The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
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.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. 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. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“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. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.