The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
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.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
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.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
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.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. 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. 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. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.