He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“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.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.