. The hook's tip kissed the eave.
Qin slid his free hand to Du's wrist and pressed. A sharp, precise pain bloomed; fingers opened. The hook dropped. Qin kicked it off the roof. It fell, caught on a lower gutter, dangled like an argument.
They stalled, locked, breath on breath. Du smiled—not malice. Clarity. "Too late," he said, tone almost apologetic.
His eyes filmed. A blackness rolled through pupils like ink poured into milk. Qin felt the killing poison in the man's veins waking—a mark laid by a master who did not like witnesses. Qin slapped Du's back hard, three points, sending qi to slow the curl of death. It bought them breaths.
"Who?" Qin asked.
The blackness chewed faster. Du exhaled a thread of words. "A silver thread," he said. "A scent… rain." He tried to say more. The poison wrote a period at the end of the sentence. He slumped, heavy and human.
Qin held him up until the body realized it was alone. He laid him on the tiles, closed eyes that had been clear even as they killed, and plucked a filament from the assassin's sleeve—a hair-fine silver thread that didn't gleam so much as decide not to be seen.
Rain washed the thread cold in his palm.
Under the eaves, the willow breathed. Ao Ling crawled into Qin's lap, scales cool and beating. Qin looked at the thread and then at the rain and then at a sky that did not answer questions.
"Noted," he said.