There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
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.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. 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.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.