Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. 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. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“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. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.