The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
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.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. 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.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“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 old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.