Elder Zhao reached the bridge at dawn with twelve Law Enforcement officers behind him and a scarred nose that looked even paler than usual.
He stopped short when he saw what hung from the iron chain.
Gao Mo was still alive, still gray-faced, still pinned at the wrist by a single blade of black-silver light that Adam had left to melt on its own. A shattered Golden Core leaked pale Qi from his dantian like a cracked jar. Beside him, in a neat row on the planks, lay a jade slip, a purse of twenty thousand stones, and a cord of blood-red feathers.
"Elder Hale," Zhao said hoarsely. "The array logs say the bridge went dark for an hour last night. A hundred and fifty years, and it has never once malfunctioned."
"It was told to," Adam said. He sat on the iron rail with a clean bandage across his shoulder and a cup of tea in his hand. "The slip has the signature of whoever gave the order. The man on the chain can tell you the rest, if he’d like to stay alive."
Zhao looked at the slip. He read the seal on its back, and the color drained from his face.
"Inner-Zenith Peak," he whispered.
"I thought you’d recognize it."
By noon, half the sect was crowded into the Law Enforcement Hall.
The Sect Master sat on the high seat, with the three Grand Elders at his right hand. Elder Ye Zhen stood alone in the center of the floor in the formal robes of an inner-sect elder, his face the color of old ash. Gao Mo knelt at his feet, a broken man in plain chains.
The Crimson Vulture spoke for a quarter of an hour. He gave names, dates, and sums: forty thousand stones, half paid in advance, the meeting in the hollow by the western gate, the hour the array would sleep. When he finished, the hall was silent.
"Lies," Ye Zhen said. "A Blood-Feather dog will say anything to save his neck."
"Then explain the slip," the Golden-Armored Elder said. His voice rolled through the hall like grinding stone. "Your seal, your jade, and an order to switch off the bridge array. And explain the twenty thousand stones in that purse, wrapped in the Gilded-Crow’s seal."
Ye Zhen’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Then his composure cracked.
"He killed my grandson!" he screamed, whirling toward Adam, spittle flying. "My only blood! Before ten thousand witnesses! And you all sit here and let him—"
"Under a duel scroll your grandson signed," the Sect Master said, in a voice that was quiet and absolutely cold. "Which you, Elder Ye Zhen, swore to honor as an elder of this sect. You have broken that oath. You have hired an outside killer to murder an Elder of this sect within these walls. There is nothing I can do for you."
The sentence took less than a minute. Ye Zhen was stripped of his rank, his peak, and his robes. His cultivation was sealed. He would spend fifty years in the suppression chains of the Law Enforcement Hall, and when they ended, he would be an old man with nothing left.
He did not look at Adam as they led him away. Adam watched him go and felt no satisfaction at all, only a flat, tired certainty that this was the last of the grandfather and the first of something larger.
He was right.
That evening, in the courtyard of Ghost-Sword Peak, the Sect Master climbed the iron stairs alone and sat across from Adam at the stone table.
"The Gilded-Crow’s stall in the Shadow-Market has closed," he said. "Elder Mu’s disciples tested the painted-halo pills and posted the results. Twelve Alchemist Peak students have already lost a month’s cultivation. The Crow’s name is dust in this sect."
"Good."
"I am told," the Sect Master said, pouring tea, "that I owe you a debt."
"You owe me nothing."
"I owe you my seat," the Sect Master said softly. "If Ye Zhen’s scheme had worked, the Inner-Zenith faction would have been unstoppable. The sect would have split." He looked up. "I asked you earlier what you were building. Have you decided?"
Adam turned his cup slowly.
"The Blood-Feather Sect didn’t fund that forty thousand," he said. "Ye Zhen’s treasury was nearly empty after the Sun-Fire Peak wager. Gao Mo told your Hall that the stones came wrapped in the Gilded-Crow’s seal, from a vault in the Imperial Capital, delivered by a man from the Ye clan’s main line."
The Sect Master’s cup paused in the air.
"The Ye clan."
"A family that sells pills to a quarter of the Central Dynasties," Adam said. "The boy was a branch. The roots are in the Imperial City. If I stay here, they’ll send another Gao Mo, and another after that. I’d have to keep killing until they ran out of branches." He set the cup down. "I’d rather cut the root."
A long silence.
"The Void-Traversing Token," the Sect Master said finally. "You mean to use it."
"In three days."
The old man’s shoulders eased very slightly, as if a weight he had carried for a month had set itself down. "I won’t ask you to stay, then. But I will ask you for something else."
"The Pavilion," Adam said.
"The Pavilion."
Adam looked down at the sect spread beneath his peak, the chained mountains and the glowing arrays, the plazas where a month of rumors had burned down to quiet ash.
"Come back in three days," he said. "I’ll have a gift for you."