Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“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. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.