Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. 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. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
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.
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.
“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. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.