There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
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.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
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.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. 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. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.