He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. 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. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.