Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
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.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. 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. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. 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.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.