There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“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. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
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.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“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.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.