The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. 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. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
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.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. 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. 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. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
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.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. 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. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.