Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
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.
“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. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.