The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
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.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.