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.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
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.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. 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. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.