Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. 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.”
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.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.