By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. 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. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.