The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
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 junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.