By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
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.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
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.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. 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. 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 contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.