There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. 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. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
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.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. 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 contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.