By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. 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. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. 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 technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. 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. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.