Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
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.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
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.
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 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.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
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.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.