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 technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
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.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. 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. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
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.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
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 days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.