The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
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.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.