By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.