Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
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.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
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.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. 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.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.