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.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. 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. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
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.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
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.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.