Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. 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. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
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.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
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.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.