Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. 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.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
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.
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.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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.
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.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.