There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.