By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. 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. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.