Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.