He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.