Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. 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.
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 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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. 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. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.