Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“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. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
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.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.