The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
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.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
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.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.