The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. 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.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“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. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“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. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
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.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.