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.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“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.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. 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. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.