The building held seven floors in total, though most of the city only ever saw the ground level — the entrance hall with its red lanterns and its noise, the rooms just beyond it where the ordinary business of the place was conducted. The higher floors existed for a smaller, quieter kind of clientele, each one more exclusive than the one beneath it, until the seventh floor at the top belonged to a category of guest that didn't so much pay for entry as simply never be asked to.
The room they occupied kept to the old arrangement the building had been built around a century before anyone currently inside it had been born — low red sofas set with their backs to painted screens, dark lacquered tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the whole space lit by paper lanterns instead of the chandeliers that ruled the floors below, so the light here came softer, redder, closer to firelight than electricity. Silk hung from the ceiling in long undyed panels between the beams, moving faintly whenever a door opened somewhere down the hall, and the air carried incense instead of perfume, sandalwood laid thick enough to soften every other smell in the room into something more pleasant than it likely was underneath.
The courtesans who moved through the space wore robes rather than the shorter dresses favoured on the floors below, layered silk in deep reds and blacks that pooled and trailed when they walked, sleeves long enough to hide the hands entirely unless a woman chose to let them show. They didn't perform loudness the way the lower floors did. Up here the entertainment ran quieter — a hand resting briefly at a guest's shoulder, a low laugh offered at exactly the right moment, a game of go set up on a side table more as an excuse for closeness than out of any real interest in the game itself. It was a different kind of seduction than the ground floor's, patient instead of eager, and considerably more expensive for the patience.
Reiner had gone off somewhere to find his missing friend and hadn't yet returned, and the two of them had settled back into their corner of red silk, comfortable, unhurried, when the first of Marianne's men drifted through the room.
There were three of them, moving with the loose, watchful ease of men who'd been sent to observe rather than to enjoy themselves, eyes tracking faces rather than settling on any one courtesan for longer than a passing glance required. One of them nodded at the young man in the vibrant red suit as he passed, a small, professional acknowledgment between people who moved in overlapping circles without needing to be friends about it, and the young man nodded back without breaking the low conversation he and Ilsa had drifted back into, entirely unbothered by the presence, the way you'd be unbothered by weather you'd long since stopped needing to check the forecast for.
"Marianne's people," Ilsa said quietly, once the three had passed further into the room. She didn't say it with any particular alarm. It was simply information, offered the way you'd note that it had started raining outside.
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"They're always here." He shrugged, reaching for his glass. "Doesn't mean anything's happening. They watch. That's the whole of their job most nights."
It was another twenty minutes before the room's temperature changed in the way rooms change when someone significant enters them, a shift felt before it was seen, and both of them looked up at roughly the same moment to find the source of it crossing the floor toward their corner.
He was old in the way that had stopped meaning frailty a long time ago — Liu Teng, though there was no need for anyone in that room to be told the name, his posture straight enough to embarrass men a fifth his age, grey hair grown long and left loose down his back, still thick despite the two centuries it had apparently been growing. His face carried the particular kind of weathering that suggested, rather than obscured, what it must have looked like when it was young — strong-boned, once handsome enough to have earned its own reputation, the lines carved into it now less like decay and more like proof of use.
"Young Master Smilar." His voice, when he reached them, carried none of the frailty his age should by rights have given it, low and even, faintly amused. "And his lady. I wondered whose laughter I kept hearing from this end of the floor."
"Elder Liu." The young man inclined his head, unhurried, entirely without the deference some might have offered a man of that age and reputation, though not without respect either — the careful, level courtesy of two people who moved in the same circles and understood, without needing to say so, exactly how much weight each of them carried. "I was sorry to hear about your grandson."
Something crossed the old man's face at that, brief, unreadable, gone again almost as quickly as it arrived. "As was I," he said simply, and didn't offer more than that, and neither of them pushed for it.
Ilsa inclined her head as well, her voice warm without tipping into the performative warmth so many people reserved for men of Liu Teng's standing. "You're still walking straighter than half the young men in this room, Elder. Whatever you're doing, you ought to bottle it and sell it."
The old man laughed, short and genuine, some of the weight easing off his face for the length of it. "If I knew the secret, my lady, I'd have sold it centuries ago and retired somewhere with better weather." He looked between the two of them a moment longer, something considering in the look, and then inclined his head once more, formal, unhurried. "Enjoy your evening. I won't keep two young people from theirs any longer than manners require."
He moved on, back into the low red light of the floor, and neither of them watched him go for more than the polite length of a glance, already turning back to each other and the conversation his arrival had briefly interrupted, entirely undisturbed by having just exchanged pleasantries with one of the oldest and most dangerous men either of them would ever share a room with.