The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
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.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.