Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
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.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.