Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
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.
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.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.