It took two full days for Wen to harangue the new men into some sort of order, and to obtain sufficient intelligence about Chin's mansion to make a burglary feasible. The only way to make the robbery lucrative enough, he decided, was to assign a number of men to be nothing more than pack animals. He had no idea of what the Meiyou treasure was going to be, other than the assumption that there were more silver scales from a set of ceremonial armor, so he had to plan for the possibility that some of what he'd find would be heavy or awkward or both.
What he didn't bother to tell the gang was that he proposed to keep the most valuable items for himself. These weren't the men of the Jade Maiden, with whom he had a bond of sorts; they were the kind of men who would volunteer to rob someone if you asked them in a bar. Oh, and if you were notorious.
Those two days Wen spent in an abandoned house on a hillside outside Jīn-sè Mèn. He arranged to meet his gang at a neutral location, and told none of them how to reach him. Now that he'd revealed himself, it would be too dangerous to stay in the city, where any soldier or watchman could track one down by asking at the nearest wine-shop. Even Chin, who had apparently set up camp here, knew better than to stay in his mansion.
The house had evidently belonged to someone who'd come to Jīn-sè Mèn to get rich—the way I was going to, Wen thought. He deduced this from a rain-spattered letter he found crumpled and wedged into a primitive brick stove in the small kitchen.
I have failed, it read. This city is full of cut-throats and cheats and no place for an honest man. That was rich, given that the "honest man" was evidently hoping to make his fortune in trade; Wen had never yet encountered an honest merchant. I am resigned to my fate and will see you in the next world if I cannot afford you in this one. At that point the writer evidently gave up, so Wen had no idea who the writer had been or where he'd been from.
Not as strong as me, though, he thought. "I will succeed where you failed, my poor friend," he said.
"Not unless you take more care, captain," said One-Eyed Lum.
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