The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.