He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
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.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.