Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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 blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.