There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. 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.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.