Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. 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. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.