By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
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 corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.