The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“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. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.