Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. 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.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
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.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.