Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“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. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
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.
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.
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.