By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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 days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“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 array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.