The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.