Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.