Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. 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. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. 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. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.