By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
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.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.