Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. 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. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.