Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.