There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. 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. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.