He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.