Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. 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. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
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.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.