By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. 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. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.