There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
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.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.