Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
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.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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.
“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. 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.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. 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. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.