Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
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.
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
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.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.