Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
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.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
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. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.