Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. 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. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
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.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.