Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
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.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
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.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.