He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
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 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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.