Inside was a single piece of paper, with no salutation or signature, only one line of typed text. Your life is in danger. Leave immediately.
Hilo turned the paper over and looked inside the envelope, but there was nothing else besides the dire warning of the note. Wordlessly, Hilo handed the paper to Woon beside him. Woon was naturally adept at maintaining a calm, careful demeanor, but his eyes widened, and Hilo saw him glance surreptitiously from side to side, his jade aura sharpening in suspicion and alarm. He looked for the assistant who had delivered the envelope, but the young man had already left the room.
Hilo sent his eyes and Perception sweeping around the large meeting room. He sensed only the people who were supposed to be there: executives of the Kekon Jade Alliance, the Green Bone clan leaders and their respective Weather Men, four Deitist penitents standing in the corners, two secretaries refilling tea and carrying notes between the meeting participants. Hilo strained his Perception beyond the closed doors. The hallways directly outside of the room were empty. A bored security guard manned the desk in the elevator lobby. Beyond that, individual energies became hard to distinguish: The people moving around on the two lower levels of the building were a busy blur.
He brought his Perception back into the room and scanned the jade auras around him. He Perceived no immediate threat; no murderous intent emanated from any of the other Green Bones, not even Ayt Madashi. The Pillar of the Mountain was staring across the table at Hilo. She could tell that something had happened to put him on high alert. Years of mutual enmity had made both Pillars sensitive to any changes in the other’s jade aura, and even without accounting for Perception, she could not fail to notice that his focus had left the discussion and that for several seconds, he had been sitting very still, gazing at nothing.
Hilo turned his head slightly toward Woon. “Take the note and leave the room. Quickly.”
Woon paled. “I can’t leave the Pillar,” he insisted, with such urgent, fearful vehemence that Hilo remembered Woon had been Lan’s best friend and Pillarman, and had already seen one Pillar killed under his watch. “I won’t do it, Kaul-jen.”
“Do as I say,” Hilo ordered him. “Wait in the hallway. I’ll be right behind you. Stop anyone who comes out ahead of me. I want you to go first so I know who in this room reacts to you leaving. Or if we’re being played for fools.” When Woon still did not move, Hilo snarled quietly, “Now, Woon-jen. Think of your daughter.”
Woon swallowed, then snatched the mysterious paper and stood up, striding for the exit of the room. Hilo placed his hands on the circular table and stood up more slowly, causing the conversation to falter and come to a standstill. “I’m afraid there’s been a family emergency,” he said. Curious, concerned murmurs rose around the room. “Woon-jen and I have to leave. Continue the meeting without us.”
Hilo walked purposefully but not too quickly toward the door that Woon had pushed through. The jadeless politicians and policymakers were merely confused, but a frisson of rising suspicion was traveling through the auras of the Green Bone leaders in the room. They could Perceive that Hilo was not being entirely truthful, that for some other unexplained reason his jade aura was humming at a high and violent pitch. Ayt Mada turned her head, eyes narrowed, to watch every step of Hilo’s progress across the room. Hilo’s Perception was so tightly strung that his hearing and vision blurred. The room seemed to be a dim and silent space filled with individual energies, each of which he held in his attention, expecting at least one of them to react with sudden malicious intent. Show yourself.
One of them did. In a room crowded full of Green Bone auras, it went unnoticed until the last second. Hilo spun around as he reached the doors; Ayt Mada had begun to rise from her seat. “You’re lying. What are you really—” and from behind Ayt, the secretary who had begun to refill the Pillar’s water glass dropped the jug, spilling water all over the table and Koben Yiro’s papers, and in the same motion thrust a knife concealed under her sleeve into the side of Ayt Madashi’s neck.
Ayt sensed the attack, but too late. Under ordinary circumstances, no one could imagine an assassin getting close enough to cut the throat of a Green Bone like Ayt Mada. It was only because the Mountain Pillar’s attention was entirely focused on Kaul Hilo’s suspicious behavior that the young woman succeeded. In the moment of collective silent shock that hit the room, everyone heard the secretary’s words, a cry of high-pitched fear and triumph. “Look at me, Ayt Madashi, you butcher, you bitch. Do you know who I am? Ven Emashan, daughter of Ven Sando, sister of Ven Haku, the girl whose family—”