Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.